by Michael Nava
Our appetite for books eventually spawned a number of small presses. A friend, who knew I’d been looking for a publisher, told me he’d read a book from one of these presses and it hadn’t been half-bad. I stopped at A Different Light and asked Richard about this press, Alyson Publications. He directed me to maybe a half-dozen trade paperbacks. I read a few pages of each. Chuck was right, they weren’t high art, but they weren’t bad. I wrote down the company’s address and submitted The Little Death. Within a couple of weeks I got a letter from an editor who told me he had been up all night reading the book and had strongly recommended that Sasha Alyson, the proprietor, publish it. On the heels of this letter came another letter, from Sasha, offering me a $600 advance and enclosing a contract. Even in 1985, $600 was not much money but I wasn’t in it for the money. I was just happy that someone, anyone, wanted to put my book into print. I signed the contract and sent it back. I was going to be a published novelist!
11.
Sasha Alyson. In April 1986, Sasha Alyson flew to Los Angeles to attend my first book signing at A Different Light. (He must have had other business too since he was far too frugal to fly across the country for a single event.) The book had received unusually good reviews, mostly in the gay press, but also from a few establishment outlets. Most surprisingly, it had been politely reviewed by Newgate Callendar, the pseudonymous mystery reviewer for The New York Times who thought the book exuded a “calm sort of strength” and seemed relieved that “the homosexual elements [were] handled with dignity.” I think it was the first time one of Sasha’s books had been reviewed in the Times; I remember getting an excited call from my Alyson stablemate John Preston on the Sunday morning the review appeared. He read it to me and then dissected it in detail, concluding that, on balance, it was favorable.
At that point I had only corresponded with Sasha and, in those pre-Google days, I had no way of discovering much about his background. I didn’t even know what he looked like, although I assumed he would be tweedy, middle-aged and quite possibly a pipe smoker. The man I met at the airport, however, was only a couple of years older than me, sloppily dressed, with bleached blond hair and a pale, knobby, pleasant face. A backpack was slung over one shoulder and in it he carried around a floppy-eared, stuffed dog who he introduced to me as Le Dogg. We went to lunch at a café in Beverly Hills where he removed Le Dogg from his backpack, sat in him a chair and asked that he be given a menu. (When the waiter came to take our order, Sasha said, apologetically, that Le Dogg had not found anything suitable to eat.)
Even after I stopped publishing with him, I saw Sasha at least once a year, on one coast or the other for the next decade. He was odd, for sure, but not inexplicably so. I soon figured out that Le Dogg was not an affectation but a prop he used to navigate social situations that made him uncomfortable (and almost every social situation did). In his publisher persona, he could be direct and forceful, but when he stepped out of that role, he was often monosyllabic. Born and raised in Ohio (under a different name, he christened himself Sasha Alyson after he left home), he was imbued with Midwestern modesty and unpretentiousness. Liquor loosened his tongue—he had a palate for good wine—and he could be dryly witty but no one except, perhaps, his (now former) boyfriend of many years got very close to him.
Sasha was given to unusual enthusiasms—in his Boston apartment, he kept a collection of unopened cereal boxes that he assured me would one day be extremely valuable. At one point, he discovered parchment paper and for months everything he cooked was wrapped in parchment and shoved into the oven; he even planned a parchment paper cookbook. I don’t remember if he followed through on that project but he did carry out his plan to print a Le Dogg calendar. He was, I decided, one of life’s observers, participating in the world only when it served his purposes and always on his own terms. Otherwise, he was wrapped up in a kind of solitude that I, for one, never entirely penetrated. I can’t say that we ever had a truly personal conversation. Still, he was completely admirable, a person of great integrity, foresight and courage. With no more than a high school diploma—he thought college would be a waste of time—he created the most important independent gay press of its time and also founded Boston’s gay newspaper, Bay Windows. When he started the press, he had no prior publishing experience, nor were there deep pockets in his family to support his venture. What he had was vision, intelligence and determination.
When AIDS struck, he corralled other publishers to jointly produce a book called You Can Do Something About AIDS, distributed free in bookstores, that ultimately reached 1.5 million copies in print. He was the first publisher to initiate a series of children’s books, writing five of them himself. To publish gay-themed children’s books at a time when gay men were still being widely demonized as pedophiles was a startlingly brave and prescient act. He took a lot of flak for it; his children’s books were condemned, burned and banned. One of them, Heather Has Two Mommies, by Lesléa Newman has the distinction of being, according to The American Library Association, the eleventh most banned book in America. In all his professional activities, he seemed to be guided by a firm, interior conviction of what needed to be done.
After he sold the press, he operated a travel company that offered upscale adventures to gay men, like bicycle tours of the French wine country. Cleverly, Sasha had found a way to make money from three of his favorite pastimes: bicycling, traveling and drinking wine. A few years later, he sold that company and moved to Laos where he founded and as of this writing still runs a small press called Big Brother Mouse. His goal, he explains in an online article, is to promote literacy in Laos by creating books for its children in their own language. Sasha writes many of the books himself and gets them to children by means of transport that include elephants.
That Sasha, in his 60s, should be delivering children’s books to remote villages in Laos by elephant seems at once wildly improbable and perfectly in character.
12.
Rereading The Little Death after its publication reminds me that I never intended it to begin a series. It was meant as a one-off, a way to teach myself how to write fiction, and an inversion of the noir fiction of the tough guy writers of the 30s, 40s and 50s, particularly Raymond Chandler. Chandler loomed large in my mind for a number of reasons. Like countless other readers, I was captivated by his inimitable style, a style as distinctive as Faulkner’s and a lot more fun to read. Then, too, Philip Marlowe was not only an outsider, but an outsider with whom a gay boy could particularly identify. Marlowe, for all his tough talk, was an honorable man who embodied the virtues that society purported to honor but rarely displayed—loyalty, courage, integrity—and, because of his status as a private eye, was the object of society’s contempt. Nonetheless, despite their contempt for him, he was the person that the gente decente turned to in their times of trouble and to whom they revealed the squalid secrets that lay beneath the surface of respectable society. This gave him a ringside seat to society’s hypocrisies.
Gee, I thought, who does that remind me of? Oh, right, me.
Like Marlowe, my inner experience of myself as a decent person was wildly at odds with society’s characterization of gay men and the contempt in which it held us. This very contempt fueled my determination to be productive, honest and ethical; I would not give in to the society’s hatred of gay men by fulfilling its stereotypes. Then too, like Marlowe, I was privy to society’s hypocrisies, in my case, those affecting sexuality and sexual orientation. Gay men were feared as sexual predators who preyed on the weak, especially children, but as a prosecutor I knew that the vast majority of sexual predators—child molesters, rapists—were heterosexual men. Gay men were said to hate women but the battered women who showed up in my courtrooms had been beaten by their husbands and boyfriends. Moreover, it was male misogyny that oppressed women, not my sexual disposition toward other men.
Thus, I saw that the private eye in noir fiction could work as a metaphor for the position gay men occupied in straight culture. (Of course, the connecti
on would not have been so apparent had Joe Hansen not blazed that trail with his Brandstetter novels; they provided my blueprint and my immediate inspiration.) Chandler intrigued me for another reason: Marlowe was ostensibly heterosexual but his most romantic relationship was with another man, Terry Lennox in The Long Goodbye.
It’s difficult for a gay man to read the opening chapters of this novel and not conclude that Marlowe falls in love with Lennox. In the first chapter, Marlowe comes to Lennox’s rescue after Lennox, falling down drunk, has been abandoned by his female companion. Lennox is strikingly described with his “young-looking face” and “bone white” hair; his first name is gender ambiguous. Marlowe takes him home, puts him to bed, and sobers him up. Here, Lennox plays the traditional role of damsel in distress—beautiful, helpless, mysterious—who inspired Marlowe’s chivalric response. After Lennox departs, Marlowe cannot get him out his mind. “I’m supposed to be tough but there was something about the guy that got me.” Which I read as: I’m supposed to be straight, but, yeah, I wanted to fuck him.
They renew their acquaintance after Marlowe comes to Lennox’s rescue a second time and their relationship unfolds in the intimate dusk of a bar where they sit together at a booth drinking, at Lennox’s insistence, gimlets (a ladies’ drink if ever there was one), and talk around the subject of Lennox’s mysterious past. One could easily imagine them as two closeted gay men glancing back and forth from their girly drinks into each other’s eyes, talking in circles, bodies tensed, one trousered leg brushing up against another, each waiting for the other to make the first move. In their last scene at the bar, Marlowe snaps, “You talk too damn much . . . and it’s too damn much about you. See you later.” Translation: Goddammit, we both know what we want, stop jerking me around.
In the first chapter of The Little Death when Rios meets Hugh Paris I made explicit what seemed to me was implicit in The Long Goodbye: two men meet and fall instantly in love or lust or some noir combination of both. The Long Goodbye and Joe’s novels gave me the warrant I needed to make this leap. I didn’t think then, and don’t think now, that it violated the code of noir; it simply extended it, taking it to one logical conclusion.
I was reticent about describing sex, however. When Paris comes to Rios’s apartment, I get them to the bedroom door and then cut away. This was a deliberate choice. Too much gay fiction at the time seemed sex-sodden to me, gratuitously so, and I didn’t see how inserting an explicit sex scene would advance the narrative. Besides, sex scenes are difficult to write without falling into pornographic clichés or silly euphemisms. Rereading the book has changed my view. The sexual intimacy Rios experiences with Hugh Paris, in light of Rios’s isolation and loneliness, is one of the elements that drives him to investigate Hugh’s murder. So, in revising The Little Death I have added a couple of sex scenes to flesh out (as it were) Rios’s motivations.
There is also very little in the book about Rios’s background, particularly his latinidad. Indeed, many white readers in 1986—before the seismic demographic changes that have made Latino/as an emerging majority in this country—may not even have known “Rios” is a Spanish surname. Again, I had my reasons for not placing Rios’s ethnicity front and center.
The first is, as noted, that The Little Death was conceived of by me as a one-off experiment that queered the familiar tropes of the roman noir. I didn’t see how an explicit exploration of Rios’s ethnic background would fit. The second reason is that Rios’s ethnicity was part of his character, if not the plot. His ethnicity emerges in subtle ways, although granted, this requires some knowledge on the reader’s part about the Mexican-American/Chicano community in California.
I certainly knew that community and understood the implications of making my protagonist Latino. I knew a lawyer named Rios in California in the 1980s was in all likelihood Mexican-American, the son or grandson of immigrants, from a working-class or poor family, and likely the first person in his family to have obtained a higher education. He would have been one of a few hundred Latino/a lawyers in California and he would have spent most of his professional life among white lawyers where the pressures to conform to their codes and standards would have been intense.
In The Little Death, Rios’s ethnicity and his background emerge in his character and the choices he makes. There is a gravity and melancholy about Rios that are characteristically Mexican. An archetypal representation of these qualities is Benito Juarez, the great nineteenth century Mexican lawyer-president. Juarez was a man committed to the rule of law in a lawless time, defender of Mexican sovereignty against the French invasion that nearly succeeded in turning Mexico into a French client state. Juarez embodies that particular male Mexican gravity that arises from a deep sense of duty, obligation and sacrifice, a quality I witnessed firsthand in my grandfather, and which may be the one positive aspect of machismo. As for Rios’s melancholy, Octavio Paz has written an entire book about that quality of Mexican character in his classic (if not entirely persuasive) meditation, The Labyrinth of Solitude. From the beginning, even before I knew there would be other novels in the series, I saw Rios as typifying this kind of Mexican dignity, humility, sacrifice and solitude, tempered, of course, by the fact that he is also a product of American individualism.
Rios’s background also informs his choices, as for example, his decision to practice criminal defense law and his rejection of Aaron Gold’s offer to join Gold’s white-shoe law firm. These are not the choices of a man from an entitled background but those of someone who embraces the marginal because he has direct experience of marginality.
13.
When I got back the publishing rights to The Little Death and decided to do a print edition, I saw this as an opportunity to go back and make some relatively minor revisions. I wanted to add passages that more clearly delineated Rios’s ethnicity and background because, as those qualities became increasingly important in the subsequent books, some foreshadowing is in order. But what started as a revision of my first book became a re-imagining in light of everything that followed, not just the other books in the series, but the history of my communities, LGBT and Latino/a, in the thirty years since the publication of The Little Death. Ultimately, I used less than five percent of the published work and the changes seem so consequential to me that I wanted to signal them by giving the book a new name. Lay Your Sleeping Head comes from the first line of W.H. Auden’s poem, “Lullaby,” which is not only one of the greatest poems in English, but which was written by one man to another. It seemed appropriate to what this book became in the rewriting.
It might seem to some readers that for me to go back and rewrite a book that has been in print for 30 years in light of the volumes that followed it is a kind of cheating. Maybe so. But the Rios books have turned out to be my life’s work as a writer and from my perspective it remains unfinished. I agree with what Paul Valery wrote about literary work: “A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death; for in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations.”
In rewriting The Little Death, I have returned to a work temporarily interrupted by its publication and go deeper into it as part of my journey of inner transformation.
Michael Nava
San Francisco
May 2016
Acknowledgements
I began my literary life being published by Sasha Alyson, an independent publisher of great integrity, who ran Alyson Publications, the most important gay press of its time. After 30 years, I have gratefully returned to the world of independent presses with Kórima Press and its publisher, my friend Lorenzo Herrera y Lozano. Lorenzo embodies the same kind of integrity as Sasha did. Like Sasha with gay writers, Lorenzo’s commitment to publishing queer Latino/a writers provides a forum for writers whose voices might not otherwise be heard. It has been a joy to work with him. I also want to thank my friend, the photographer and blogger, Michael Strickland for his close reading of
the manuscript and for his beautiful image of the grieving angel. My appreciation also goes to photographer David Quintanilla for his image of the two lovers and to the models, Jorge Montero and Nelson Marin, who brought them to life. Lastly, my love and thanks to Joan Larkin, a woman and a poet of great humanity and wisdom, for letting me use her poems.
About Michael Nava
Michael Nava is the author of an acclaimed series of seven novels featuring gay, Latino criminal defense lawyer Henry Rios which won six Lambda Literary Awards. In 2000, he was awarded the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement in LGBT literature. The New York Times review of the last Rios novel called him “one of our best.” His most recent novel, The City of Palaces, was published in 2014 by the University of Wisconsin Press. The City of Palaces was a finalist for the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for best gay novel and was awarded the 2014 International Latino Literary Award for best novel. This new novel, Lay Your Sleeping Head, a reimagining of the first Henry Rios novel published 30 years ago, is the first of a revised edition of the Rios novels to be published by Kórima Press.