The Gentrification of the Mind

by Sarah Schulman

  The second question has to do with “explicit sex which is degrading or dehumanizing.” It is without a doubt that the characters in John's books feel emotionally and sexually enhanced by their relationships. His characters maintain dignity and sense of humor, and find an increasing awareness of community and self-esteem through their relationships with other men. In fact, their relationships are often positioned as a curative or solution to a feeling of degradation imposed on them by the non-gay world. Their relationships with other men are the very experiences that uplift John's characters from feelings of ostracization and rejection. Both books in question suggest that depriving people of information and images of their own emotional/sexual realities is an act of degradation, while affirming these images and fantasies improves their self-esteem, quality of life, and sense of social place.

  In terms of the “literary merit” of the books, I am struck by their conventional narrative formats. Each story is motivated by the development of a first-person character. Usually he is a gay man with a particular job, sensibility, or environment who is motivated by psychological or emotional issues. Typically through his relationship with another man—an intense, personal relationship involving sex and often love, the protagonist resolves or moves beyond his initial interior conflict. John consistently used accepted literary structures of character and description recognized in every college classroom where writing is taught and analyzed.

  These relationships are always presented in the context of the narrator's autobiography. In the story “Pedro,” he recounts growing up in New England, hitchhiking as a boy as his first strategy for meeting other gay men. This places his work in a specific historic context because he was only able to experience his homosexuality through the anonymity of these seductions. Hopefully, a young man growing up in John's hometown today would have other ways of living his homosexuality if he wanted them. Some of those changes, that widening of choices and opportunities for gay teenagers, are a result of lifelong efforts by people like John Preston to bring these experiences out of isolation and into common knowledge. This is the context for the sexual description in John's work.

  In “Pedro,” John describes his first experience of being in love and in a couple. Pedro meets the narrator's parents and brings them gifts. John describes his own transformation from a bookish loner into a lover. And the sexuality between him and Pedro is completely relevant to the development of the story. It is part of his character's feelings of passion, desire, and satisfaction and underlines accurately the tension between his parents' homophobia and the joy of his sexuality with his lover.

  In the story “An Education,” John's protagonist has graduated from college, is working towards a graduate degree in sex counseling, and has come to a major city to attend a conference for sex therapy professionals. He goes from stuffy academic conference rooms to the more personally revealing atmosphere of men's bars. The hypocrisy of his professional position becomes increasingly obvious. Ultimately, through an intense sexual and psychological relationship with a man he meets in a bar, the protagonist is so changed that he is unable, at the close of the story, to resume his professional demeanor. The story is structured in such a way as to juxtapose the banal theoretical comments and cynical attitudes of the sex therapists with the protagonist's experience of his new sexual relationship as provocative, profoundly transforming, and deeply passionate.

  The books are united further by the through-line of John's life. He is always referring to his daily routine in Maine, meeting friends for dinner, remembering incidents about his family, noticing his own ageing process. His work is rooted, always in the personal. In this way John's books have now become historical documents about rituals, language, sex acts, fashions in clothing and appearance that describe a sector of gay male life before the onset of the AIDS epidemic. Every interaction is set within a particular context reflective of that time. Whether it is Provincetown at its height or the Mineshaft before it was closed by the New York City Police Department, the seductions, the sex, the friendships are all particular to a disappeared era. This alone merits their preservation.

  But even more important to this work is John's fascination with and devotion to men. He was willing to risk repression and isolation as a writer in order to honestly depict and express this depth of feeling. And by placing his own desires within the context of everyday life, John's books move towards a normalization of homosexual love and passion. Given the hostility surrounding his work, these actions were visionary, prophetic ones— based more in a freer future than in the emotionally denying real world in which he worked.

  In the final chapter of I Once Had a Master, John discusses his own work in the context of contemporary political discourse on writing about sexuality and the body. The self-consciousness and ability to grasp intellectually complex social and aesthetic questions places this essay in the realm of literary theory. He reveals the meaning of his books to his larger community, the dialogue between himself and his readers about his work, the social context in which it appeared, and how he wished it to be viewed. These concerns make clear that John considered his work to be of literary merit and that, in fact, it was also viewed that way by his readers and publishers.

  John Preston's depictions of sexual power dynamics between lovers do contain social commentary. While Pat Califia's depictions highlight women's social and political inequality and the role that sexual play can have in reinforcing a sense of equity, power, and self-esteem, John Preston's male characters refrain from the classic heroic male behavior codified in literature. They do not bully, violate, or conquer women, children, or other weaker men. Instead they bring their desires and abilities relating to sexual power purely into a consensual arena. These gay male characters can use their sexual imaginations to mitigate oppressive practices aimed at them from a prejudicial dominant culture. Given these dimensions to Preston's work, it is confusing to note that other books of more challenging sexual content such as the internationally recognized classic The Story of O by Pauline Réage and the Beauty Trilogy by Anne Rice are available in Canada while John's work was singled out for restriction.

  The actual testifying did not go that well. Once I got on the witness stand, the Crown claimed that I was not qualified to be an expert on “harm.” I said that as someone who has experienced “harm” for being a lesbian, and especially for being a lesbian writer, I was quite expert on the matter. I argued that “homophobia is a social pathology that causes violence and destroys families.” I said that gay and lesbian books are a mitigating force against homophobia and therefore are socially beneficial and the opposite of “harm.” The Crown claimed that I was not qualified to make this statement because I am not a sociologist. They won, and I was forbidden from addressing that issue in court.

  This was the first indication I had of our judge's conceptual limits. As we moved along, I came to learn that Milord did not know what “deconstruction” meant. And later he revealed a puzzlement over the meaning of the word “enema.” Oh no, I thought. If he has never heard of enemas or deconstruction, we are doomed.

  The Crown read out loud a passage from one of John's books describing nipple torture. It was a bit surreal. Then he asked me if this was “degrading or dehumanizing.” I did my best.

  Through the rest of the trial the government repeatedly made clear their view about any gay sex. They had seized a lesbian anthology called Bushfire because it included the line “she held me tightly like a rope,” which they said was “bondage.” They had also seized a book called Stroke, which was about boating.

  In the end, after many more years and courts and dollars, Little Sister lost their case. The judge ruled that Canada customs officials had, and still have, the right to decide which materials are not suitable to come into the country. Interestingly, they quickly ratified gay marriage, while continuing to retain the right to insure that no married gay man will ever go looking for Mister Benson.

  Those two days in court made it crystal clear to me that i
n the minds of many people, homosexuality is inherently pornographic. And there is nothing that has occurred in the subsequent three presidential terms that has created any other kind of context. The best proof is in our contemporary placement and treatment of sexually truthful gay literature. That John Preston was invited to give a keynote address at Outwrite, the now defunct lesbian and gay writers' conference, was a sign of the prominent and central role of sexually explicit content in gay literature when it was controlled by the community. Now that gay presses and bookstores have been gentrified out of existence, first by chain stores like Barnes and Nobles, which are now being outsold by Amazon.com, gay literature is at the mercy of the mainstream. Many of the male writers with primary gay content who are rewarded and accepted by the mainstream create characters that are inadvertently palatable to heterosexual liberals. We all love David Sedaris, but he doesn't write explicitly about his Master. Other, smarmier, highly rewarded works show gay men who are alone, betray each other, commit suicide, who have demure and coded sex. The few men who manage to get published at the highest levels with sexually true materials, like Edmund White, still remain on the outside of the straight literary power elite.

  John Updike, in 1999 wrote a stunningly idiotic attack on Alan Hollinghurst's novel The Spell in which he accused Hollinghurst of being “relentlessly gay” and sexist because he is gay, and referring to the author's community of gay men as “a Genet prison without the guards.” Updike wrote that only heterosexuals' lives involve the “perpetuation of the species and the ancient, sacralized structures of the family.” Although many gay and lesbian writers including myself and Craig Lucas wrote letters of protest to the New Yorker, none were published. When Updike died, only gay novelist Karl Soehnlein even mentioned the incident, as the endless mainstream tributes were silent.

  Barnes and Nobles makes the obscenity inherent in homosexuality explicit by pulling novelists with enough integrity to be out in their work, off of the fiction shelves, and hiding them in the gay and lesbian section, which is usually upstairs on the fourth floor behind the potted plants. Mainstream book awards agree by ignoring overtly lesbian fiction, as do mainstream review and publication venues. If the New Yorker has ever published a lesbian story by an out American lesbian writer, I've missed it. If Terry Gross has ever interviewed an out American lesbian novelist with a lesbian protagonist, I've missed it. If Charlie Rose has ever interviewed an out lesbian American novelist for a book with a lesbian protagonist, it has escaped me. If the New York Review of Books…et cetera, et cetera. They all agree that this work belongs behind the potted plants. If any multicharacter play inside an authorial universe (i.e., not performance art, vaudeville, or stand-up) with depth, authenticity, gravitas, and a lesbian protagonist has ever gotten more than one production in the United States of America, it eluded me. Television shows—beyond a handful of cable series—don't have sexual gay protagonists, commercial movies with explicit gay sex are few and far between. The only thing that seems to evict homosexual sex from the realm of the pornographic, in some people's minds, is marriage. Which reaffirms my argument, since nothing is more desexualizing than marriage. This puts gentrified gay people in a terrible bind: we can dissociate ourselves from the full continuum of queer literature, that is, from queer sexuality, thereby falsely describing our literature as “quality” if its sexual content is acceptable to straights. But that is a kind of implicit agreement that we only become deserving of rights when presenting as somewhere between furtive and monogamous.

  Specifically regarding lesbian content, which Urvashi Vaid insightfully called “the Kiss of Death,” is there any literature that has been as gentrified out of existence as fiction by American lesbian writers with lesbian protagonists? After the gentrification economy / value system killed so many small presses, bookstores, countercultural newspapers, magazines, gatherings, conversations, imaginings, and expressions, lesbian content fell upon the mercy of the replacement system and that system had no mercy. U.S. lesbian literature has endured a fifteen-year period of profound censorship in which most lesbian writers who have lesbian protagonists have been driven out of writing or abandoned their content in order to stay in print. The equation has been made brutally clear. If the work has a lesbian protagonist it is no good. It is badly written, meaningless, and undeserving of recognition. Ask people with power in the industry who is the greatest American lesbian writer. Their answer? Susan Sontag, who never applied her prodigious gifts to articulating her own condition. She even wrote a book analyzing AIDS stigma while staying in the content closet—as a result, it is the most cited book in AIDS literature, seen as more legitimate than those written by out queers. There are numbers of writers, filmmakers, historians, actors, directors who may not hide that they are lesbians, but would never assert their right to a protagonist as explicit about the author's own realities as every other writer is about theirs. If they were to do so, these gifted women would become second rate automatically. It kind of reminds me of Black movie actor Step'n Fetchit (real name: Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry). At the very moment that Black people were doing a great deal of the hard labor of this country with no appropriate compensation, he earned millions by portraying a Black man who was, of all things, lazy. The very thing that Black men were not. For gifted lesbians, the greatest recognition awaits if they do pretend the opposite of the truth, if they replace the complex, human, fascinating details of their own experience/history with the pretense that that experience is not worthy of mention. They must agree that we do not deserve to be protagonists.

  When I was a child, the dominant culture could still pretend that lesbians did not exist except as predators. While of course modernism allowed for some women to be out to some degree in their work, and pulp fiction reserved a stigmatized place in popular reading culture, a full range of literary motifs with lesbian protagonists was only allowed to start to come to the surface in the 1970s. But this work, even the tip of the iceberg that was allowed to be seen in the most mainstream of places, was fueled by the passion, money, and attention of a mass political movement. Once that dissipated with Reaganism, AIDS, and gentrification, lesbian literature became more dependent on traditional modes of literary acknowledgement and support to exist.

  A report published by the Astrea Foundation in 1999 documented how private funding was ignoring lesbian writers, and creating incentive for serious artists to avoid lesbian content. By 2009, we now see the consequences of the institutionalized underdevelopment they warned us about. The report stated that

  there are many stages of closetedness and openness in the current literary market, and they have distinct relationships to foundation support. In today's climate, lesbians who are closeted personally and in their creative work are the most likely to receive funding. Almost every foundation that we examined funded women in this category.

  The second most likely group for support were women who were openly lesbian or bisexual in the gay and lesbian media, but omit or deny their same-sex experiences in the mainstream media. None of these women had primary lesbian content in their work. They have had secondary characters, sub-plots, or coded or euphemistic content that could be read by a lesbian reader but they never represented their own homosexuality on the page in the way that heterosexual writers currently represent their own feelings and experiences.

  The third most likely group for support are women who are completely out personally, but are known to the dominant group for creative work with no primary lesbian content.

  The final category, women who are out personally and in their work, are almost completely excluded from foundation support in

  The Astrea study assessed board composition and the selection process. They found that while all foundations discriminated against work with openly lesbian content, they were equally divided on gay male content. When a foundation excluded gay male content, they did so completely. When they supported it, they did so systematically. Surprisingly, the study found no correlation between gender pari
ty and gay funding. Foundations with conscientious gender parity in grant-giving often completely excluded openly gay and lesbian work.

  The study uncovered that it was virtually impossible for openly lesbian work to be awarded on internal nomination only basis. The only American writer with primary lesbian content to get private funding in the entire decade, Blanche Boyd, was awarded a Guggenheim in fiction through an application-based process.

  I want to reproduce for you here the granting patterns of the six major private supporters of fiction writing by openly gay and lesbian artists with out protagonists in the United States during the entirety of the 1990s.

  1. The MacArthur Fellowship Program (internal nomination)

  MEN WOMEN

  1990 Guy Davenport None

  1991 None None

  1992 None None

  1993 None None

  1994 None None

  1995 None None

  1996 None None

  1997 None None

  1998 None None

  1999 None None

  2. The Guggenheim Fellowship Program in Fiction (application)

  1990 None None

  1991 None None

  1992 Mathew Stadler None

  1993 Michael Cunningham Blanche Boyd

  1994 Randall Keenan, Dale Peck None

  1995 None None

  1996 None None