Garth Greenwell and the gay fiction ghetto

LitHub has an interesting interview with an up-and-coming gay writer that's worth a read.

Henry Bemis Books has noticed, after we post items like this on our Facebook page, we tend to lose a like or two. We regret this, although we understand everyone has things he or she doesn't wish to know about. Facebook also makes it really easy to pass one's time without a single troubled thought.

Most of what is now classed as great literature began under a ban somewhere, or was denounced as trash in the prevailing views of its time. LGBT writers are part of our present, and our future. Knowing something of what we don't know may help us hlod the views were already held, but wth more articulable, well-grounded reasons. It may prompt us to think anew, and act anew. As Governor Christie said, in last night's Fox News debate, there is no law that says we can't change our minds.

AV: When I was doing a lot of musician interviews, I became fairly aware that critics always feel the need to say “female-fronted” band. Like it’s an anomaly. Do you ever feel that people put too much focus on gay writers’ (or any profession for that matter) sexual orientation? 

GG: I think this is always a fraught issue, and there’s no way to ask the question that will please everyone. Some writers don’t want to be thought of as gay writers, for a variety of reasons, and I don’t think anyone should place demands on others’ identifications. I will say, though, that formulations like “This is a book about two men in a relationship, but it says universal things about love, etc,” seem wrong to me, even if they’re necessary. We live in a culture where reviewers who want to encourage readers to approach work by minority writers (and bless them, each and every one) need to extend invitations that can seem to conjure away difference. The word “universal” is that invitation. 

The real problem comes when “universal” is preceded by “but.” This is a novel about black lives, but it’s universal; or this is a novel about trans lives, but it’s universal. The problem with this is that it allows the term “universal” to be used in that deeply false way that means straight and white, and very often male. I do believe in the universal impact or resonance of art, of the literary or aesthetic imagination. I believe absolutely in the power of imaginative art to cross difference and the wounds caused by structures of inequity. But it doesn’t do that by erasing difference. I think literature achieves the universal by rooting as deeply as possible into the particular. 

I write as a queer man about queer lives for queer readers in a queer aesthetic tradition that I’ve chosen. I’m not writing to explain those lives or make them palatable as part of some political project to sway people whose response to them remains disgust. I don’t mean to dismiss efforts to do that, which have purchased so many freedoms for queer people, though maybe at too great a cost. But it’s not my project. 

It’s not despite of, but because I’m writing from that specific position that my book can have whatever resonance it has. I don’t think this is anything special about my book. I think it’s how literature works. 

AV: Do you still think there is a stigma about books about gay or lesbian characters? 

GG: I think queer books struggle for attention, support, and prestige. I think this is especially true when those books are sexually explicit, when they explore models of life that are not heteronormative, when they tell stories that take place far from the zones of (still very relative) lesbian and gay privilege.

Another interview, with The Guardian, is here. 

http://lithub.com/garth-greenwell-on-sex-passion-and-the-queer-body/