K.M. Soehnlein

An interview with Sarah Schulman, author of "Let The Record Show," a history of ACT UP New York

I interviewed my friend, author Sarah Schulman, about her recently released nonfiction book about ACT UP New York. It's called Let The Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993. You can read an edited version of the interview on Queerty. 

The full interview lasted an hour and a half. I'm making the (lightly edited) version of the transcript available by clicking here: Download Transcription of Interview with Sarah Schulman.Share

 

Seeing Results: Otto Sabotage and Army of Lovers

Today marks one month until publication date for my novel Army of Lovers. It also marks 10 days before the staged reading of a screenplay, Otto Sabotage, co-written with Aron Kantor, which we’re presenting for the first time to the public. These two events are coincidentally happening within a couple weeks of each other, but they took two winding, overlapping journeys to get here. Today I’m taking a little time to reflect on what it has meant to work away in private, alone or with a co-collaborator, without seeing any results for a long time.

I was remembering one of the most important things anyone ever said to me. I was a grad student in creative writing, having moved to San Francisco after a lifetime on the East Coast, doubting whether I had made the right choice. I’d always written, ever since I was a fifth grader with a diary, but taking myself seriously as a writer by embarking on a degree program was new, and it was daunting. I was working three jobs to put myself through grad school, in addition to taking out loans, and I didn’t know if I had made the right choice, if I was any good, if I had what it took to get where I hoped and dreamed I would wind up. What my friend Jack said to me that day was “persevere.“ That’s been my guidepost through the doubts and challenges that followed. No matter how it’s going, persevere.

Army of Lovers began with sketches I started writing about my time living in New York, when I was involved with ACT UP and was part of the group who created Queer Nation. I was documenting events that were personal and historic at once—events still quite close in the rearview mirror. I wrote so I wouldn’t forget. Other projects took over, and I turned to those instead, but I kept returning to these memories of activism in a time of crisis, even though I had yet to fully understand what they meant to me.

What started to take shape was a novel, not a memoir. Things, people, and places I’d known were transformed by imagination into a story through the tools of fiction—character, plot, language, structure. I worked on it steadily until it was ready to be shopped around to mainstream publishers by an established agent. The publishers all said no, the agent faded from my life, and I was left with a manuscript that I didn’t know how to repair and a dream I couldn’t quite let go off.

Enter Aron Kantor, a filmmaker and my friend, asking me to collaborate with him on a screenplay and kicking off a partnership of creativity that has birthed three feature-length scripts and a TV pilot. After a lot of alone time, working as a team was energizing. Aron is a wonderful partner: enthusiastic, open, visionary, and seriously funny. We each have strengths that bolster what the other one needs. We wrote through the isolation of the pandemic, and we’ve been working ever since, through lots of rejection, to find each of these projects a home. Right now Aron is working his tail off to produce Otto Sabotage—a comedic 24-hour odyssey set in San Francisco’s queer nightlife—as an independent feature that he will direct.

At some point, in the midst of all this screenwriting, along came Michael Nava, editor at Amble Press. Michael invited me to show him my ACT UP novel, which I had completely rewritten. I was elated to find that Michael understood the story I was telling and the way I was telling it, and he guided me through a round of revision that became a finished draft. Amble will publish Army of Lovers on October 11.

If you have read this far, thank you. I appreciate that you’re curious about where I’m at right now and what it took to get here. Please support the work! Here’s how:

Come to the staged reading of Otto Sabotage and learn more about what we need to turn it into a film. It’s free, but you can make a reservation. September 21, 7 PM, at SF Oasis in San Francisco.

Pre-order Army of Lovers, either directly at your favorite local bookstore; through the indie bookstore portal bookshop.org; or anywhere you order books online.

After years of hearing No, amid much self-doubt, and through periods of true despair, it seems surreal that suddenly there will be a book, and a presentation of the screenplay, to share with the world. I’m excited! And of course I’m a little scared, because every time you put yourself out to the world you open yourself up to all kinds of things. There’s a lot of vulnerability inside all this excitement. That’s part of persevering as well. Persevering through the vulnerability.

That’s it for now. I look forward to sharing that work with you really soon. Love, Karl.

Happy Lammy-versary to Me

With the great Michelle Tea

20 years ago today! This is me and Michelle Tea on May 31, 2001, beaming with joy after each of us won Lambda Literary Awards – hers for the inimitable, influential, already-a-classic Valencia (Mission San Francisco at its peak queer ’90s explosion) and mine for The World of Normal Boys, my first novel.

What I remember about that night: my heroic, generous editor, John Scognamiglio of Kensington Books, paid for my rented tux; Michelle told a hilarious story about the uptight flight attendant who didn’t want to let her on the airplane to Chicago because she was wearing her “underwear” (“Yes, it’s a slip, but it’s also my dress!”); we sat at the same table as the lovely Krandall Kraus and Paul Borja, also San Francisco-based writers, who won an award that night, too, which made us the winningest, happiest crew in the room.

With my editor, John Scognamiglio of Kensington Books

I also remember being so flat-broke before I flew from SF to Chicago that I was literally turning over couch cushions in my apartment to scavenge coins for extra pocket money. By the end of the night Kevin (then-boyfriend-now-husband) and were I jumping for joy on the bed in my hotel room, not because the award came with any money but because it had been such a long hard road to publishing. Something like 33 publishers rejected The World of Normal Boys before Kensington said yes, and it’s gone on to be the most-read of my books, in its 10th printing, translated into three languages, still coughing out modest but much appreciated royalties and inspiring a sequel (Robin and Ruby), with another one drafted, currently titled Dorothy’s Children. (Publishing goddesses willing, it won't take 33 rejections to get this one into the hands of readers.)

ALSO: This 20-year anniversary is a prime time to announce that I’ve just signed a contract for a novel, Army of Lovers, that I’ve been writing for a long, long time. This is my ACT UP/Queer Nation novel set in the late-’80s / early-’90s in New York. It's a work of fiction but also really personal, about a time in my life when my mother died, when so many comrades fought to stay alive, when a wave of gay-bashing hit my friends and me. And it's a story about falling in love, finding a voice, and speaking truth to power within a political community doing direct action to change the world.

I’m thrilled that Amble Press, a new LGBTQ publishing imprint headed by the brilliant writer and editor Michael Nava, has acquired this novel. (Michael's new novel is called Lies With Man.) The ink on my contract is barely dry, so I don’t yet have a publication date or any juicy details. But you can be sure you’ll be hearing a lot more about it.

So Happy Lammy-versary to Michelle, Krandall, Paul, and me. And good luck to all the nominees for this year’s Lambda Awards, held on June 1, and hosted by the charming and talented Rakesh Satyal.

Why don’tcha go out and get yourself a queer book today?  

Kevin Killian, essential writer

Kevin Killian has died, a tragically sad and unbelievable piece of news, an irrevocable loss for those who loved him and a stunning gut punch for those of us who knew him from the world of writing, where he was a kind of foundation upon which many other things stood—books, poems, plays, anthologies, classes and lectures and social happenings. If you knew Kevin you knew he was talented, original, generous, well-liked, gossipy, and he popped up everywhere. And if you don’t know who he is that’s a sad testament to the way a writer with a three-decade body of work and a crucial role in the queer San Francisco literary scene (and beyond) can still be somehow marginal rather than essential, which is what he was.

When I first started timidly telling people in my early 20s that I wanted to pursue a life of writing, a slightly older but far more artistically pedigreed friend said to me, “Well, if you’re going to be a gay writer you have to read Kevin Killian, you have to read ‘Shy.’” I went to St. Mark’s Bookstore in the East Village, when it was still on St. Mark’s Place, and found a copy, back when books by or about gay men always had a shirtless torso on the cover, which damned a whole generation of gay male writers to the tyranny of low expectations. But “Shy” was more interesting and cooler than anything I’d ever read before.

I loved the way the narrator was named Kevin Killian, same as the author, and that in Chapter 1 he was at his typewriter in his rented apartment when the other characters entered his life, as if he was writing them into existence. Which he was, since this was a novel, but it also seemed true, like a memoir. I didn’t know then that Kevin was a pillar of a movement dubbed New Narrative that made literary tricks such as this the point of literature, but instead of feeling tricked I felt awake to new possibility. I loved that his teenage characters had absorbed David Bowie’s lyrics to the point that they saw the world through the wisdom they found there, which was foolish and fabulous at the same time. I loved the unmistakably homo point of view, where “Kevin” could write of a character: “I thought he was kind of boring. Right at first sight. You could tell he was straight: he fairly vibrated with nasty heterosexual strings.” I absorbed with astonishment that this was a novel that wasn’t asking anyone for permission to be what it was going to be.

I was an MFA student at San Francisco State when I first met Kevin. I wound up after a reading at a table full of people where I had no business being and everyone seemed knowing and fabulous and gossipy in a way that must have been charming but mostly just intimidated me. Then years later we met again and maybe because I was older or maybe because he was, he was very easy to talk to. After that he always greeted me with a friendliness that seemed steeped in admiration. We once talked in the aisle of Trader Joe’s for 20 minutes about five hundred different things. He was irresistible. 

Later still he was writing review after review on Amazon that were little works of literature themselves, a kind of performative review cycle, and I said something like “I don’t dare ask you to review my novel,” but he smiled and said he would. His review of “You Can Say You Knew Me When” had the subject line title, “You Asked for It,” a message from him to me. In it, he said some of the most amazing things that have ever been said about my writing, like, “Soehnlein's details are like pinpricks of starlight in the black velvet vistorama of his novel.” Yes, I’m bragging, but, I mean, velvet vistorama! Thank you, Kevin, forever, for that. Worth noting: he also took the time to call out, delightfully, the fact that I incorrectly referenced when Ingrid Bergman was in Italy having her affair with Robert Rossellini; by the date I cited, the affair was “cold as ashes,” Kevin noted in a perfect aside.

Kevin was high and low in one, writing about Dario Argento, Kylie Minogue, Jack Spicer and the Black Mountain School. He was nice to everyone, knew everyone, told stories about everyone, collaborated with everyone—that is all the everyones who populate a literary underground, where you can make your life if not your living from art. He died at 66, which is grievous, stupid, and horrible, leaving behind his wife, the brilliant writer Dodie Bellamy, and countless friends, collaborators, former students, readers, admirers, and people he schooled on Ingrid Bergman. “Shy” seems to be out of print, which someone needs to correct immediately, but in the decades since he wrote dozens more, including his last, the brilliant “Fascination,” which came out in 2018. Go find one of his books and read it.

"Everyone lies about their lives, but he had not lied about his."

The writers that matter to us matter for reasons that are entirely personal. It’s usually not the writer’s biography or even subject matter that makes his or her stories meaningful, but the writer’s voice, a literary style translating intimately in our ears, like confessions.

James Salter, who died yesterday, mattered to me. Obituaries are already calling him a "writer's writer," meaning much loved but not widely read, which is perhaps overstated. After all, his works are in print. He won awards. He was celebrated more than many, if not enough for those who believed he was one of the greats among us. Maybe he will be taught as one now, after his death, when things tend to get most interesting for writers. Sometimes, it’s only after we know that a voice has been silenced that we can fully hear it. Why is that? Are we more entranced by the echoes in the canyon than by the original shout?

Salter was a writer who cared perhaps most of all about desire. He kept finding new ways to express the pull of sex and affection, mostly between married men and women and the people they had affairs with.

One story of his I love, called “Give,” stands a bit outside his usual realm. In it, Salter—presumably heterosexual—writes with aching beauty about one man’s infatuation with another.

“Give,” from the collection “Last Night,” tells of a poet named Des whom the male narrator folds into his family as a friend to his wife and a playmate to their son. Here are the first impressions we get of Des; we don’t at this point in the story know that the men are more than friends, though later it’s abundantly clear that this rapturous description could only come from the gaze of a lover:

    Des was barefoot, I noticed. It was early for him to be up. He often slept until noon and then managed to slip gracefully into the rhythm of the household. That was his talent, to live as he liked, almost without concern, to live as if he would reach the desired end one way or another and not be bothered by whatever came between. …

    He was a poet, of course. He even looked like a poet, intelligent, lank. He’d won the Yale prize when he was twenty-five and went on from there. When you pictured him, it was wearing a gray herringbone jacket, khaki pants, and for some reason sandals. Doesn’t fit together, but a lot of things about him were like that. Born in Galveston, ROTC in college, and even married while an undergraduate, although what became of that wife he never clearly explained. His real life came after that, and he had lived it ever since, teaching sometimes in community classes, travelling to Greece and Morocco, living there for a period, having a breakdown, and through it all writing the poem that had made his name. I read the poem, a third of it anyway, standing stunned in a bookshop in the Village. I remember the afternoon, cloudy and quiet, and I remember, too, almost leaving myself, the person I was, the ordinary way I felt about things, my perception of—there’s no other word for it—the depth of life, and above all the thrill of successive lines. The poem was an aria, jagged and unending. Its tone was what set it apart—written as if from the shades. There lay the delta, there the burning arms…was the way it began, and immediately I felt it was not about rivers uncoiling but about desire. … Lines that seemed unconnected gradually became part of a confession that had at its center rooms in the burning heat of August where something has taken place, clearly sexual, but it is also the vacant streets of rural Texas, roads, forgotten friends, the slap of hands on rifle slings and forked pennants limp at parades. There are condoms, sun-faded cars, soiled menus with misspellings, a kind of pyre on which he had laid his life. That was why he had seemed so pure—he had given all. Everyone lies about their lives, but he had not lied about his. He had made of it a noble lament, through it always running this thing you have had, that you will always have, but can never have.

There’s always something alluded to but absent from the emotional lives of the men in Salter’s stories—that thing “you will always have, but can never have.” He wrote of long friendships between men who avoid intimacy, triangulating their feelings via women who matter less to them than they do to each other, as in the short story “American Express.”

In “Give,” Salter saved one of the most purely romantic passages in his work for a man unexpectedly and unwittingly falling in love with another man through his poetry. But this reveals something I have always felt about Salter himself: the writing itself is seductive, it creates my love for it, it earns my devotion. No surprise that the person who first introduced me to his work was someone I had fallen deeply for, himself a weaver of fiction.

The death of a literary artist is always a loss, the knowledge there’ll be no new stories, no further confessions, from this voice you treasure. The words you have are all the words you’ll get. Now you must listen for the echoes.

 

Adrienne Rich: "...the worst affliction / is not to know who you are or have been..."

When news of the death of the great lesbian poet Adrienne Rich arrived today in the form of a tweet, I was stunned.

Stunned that this vital poet—still actively publishing in her 82nd year—could be gone. Stunned because Rich's 50 years of poetry—thoughtful, sensual, beautifully composed—is so at odds with the world of social networking, where everything is trivial, inane and sloppy. And stunned because it felt like a kick to the gut, and I had to stop what I'd been doing to figure out why.

 The New York Times reports her books of poems have sold over 800,000 copies—an extraordinary number in a culture that "doesn't get" poetry. For many of us, she was the lesbian feminist poet, the one we were told to read in our youth (by feminist professors, leftist activists and lovers hoping to transmit the passion in her lyrics)—the one we continued to turn to, because she gave voice to outrage and hope, showing us a clear-eyed, moral view of the world.

For those of us who write, she was a model: a commitment to the idea that art is necessary. I doubt I'd be the writer I am today without The Fact of a Doorframe, or Your Native Land, Your Life, or What is Found There, or Dark Fields of the Republic, books that make the case for poetry on every page. I discovered her exactly at the moment when I was trying to figure out what kind of writer I wanted to be. She provided instruction.

Tonight in the literature class I teach at USF, I talked about what she represented. In the classroom, I don't talk enough about the role of the writer. The responsibility of the writer. I talk about craft—characterization, point of view, prose style, tone—as if any of that matters without substance. We ask of the stories we workshop, "What's at stake?" But we don't often ask of ourselves, what's at stake for me as a writer in the world? Why does it matter that I do what I do? 

Tonight, I read this poem to my students. It's from a series in Your Native Land, Your Life called "Contradictions: Tracking Poems," which I believe is one of her masterworks. Each section is numbered, and each tackles the way "our lives will always be / a stew of contradictions." The poet's canvas here is epic—international politics, imprisonment, government corruption—and simultaneously private—"My mouth hovers across your breast / in the short grey winter afternoon." In this section, she turns her attention to Writing:

27.

The Tolstoyans                      the Afro-American slaves

knew this:                  you could be killed

for teaching people to read and write

I used to think the worst affliction

was to be forbidden pencil and paper

well, Ding Ling recited poems to prison walls

for years of the Cultural Revolution

and truly, the magic of written characters

looms and dwindles              shrinks small             grows swollen

depending on where you stand

and what is in your hand

and who can read and why

I think now the worst affliction

is not to know who you are or have been

I have learned this in part

from writers              Reading and writing

aren’t sacred             yet people have been killed

as if they were

 

The daily grind of the internet can be a graveyard, with tombstones of the famous erected as fast as the news hits. But I don't think I've ever seen a poet "trending" on Twitter for twelve hours. Something happened today: we turned to each other and acknowledged that Adrienne Rich's life—her work, her personal-is-political worldview—mattered. Her death is undeniably a tremendous loss, but it is also an opportunity to talk to each other about what she still has to say to us, and where we go from here.

Reborn This Way

Robin and Ruby turns one today. It was exactly a year ago that my third novel was published in hardcover. What a great year it's been. I made a book trailer, did readings in SF, LA, NYC, Philadelphia, Boston and Berkeley, was interviewed by some smart people, and even got nominated for one website's gay fiction award.

As of this week Robin and Ruby has been reborn as a paperback, with a new cover photograph, a book group guide and some great blurbs to help convince folks to buy it. I hope they do. Book sales are the least of the reasons that motivate my writing, but without moving a few units, what I do becomes unsustainable.

You'd have to have your head in the sand not to know that the publishing industry is going through all kinds of changes, not least of which are shrinking hardcover fiction sales and the increase in E-books to 25% of publishers' overall sales. Though I'm a read-on-paper guy when it comes to my own habits, I don't much care how someone finds my stories, just that they do.

But the big bummer of E-publishing is piracy. Just as music artists suffered ten years ago when everyone started passing around files for free, so too are authors seeing their incomes shrink as pirated versions of their books become disseminated. It's been plenty hard to make any kind of living off writing fiction; things aren't getting easier. I can't tell you how many times I've stumbled upon a website offering a free (i.e. illegal) download of Robin and Ruby, usually for the iPad. (My publisher stays on top of that, in a cease-and-desist way, but it's nearly impossible to stop. They call it "viral" for a reason.)

If you haven't bought a copy of Robin and Ruby yet, this would be a good week to do it, to give the book a little sales bump. And if you have: THANK YOU. The reason I do what I do is because of you—the chance to communicate with a readership hungry for stories.

If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, I'll be reading at the following events next month. Come by and say hello.

Mon. April 18. 7-9pm. Lost in the Woods: Five Writers off the Beaten Path. At Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby @ MLK, Berkeley. Theater is located across the street from the Ashby BART.

Fri. April 22.7pm. Peninsula Literary Series. 7pm at Gallery House, 320 South California Ave., Palo Alto. 

Quoted in the NY Times

Today's New York Times casts a spotlight on the literary scene in San Francisco, with nods to the legendary, the up-and-coming, and the hidden secrets. There's even a quote from yours truly in there, where I come off sounding like a cheerleader for the home town team.

“The longer you are in San Francisco, the more you realize it is just one big scene with a lot of different ways of making itself known,” said Mr. Soehnlein, whose own novels, like this year’s “Robin and Ruby,” live on the gay lit shelf. “In S.F. people ask more questions. In New York or L.A. it’s like crickets out there, even if they are very attentive. Do they think they’re too cool to ask questions?”

It's a kick to get quoted in the NY Times, which seems to be the paper that everyone reads, even 3,000 miles away. But it's funny how wrapped up my reputation is with this city, because even though I've lived here for seventeen years (!), I never meant to stay. The initial lure was grad school. I figured I'd finish up my MFA and go back to New York, where I had been before, but then I got a boyfriend, and then I joined a band, and then I got another boyfriend (who eventually became my husband) and a rent stabilized apartment and...

But I’m deeply connected to NYC, and when I visit once or twice a year, I feel my heart beating at a faster, and what seems like a more natural rate. New York is lodged under my skin, forever. So it's ironic that I'm dissing New Yorkers in that quote as "think[ing] they’re too cool." The context for that was a discussion about book readings. I'd just finished my book tour for Robin and Ruby, and I'd noted to the writer how many questions came from the audience during the Q&A in San Francisco, compared to how difficult it was to get folks to ask questions after the reading in NY. (Same was true for LA, when I read there.)

But I don't think "coolness" is really the issue. There's something in the literary culture of San Francisco that invites more dialogue between author and writer. Without the infrastructure of the publishing industry here, as in NY, the center of a writer’s world is not the book deal but the public reading; not the author-agent-editor triad but the author-workshop-bookstore.

Being a writer in San Francisco means, I think, getting close to your readers, feeling like you know them. There are so many opportunities to read your work in public that you can be a very visible author here having published very little, or to little renown. True, away from the deals and the publishers, SF is not the most viable place to earn money for your writing. But it's possibly one of the best places to be a writer if you want your art to reach an engaged audience, and, in return, to hear what they have to say about it. And that’s pretty cool. 

 

All the Books You Haven't Read

Two things have been on my mind this week. One is that Friday, July 10th is Proust’s birthday. The other is that Newsweek published a Top 100 Books list.

Neither of these things is particularly urgent. It’s 131 years since Marcel Proust was born—not exactly a milestone anniversary. Likewise, the Newsweek list doesn’t represent any particular breakthrough in scholarship or pop culture; it’s a “meta-list”—compiled from ten already existing best-books lists—and in fact when you read the methodology, it seems a little random. Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (a.k.a. In Search of Lost Time) shows up on Newsweek’s list at #65, but that's not why I've put these two things together. I've put them together because they both seem to be part of the conversation that I have with myself all the time about reading—about what I have read, what I’m reading now and most importantly, and most confusingly of all, what I should read next, out of all the books I haven't read.

I teach in a creative writing program, which means I put reading lists together for my students. I’m expected to know a lot about literature. I’m expected to read widely. Last year, I read 47 books. (Yes, I keep count.) Some of these were books I read for the first time. Many were books I re-read because I put them on a syllabus and needed to re-familiarize myself. A few of them of them were book-length manuscripts written by students or by friends that I’d been asked to read, to give advice, to give a blurb. Some of them I read purely for pleasure—these were the ones on my nightstand, the ones I read before I fell asleep every night. Some of these were pretty light or pretty thin. It worked out to almost one book a week. That seems like a lot to me; at any rate, it was what my brain could absorb.

And yet it always seems like I haven’t read enough. When I went through Newsweek’s 100 books, I saw that I'd read fewer than a third of them. It actually makes me nervous to admit this. In the world of writers and professors that I spend a lot of time in, admitting that you haven't read something you're supposed to have read is one of the great unspeakables.

Of course, you can’t read everything. No one can. But there’s this attitude that gets passed around, where if you admit, “I haven’t read [fill in the Great Book]” you may hear your words repeated back to you incredulously, “You haven’t read [fill in the Great Book]??” I think writers take pleasure in shaming each other on this subject, and so  we sometimes lie about what we’ve read—or if not out and out lie, at least perform a vague nodding of the head, in reference to whatever book is being discussed at the moment, as a way of not admitting that you haven’t read it. I know I've done that in the past.

So I'm going to come clean here, at least a little. War and Peace, ranked number one on Newsweek's meta-list: never read it. Ulysses, ranked number three: read parts of it, but never got through the whole thing. Number 8 is both The Iliad and The Odyssey: I remember reading some piece of that in high school, but it’s a fuzzy memory at best. Number 9, Pride and Prejudice—nope, and I've lied about that one in the past. Number 10, The Divine Comedy: nope, though I admitted that to my students last year. Add to that Moby Dick, The Brothers Karamazov, Middlemarch, most of Faulkner, all of Pynchon. That's just a few of them.

Which brings me back to Proust. A few years ago, my colleague Aaron Shurin told me, "Once you read In Search of Lost Time, your life will become divided into before-you-read-Proust and after-you-read-Proust." That was a grand enough statement to get me interested. Then this year I taught a gay literature class, and I wanted to fill in a few gaps in the gay-lit canon. On top of that, I had a trip to Paris planned, and I wanted to get ready for the trip by reading a French novel. And so, I started to read Swann’s Way, translated by Lydia Davis, the first volume of the seven volumes that make up Proust's masterwork.

I’d tried to read it before and had put it down after a dozen or so pages. His sentences are long and multi-clausal and often without helpful commas where you want them—you can literally lose track of what the sentence is about before you get to the end of it. You can’t skim; if your mind wanders, you have to start over. But something happened this time around. I think the moment I knew I’d stick with it came after I read, appropriately enough, the passage when the young narrator talks about the joys of reading. Specifically, about the power of a novelist’s “creatures” to take hold of a reader’s soul:

… we have made them ours, since it is within us that they occur, that they hold within their control, as we feverishly turn the pages of the book, the rapidity of our breathing and the intensity of our gaze. And once the novelist has put us in that state, in which, as in all purely internal states every emotion is multiplied tenfold, in which his book will disturb us as might a dream but a dream more lucid than those we have while sleeping and whose memory will last longer, then see how he provokes in us within one hour all the possible happinesses and all possible unhappinesses just a few of which we would spend years of our lives coming to know and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slowness with which they occur prevents us from perceiving them… (p. 87)

And I thought, after I re-read it a couple of times, that’s exactly right. It’s an elaborate but nonetheless accurate way of talking about the power of a novel over a reader, and also demonstrating that power in the sentences themselves. It’s mesmerizing, if you surrender to it. I surrendered to it. It took me three months, but I finished Swann's Way. I'm not sure it changed my life, but then there are still six more volumes to go...

I wish I could read more. I wish everyone did. Which is why when I finally get around to reading something I’ve wanted to read for a long time, there’s a very sweet satisfaction involved. It’s the pleasure of feeling like you’re conquering that big mountain of knowledge and experience one volume at a time. But more importantly, it's the pleasure of the book itself, which casts us inside its dream, "a dream more lucid than those we have while sleeping and whose memory will last longer."

Bon Anniversaire, Monsieur Proust. Thanks for the pleasure.

Lit for Pride

Few things put a smile on my face more than walking into my favorite bookstore and finding my novel on special display, complete with a Staff Favorite card attached. I snapped this pic at Books Inc. in the Castro, where their LGBT Pride Month rack gave a top-shelf slot to You Can Say You Knew Me When.

Most gay writers seem to object to the "gay writer" designation to some degree -- David Sedaris just put his ambivalence on record, saying that yes, he is a gay writer, but please don't shelve his books in "the ghetto" -- though you can't deny that this kind of prominence puts you right in the face of potential readers. (In San Francisco, June is a big month for queer tourists, some of whom are going to wander into a store like Books Inc. and buy something the staff recommends.) No writer wants his or her audience limited, but not everyone has Sedaris's platform or visibility.

Indeed, invisibility is an ongoing issue for books by queer writers, as yesterday's infuriating column in the Washington Post Book World makes clear. Asked by a reader to recommend a "new gay book," editor Dennis Drabelle responds, "not many of these are being published anymore," then goes on to recommend a single British novel many years out of print. As awesome queer website Band of Thebes observed of Drabelle's idiocy,

A more helpful answer might have steered readers toward the annual Lambda Literary Awards, the Publishing Triangle Awards, the ALA gay book prize, and the revamped Alyson Books.

I was at the Lambda Awards last month, and I can assure you that many, many queer-themed books are being published. (Check out the gathered GLBTerati from that night on Homo-Neurotic.com ... I was there in a chartreuse ascot, and posed for this pic with short story writer Justin Torres.) Band of Thebes offers a list of authors whose "new gay books" might have made for a better answer from Drabelle. A couple of current suggestions from my own shelf: Rakesh Satyal's Blue Boy, a beautifully composed tale of a grade school baby-gay who finds transcendence through voyeurism, the Hindu god Krishna and early-90s-era Whitney Houston; Vestal McIntyre's Lake Overturn, which weaves together many stories of the residents (both gay and not) of one Idaho town; Drew Ferguson's The Totally Screwed Up Life of Charlie the Second, a funny, sexy first-person teen romp; and Trebor Healey's A Perfect Scar and Other Stories, just re-released , which includes a heartbreaking favorite, "The Mercy Seat." And those are just by the boys.

Seems to me that Dennis Drabelle and The Washington Post Book World ought to print an apology. And how about reviewing a couple of new queer titles while you're at it?

Meanwhile, if anyone needs any evidence that those who hate queers understand the power of gay-themed books, check out this story about Francesca Lia Block's Baby Be-Bop, first posted on Salon and then covered on the Advocate. A wingnut "Christian" group has not only attempted to ban this book from a library's shelves -- they actually WANT TO BURN IT.

The Regrettable Demise of Eddie Socket

This year marks the 20th anniversary of one of my all-time most-treasured novels, The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, by John Weir. When the book came out I was about the same age (mid-20s) and living in the same location (the East Village) as the main character, Eddie Socket, and I became immediately attached to him a way that happens only every now and then in a lifetime of reading. Eddie was an unlikely hero for literature, a gay slacker with an artistic bent who was "out" but not necessarily "proud" and who was so focused on a handsome, unattainable older man that he wasn't paying a whole lot of attention to his own premature decline (a decline due to...well, it was the 80s...you figure it out). One of the central themes was how to overcome one's own very necessary denial about the worst of life -- how to grow up, in other words, when you're not at all ready. Weir's tone was funny, heartbreaking and angry in turns, and his skill as a storyteller was apparent from page one. The novel quickly became for me a model of the fiction I wanted to write.

In 2001, a special edition of the book was brought out by Triangle Classics, an imprint of the Insight Out Book Club that was dedicated to overlooked queer novels and memoirs. I was enlisted to write the Introduction, and was all too happy to have my say about the book's importance, not just to me but in terms of its place in the lineage of gay fiction. Rereading the novel, I was thrilled to experience it all over again -- and newly struck by its balance of pop and sophistication. At the same time, Alyson, a queer fiction publisher, had picked up the title, too, so suddenly there were two new editions available.

And so I wasn't prepared for the email that came in yesterday, from Alyson, informing me: "Unfortunately, this title has long been out of print.  All remaining stock was destroyed a while back." I'd been trying to track down copies for my university bookstore, because I'm teaching a gay fiction class and I put the novel on my syllabus. The bookstore rep told had informed me she was having trouble filling the order, so I was doing some legwork myself.

Books go out of print all the time, but this one hurt. Maybe it's the violent sound of "destroyed stock," which conjures up a big, evil bonfire. Maybe it's the fact that The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket has never stopped being alive for me, so it's impossible to imagine it only exists in the world in the used copies tracked down through Amazon or Alibris. Maybe it's the fact that Triangle Classics also seems to have ceased to exist. Maybe it's just the extra disappointment at not being able to share this beloved book with my students, most of whom were born after it was first published and who have never had to think about how gay writers addressed the AIDS crisis when it was at its most devastating.

John Weir's second novel, What I Did Wrong, came out in 2006, 17 years after the first one. It's another beautifully written, intimate, wise and funny take on urban life, this time set in the post-everything era in which we now live. I strongly suggest ordering a copy of it -- while it's still in print. Meanwhile, here's hoping that another publisher recognizes the value of Weir's debut, and that Eddie Socket's demise turns out to be reversible after all.