The following remarks were offered by the author at a panel discussion comprised of G&LR contributors at the Equality Forum conference in Philadelphia in May. Moderated by editor Richard Schneider, the other panelists were Andrew Holleran, Mark Merlis, and Natalie Hope McDonald (who discussed the paper on AIDS literature that appears in this issue). As suggested by Bergman’s piece, much of the discussion focused on the continued viability of literary gay fiction in an era of declining readership, burgeoning media options, and GLBT assimilationism.
GLBT writing, like any minority writing, is driven by at least four dynamics.
§ The first is to create art, by which I mean the desire to create works with the most potent, subtle, amusing, original resources of language. § Second, it is driven by the desire to help those within the minority group, usually by providing them with “positive images.” This is what I will call the social work dynamic. § Third, such writing is driven by the desire to change the attitudes of the majority, which I’ll call the political dynamic. § Finally, it is driven by money or the economic dynamic. Not that writers actually imagine that they will make a living wage, but publishers and book sellers need to feel they will make money. At various times and for some individual writers, the hierarchy of these dynamics changes and the balance among them alters. But to some extent these four forces are always present. I believe that for a short period of time these forces converged. Andrew Holleran is one of the finest writers in America, as is Edmund White. They emerged as writers in the late 1970’s, at a time when the desire to produce the very finest writing converged with a marketplace that made their writing reasonably profitable. Their work had a powerful effect on gay readers, although Holleran and White ran afoul of some critics and activists who thought that they should have served their gay readers with more uplifting images. They are weak in the social work dynamic, and they reached fewer straight readers than I would have hoped. Yet I think they provided (and still provide) straight readers with powerful images of how some gay people live. It is useful to remember that then, even more than now, straight readers weren’t really comfortable with the facts of GLBT lives, and they argued that gay and lesbian writers wrote best when they wrote about heterosexuals. I should also mention lesbian novelists like Sarah Schulman and Blanche Boyd, two remarkable writers. But these forces diverged after the 70’s and 80’s. AIDS may have been part of the scattering of these forces, but I think literary culture in general came apart in America in the 90’s. One aspect of assimilation is that GLBT people—who stayed on as readers long after most Americans gave up literary fiction—also turned away from books in the 90’s. Gays and lesbians became as illiterate as their straight counterparts. We had music, movies, and television as well as the Internet to entertain us. Why do the heavy lifting of reading a book? What do we need for a literary culture or a book culture to survive among GLBT people? I suspect we need, first, greater quiet, less interference. We need to screen out some of the media messages with which we’re bombarded. Second, I suppose we need different sorts of drugs, ones that give us longer attention spans. Third, we need a culture that isn’t stratified so much by age. When I came out, I was immediately taken up by older men who talked about history, opera, and books. Books were important socially if one wanted to be part of the discussion. (I don’t want to make it sound like all the talk was highbrow; I also learned where to buy good drag shoes.) Finally, I think, GLBT people also need to cultivate an attitude that smart is sexy, and that the dumb are not particularly attractive. Do I think that will happen? No. But I go on reading and writing as I’ve always done. David Bergman, poetry editor of this journal, is the author of The Violet Hour: The Violet Quill and the Making of Gay Culture (2004) and the editor of The Violet Quill Reader: The Emergence of Gay Writing after Stonewall, among other works.
