Representation: Voice & Identity

In this month’s post, I want to talk about why I’m emphatic about writing gay fiction as an out gay man. This is all very personal and in no way should be construed as an opinion on what or how others should write. (It saddens me that I even need to add that little disclaimer, but things are what they are.) And, while I’m doing disclaimers, I’m not speaking for all gay men. I believe many gay men of my age have had similar experiences, but these views are still my own.

Born a Mentally Ill Felon

In the spring of 1961, I came into the world as a mentally ill felon. Well, to be fair, I was just a potential felon. I really didn’t become a felon, un-convicted—of course, until 1968 when I started “messing around” with the other little felons in the neighborhood. We were a lawless lot terrorizing tents set up in backyards, tree forts, and secluded spots in the swamp.

When I was 12, the powers that be, the arbitrators of what is or isn’t sane in America, voted that a boy liking another boy and wanting to do boyish things with him wasn’t really that crazy after all. Thanks, but not that much changed.

In my early 20s, I was in college and just coming out publicly, when the rumors of the plague started. LA, San Francisco, and New York were places where gay death lurked. In no time, my brothers started dropping. In the beginning, by the time HIV was diagnosed, you were dead or nearly dead.

Summary of the gay community in the late 80s and early 90s: Who had it? How’d they get it? Why the hell didn’t I have it? What can we do? We’re dying here, does anyone care? Have you seen The Quilt? Can I help sew your panel?

I was 42 when making love was no longer a felony. Thank you, America. I was no longer a mentally ill felon, but I could still lose my job and housing for my sexual orientation. It’d be another 12 years or so before I could get married in the eyes of the law. However, I’m still waiting for the housing and job protection thing.

Becoming: Identity Formation on the Margins

Because humans are such social creatures, our personal identities are the result of this weird tension between our own innate characteristics and feelings, and what our culture says about those characteristics and feelings.

For example, if you’re born with a dick and accouterments, society has a lot to say about what you should do with that dick. What it means to have a dick and even going so far as to strongly urge parents to cut off the foreskin, thus making the dick less user-friendly (US thing. Hopefully that is changing.).

[Yes, I’m aware that society has even more dictates about humans blessed with a vagina or those folks that fall somewhere in between. But being a dick-bearer, I don’t feel qualified to comment on that experience. I will happily shut-up and listen, if you want to share.]

And so as the young human grows and ponders his place in the world, he looks around for people like himself. There are many layers to our identities—we’re complex critters after all. We start with our families. If we’re in a birth family, they usually look somewhat like us and share other characteristics. We start learning gender roles in the family and how to behave. But sometimes we don’t match up with the family and eventually, all of us have to look beyond.

I got cues about what it meant to be a boy from my relatives—not just the male ones—everyone plays the gender reinforcement game in our culture. And for the most part, I was okay with boyness but I was one of those odd ones that was “sensitive,” artistic, and had no interest in sport of any kind. I like nature, animals, exploring, and science. Looking beyond the family I found examples of men that were naturalist, explores, and scientist.

[Side note: Rascal, was one of the first novels I read as a kid. I so identified with Sterling North as a boy running around in the woods. You can’t imagine how badly I wanted a pet raccoon. Also, the descriptions of his father’s melancholy remembrances of a passing frontier Wisconsin reminded me of my grandfather and great-uncle telling stories of old Florida. As an adult, I got to sleep under the stars along the shore of Lake Superior, and in my mind, I was right there with Sterling and his father’s encounter with the porcupine. Sterling University, in my Bennett Bay series, is named in honor of Mr. North.]

What I didn’t find any clues about was boys liking other boys. How was that supposed to work? I knew I wasn’t the only one—all of that messing around—but what did it mean? There was no evidence of adult men doing that—everyone seemed to be paired up with women. Why?

As I got older, the social cues came, and some not so subtle, boys don’t do that. Not ever. And don’t talk about it. But we did do it.

You know how when you lose a tooth, you can’t just let that hole alone? Never bothered about that tooth before, but now that it’s missing, it seems like the most important thing out there. Or if you can’t touch your nose for some reason, suddenly it’s got a god-awful itch that will drive you mad.

An un-affirmed aspect of your identity is the same. On the outside, I had it good. A comfortable cis-gendered, middle-class male, about as well adjusted as one could expect, but that boy-liking-boys thing kept eating at me. It was the itch that couldn’t be reached. And I searched and searched.

Eventually, I found the word homosexual and realized that’s what I probably was, but that didn’t bring a lot of meaning along with it. When I was about 13, my dad was working on his MBA on the weekends and he’d take me to the university library with him. Yes, I was a 13-year-old that loved spending time in libraries. Armed with the Word, I employed my card catalog skills [Note for young people: a card catalog was an analog and every inefficient means of searching for information in dead tree archives.] and looked up books on homosexuality. Not a good move.

All of those books had been written when homosexuality was seen as a sick deviance. At 13, I didn’t have the skills or knowledge to figure that out. A life of alcohol and drug abuse, sex in public restrooms, arrest, and dressing as women [drag always came up—not as an art form but as evidence that ALL gay men really wanted to be women—can you say, Junk Science?] was offered up to me. I’m not sure how long I sat on the floor in the stacks and cried. But at some point, I slammed the book shut and said something like, “Fuck that. I’m not that.”

I knew what I wasn’t, but I didn’t know what I was.

Tolkien to Hansen

The hole in your identity is like a hole in your soul. It becomes a greedy desperate thing that needs filling and affirmation. Especially, when that hole is around the way you love. What I did, like many others on the margins do, is try to find my reality hidden in the wider culture. There had to be a we out there somewhere. Were there clues?

And then I stepped into Middle Earth and found a place to hide the last year or so of high school and the first few years of college. I have no knowledge of what Tolkien thought about the sexuality of his characters, but this gay boy read a story of a single uncle with no female attachment or apparent interest adopting one of his nephews. The nephew didn’t seem interested in females either.

It was very apparent that Sam really loved Frodo. Merry and Pippin and Legolas and Gimli were fast friends that spent the rest of their lives together as couples. I’m not saying there was sex between them, but you can’t deny that they were life-long same-sex couples and for me, that was enough because in the late ’70s and early 80s there wasn’t a lot of “gay” portrayal in the media. What there was wasn’t very flattering. The whole Kill the Gays trope. And then there was the Every Gay has AIDS trope. Sigh.

In 1982 or so, I’m poking around the university bookstore looking for some light reading to take back to the dorm room. At that time, if I wasn’t re-reading the LOTR, I was devouring Star Trek novels. I loved Trek. Yeah, Kirk tended to be a horn dog, but it wasn’t in your face and you knew the Enterprise and Spock were his true loves, so I could just skim those parts. As I passed the mystery section, a title caught my eye, Fadeout. I was a media major and that’s one of our terms. So I picked up the book. The author: Joseph Hansen—never heard of him, but I really didn’t follow mystery writers. A Dave Brandstetter Mystery. I turned it over… and froze. A gay detective? I looked around. Could this be real?

I felt giddy going through the checkout. Did the clerk know it was a gay book? Would they know I was gay because I was buying it? Was everyone looking at me? I wasn’t really out yet and worried about things like that. It went in my book-bag as fast as possible.

For the second time in my life, I sat crying over a book. This time it was tears of joy. I held in my hands a book written by another gay man. A story about a real guy, that just happened to be gay. He was a no-nonsense detective but he also had a life—a gay life.

I’m not a skilled enough writer to truly convey what that meant to me. It was a double affirmation because not only were there characters like me in the story, but it had been created by someone like me. That was huge. There was gay literature out there. I had a culture to belong to. I wasn’t alone.

Time to Write and the Rise of the Fierce Muse

I think being a storyteller has always been part of me. I’m not exactly sure when the notion of writer came about. Writing has always been hard due to my dyslexia. There have been a number of false starts over the years—I always got hung up on the process. I thought the only way to be a writer was to outline everything and my brain just didn’t work like that. And honestly, because of dyslexia I really needed computer assistance. Well, I had a friend explain that, no, you don’t have to outline—lots of writers don’t. And then Scrivener came into my life, but that’s another post.

I had dabbled in fantasy and sci-fi, but when I was ready to write “for real” I found myself working on contemporary fiction. It was mainstream except for the gay components. I wanted to tell stories of real gay men going about their lives. On one level that’s pretty mundane and yet at the same time, it’s radical as hell. It’s one thing to have buff space marines boinking one another out on an alien world, but it’s another to have the out and proud black cop down the street married to a cute white dude. That’s subversive lit.

But I wasn’t sure yet. Insecurity is the constant companion of new writers. As you gain more experience points, you are able to banish Insecurity to the corner for a few hours at a time. Anyway, I was working on the first book, which would eventually become Return to Cooter Crossing, and getting a lot of encouragement from my writer friend Cynthia. She knew a friend that was putting together an anthology of paranormal stories and encouraged me to submit something.

I wasn’t sure I was ready for that. It was one thing to play at writing a novel and showing bits to a trusted friend and it was another to write a complete story and send it out to a stranger. Well, to cut to the chase, I did. I got the idea of a ghost on an abandoned dock along the river and The Broken Heart was born. I sent it off and didn’t get the response I expected.

The guy liked the story. When the editor learned it was my “first” short story, he was really impressed. But there was one problem—it was too gay.

Me: Okay, what does that mean?
Editor: Well the MC is gay, and he meets two gay cops, the ghost is gay, and there are two gay teens at the marina. Don’t you think that’s a lot?
Me: Too many characters for a short story?
Editor: No, too many gay characters. Doesn’t that seem unrealistic?
Me: Aha, so in the other stories are you concerned about too many het characters?
Editor: Why would that be a problem?
Me: Right.  So in a ghost story, the unrealistic thing is gay people? Well, thanks for the consideration.

 

By this time, I realized I wanted to be a writer—for real. It was time to do it. I was totally prepared for the criticism of my craft. No one knew its weakness better than I did, but the too gay thing? Was this just a taste of what I was going to face? At that moment, I questioned everything. I questioned Story. I questioned the Word. Never do that, ever.

You need to know two things before I share the next part. First, like all new writers, I joined a bunch of new writer groups online. I’m not sure they’re that helpful, but it is fun to chat with others and share encouragement. One of the discussions was about the origin of story ideas and our muse—how do we think of them—how they’ve been portrayed. I’ve always been a fan of the little shoulder angels and devils in cartoons and decided my muse was probably something like that but didn’t give it much further thought.

Michael is the second thing. I was about 22 or so and he was… well, he said he was 18 and I never asked for ID. He was this thin Latinx diva with long wavy black hair and dark eyes I just fell into. He was this astounding mix of fem and fierce that some Latin guys throw around like a superpower. He was just a little tiger—I mean like a real tiger—the sounds he made when we were…well did the things young men do together.

Yeah, there was a catch. He wanted to be a drag queen. He loved the drama, the theater, and the spectacle of it all. However, my fragile 22-year-old manhood couldn’t handle dating a boy in a dress. I say I ended it over the lipstick on my new towels. That’s what I told myself the fight was about. The truth, Michael was too much of a man for me. Too bold. Too brave. Too fierce. I failed him as a brother and a lover—regrets of an old man.

Anyway, I sat there in front of my computer astounded at the hurt and anger I felt. Shaking so hard I really couldn’t type, I wondered if this was what I was setting myself up for? Maybe I shouldn’t write gay stuff?

I said something, “Like what do you think Muse Boy?” I always imagined my muse as a young man, someone like Eros from Greek myth floating behind my left ear. But at that moment I thought of Michael. It’d been 30 years since I’d thought of him. But he was clear as day in my mind and I grinned and then I imagined him as this little guy sitting on top of my monitor. He shook his long wavy hair around. He had on a cream colored loose fitting sweater, too tight jeans, and killer cream colored cha-cha boots. His eyebrows were lined and he had on his signature turquoise lipstick, damn that lipstick. He raised an eyebrow and asked, “Are you really going to let that stop you?” He pulled a nail file out of thin air, looked away, and started touching up his nails. After a moment, he looked back at me. “Sack up Daddy Bear. Your voice matters.” He blew me a kiss. I remembered the taste of those lips from so long ago.

And I saw a kid reading a book in a dorm room realizing he wasn’t alone. I needed to be fierce. I needed to be fierce for my brothers out there that still felt alone. My Voice Mattered.

Summary: Voice Matters

As a true southerner, I took the long way to get where I was going: Voice Matters. That is Character Voice as found in narrative work, but the Authorial Voice as well. This is what lies behind the #OwnVoices movement. OwnVoices is about lifting up the voices of marginalized creators so they can be found in the midst of the majority. It’s especially important for readers from marginalized groups wanting to find their own authentic literature.

It’s really sad that so many gay men I know don’t read. When I ask why, I end up getting variations of I never found books that I could relate to. This really saddens me.

What OwnVoices is NOT about is saying who can write what. Not even close to being that. OwnVoices isn’t just about the story itself, it’s about the culture the story comes from. The context that created it. A context shared by the reader. This is really important to understand because I believe so much of the bitterness and division in the M/M community comes from not getting the difference between gay or lesbian fiction written from within the community and Romance stories with same-sex couples. This is not a value judgment, but an attempt to point out that one is functioning as cultural literature for a minority community and one is not. And oh my God, that is so okay! We need both. I believe it’s a mismatch of expectation. It is ultimately a failure of marketing and genre delineation. I have no idea what to do about that!

In summary, I write gay fiction because as a gay man it’s something I have to do. A pay it back; pay it forward kind of thing. If you are a writer, why do you write LGBT lit? If you’re a reader, what draws you to this subject?

 

Please leave comments below!

—Stephen

 

---

About Stephen del Mar

I’d really like these posts to be interactive, so please comment below and let me know what’d you like to hear about.

Stephen del Mar lives in the Tampa Bay area and writes in the Southern Literary Tradition. His stories are character driven with rich settings. They often have a touch of the paranormal, supernatural, or magical realism.

Although he writes about serious subjects, they are sweetened with humor and wit. He says, “It’s a southern thing.”

Stephen del Mar’s book list on Amazon.