The Letter Q

by Sarah Moon

  One day not long ago something unlikely happened. You ran out of gay books. You read your way through the library’s limited collection of queer. Your discreet search of the card catalog turned up nothing new. You weren’t brave enough to ask the librarian for a suggestion. Instead you rode the red Schwinn over to the Pasadena Plaza. On the mall’s second floor you hunted around Waldenbooks until you found the small gay and lesbian section at the back of the store, next to health and fitness with that oversized exercise book called Buns! staring at you. Trembling, you bought your first gay book, Forgetting Elena by Edmund White, with the money you earned babysitting Friday and Saturday nights for the past two years. Back in your bedroom you read it in an afternoon. Though you barely understood it, its mood of longing felt exactly how you’ve been feeling all summer — the hot sun, the hypersensitivity to male flesh, the endless cycle of longing and hunting and devouring.

  Now you have a new routine: up in the morning, on the Schwinn, and over to Walden for another book. Today, it’s Family Dancing by David Leavitt, the Warner mass market paperback with wet footprints on the cover. You buy the book, frightened the clerk will figure you out (in fact, he’s too stoned to care) and bicycle home in something of a trance, the little plastic Walden bag dangling from your wrist. The house is empty and you run to your room and fling yourself on your bed and begin to read. And read and read and read. These stories are about young gay men from middle-class families in California — men who could be you in a few years! How much you recognize — the swimming pools and the mothers who drive station wagons and sunbathe in bikinis and cocoa butter and their sons who break from the family in search of love. All of it feels like you.

  No one will be home until 4:30 or 5:00, but you must read quickly. You don’t stop to eat. You don’t stop to do anything except maybe pee. You don’t want to stop because this summer, for the first time, you are seeing evidence of yourself beyond yourself, if you know what I mean. Evidence in black ink and cheap mass market pulp that your existence is worthy of print. Proof that you’re not alone in this cyclone of feelings. It’s late July and you’ve been doing this for two weeks now, maybe ten books bought and read in this adolescent fever dream of words. You don’t pause to analyze the books or their layers of meaning. All you want from them is what they mean to you. The recognition of emotions. The recognition of impulses. The mirror on the page. All you are doing is reading and feeling and you’ve never felt more free. The words are saving you from yourself.

  At around 3:30, with the thought of Mom pulling up the driveway in her paneled estate wagon, you finish the book. Another day and another book and another day of inching closer to a kind of love you’ve never felt before — a love for these words, for these pages, and, eventually, yourself. Although you love the book in your hand, although the last five hours of your life disappeared because of the words on these pages, you also know you must get rid of the book. You are fifteen. You aren’t prepared for the world to know that this is what you love — that the great loves of your life will have to do with this. Men and words. Loving men and loving words. That these are your great passions and they will always be intertwined somehow. With each passing day, and each new book, you come closer to understanding this. Still, you can’t let anyone know this and so you must get rid of the evidence: the book. It can’t sit on your shelf. In your heart, yes. But not on your shelf.

  When they say it gets better, for you, David, this is what that means. After this long summer you will never again have to do what you’re about to do. You take Family Dancing outside behind the garage. You drop it into an empty aluminum trash bin. You look at it, at the paperback cover you held so tightly that it’s now creased, and you douse it in Kingsford lighter fluid (from one of those metal squeezable cans). You open a matchbook pocketed at Ariba! (your mom’s favorite Mexican restaurant) and you drop the small flame into the can. You burn the book you just read. You get rid of it. You watch the flames eat the words — just as you ate the words all day — until they are no more. Not only are you eliminating your greatest love, you are destroying evidence of it. For no one must know that you are drawn to stories about men who love each other. That you long to read more stories like this, and one day write them too. You poke the black pages with a stick until they are ash. Then you throw a little dirt into the bin and go back to your room. You did this two weeks ago with Forgetting Elena and you did this yesterday with Dancer from the Dance and you’ll do it tomorrow and I’m writing you today to tell you after this summer you’ll never do this again.

  Here’s the miracle: those words you burned in the trash bin? They’re still with you. Not verbatim, of course. But the feelings they created have stayed for almost thirty years. You can’t know this now, but this hot summer of books is creating your future. Your love of books will become so great that you will create a life around them. You will become a writer, an editor, a teacher. All of it about words. You will have many friends, and a couple of boyfriends, who come into your life because of words. Your happiest hours will be when you are working to find the right words. You will become a professional word nerd not because of career ambition but because of the love those books this summer have given you.

  That’s what I want you to know. Yes, your life will change. Yes, things will get better. Yes, that feeling of being trapped will go away. But not everything will change, thankfully. I want you to notice what you love the most right now, today — for this will guide you a long, long way.

  Love,

  David

  All my thanks to: James Lecesne, for his lovely partnership in this project; Arthur Levine, for being so very good at his job; Matt Hudson; the authors who said yes (and made their friends say yes) when this book was just an idea; my loving, funny family; Amy Bloom and her extraordinary talent as both a writer and a mother; students and colleagues at Saint Ann’s School; Alexis Waller, Priscilla Swan, Margaret Goodwin, Ellen Shapiro, Paula Gilovich, Kate Roberts, Annie Rollyson, Max MacMillan, Claire Mannle; Jasmine, for her reading and re-reading, wisecracking, title-creating, typo-spotting, and love supreme.

  SARAH MOON

  I want to thank The Trevor Project and all the people who work so hard to support LGBT and Questioning youth throughout the U.S. I am especially grateful to my fellow co-founders, Peggy Rajski and Randy Stone. And as always, my thanks to Bill Clegg for standing by me.

  JAMES LECESNE

  LaShonda Katrice Barnett is the author of the short story collection Callaloo and editor of I Got Thunder: Black Women Songwriters on Their Craft. Her stories have appeared in numerous queer anthologies including Does Your Mama Know?, Homestretch: Chasing the American Dyke Dream, and Hot & Bothered volumes I, II, and III.

  Marion Dane Bauer is the author of over eighty books, including the 1987 Newbery Honor Book On My Honor. She was the editor and a contributor to the groundbreaking collection of gay- and lesbian-themed short stories Am I Blue? Coming Out from the Silence.

  Lucy Jane Bledsoe is the author of four novels, a collection of short fiction, a collection of narrative nonfiction, and six books for kids.

  Amy Bloom is the author of three short story collections, two novels, one children’s book, and a book of essays on gender and culture. Her work has been published in fifteen countries and nominated for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She received the National Magazine Award for Fiction.

  Anne Bogart is the Artistic Director of SITI Company, which she founded with Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki in 1992. She is a recipient of two Obie Awards, a Bessie Award, a Guggenheim as well as a Rockefeller Fellowship, a USA Artists Fellow, and is a professor at Columbia University where she runs the Graduate Directing Program.

  Paige Braddock is the Creative Director at Charles M. Schulz’s studio in Santa Rosa, California. Paige is the creator of the comic Jane’s World and co-creator of the graphic novel The Martian Confederacy.

  Melanie Braverman is the author of the novel East Justice (Permanent Pr
ess, 1996) and the poetry collection Red (Perugia Press, 2002), winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Poetry Prize. She is Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University.

  Nick Burd attended the University of Iowa and received his MFA from the New School. The New York Times Book Review named his debut novel, The Vast Fields of Ordinary, a Notable Book of 2009. Nick’s second book from Dial Books for Young Readers is forthcoming.

  Cartoonist Jennifer Camper’s books include Rude Girls and Dangerous Women and subGURLZ, and she is the editor of two Juicy Mother comix anthologies. Her cartoons and illustrations have appeared in magazines, newspapers, comic books, and anthologies, and have been exhibited internationally. www.jennifercamper.com

  Bill Clegg is the author of the memoirs Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man and Ninety Days. He is a literary agent in New York City.

  Bruce Coville has received over a dozen Children’s Choice Awards, and has written more than a hundred books for young people, including My Teacher Is an Alien and Into the Land of the Unicorns. He runs an audiobook company called Full Cast Audio and lives in Syracuse, New York, with his wife, Katherine.

  Howard Cruse was the founding editor of Gay Comix in 1980 and the creator in 1983 of the Wendel comic strip series for the Advocate. He has published nine books, including the critically acclaimed and international award-winning graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby.

  Michael Cunningham is the author of the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours (winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize), and Specimen Days. He lives in New York.

  Ray Daniels received an MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College and is currently a teacher, writer, and freelance editor.

  Benoit Denizet-Lewis is an award-winning contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. Formerly a senior writer at Boston Magazine and staff writer at the San Francisco Chronicle, his work has also appeared in Sports Illustrated, Details, Slate, Spin, Out, and others.

  Stacey D’Erasmo’s first novel, Tea, was selected as a New York Times Notable Book. Her second novel, A Seahorse Year, was named a Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and Newsday and won both a Lambda Literary Award and a Ferro-Grumley Award. Her third novel, The Sky Below, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

  Carole DeSanti is an acquisitions editor at Viking Penguin, known for her championing of independent, original voices in women’s fiction. She is also the author of a novel, The Unruly Passions of Eugénie R.

  Diane DiMassa is a feminist author and cartoonist. Her works include comics, illustrations, and a graphic novel. She is best known for the character Hothead Paisan, Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist.

  Michael DiMotta is a freelance illustrator and storyteller, with diverse clients that include DC Comics, Perkins Eastman, Instinct, and Scholastic. Michael has contributed to online daily Young Bottoms in Love.

  Mayra Lazara Dole’s Américas Award Commended Title, Down to the Bone, received a starred ALA Booklist review, was nominated for ALA Best Books for YA 2009, and made the following lists: Booklist’s Top Ten Novels, ALA Rainbow List, and CCBC Top Choices.

  Colman Domingo is the Tony Award–nominated actor for Best Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical for the critically acclaimed The Scottsboro Boys. Colman is the recipient of the OBIE, Lucille Lortel, GLAAD, and Connecticut Critics Circle awards. He has been nominated for the Drama Desk, Drama League, Audelco, and Fred Astaire awards. Colman is the author of A Boy and His Soul.

  Larry Duplechan is the author of five novels, including Blackbird (considered the first modern African-American coming-out novel) and the Lambda Literary Award-winning Got ‘Til It’s Gone.

  David Ebershoff is the author of four books of fiction, including The Danish Girl, The Rose City, and Pasadena. His most recent novel is the international bestseller The 19th Wife. Ebershoff has taught creative writing at New York University and Princeton, and currently teaches in the graduate writing program at Columbia University. He is an editor-at-large at Random House and lives in New York City.

  As an essayist and reporter, Paula Gilovich has contributed to the New York Times, Allure, and the Stranger. Her plays include Le Roy, Le Roy, Le Roy; Water to Breathe; and Queertopia. At About Face Theatre, she worked as a writer and director for the creation of new main-stage and touring plays about the lives and experiences of queer youth.

  Jewelle Gomez is a writer and activist and the author of the double Lambda Award–winning novel, The Gilda Stories. Her fiction, essays, criticism, and poetry have appeared in numerous periodicals. Among them: the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times, the Advocate, the Village Voice, Ms. Magazine, Essence, Callaloo, and Black Scholar.

  Brent Hartinger is the author of a bunch of books, mostly for teenagers, including Geography Club and Shadow Walkers. He’s won a bunch of awards, including the Lambda (for one of the sequels to Geography Club). Also a screenwriter, sometime college instructor, and editor, he helped create AfterElton.com, now one of the largest gay sites on the web and where he still works.

  Adam Haslett is the author of the short story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and the novel Union Atlantic, a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

  Randall Kenan is the author of A Visitation of Spirits; Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century; The Fire This Time; Let the Dead Bury Their Dead. He is associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill.

  Lucy Knisley is an illustrator, comic artist, and author. Her first published book, French Milk, is a drawn journal about living (and eating) in Paris with her mother.

  David Leavitt is the author of the short story collections Family Dancing (finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award), A Place I’ve Never Been, The Marble Quilt, The Lost Language of Cranes, Equal Affections, While England Sleeps (finalist for the Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize), The Page Turner, The Body of Jonah Boyd, and The Indian Clerk (finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin award).

  James Lecesne is an actor, writer, and activist. His Academy Award–winning short film, Trevor, inspired the founding of The Trevor Project. In addition to his career as an actor, he has written for TV and he performed several of his own one-man shows, including Word of Mouth, which won a New York Drama Desk Award.

  Arthur Levine is the author of six picture books, including Monday Is One Day, illustrated by Julian Hector. He is also the publisher of Arthur A. Levine Books; his list includes works by J. K. Rowling, Shaun Tan, Lisa Yee, Martha Brockenbrough, and David LaRochelle.

  David Levithan is the author of a whole lot of books, including Boy Meets Boy; The Realm of Possibility; Love Is the Higher Law; The Lover’s Dictionary; Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (with Rachel Cohn); and Will Grayson, Will Grayson (with John Green).

  Ali Liebegott is the author of the award-winning books The Beautifully Worthless and The IHOP Papers. She is currently trying to finish a novel about some Brooklyn misfits and their gambling addictions.

  Malinda Lo is the author of Ash and Huntress, two young adult fantasies. Ash, a lesbian retelling of Cinderella, was a finalist for the William C. Morris YA Debut Award, the Andre Norton Award for YA Fantasy and Science Fiction, and the Lambda Literary Award. Malinda lives in Northern California with her partner and their dog.

  Gregory Maguire is the author of many books for children and adults, including the bestselling novel Wicked, and was a contributor to Am I Blue? Coming Out From the Silence, a collection of short stories for gay and lesbian teenagers. He is a founder and co-director of Children’s Literature New England, Incorporated.

  Jaye Maiman is the author of the Lambda Award-winning Robin Miller Mystery series, now being reissued in beautiful new print and ebook editions by Bella Books (www.bellabooks.com). She lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

  Armistead Maupin is
the author of nine novels, including the six-volume Tales of the City series, Maybe the Moon, The Night Listener, and, most recently, Michael Tolliver Lives.

  Richard McCann is the author of Mother of Sorrows, a work of fiction, and Ghost Letters, a collection of poems (1994 Beatrice Hawley Award, 1993 Capricorn Poetry Award). He is also the editor (with Michael Klein) of Things Shaped in Passing: More “Poets for Life” Writing from the AIDS Pandemic.

  J. D. McClatchy is a poet and literary critic. He is editor of the Yale Review and president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

  Terrence McNally is the author of many plays, including LOVE! VALOUR! COMPASSION! (Tony Award), Corpus Christi, The Lisbon Traviata, and Master Class (Tony Award). For television, he wrote Andre’s Mother (Emmy Award). His musical theater credits include Ragtime and Kiss of the Spider Woman (Tony Awards).

  Erika Moen is a freelance cartoonist with a self-designed degree from Pitzer College in Illustrated Storytelling. She lives in Portland, Oregon, and is a member of Periscope Studio. She has been happily married to Matthew Nolan since October 2008.

  Sarah Moon is a teacher, writer, and translator. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.