Monday morning and in Jasper, Alabama. Today is my parents’ anniversary, and the first since we lost Mom earlier this year. Dad and I are going to the grave to put flowers on it, and then we’re going to convoy up to Kentucky. There’s no plan, really, other than having breakfast here and then checking out and so forth. The firsts are always the hardest; both of their birthdays, which are only a day apart, will be rough come October; him being alone on his and then her not being here for hers. Their birthdays are weekdays, so I don’t know if I can make it up here for that–unless he decides to do it on a weekend, but he’s also retired, so his time is his own. I do worry about him, though. It’s very easy to put myself into his place by imagining the horror of losing Paul. I mean, I’ve already had to confront that hideous possibility several times already, but even so it’s not going to be easy. The selfish part of me kind of hopes I go first, to be honest…but I would prefer not to; because I don’t want Paul to go through what my dad is going through right now. I’d rather shoulder that grief and burden then put him through it, if that makes sense? My life would be empty and bleak and there wouldn’t be anymore joy in it, but I’d rather I deal with that than him.
I hate even thinking in terms of “who goes first,” really. Kind of hard not to have thoughts about our mortality when having to go through this sort of thing.
The drive was lovely, but there was a lot more traffic than I am accustomed to; but then I never drive north on a Sunday, either; it’s usually mid-week or not on the weekend. We’ll probably get to Nashville just in time for rush hour (hurray!), and then the rest of the drive up, but at least the drive was broken up a bit. I was able to get Whataburger in Tuscaloosa (seriously, the simple pleasures mean everything to me), and then drove on up through the countryside. Alabama is so beautiful; everything is in bloom and everything is green. I had wondered about kudzu the last time I came up here; I’ve seen a lot of it on this trip so maybe May was too early for it to get leafy and green? The mystery of kudzu is just another one of those things I’ll probably always be interested in and never completely understand.
I’m also thinking about writing about Alabama again.
On the drive, I kept thinking about stories that are in progress–particularly one, which I wrote first in 1983 and have been sitting on ever since–and I was even thinking about my next book to start writing (yes, I have others that have to be finished but…) and I want to write another Gothic. I was listening to Carol Goodman’s marvelous The Widow’s House (and yes, absolutely loving it) which got me to thinking about Gothics again, and a New Orleans ghost story I’ve been wanting to tell, set on Camp Place in my neighborhood and roughly titled Voices in an Empty Room. I’ve had the idea forever, and I love that title–does it get more Gothic than that title?–and I was also thinking about another short story I’ve rewritten and revised and haven’t been able to sell anywhere; I may do another draft and try again, but it will probably just end up in my next short story collection. One of the things I love about being an avid reader as well as a writer is that great craftsmanship in novels is something that always inspires me to be better myself. Carol Goodman does that whenever I read/listen to one of her books; many authors do, frankly. I often am amazed that they consider me a colleague, let alone speak to me. I always feel like a rank amateur when I am reading a master like Carol.
As for the grieving, it’s still hard for me to talk about Mom without getting upset or getting teary-eyed and my voice cracking. I try very hard to hold it together in front of Dad–not in a toxic masculinity sense of “men don’t cry” but more in the sense that he’ll lose it completely if I do; he’s never going to get over this. It’s funny, but I never have ever felt completely comfortable crying in front of my parents. Maybe it’s a holdover from childhood? I cry easily, actually; television shows and movies and books make me cry all the time. I don’t like crying in front of anyone, really; maybe that is a toxic masculinity thing after all? I’ve always wept privately, away from people and by myself. Maybe it’s a vulnerability thing? I don’t like showing my vulnerability–primarily because whenever I have, those I thought were safe enough to let in, eventually went on to exploit it and I have always regretted it.
I’ve always been a magnet for shitty people, seriously. (That isn’t to say I don’t have marvelous, wonderful friends now; the kind I used to dream about having when I was younger.) Maybe, for whatever reason, there’s something about me that makes people be shitty to me? This is a distinct possibility; I am terrible with verbal and physical cues and often misread situations and say or do something inappropriate or unintentionally offensive; if I had a dollar for every person I’ve accidentally offended, I could retire now. I never want to offend anyone–even people I don’t much care about or like (racists and misogynists and homophobes, on the other hand, oh, yes, make no mistake–I am definitely determinedly trying to offend the fuck out of all of you trash). I don’t ever want to make anyone feel bad, for any reason. Even when someone deserves it, I always feel terrible and guilty about making them feel bad later when I’ve calmed down. I know I have a temper, and a bad one at that, so I am constantly trying to not lose it. Knowing that I have a terrible time grasping what is obvious to everyone else and being bad at reading social cues, I am often asking myself do I have a right to be angry about this or am I being unreasonable? Because I also know that when I AM angry, I am completely unreasonable, and I don’t like that because it’s not fair, for one thing, and for another, I prefer to be rational and logical.
Saturday morning and lots to do before hitting the road tomorrow. The lovely thing is it isn’t that much of a drive, about five and a half hours, and there’s a Whataburger in Tuscaloosa. Yay! I have The Drowning Tree by the amazing Carol Goodman queued up on my Audible app and ready to go once I hit the road. I have to make a grocery run today for Paul, and was thinking about dropping books off at the library sale, but I don’t know. It’s hot and the grocery thing is going to be exhausting enough as it is, and I have a lot to get done today. I was exhausted yesterday after work. The escape room thing was quite fun, and then we had lunch at Olive on Carondelet, a Middle Eastern place (sobs with joy! I got to have a gyro) and then I came home to work. The walk home was exhausting in the heat, and of course, I actually drifted off to sleep in my easy chair a bit. I got some more Alfred Hitchcock Presents books in the mail as well, and I started reading this delightfully creepy story I haven’t quite figured out yet, but the suspense and the build is sensational. We also watched the International Male catalog documentary (more on that later), and then I finished doing the laundry before going to bed, exhausted and ready to sleep for an eternity.
Despite the hideous heat yesterday, it actually wasn’t terribly humid and there was also a lovely cool breeze so the walk didn’t seem that dreadful, or at least not while I was doing it. The sun was merciless, though, and it was in the mid-nineties.I also marveled as I walked home a different way than usual–I took Camp Street to Prytania, rather than St. Charles–and I again marveled that not only do I live in New Orleans, but how quickly things change. I was also puzzling out some knots and final corrections I need to make to this manuscript before turning it in tomorrow–a walk is always lovely for things like that; even in the heat, and I need to remember that more often, quite frankly. I was also thinking, as I walked, about how I am always worried about repeating myself, or writing the same book again. It’s easy enough to do when you forget what you’ve already written and published, as I am wont to do at this stage. My editor’s notes were kind of amusing, in some ways, because one thing that he was pointing out was something that I always do–and something that I’ve noticed in the other two active manuscripts on hand–which is a tendency to name the characters with alliterative names. (For example, in the pro wrestling noir everyone, it seems, has a first name that begins with T) I also have a tendency to write hangover scenes, and car crashes. Now that I have this permanent brain fog or whatever it is that’s going on in my head since last summer, it’s even harder for me to remember past books that I’ve written; so I think I am going to have to start blogging about past books I’ve published so that I can remember them. I’ve done some of these posts before in the past, because I like to try to remember what was going on while I was writing the book; what I was trying to do with the book; how long had I had the idea for the book and where did it come from; what changed from the original idea during the process of writing it and what other influences got involved after getting started; and so on. I also like to think about the voice and the tone, how did I do with the setting and scene? What was I going for with the main character, and why? Facebook reminded me yesterday that at some point in the past twelve years the box o’books for The Orion Mask arrived on this date–and I just walked past the house that inspired a part of the book recently, and I was amazed yet again at how much detail I’d gotten wrong.
So, I decided to rent the documentary All Man: The International Male Story last night, for a multitude of reasons. Now that I’m in my sixties my former indifference to nostalgia has lessened (and I do tend to worry that I look back through rose-colored glasses, making the past seem better and more idyllic than it was; I have to always remember yes, but you were also a neurotic mess then, too), and so yes, there was a bit of a curiosity involved with my wanting to watch. I think I only ever bought one thing ever from International Male–a red pirate blouse, a fluffy shirt, if you will, and I got it to go as a pirate for Halloween–but I always got the catalogue, and I often liked their clothes…but was also always very consciously aware that to wear those clothes, you also had to look like their models; the lesson that beautiful people can wear anything and look good I’d learned early in life. I also had no fashion sense because I never was able to develop one–because men’s clothes were hideous, and there weren’t many options when I was growing up. I’ve also have a very mild case of color blindness with certain shades of certain colors–I can’t tell dark blue from black, for example–and I am never entirely sure what colors go with other ones. I do know that red, black and white all work together, so usually my dressier clothes are some combination or variation of those colors. But for the most part, I don’t care about what I wear and I don’t know what’s in style or not. I’m never sure if the clothes I am wearing match and/or look good on me, and I’ve stopped worrying about it. When I was younger, I used to deplore the fact that men’s clothes were so dull and boring. I love hats, for example, but men don’t really wear any hats other than baseball or cowboy anymore. I have some lovely hats, but never have any place to wear them. I have a marvelous fedora I bought in New York many years ago, but I never go anywhere here that I could wear it; it would be perfect for something like the Anthony Awards or something, but it has it’s own special box and that’s another item to take on the plane…so it just sits in its box in the closet. But I used to love the International Male catalogue, because the clothes, to me, looked kind of fun and cool. I’ve never been a cool or fun gay, and I’ve never been a fashion gay. But the International Male catalogues allowed me to escape into a world where I could wear something off one of its pages in a place that was exotic and exciting and fun. (I’ve also always kind of wanted a pith helmet. I had one in college and I loved it) So, it was interesting to watch how the business came to be, and how it really did kind of help change the way men dress and the way we look at men in more sexualized way now than we did when I was a kid. (I’m trying to remember things that resonated with me before I came out finally; that’s my current nostalgia kick) I do recommend it; it’s very well done and it’s kind of a nice story. The catalogue impacted a lot of gay teens in rural places in the 80’s and 90’s, and it should be remembered for that reason alone.
My first exposure to crime fiction short stories came in the Alfred Hitchcock Presents anthologies. My grandmother used to get the Dell paperbacks, and the stories always had a delightful little twist of some sort, always macabre. I’ve always remembered those anthologies, and recently went on an eBay binge of buying copies. Two more arrived yesterday, Alfred Hitchcock Presents My Favorites in Suspense and Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories That Go Bump in the Night. I started reading a long story in My Favorites in Suspense, “Composition for Four Hands” by Hilda Lawrence, and it’s really quite good; the suspense and tension builds with every paragraph, and I’m still not entirely sure what’s going on in the story–but we have a bedridden woman who cannot speak, and she suspects some of the other people in the story might be wanting to kill her, but we don’t know who and we don’t know why; nor do we know yet how she ended up in this condition. The writing style is quite Gothic in tone, which of course I love, and I am hoping to finish reading the story this morning. I have quite a lot to get done today, but I did sleep marvelously and I feel very alive, rested and alert this morning. Good thing as I do have so much to do. I want to also watch the LSU game this evening (GEAUX TIGERS!) but will be on the road during the game tomorrow, alas.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a marvelous Saturday, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again tomorrow morning, if not later.
One of my favorite things about homophobic straight people is how clueless they are (the homophobia is really a tipoff) when it comes to queer stuff. (In fairness, if they don’t know any queer people why would they know anything about queer stuff?) Nothing amuses me more than watching crowds of straight people–whether it’s a sporting event, wedding, or a party– start doing the “YMCA” dance when the deejay puts it on. It’s particularly funny to me when it’s a sporting event, particularly something more on the unenlightened side with their fan base when it comes to queer equality, like NASCAR or hockey (although NASCAR had been doing rainbow stuff all month…). As I watch them all stand up and do the ‘YMCA dance”–always out of rhythm, never to the beat–I smirk to myself and think, you clearly don’t know that this song is about the sexual smorgasbord a YMCA was back in the day for gay men, do you?It’s about GAY SEX, homophobes! You’re singing along to a song about getting fucked at the Y!
It always makes me laugh. Every. Single. Fucking. Time.
I’m sure the founders of the YMCA system would have been quite nonplussed to know that in some major cities, gay men turned YMCA’s into essentially bath houses. There were a couple in Manhattan that were notorious for hook-ups, but of course a YMCA would draw gay men. For a long time they were the only places for men to go and get exercise, unless they belonged to a men’s club, like the New Orleans Athletic Club (which used to be for men only), and since gay men, especially after Stonewall, liked to be fit and keep their bodies worked out and in good shape (to draw lovers, of course) they wound up at the Y. And when you get a bunch of gay men thrown together in an environment that includes pools, weights, saunas, steam rooms and showers, you’re going to get hook ups. YMCA’s also provided cheap rooming alternatives, too–and of course, that meant that you could get a room at the Y (just like you could at a bath house) which meant you could bring partners back to the room for sex.
When we first moved to New Orleans there was still a Y at Lee Circle (now Harmony Circle); the Lee Circle Y had been there forever and was actually kind of historic; one of the Israeli athletes murdered at the Munich Olympics was a Tulane student who worked out at the Y. I thought that should at least have some kind of commemorative memorial plaque–and had preservation-minded folk cared about the Lee Circle Y, it could have been declared a historic landmark, instead of closing and the land being sold for yet another hotel. Maybe a murdered Israeli athlete isn’t enough of a connection for historical landmark status. But I used to train people there, and also taught aerobics until it was closed permanently. They had redone the weight room and bought all new equipment a few years earlier, too. Some things–like the locker room and so forth–were musty and moldy smelling, with that distinct stench of decades of male sweat baked into the walls.
But yes, the Village People of “YMCA” fame–every one of them was dressed as a particular gay archetype (leather man, Indian chief, fireman, cop, etc.) and all of their songs were thinly veiled odes to the joys of being gay and having lots of no-strings-attached sex; “Macho Man,” “In the Navy,” “YMCA,” “San Francisco”–and the village in their name was Greenwich Village, the gayborhood in Manhattan. (The promotional video for “YMCA”–taken mostly from the movie Can’t Stop the Music–which is a topic for another time, because yes, that movie needs discussion–really says it all.)
There were bath houses, of course (Bette Midler famously got her big break performing at the Continental Baths in Manhattan); New Orleans had two when we first moved here–the Club New Orleans in the Quarter on Toulouse Street and Midtown Spa on Baronne in the CBD, across from where the Rouse’s is now. Both are long gone now, ain’t dere no more as we say down here. We used to do testing in the bath houses, which was always a weird experience. Every room had a television with porn on a loop; the room they used to let us at CNO to test in also was the sling room. So I’d sit on the bed/cot, with porn playing on the television hanging from the ceiling in the corner, and a sling in the opposite corner from the television. I bet that sling could tell some tales….or could have before it was consigned to the dustbin of history.
I also remember the battle over closing bath houses during the height of HIV/AIDS. Rewatching It’s a Sin reminded me of a lot of the struggles back when the disease was new and we didn’t know much about it other than almost everyone who got infected died. It seems kind of counter-intuitive now, but there was an argument that could be made that restricting gay sexuality was also a repressive attempt to push gays back into the closet as well as further stigmatizing gay men. It seems silly now, of course, knowing what we know now, but the mask argument during the pandemic kind of took me back to the struggle to get gay men to wear condoms. (I’m so old I remember when herpes had everyone freaking out in the late 1970s.)
I keep thinking I should write about the Lee Circle Y, just to preserve that piece of New Orleans history. “Never Kiss a Stranger” originally started with my main character getting off a Greyhound bus and lugging his duffel bag down Howard Avenue to the Lee Circle Y, where he gets a room while looking for a place to live. (I later realized the story actually begins with him finding that place to live; the rest is just filler and not very interesting.)
Monday and a holiday; it’s lovely to have another day at home to work on these edits, which I am hoping against hope to complete today. Yesterday was lovely and relaxing; I worked on the micro edits–the lines/copy edit–which is always a long and tedious process. The macro edit, to me, is more fun if more creatively taxing. I’ll be digging into that a little later, when my mind is more awake and I have more caffeine in my system. It’ll be a weird and short work week for me, and then of course next week I am on vacation. I’ll be taking lots of books with me on that trip, although I’m not sure I’ll have much time to read. I’m not really sure what Dad and I will be doing in Kentucky. I know when I’ve been up there before he’s mentioned going sight-seeing; like to Cassius Clay’s home (the original, the one Muhammed Ali was named for at birth; he was Henry Clay’s brother and one of Kentucky’s leading abolitionists) or to the Kentucky Derby museum. Which is fine, I love history and while horse racing history isn’t something I’ve ever looked into much before, but you never know. I had thought about writing a mystery around the horse racing at the Fairgrounds…I knew a horse trainer back in the day–but never got around to it. I mean, Dick Francis kind of cornered the horse racing mystery market, did he not?
Of course, I’ll come home to another short week because of the 4th holiday, too–so it’s going to be three weeks before i do another full five day work-week. I slept decently last night–not great, but not bad, either–and so this morning feel a little bit dragging around, but that’s fine; coffee, a shower, and some time reading should get me over the hump. We abandoned City on Fire last night; we just had no enthusiasm for watching, and so moved on to The House of Hammer, which is about, of course, the twisted history of the Hammers through the lens of Armie Hammer, the actor, getting canceled for his abusive sexual preferences. It was interesting–I am always fascinated by twisted rich families that hate each other so passionately–but we need to find something meaty, like a good crime series, to dig into. It’s amazing how we can hve so many options yet can never find anything to watch, isn’t it?
I spent some time yesterday with Chris Clarkson’s adorable That Summer Night on Frenchmen Street, which is charming and fun and delightful to read, and may even be able to finish reading it today, with any luck and some strong motivation, at any rate. I think from that I will move on to either Megan Abbott or Eli Cranor; I can’t decide which of the plethora of great 2023 new releases to select from, to be honest. I know I’ll be listening to Carol Goodman in the car next weekend on the way up and I’m not sure who I’ll listen to on the way home.
A quick glance at Twitter has shown me that LSU fans have now surpassed eleven thousand shots in the Rocco’s College World Series Shot Competition, and are well on pace to break the record (just over eighteen thousand) set by Mississippi last year. Oh, how the bars and restaurants in Eauxmaha must love LSU fans! I mean, even if the shots are only a dollar, that’s over eleven grand in receipts on those shots alone, not counting everything else being sold there. LSU is playing Wake Forest tonight, and it will take a strong effort for the Tigers to pull off the win. If they do pull out a win, I’m thinking the shots record will fall tonight.
I also read an old short story yesterday that I remember from when I was a kid. Periodically, Mom let me join a book club. The first one I joined was the Mystery Guild, and those selections i received from the Mystery Guild really kind of shaped my future both as a reader and writer. I still remember the books–still have some of the original copies–and over the years, I’ve tried to replace the ones lost over time to cross-country moves. Recently I repurchased a copy of Alfred Hitchcock Presents a Month of Mystery on eBay, and there was a story in it I read as a kid that I never forgot; and I wanted to reread it. It was called “The Queen’s Jewel” and was written by Robert Golding (I’d forgotten the name of the author). I took the book down yesterday afternoon to reread the story, and it was amazing to me how much of it I still remembered, the details. The main character, Jane Farquhar, owns a small hotel of sorts with guest cabins in the brush in Africa. One of her ancestors was a server for the imprisoned Mary Queen of Scots, and before her execution she gave him the pendant of a ruby set in a heavy gold chain with four carat blue-white diamonds surrounding it. It is very valuable, and Jane’s father raised her to be prepared, always be prepared, because someone will eventually come to try to steal it from her in some way…and thus the story is about her defending herself against a criminal pretending to be an American cousin. The story holds up and works, but it opens with Jane discovering the body of her poisoned guard dog–which did make me wonder, would this story be published today? Opening with a dead dog?
I also didn’t know much about Robert Golding, so after reading the story I used the google to find out he was one of the many Ellery Queen ghostwriters (I only recently found out that many Ellery Queen novels were ghostwritten) and it turned out Golding wrote two of my favorite Ellery Queen novels, The Player on the Other Side and Calamity Town, which is one of my all-time favorite mystery novels; little wonder his short story connected so well with me. I don’t remember The Player on the Other Side other than that it was one of my favorites; but Calamity Town? I remember a lot of that novel, and it was primarily about the Wrights, the first family of Wrightsville–a location so popular that Queen kept returning there for more murder mysteries (The Murderer is a Fox was another great Wrightsville mystery). He also apparently wrote a lot of the juvenile Ellery Queen mysteries–published as Ellery Queen Jr.–which I also enjoyed as a kid; Ellery Queen Jr. and the Jim Hutton 1970’s television series Ellery Queen (which I loved) were what originally brought me to reading the adult Ellery Queens; the first I read was the one they actually filmed for the pilot, The Fourth Side of the Triangle, which was marvelous, and then I started buying his books or checking them out from the library. So thank you, Robert Golding, for being an influence on me and my writing without my knowing it. I’m really looking forward to reading some more of these old short stories. I got another Hitchcock (Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories to Be Read with the Door Locked) and an old MWA one, edited by Robert L. Fish, With Malice Toward All, which also looks rather fun.
And on that note, I think I am going to head into the spice mines and read for a bit while my brain continues to wake up before tackling the manuscript. Have a lovely holiday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check back in with you later.
One of the most frustrating things about being a queer American is the absence of any kind of history, really. Oh, sure, there’s Stonewall and some other riots/protests in the years leading up to Stonewall; the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis. But since historians have done such a marvelous job of erasing us, trying to find our history isn’t the easiest task. You have to look for clues, coding, and signs.
Because, you know, we’ve always been here. We have also always consistently, despite the muzzling of the overarching culture and society’s constant attempts to erase us from the pages of history, managed to sneak traces of our existence and our sensibilities into the art of the times. Ever wonder why so many statues and paintings decorating cathedrals, cemeteries, and palaces in Europe are depictions of well-muscled, physically beautiful men? Because the artists were gay and the only way they could make art celebrating the beauty of the male body was to do so in a religious setting. (The depictions of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, in particular, are insanely homoerotic; one such painting was used for the cover art of Anne Rice’s Violin, which I think may be her finest novel.)
This entry’s title is also one of those sneaky gay songs passing for straight. Good old Cole Porter, the witty and intelligent composer and songwriter and overall bon vivant. Queer coding is everywhere in old books and movies and television shows and music. (I’m currently reading Matt Baume’s marvelous Hi Honey I’m Homo, which focuses on queer representation on old television series from the 70s and 80s, focusing primarily on comedy shows.)
There have been queer Kings and Queens and Emperors–and two of the greatest military minds of all time were gay Kings: Alexander the Great and Frederick the Great. But our history always gets erased–and homophobic historians will argue till their dying breath that unless there’s definitive proof, those sexualities and identities cannot be named. This is both infuriating and frustrating; take the instance of King James I of England–he of the King James Version of the Bible. He didn’t have female favorites–he had male ones, and he gifted them titles, money, jewels and estates and raised them into high positions of power. But because there’s no diaries where King James admits to taking it up the bum or going down on Robert Carr, there’s no proof. Well, likewise, the only proof the man was straight was because he was married and had children…which was also his duty as King. I know of no women favorites of King James. Likewise, there are no letters or journals written by Frederick the Great where he talks about some soldier having a nice ass or having sex with some hot young ambitious Prussian noble. So, no, there’s no actual proof. There are no photographs, no videos, no nothing. But…while he was married, he had no children; and he would go years without seeing his wife. Women were banned from his court. He also wrote his actually confirmed gay secretary a letter during the course of which he said: “My hemorrhoids affectionately greet your cock.” (The hoops historians will leap through to deny that Frederick the Great was a big ole bottom, and that sentence doesn’t mean what it actually said, are worthy of Ringling Brothers.) There was a lot of gossip, and Frederick’s preference for young men was openly gossiped about at other European courts. And most of his art collection celebrated homoeroticism.
I would love to write a biography of Frederick, seriously.
I also find Louis XIV’s younger brother “Monsieur,” Philippe, duc d’Orléans, fascinating as well–another one who’d be interesting to write about, especially since he is known as the Father of Europe; almost every European monarch from at least 1800 is one of his descendants, despite his sexuality and his predilection for wearing women’s clothes to court.
My story in The Faking of the President addressed this erasure; I chose James Buchanan to write about because he is the only president who never married and he was allegedly in a long-term relationship with Senator Rufus King (Andrew Jackson referred to Buchanan as “Aunt Fancy”). There’s no evidence that Buchanan and King were actually a couple; all of Buchanan’s correspondence was burned, on his instructions, when he died. I wrote my story about a gay historian who firmly believed Buchanan was gay…and after effectively wrecking his academic career, someone contacts him who claims to have the long lost letters to Buchanan from his fiancée when he was a very young man–and the letters will prove his thesis.
Believe me, I get the frustrations he experienced. I don’t think I’d go to the same lengths he did to get that proof, but I empathized.
But this also is an issue in even more recent history. When I was with Mystery Writers of America, at one point I wanted to try to figure out how many queer authors were members…but the impracticality soon became evident. First, you have to start with the question of what precisely counts as queer fiction, and what is a queer book? Is it the sexuality of the author what matters? What if they are openly queer but don’t write queer characters and stories? What about a straight person who writes queer stories and characters? Does that count? Lambda Literary went through hell over this, and there’s literally no way to please everyone. Is it the book, or the author? I’ve always been a firm believer that it’s the book when it comes to awards. Yes, the author gets the award, but it’s for writing the book. So, in my opinion, I would consider Call Me By Your Name a gay novel, despite the author being straight, and my own A Streetcar Named Murder to not be one, despite my being gay. The argument can be made, of course, that being gay gives me a different perspective and point of view that’s more queered than that of straight writers, but I don’t think there’s any “gay sensibility” to Streetcar.
Maybe I’m wrong. I’m not the final word on my books, really.
But this becomes problematic in two regards: one, if someone never officially stated anywhere that they weren’t straight, can it be inferred? Not every man or woman who never married was queer; but marriage itself isn’t proof of heterosexuality because a lot of queer people marry opposite sex spouses and get divorced when they come out later. I was engaged at nineteen; does that serve as proof to future generations that I was straight, despite all of my writings to the contrary? People still don’t feel completely comfortable coming out TODAY, let alone before Stonewall. Take Cornell Woolrich, for example. He never married, lived with his mother for a very long time, and was an alcoholic, pretty much had a miserable, horrible life. He never said he was, but would he have during the time in which he lived? Likewise George Baxt, who wrote a series about an openly gay Black police detective in the 1960’s. Baxt never made any announcements or pronouncements one way or the other; some of his acquaintances have said that he was but Baxt himself never did in any meaningful, definitive way. So, was Baxt or someone else the first gay crime writer? Joseph Hansen was definitely out, and his David Brandstetter series was not only groundbreaking but still remains one of the definitive gay crime series.
Secondly, it also becomes a matter of privacy as well. I know any number of authors who identify as queer but don’t write queer; how do you know how far out of the closet someone actually is in their life? There’s a hugely successful thriller writer who is a gay man, but I won’t say his name here or to anyone else because I don’t know how out he is…and whose business is it, anyway? There’s a hugely successful crime writer that I know for a fact is a lesbian. But if I google her name and lesbian, there are no hits. I generally put myself into their place, really, and ask myself, okay, what if you had somehow managed to start getting published when you were closeted? You wouldn’t have written books or stories about gay men, for one, and for another, I absolutely hated when people speculated about my sexuality–because it never meant anything good formewould come of it.
I’ve never been militant about people’s need to come out, and I also don’t think it’s anyone’s place to out anyone; with the caveat that if you are closeted and actively doing the community harm, you absolutely should be outed. That congressman from Illinois, the über-conservative congressman from Illinois who was outed? Ah yes, Aaron Schock. He deserved it–and while I don’t think he ever repented from his self-loathing brand of conservatism, he certainly has been living the gay high life since it happened. J. Edgar Hoover should have been outed; he was a monster, as was the always disgusting Roy Cohn. But actors and singers? Models? Writers? People who are just navigating their lives and coming to terms with who they are? Everyone should have the time and space to come out when they are ready.
The closet is a horrible place, and it seriously fucks with the people who are living there. I can be empathetic because I know how hard it is, how terrifying it can be. It can twist people (Aaron Schock, for example, clearly felt the need to be über-homophobic just to show he wasn’t one of those people, and yes, that is twisted and sick and sad, and why I am able to feel some empathy–not sympathy–for him as his life must have been hellish, even if it was his choice), and warp them into horrific behavior….but accountability, respect, and atonement are also necessary if the closet turns you into an Aaron Schock. I mean, how much self-loathing had to be there in his mind?
Not everyone has to be a spokesperson. It depends on your level of comfort. And please give people the grace to come out at their own pace and on their own terms. Struggling to accept and love yourself–realizing there’s nothing wrong with you–is a process that isn’t made easier by speculation. I’ve indulged in speculation about actors and singers and other public figures. That kind of speculation usually happens because there are so few queer role models in the public sphere; but I can also understand why people in the public sphere would want their privacy. Being a role model is daunting and full of pressure and potholes and dips and swerves in the road. And it also begs the question–what do we out queers owe to the rest of the community? What is our responsibility? Can we opt out of those things if we aren’t comfortable? I’m certainly not comfortable speaking for the entire community; I always say “in my experience” rather than making my own the community’s.
And we do live in dark times. There is a vast right-wing conspiracy (thank you, Madam Secretary, for that accurate phrase) to wipe queers off the face of the country–and don’t you dare call me an extremist for thinking that. We are being dehumanized and devalued on a daily basis by a bunch of evil people who think they are somehow doing God’s work (that arrogance alone will keep them from Heaven), and if dehumanization isn’t the first step towards eradication, study your Weimar Republic history. This country is at a tipping point–and it wouldn’t take much to tip us over into becoming the 4th Reich, which is terrifying. Oh, Greg, you always look at the worst case scenario!
That may be true, but I’m rarely wrong–and usually the reality is much worse than I imagined.
But I still hold out hope that decent people in this country outnumber the monsters, and that decency will inevitably prevail again. The importance of coming out, because the more of us there are and the more visible we are, cannot be underestimated. This is also where that lack of history bites us in the ass. It’s very easy for haters and bigots to dismiss us as “something new” or “it was better when you were quieter” or the ever-popular “I don’t care just don’t shove it in my face” (which literally has the opposite effect on me–tell me that and I will rub your nose in it) because we’ve been erased from history and a lot of the language around us is new. Language has changed and evolved over the course of my life, as we get more information and learn more, and yes, that means you have to keep up and might actually make a mistake by saying something you didn’t know had become dated or offensive. I am learning all the time, and want to continue to learn because I want to keep growing into the best version of myself that I can be (thank you again, Ted Lasso) and I don’t understand people who don’t want to grow but would rather stagnate and calcify.
Thursday and last day in the office for the week. I was very tired yesterday, despite not working on Tuesday, and so when I got home I didn’t do a whole lot of anything. No chores, nothing of that sort. I didn’t even read anything! The heat and humidity have returned and it was so miserable when I went out to the car after work yesterday that I felt drained by the time I got into the coolness of the Lost Apartment. I slept decently last night–not great, but restful, waking up a couple of times throughout the evening, but I feel a bit groggy this morning, which is also fine. I think we have a fairly light schedule today at the office and I have some other things I need to get done around seeing my clients. But I’ve almost made it through another week, survived it all, and now we’re at another three-day weekend, which is lovely. I have a lot of work to get done around here this weekend, so the extra day is going to be super great to have.
I need to get caught up on my emails–which won’t take nearly as long as it used to, because I don’t get nearly as much as I once did, which is kind of nice. It’s not that I consider email to be an odious chore or anything, and it’s not like I get problem emails anymore (thank God; I no longer cringe and cower and have to steel myself before pulling up my email), but there’s also not as much urgency with them anymore, either. The decline in the amount as well as the not-quite-as-urgent sensibility of it has resulted in my being pretty lazy about it. (My email provider also recently changed a lot, which is irritating because I don’t like the way it looks now and it wasn’t an improvement to make it easier to use; the Spotify app on my phone recently did the same thing. The lovely thing about technology is the constant need to have to relearn how to fucking use it. That was sarcasm font, by the way.)
So, rather than being my usual lazy self and wasting time finding things on Youtube (primarily to see if they are there), lately as I sit in the easy chair with a purring kitty in my lap I’ve been trying to do some research, that hopefully will stick in my head. Mostly I’ve been looking up videos about the HUAC and Confidential magazine in the 1950s, among other things for that period–also beefcake and peplum–as research for Chlorine. I’m also digging into the 1970’s–mostly music and pop culture, along with historical stuff from the decade–because I want to write a book called The Summer of Lost Boys, which has been simmering in my head since the earliest days of the pandemic. I’m leaning towards setting it in 1975–the summer I turned fourteen and started my sophomore year of high school. It has some potential I think, and while the idea is still amorphous up there in the clouds in my brain, I really like the idea and think it could be a really good book…but I really want to get these two noirs done in first draft this summer. If the heat and humidity doesn’t wear me down too much, I should be able to get both drafts finished by the end of summer.
Unless I get lazy, which is always a possibility. The heat seriously doesn’t help, either. But the thing I always forget is the best thing to do when you get home from work in New Orleans in the summer is take another shower and get cleaned up. I sleep better and I feel better and it generally results in me being a lot more productive. I need to do laundry tonight, put away dishes, and reload the dishwasher, and I am going to start rereading this book that I am about to revise per my editorial letter (I still will be getting one for Mississippi River Mischief, too) and I want to finish reading my book, which I’ve stalled out on now for a couple of weeks…but I need to finish it if I want to move on to my AMAZING TBR pile. I have some errands to run tomorrow morning, too, before starting in on my work-at-home duties, and after that–I am hoping to not leave the house again until Tuesday when I return to work. It would be nice to get some more de-cluttering done this weekend, but I also want to relax, write, and read a lot.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. May you have a lovely Thursday, Constant Reader, and I will see you again tomorrow.
The first song I ever danced to in a gay bar was, quite naturally, “It’s Raining Men.”
I never said I wasn’t a stereotype, did I?
I was twenty-one the first time I ever set foot in a gay bar. (If there were gay bars anywhere near me in Kansas, I had no idea) It was in Fresno, California, of all places; where I spent the 80’s and which I often lovingly refer to as “Topeka in the Valley.” It wasn’t much of anything, really; a small building on Blackstone Avenue, I think just past Olive, and near the off-ramp for the new cross-town highway in an attempt to alleviate traffic on the main streets of the city (it may have been further north). The bar was called the Express, and someone I worked with–the first obviously gay man I ever knew, and certainly the first one who was out and proud and not ashamed of it–took me one night after work. I was nervous as hell. I had no idea what I was getting myself into, and I remember it was dark and crowded. There was a bigger front room with the bar, and there was a smaller dance floor further in the back. We arrived–I didn’t recognize the song that was playing–got a beer (he got a vodka and cranberry), and then the next song started up. I didn’t know it, had never heard it before, but he dragged me out onto the dance floor and yes, the song was quite a jam. I loved it, and rather self0-consciously danced my ass off (I always loved to dance). My friend later told me the song was by the Weather Girls, who used to sing back-up for Sylvester, and it was called “It’s Raining Men.” The song was utterly ridiculous–it still is–but those powerhouse vocals, the driving beat, and the absolute joy in the idea that all you had to do was “rip off the roof and stay in bed” so a hot man will drop in from the sky for you? How could gay men not embrace the song? I bought the single at Tower Records a few days later, and every time that song played, I’d be out on the dance floor. Even now, when I hear it, I always think back to that first night I went to a gay bar.
HIV/AIDS was already a thing, but we didn’t know much about it in Fresno; it seemed like something new and scary but maybe no worse than some other new diseases that had been discovered in the 1970’s/early 1980’s. The rare yet terrifying information and reporting on it referred to it as GRID. It eventually claimed that co-worker who took me to my first gay bar, and his roommate, who was the one who told me years later that the co-worker (whose name I cannot recall, I just know it started with a K) was in the hospital, dying. “It’s Raining Men” always reminds me of him; always takes me back to that first time when I so nervously paid my cover charge and flashed my ID and walked into my first ever gay bar. There was another gay bar in Fresno, the Red Lantern, that was in a much shoddier (“dangerous”) part of town. (Gay bars, back in the day, were never in the best neighborhoods. Tracks in Ybor City in the early 90’s–when I lived in Tampa–was also not in the best neighborhood. Ybor City did begin gentrifying before I moved away, but originally? Yeah, not the best neighborhood.) I went there a few times as well–made friends there, made friends in the other bar, too. I lost all those friends, of course, and their names and faces are also gone, more lives lost to the mists of time in my memory. It seems a bit shameful to not be able to remember the names and faces of the first people who knew a part of me I’d never let anyone see before, but they also didn’t know me in that I kept the other part of my life secret from them.
It’s very strange, because I decided to google the gays bars of Fresno while I was writing this and apparently the Express closed in 2013? I don’t think it stayed in the same location–according to the site I found it had also been called “708” before becoming the Express again; who knows what that was all about. But the Red Lantern is still there on Belmont Avenue, in the same location; how wild is that? That’s a pretty long-lived gay bar for a place like Fresno, really. I remember in Houston there was JR’s, and Heaven, and maybe another one there in the Montrose district. But I didn’t start spending a lot of my weekend evenings in gay bars until I moved to Tampa. Tracks in Ybor City and Howard Avenue Station were the two primary gay bars when I lived there; and there was Bedrox on Clearwater Beach–which was the gay section.
And of course, there are gay bars everywhere in New Orleans. I haven’t set foot in one in a number of years, and may never do so again. I’m old; spending the night dancing would end with me in the hospital, or needing days to recover.
I don’t know what gay bars are like now because I’ve not been a part of that culture for a very long time–we haven’t even done condom outreach during special weekends in the bars in years anymore–which is why it’s hard for me to write about Scotty being still a party-boy. His age in the book I just finished and turned in is roughly forty-three or forty-four; after Katrina when I had to actually pick a time for the books to have been set (Katrina couldn’t be ignored), I decided that the Southern Decadence where Scotty met both Frank and Colin was in 2004, Jackson Square Jazz was that Halloween, and Mardi Gras Mambo was Carnival 2005. Scotty had just turned twenty-nine in Bourbon Street Blues, which meant he was roughly born in 1976, which works with the other timelines, making him twelve or thirteen when the Cabildo caught fire the last time. While the other books can be more amorphous, obviously Who Dat Whodunnit was set in January of 2010, right before the Saints won the Super Bowl. With the pandemic starting in 2020–which I will deal with at some point–this one had to take place before the world shut down, so I am thinking it’s May of 2019. I don’t want to skip ahead a year to the pandemic, so Quarter Quarantine Quadrille will be further in the future. I kind of want to do Decadence again in another book–with Scotty older but not much wiser–but am not entirely sure. I also would like to really do a Scotty Halloween book, and maybe even a hurricane evacuation one, I don’t know.
I am, however, very glad that I did write those first three Scotty books, when I was enmeshed in gay bar culture, because I’m glad it’s preserved in fiction. That world is gone now–washed away when the levees failed and the city rebuilt. Someone once told me I was the only person to document that pre-Katrina gay male existence, of going out to bars and being promiscuous and dancing all night long and drinking too much and occasionally dipping into party drugs.
I’m also kind of glad modern gays don’t have to use the weekends and gay bars as a place to let loose and be as free and gay as possible, which they couldn’t do during the week. Friday nights were always a relief, a respite from a cold and unloving world that judged us harshly and wished us harm.
I don’t miss the bright lights, the cigarette smoke (that’s how long it’s been), the stench of male sweat and the smell of poppers in the air as the deejay spins another banger. I mean, I do, but not in a sad kind of way; those memories are lovely and they make me a little wistful for the days when gay bars weren’t clogged with bachelorette parties and obnoxious drunk straight girls. But those weren’t the good old days, really; we had no rights and our sex lives were against the law; the few legal protections we have now were goals back then, something we could strive to achieve sometime in the distant future. I certainly never thought Lawrence would decriminalize my sex life and Obergefell would make it legal for Paul and I to marry; I never thought those things would happen during my lifetime. I didn’t expect to see an openly gay member of the Presidential cabinet; out queer characters as leads in television shows and movies–none of these things seemed possible to that closeted twenty-one year old who walked wide-eyed into the Express and went out to dance to “It’s Raining Men.”
I had no idea what the future held for me or for my community that night. In some ways I wish I could let that kid know everything would be okay and his life would turn out so much better than he ever dared dream…but knowing might change things, and I wouldn’t want to change anything that would take away the life I live now, because I love it.
Tuesday morning and heading out to Metairie for an appointment. I took the entire day off because I have no idea how long this might take or how I might feel after, so I figured it was better to not have to deal with clients. It’s nothing serious, and perhaps by being vague I am intensifying interest in what my appointment is; I’m just not comfortable talking about it just yet. Who knows? Tomorrow I might be here telling everything and more, always more than you could possibly want to know. Then again, you are here, after all.
I got some great work done on the book last night, and I am feeling most self-satisfied to the point where I can barely stand myself today. I hadn’t planned on using today to finish the revision when I asked for the day off, but how opportune this has turned out to be for me. When I get home, I can do some chores around here and then dive into the final two chapters of the book. Yes, I said the final two chapters. The end is clearly in sight, and the work I did today successfully pulled the story back in from some dead ends and subplots that were not absolutely necessary. I cannot wait to get home and finish it off this afternoon. But…we’ll see how it goes. One never knows when fate is going to throw a monkey wrench into your plans. (And what an odd phrase that is. I wonder what it’s origin was?)
We finished watching The Lake last night and it was quite fun and cute. I really like Justin Gavanis, and Julia Stiles is epic as Maisie the bitch no one likes and everyone fears. We also started watching the new Apple Plus Tom Holland series, The Crowded Room, which seems relatively intense and sad at the same time. But we’re intrigued and will most likely continue with it this evening. I also like Amanda Seyfried, and she’s the female lead.
I didn’t fall into a deep sleep last night but I rested, which is all that matters. I’ll hit a wall at some point this afternoon without doubt; but that’s okay. As long as I can get my work done once I’m back home from this appointment, that would be super great. I can also get some more chores around here done, too. Or I could get back to reading, if my brain isn’t too fried. Funny how reading used to be the thing for me when I was tired, to relax and refresh and reboot my brain, and now that I’m older I can’t focus enough to read when I’m tired. My reading has slowed down a lot this past year or so; the pandemic gave me a lot of time to read, but for the longest time I couldn’t. I did reread a lot of Mary Stewart novels to get me into reading again–I also reread some other marvelous older titles that I love, like Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters–and that broke through that barrier to reading. Maybe I should do that again, once I get my current book finished reading? But I’ve also got some killer reads to get to–new books by Kelly J. Ford, Eli Cranor, Megan Abbott, and S. A. Cosby, with a new Carol Goodman and Laura Lippman coming later this summer. And then of course there are all the books I’ve got here that I haven’t read, because I am a book hoarder.
And I got the notes for the other manuscript I am trying to get finished and out of my hair as well. So, if I can get the last two chapters finished today, and write the epilogue, I can start doing the macro edits. I have a long lovely weekend ahead of me, thanks to the Juneteenth holiday, and of course the week after that I am heading to Alabama and Kentucky to spend some time with my dad. Their anniversary is–was–June 26th, so I am going to meet Dad there in Alabama for their anniversary and then we’ll caravan back up to Kentucky. And then we’re in July–another truncated work week for me–and next thing you know it’s Bouchercon and football season and then the holidays and the year ends and that, my dear Constant Reader, is how you run out of time and how quickly life shoots past.
And on that cheery note, I am going to head into the spice mines and start getting ready for this appointment. Have a lovely Tuesday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again later.
Sunday and I slept late this morning and i am not a bit ashamed of it, quite frankly. The opportunities to sleep in are rare these days–getting up early so often for so long has adjusted and shifted my body clock in ways I’m getting used to but don’t like, and chief among those ways is the inability to sleep in. Yesterday I was up before eight, for example, but this morning it wasn’t even nine when I got up, and I could have easily stayed in bed longer. But there’s spice to mine today, and while there is still a lot of it to get done, I am feeling very good about things this morning. I actually felt really good about them yesterday if I am going to be completely honest. I got two chapters done and finished editing a manuscript (not my own) and turned it in to the publisher, which felt marvelous to be finished with that. Deadlines and juggling projects is something I’ve always done, but something I’ve noticed since the pandemic shutdown is deadlines are much more stressful and demanding on me, and take a bigger emotional toll than they used to. Probably part and parcel of the long COVID rewiring of my brain, but whereas before, I relished the pressure and it drove me to work harder, now it shuts me down and/or depresses me, which has the exact opposite reaction it used to have with me: instead of driving me, I think oh I’ll never get this all done so why bother and I end up blowing things off completely. Depression is quite the bitch, you know.
But I am very pleased with the work I got done yesterday and look forward to today’s work. I also did a load of dishes and laundry yesterday, and some cleaning. But after I was finished with work for the day, my brain was too fatigued to read so I watched movies on television, discovered two gems I’ve been wanting to revisit: Cruising and The Last of Sheila. I wanted to watch Cruising because I remember all the controversies about the movie while it was being filmed (yes, even in rural Kansas we heard about the gays being mad about the movie). I eventually watched it in the mid-1990’s. Paul is a huge Al Pacino fan, and when we moved in together he owned almost the entire Pacino filmography on videocassettes, so one night we watched Cruising. I didn’t much care for it when I watched it the first time, but I’ve wanted to watch it again–when I watched I wasn’t yet a published crime writer–because the story itself is interesting to me. A hot young ambitious cop sent undercover into the gay BDSM/leather community to look for a serial killer? The question of identity and sexual confusion that could arise from playing the part, which entailed going out and picking up (or being picked up) by gay men expecting some sex? I mean, you have to admit that’s a great set-up and concept for story. The Oscar winning director William Friedkin (he won for The French Connection but was much better known for directing The Exorcist) failed and ended up with a deeply flawed film. Pacino was also robbed of a far greater performance due to the homophobic cowardice of the either the director or the studio. Rewatching, the film’s flaws are even more apparent, but it’s a shame. It could have been a great film–and it does remain one of the few Hollywood films that actually depicts gay bar culture of the late 1970s the way it was–but I don’t know what went wrong with it, but it’s still a great idea. I also liked seeing New York as dirty and grimy, the way it was during that time period before gentrification came to Manhattan. It’s also fun seeing old movies where people who went on to greater stardom later had bit parts or cameos; Ed O’Neill popped up on screen at one point, as did several others that made me think, hmmmm.
If I had the time or inclination, I would take that basic framework of an idea and turn it into something stronger than the film. There was also a book it was based on, but it’s rare and used copies are insanely expensive. It also reminded me of a gay crime novel I read as a teenager living in Kansas; I may have been in college, I don’t remember, called A Brother’s Touch by Owen Levy. The book was about a brother who comes to New York to look into his estranged brother’s life after he is murdered–they were estranged because the dead brother was openly gay–and begins to question his own sexuality after being enmeshed into the gay community of Manhattan at the time. It was reprinted recently and I got a copy (by recently I mean in the years since Katrina; I have no concept of time and its passage anymore); I should move it closer to the top of the TBR pile. I wish I could still read as voraciously as I used to…something else that has slowed down with getting older.
After watching this I wanted to rewatch a classic old crime film of the old school, The Last of Sheila, which I’ve always loved. Co-written by Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins and directed by Herbert Ross, it’s a whodunit worthy of Christie herself, in which a widowed producer invites some film community members on hard times for a week on his yacht. Everyone invited was at the party a year before where the producer’s wife Sheila wound up being killed by a hit-and-run driver, and the producer, whose known for loving to play games, has come up with a game for his guests to play. Everyone gets a card, and every day they will stop somewhere they will look for clues to the identity of whoever holds the card of the day–the first is a shoplifter, the second is a homosexual–and of course, the game turns dark and ugly when the producer host–played to sadistic asshole perfection by James Coburn, is murdered…and it turns out the game their host was playing had layers none of the guests knew about going in. The cast is a perfect time capsule of early 1970’s stardom: Richard Benjamin, Raquel Welch, Dyan Cannon, James Mason, Joan Hackett, a beautiful young Ian McShane, and of course, Coburn. It has twists and turns and surprises, and is so markedly clever that it’s hard to describe without spoiling anything…and the surprises are what make it such a great and fun film. This was one of our Sunday movie-after-church movies, I think; I do remember seeing it in the theater and being impressed and amazed. One thing I absolutely loved in the rewatch was the books scattered over every set–they are all mystery novels by Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Ellery Queen, and Erle Stanley Gardner, which should tip the viewer off that you are in for a mystery influenced by the master crime plotters of the time. It’s really a shame the film wasn’t a success, because it would have been amazing if Perkins and Sondheim had collaborated on more scripts like this one. As I was watching, I kept thinking how much I would love to write a puzzle-type mystery like this one; I’ve always feared such a thing was outside of my wheelhouse so I have always been afraid to try. Who knows? Maybe I will.
I feel very rested this morning and I am not dreading diving into the book this morning, which is nice. I don’t think I have the mindspace and bandwidth to work on multiple things all at the same time anymore, if that makes sense. I don’t know if it has to do with the long COVID rewriting of my brain waves or what, but the last few books I’ve written or worked on–going back to Bury Me in Shadows–have been more stressful than fun for me to write. Writing on a deadline is always stressful, and I rarely, if ever, actually make deadlines. But having multiple projects going on at the same time now feels like I am not devoting enough of my time and attention to any of them, let alone all of them, and that makes me feel uncomfortable about the work. Of course, my last three books–and my last anthology–have all gotten a lot of mainstream award attention, which makes it seem weirder. Which, of course, makes me wonder if the stress and the heavy burden pressure of multiple projects going is somehow making me produce somehow better work than before, and do I really want to mess with that at all? It never ceases to amaze me how neurotic I am about being a writer, and how afraid I am that any change or variation means it’s all over for me now.
I do wonder sometimes if other writers have that same secret fear: that the well will eventually run dry or that we’ll forget how to do what we do. People like to call me prolific; I’ve slowly come to the conclusion that I am and that it’s not a bad thing (I always try to figure out if being called something is bad–which goes back to being called a fairy as a child and thinking he was saying ferry and being very confused). John D. MacDonald was prolific; so were Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie, and Erle Stanley Gardner. I think my insecurities came into play when people started calling me prolific; I am so used to being insulted that I assumed it must be an insult as well, like it was something I should be ashamed of or something. I’ve decided to embrace it as a compliment. I am sure there are literary writers who produce one novel every ten years or so who would think it an insult, but I don’t respect them so don’t really care much what they think. And if I am not as prolific as I used to be–which I am not–it’s nothing to be ashamed of; I’ve gotten older, have gone through some things, and I don’t have the energy that I used to have. My imagination still rages out of control at any and all times, of course, but I don’t have the energy to fool myself into thinking every idea I have will turn into a short story, an essay, or a novel. I certainly won’t live long enough to turn all the ideas I already have into longer works of whatever style and kind.
And on that note, I am diving back into the book. I am getting another cup of coffee and putting some bread in the toaster for later, and I may or may not do another Pride month entry later today. Anyway, you have the loveliest Sunday possible, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again later.
Probably the first clue that I wasn’t like other guys was that I loved to dance. There’s nothing like that feeling of freedom when you’re out on the dance floor and the deejay is playing one of your favorite songs to dance to, and you’re in a crowd of gay men, all moving to the same music but in vastly different stages of reality diminishment, from total sobriety to tipsy to buzzed to wasted to fried on a drug of some sort (you always could tell the difference between the drunks, those fried on a stimulant, and those on Ecstasy), and many of them with their shirts off and passing around bottles of poppers. Dance floors in gay bars always have a musty smell to them when they’re crowded, as though the man-musk from dozens and dozens of sweaty men has somehow seeped into the walls, the floor, the speakers.
That interesting mix of sweat, musk, cologne, cigarette smoke, and poppers that lets you know you’re in a gay bar, and pheromones are everywhere.
And of course, there’s today’s title, which was a great dance hit back in the mid-90’s; 1995, I think, to be exact?
I had no idea how to actually dance, of course. All I had was years of watching American Bandstand, Soul Train, and various teams of cheerleaders and pom-pon girls. The first time I went out onto the dance floor was when I was a junior in high school. It was a victory dance after we won a football game, and someone asked me to dance. And oh look, Greg actually can find a backbeat and knew instinctively to move to it–and that your upper body could move differently than your lower body. It was fun, I loved it, and people actually thought I was good at it, which made it even more fun. My junior and senior years of high school saw the rise of disco, and my first few years of college were during the height of the disco era. The little clubs and bars in Kansas I was able to get into, where I could drink beer till I was drunk and the music played and I could dance, weren’t Studio 54 or anything like that, but I could dance, and I would spend the whole night out there on the dance floor, sweating through my shirt and my bangs plastered to my scalp with sweat. I missed dancing, when we moved to California and I was no longer old enough to go out to bars, and when I was, I did want to go out dancing, but the 80’s weren’t a great time for dance music (in straight bars, any way), and the few times I was able to get to a gay bar, the music was much better and the dancing was way more fun…
The dance floor was, for a long time, the only place in a gay bar where I felt comfortable. This remained true even after I came out and merged my two separate lives into a single whole. Coming out was really just the first step towards accepting myself and figuring out who I was. I’d spent most of my life thinking there was something wrong with me, and that manifested itself in incredibly unhealthy ways for me emotionally and mentally. I’d always believed that coming out would solve all of my problems, but it didn’t; instead it created new problems to replace the old. I felt unattractive, overweight and unlovable. Every experience I had with another man only added to that sense of discomfort, that self-loathing that was still there in my head. I used to go to gay bars with co-workers, who would disappear as soon as we got there, out prowling for a cute boy for the night’s comfort while I just stood somewhere in a corner. I had a crush on this really hot bartender at a gay bar in Ybor City, Tracks, which is where we always used to go. He was always so friendly and polite and I naïvely thought he might be interested…which was when I learned all gay bartenders are friendly and nice because they want to get tipped (and I never made that mistake again). The only time I ever felt comfortable or at ease was on the dance floor. I also convinced myself that I was unappealing, which was why no one ever approached me–or it was rare that someone did (I am too shy to ever approach anyone). I had an extremely unpleasant experience the summer I turned thirty-three, and that motivated me to reevaluate everything in my life and start over. I essentially burned myself to the ground and started over.
I still had the same shitty job, but if people thought I was out-of-shape and unattractive, well, I couldn’t change my face but I could change my body. I radically altered my life and started eating healthy and exercising. I even stuck to it. I lost a lot of weight in a very short period of time (which probably wasn’t healthy) and figuring (hilariously) that the possibilities of finding love and a relationship were already gone because I was thirty-three and still single (just goes to show what I know, right?), but everything changed. I also began to realize over the years that followed that I wasn’t ever approached back in the day because I wasn’t attractive but because I was giving off a bad vibe–how can you help but give off a bad vibe when you’re insecure and feel uncomfortable? It’s amazing what a difference a friendly, open smile makes. But it’s hard to look friendly and inviting when you don’t feel friendly or inviting or good about yourself. The on-going struggle with my self-esteem really started in earnest during this time of my life, and while those self-esteem issues have never truly been conquered, I started enjoying my life a lot more. I no longer felt like my life was something that just happened to me. I felt like I was making things happen for myself. And as my self-esteem continued to grow, I also found myself figuring out how to make the big dream–becoming a writer–come true.
And I also managed to find my true love in the process of finding myself.
I do miss dancing, but I don’t think I am capable of staying out late at night to dance. But I remember those days of dancing till dawn fondly, trying to flag down a cab in the cold gray morning light, drenched in sweat and shivering. It would probably take me a week to recover from dancing all night…and let’s face it, dancing all night was the best way for me to get cardio.
Queer and Loathing in America 