Perry Brass on
What Is Fiction, and Gay Fiction, Too?
Fiction is facts, feelings, and ideas
arranged for a
purpose. Fiction is important for human life. Our imagination is fed
through
fiction. Children are taught lessons from fiction. Fiction provides the
relief
humans need from the wearing business of consciousness. One of the
first
marks of a totalitarian society is that it limits fiction: it tells you
what
kind of stories can be told.
Our needs for fiction are seen in beauty contests,
staged political events, any form of drama such as plays, movies,
commercials, magazine ads, TV, and WWF wrestling smack-downs. People
feel that fiction "lies." It
does not lie as much as it arranges the truth, or what we can accept as
the
truth.
In truth, or reality,
bad fiction lies: it is based on trumped-up phony
concepts of the truth. But good fiction has its own "fictional truth."
It
shows us what reality really
is.
Some basic ideas about "arranging facts": the "round
house" theory of fiction.
The first fiction was in the form of folk tales, a
very
potent, usable form of fiction. People told folk tales -- stories from
the "folk," from regular people. These were tall tales,
wish-fulfillment stories, dreams,
etc. and they told them in round huts, tents, and small one-room
shelters.
So folk fiction was "circular": beginnings and
endings
met in a believable and satisfying way.
Folk tales start off with a basic
question, and then end with an answer. Why does the leopard have spots?
How
did humans come into the world (creation myths)? Why do we behave the
way we do? Who were the first kings and queens? What punishments do the
bad
receive, and what rewards do the good get?
Folk tales are filled with "folk wisdom," the
popular
wisdom that is often based on almost universal wishes, rather than on
real
life. Another form of folk wisdom is popular music ("My boyfriend's
back
and it's gonna be trouble!"), country music ballads ("Love is just a
four-letter
word!"), even nursery rhymes in which bad children are punished and
good children
get rewarded.
As human life became organized by power, the "little
people" kept living in their huts, while powerful people
lived in castles. Folk tales gave way to what we call "courtly
tales" -- tales of the royal court.
The courtly tale is very much a part of gay fiction,
because courtly tales pay a
lot of attention to differences in status, and
that has always been a queer interest as well: the powerful vs. the
weak. Beautiful
vs. ugly. Smart vs. dumb.
In the courtly tale, differences in status charge
the
story. Also, courtly tales are concerned with attention to status
details:
how a great house looks; fine clothing and it's style; the
way people dress and convey themselves. These are hallmarks of courtly
tales. Loyalty, submission, and longing for power are also aspects of
courtly tales, as are codes
of chivalry and behavior. Andrew Holleran's popular novel Dancer
from the Dance
is very much a courtly tale, dealing with status, "queenliness,"
the desire for heroes in a cynical world, and a longing for purity and
honor.
In our own day, Mafia and gangster stories, Westerns
(the code of the Old West), and many most romances are courtly tales.
One of my favorite courtly tales concerns the quest of the good "little
knight:" to prove himself against all odds. Hollywood uses this format
constantly: Robin Williams has made a career out of it, but so did
Jimmy Stewart before him.
Gay fiction has not paid much attention to folk
tales and fairy tales, but they are a very potent form of fiction. I
used them in my Mirage trilogy of novels, which were billed as
science fiction but were actually more "Sword and Sorcery" stories in a
science fiction
setting. One of the characteristics of folk tales is that they are
based
on gossip and are told in a vernacular language, the language of the
people.
I wish we had more queer stories like that, told in the language of
street
queens, hustlers, and regular folk, instead of opera queens, PhD
candidates,
and Francophiles writing in eighteenth century French translated into
English.
One of my favorite writers for this is John Rechy. His wonderful novel City
of Night is filled with queer folk tales, often told in a
shockingly
magical "You won't believe this!" way.
The
novel emerges.
The first "novels," or "new stories" came about in
the 18th Century in English through letters. The first novel in English
is Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, published 1740 by Samuel
Richardson. Richardson was
a prosperous printer and he was asked to produce a book with models for
letter
writing, then a great hobby and craze among the rising upper middle
class
to show that they were educated enough to write. He wrote Pamela,
and later, in 1747, Clarissa Harlowe. Both novels are
"epistolary
novels," that is, the plot is revealed in letters.
The novel came about due to the advent of having a
“private life,” a "private space" (a place for reading and gossip), and
"private
time," such as a time for social visits, vacations, travel, and dealing
with
personal money as a part of a private life.
During the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, sex
was considered fairly much a public "function." There was an amazing
candor
about sex, as witnessed by The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s
great poem
filled with bawdy stories and rhymes. This sexual candor later died in
Victorian
times.
In the Middle Ages, religion took the place
of
a private life. Religious feelings were often hidden and very
vulnerable--you could easily be killed for your religious feelings, but
rarely for your sexual ones.
Much of our human "religious" feelings are now
incorporated in what we call “gay fiction” — the idea of power worship,
of glimpsing
inaccessible beauty, of religious ecstasy as a sexual experience. I
think
we need to explore these ideas and experiences much further. However,
we
are only beginning, openly, to twin the religious with the sexual. For
too
many people, under Catholic or Protestant Christian conservative
repression,
religion is the absence of sexuality. However, throughout human
history
this has never been true.
What Is Gay Fiction?
I have two definitions that I like to use. The first
is more academic:
1) Fiction that takes all the power and energy that,
in conventional fiction, one gender exerts on the opposite gender, and
in gay fiction exerts on the same gender. In doing this, our ideas of
that gender
are enlarged: gay and lesbian fiction, by its nature, enlarges our
ideas
about gender definitions and boundaries. Men become nurturing, tender,
wild,
queenly, exciting, etc. Women become powerful, huge, positive, etc.
Or----
2) Fiction that is written by, about, and for queer
people. Simple as that.
Pre-Stonewall, much gay fiction was extremely
closeted, as
was most of life. In fact any mention at all of homosexual
activity put a work of fiction in a very special place: on the shelves of
multitudes
of closeted queer people. So, much gay fiction has a historical
purpose. In
other words, what was shockingly "gay" a hundred years ago, may not be
so
today, except as an historical artifact. You also have the question: is
the
writing of almost totally closeted queer writers, like Somerset
Maugham,
part of gay fiction, even if there are no gay characters in it? My
feeling:
YES. Because Maugham reveals his own covert, rebellious, distinct gay
voice
regardless.
Also, how about works of fiction in that strange
"netherworld"
of "ambiguously gay" writers writing ambiguously
gay books? Books like D.
H. Lawrence's Women In Love or Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim?
My feeling: YES, again. These are "gay books," in
that
the intimacy between men in them is so intense that dismissing it as
devoid
of homosexual or homoerotic longing is deceitful.
So, all great fiction -- that is, fiction that deals
with the whole of human experience is "gay fiction"--but not all "gay
fiction" is great fiction!
Three concepts that you can
dismiss regarding
writing fiction:
1) "Originality"— this really cripples many writers.
You do not need your own "original" plot. There are virtually none,
especially since most plots hail back to a few ancient stories, like
"Cinderella," the basis for thousands of novels, plays, movies, and TV
series. However, if you
have one "original" character, you have done something amazing.
Tennessee Williams gave us Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski, but
both those characters can be traced back to Shakespeare, with the
emotionally fragile Ophelia (from
Hamlet) and the horrific demon Caliban (from The Tempest)
who
was all muscle and unleashed fury.
So, the writer must rely on his own originality —
that is, his ability to observe and organize ideas and feelings.
Having your own "material," in the form of direct
experiences,
is not important. One of the world’s greatest war novels, The Red
Badge
of Courage was written by a young writer, Stephen Crane, who’d
never
been in a war. Jane Austen led a reclusive life, never married, and yet
wrote
constantly about love and marriage.
2) "Voice" — many writers feel that they can never
achieve a real "voice," a distinctive style or approach. In truth,
there is no such thing in fiction as "voice." There is only technique
and what you do with it.
Technique is what allows you to write what you want
to write, and say what you need to say -- the way you need to
say it.
One of the most distinct "voices" in literature,
Ernest Hemingway’s, came from using newspaper techniques. He was a
journalist in the Midwest, so he merged journalism with the style of
Willa Cather, another writer from the Midwest.
Writers have to learn what it is they need to say,
then say it. Learning technique will get you there.
Dancers learn technique in order to dance. Just as
there are many different types or schools of dance technique -- ballet,
modern, folk, jazz, and schools within these types, there are many
different fiction techniques. A writer needs to learn techniques — how
to recognize them, practice
them, and use them to develop his own "voice."
3) "Writing is lonely and hard. It is a constant,
brutal struggle. Writers lead miserable, neurotic, self-destructive
lives."
No, writing can be one of the world’s most
pleasurable
activities. Writing is not lonely, but is the complete antidote to
loneliness,
because you are contacting the deepest part of yourself. It is wearing,
but
worth it. What writing does require is great discipline, concentration,
and
effort. But then, so does any other art form, or working in any field
of
science.
And 4), regarding gay fiction: There
is a certain way that gay writers are supposed to sound — like Oscar
Wilde,
Proust, or Andrew Holleran — and if you don't write like that, you
can't be one.
Forget that one totally. This idea has been foisted
on us by the ever-present queer academic establishment. Oscar
Wilde, Proust, and
their many progeny, such as Holleran or David Leavitt, are only one
strand of gay feelings, thought, and writing. There are many more, from
many different periods and other countries as well. So, if you don’t
feel you fit into the
"classic" gay mode, which I used to describe as spanning the entire
gamut of human feelings and experiences, from artificial to
bitchy, don't worry.
In fact, you might be working in a mode that is all
your
own, and I'd be delighted to read it.
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