Re-Reading Angels in America Again: A Gay Lamentation on National Themes

 

I've been thinking a lot about Angels in America this week. A friend of mine texted me last weekend about joining her old law school cohort who were saying Kaddish for Ruth Bader Ginsburg via a text exchange. Where are we as a nation right now? We cannot sit together, yet for many of us the communities to which we belong were already spread all over the country. So, we reach out in little electronic attempts to ease our collective pain. Kaddish has been said in many places—a Eurasian steppe, synagogues in Jerusalem, in unnamable camps during unbelievable times. And via text message by some now-graduated law students, sending to whatever god who listens these words of blessing for the dead.

 I think of Angels in America a lot these days. I think of Roy Cohn's fictional avatar swearing to the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, "Better dead than red" while I know that his protégé occupies the White House thanks to the past and still-occurring assistance of a foreign leader who was once an agent in the KGB. And who—the protégé in his starring role as president—gave the presidential medal of freedom (I've left this intentionally uncapitalized) to Ed Meese. I can't decide if the blatant corruption of our democracy at the behest of Putin would trouble the real Roy Cohn, who claimed to hate the Commies. Or if, as seems to be emerging in our national crisis, the real motive of all of these "Saints of the Right," as Kushner calls them, was always just a craven pursuit of power. The fictional Cohn may die spitting venom at the memory of Ethel Rosenberg, the Russian spy; the real Cohn was probably just riding a zeitgeist to power, though his real animosity was towards a woman he didn't like. Methinks his protégé learned many of his tricks.

 My particular reason for thinking about Angels in America this week, however—as opposed to the million different things happening in our country that make Kushner's masterpiece feel so unnervingly prescient—was that collective Kaddish my friend join in honor of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I am reluctant to hold any public figure in such high esteem that I consider their passing in biblical proportions, but I wept when I heard the news about Ginsburg's death. I do honor her and acknowledge her extraordinary accomplishments. And, towards the end of her life, her courage and, to give a word to it, martyrdom. She should have retired a couple of years ago and spent a year or two at rest with her family, but she fought through cancer and other illnesses to the point her body finally gave out—all for the cause of preserving one seat on a court the loss of which could truly undermine basic freedoms in this country so completely as to return us to the final days of Reconciliation. These are the terms of America; for this cause, Ginsburg gave her full measure of devotion even unto her last. Thus, I wish I had joined with people in my community, or any community, to say Kaddish for her. I am not Jewish, but I honor all prayers for the dead. Ginsburg was Jewish, and I'd have liked to participate in some capacity in honoring her through this deeply moving prayer.

 Meanwhile, I started thinking about Louis saying Kaddish for Roy at Belize's insistence in Angels in America. The film version of this scene in the hospital is stunning—the already quiet hospital room and the dead body in it; the secrecy of Belize's mission to steal a supply of AZT for Prior; Louis' general shock at being, for the first time in his life, in a room with a dead body. These quiet contexts give way, of course, to Louis’ angry disbelief that Belize would ask him to say Kaddish for Roy, mixed with his own admission of being a "deeply secular Jew" who doesn't know the prayer in the first place. Kushner adds a touch of humor; in the film, at least, Louis places a napkin on his head because the entire scenario is divorced from anything that should be acceptable. It is doubtful Roy said Kaddish for Ethel Rosenburg. It is doubtful he gave two figs for any of the lives he destroyed (in this his protégé also learned many lessons). What person would say Kaddish for him, then?

 No one. Which is why Belize calls Louis. Roy was, after all, just a man, and "he died a hard death" (as did so many gay men in the AIDS ward at St. Vincent's, so many alone, so many with no one to say a prayer for them). In the end, we do, in fact, all die alone.

 That same friend of mine who said Kaddish via texts messages with her law school cohort apparently was in a similar headspace as I this week, thinking on this scene and its significance. We were texting each other a few days later and weighing in on why this scene resonates. I offered that it is "a raw reminder of the stakes of life and death," meaning that we all die and that death is significant. No one should celebrate it. No one should dance on any graves.

 My friend had a clearer way of seeing this scene, and her words struck me as the better way to see it: "To me it is the refusal to live by the terms of people who hate you."

 Yes. And that is what makes me who I am; Louis and Belize who they are; and, in his opposite perspective, fictional Roy Cohn (and his real-life protégé) precisely not like me and others (my friend) who stand for the value of human dignity. It is as simple as that. I would like to say Kaddish for the Ruth Bader Ginsburgs of this world; I will also say Kaddish for the Roy Cohns.

 Oh, but the scene then gets even more stunning. As Louis tries to remember the Kaddish, he first misspeaks a different prayer. He tries to find ways to say he can't do it. He wants an excuse not to do it—but he keeps trying. To circle back to that napkin on his head, if nothing about the scene is or allows for the appropriate way to say Kaddish, you make do as best you can. As Louis stands there, lamenting how ridiculous he looks and feels, Belize quietly looks on. Belize and Louis are not exactly buddies, but here they are still two queens, two people who know what it is like to be on the receiving end of the hate of men like Roy Cohn. They are there together, saying Kaddish for the dead.  

 Then the lights go down, and from a dark doorway in the wall, Ethel Rosenberg emerges—she says a line; Louis hears her and repeats it. Cut to Belize's perspective: the lights are back up and Louis stands beside Roy's deathbed, speaking the Kaddish alone. Cut back to Louis with Ethel, from the darkness of death and eternity . . . and life and those still living. They begin to speak together, to engage in a call and response. A deep gap in time and experience lessens, and history, in all its magnitude, heartbreak, loss, and potential, reaches down from some high heaven and in touching this moment touches all of us. 

 Then Ethel adds a final line, which I think is not in the Kaddish recorded in books to teach new generations these old Jewish prayers. If I were to say Kaddish for the Roy Cohns of this world, that is the amen I’d add to the end of my prayer as well.  

 Ruth Bader Ginsburg died right as we eclipsed 200,000 deaths from COVID (officially), right as Cohn's protégé said it was affecting basically nobody, at least no one who mattered. It might even be, some still feel, be a giant hoax after all—or so I thought last night while sitting at a bar watching NFL teams play in empty stadiums to very realistic crowd noise piped in from the PA system. To quote Louis from elsewhere in Angels in America: "This is progress?" He says this line in his apartment in Alphabet-land, and he delivers it with a performative irony borrowed from an impression of a Jewish grandmother, but he adds to it the irony inherent in the perspective of any world-weary queen. It fits so much right now.   

 I taught Angels in America for the first time in Fall 2016, just past midterms, our second-to-last book for a Gay and Lesbian Literature class I teach every semester. I had been using so many scenes from it to explore the impact of AIDS on the [gay] community (thanks, Fran Lebowitz) that I figured I might as well just have the students read it instead of showing them clips from it to explain scenes in other books.

 I bought a new copy for that semester—the most recent revision by Kushner and published by Theatre Communications Group in 2013. This "revised and complete edition" includes a new introduction by Kushner, written in 2012, about the presidential campaign, fears of (Mormon) Mitt Romney and the descent into a madness too familiar from the play set in the 1980s and published nearly 20 years before that election wherein the contrast felt so stark.

 In the days after the 2016 election, I struggled to find the energy to feed myself, much less read anything. I would start crying in the middle of the day, at random moments. The fall skies in those mid-November weeks were golden but the sun set so early. By the time I got home from work, it was just passing dusk. On the weekends, I sat in a chair by the enormous front window in my apartment in Mineral Point, watching what felt like the sunset on the last days.

 Then, at one point, a couple weeks after the election, I met three of my colleagues for dinner in Platteville. We all had been in collective mourning and shock, but we wanted to meet to see each other, to share our emotions. We sort of pretended we weren't going to talk about the election, but that was just a way to get ourselves together so we could talk about it, about each other, about our world and our lives. It was a dinner that I found so deeply necessary. It pulled me up from a level of despair to which I did not realize I had descended.

 Then, on the way home, after dark, I got off the exit for Mineral Point, and just past the first silos and in front of the tractor dealership, I saw too late two raccoons scurrying across the road. I hit the second one. The impact was so loud I knew that I had killed it. I pulled over, right there where I had hit it, and cried to the point I couldn't breathe. And begged and begged that I was sorry. Because all I could think of was not the life that was taken, but the life that now had to go on, alone.

 After a while, I opened my door to see what I had done. No other cars were out. The raccoon lay in the road, unmoving, exactly where I'd hit it. I finally drove the mile to my apartment, got a broom (the only thing I had), drove back, and scooped it up out of the road. I walked it into the ditch, a few feet off the highway. I didn’t want any other cars to hit it. I wanted it, even in death, to find a quieter place to lie in peace. Then I texted some friends, but I couldn't explain it. I was distraught at the time and thought that is why I couldn’t put words to why I was so devastated. Now, despite this blogpost, I still can’t quite tell you what it means.  

 I suspect the other racoon ran for its life; at best it hid in some distant bushes, terrified of the ogre who had taken the life of its traveling companion. And they were companions. They were near the same size, young adult. Walking one behind the other. I killed the one behind. It was an accident, but still I did it. It was a loss that is irreplaceable. There is no undoing what is done.

 That weekend I began re-reading Angels in America, Part I on Saturday, Part II on Sunday. I had to read it for my class—I can quote the nearly the entire play from memory, but I wanted to re-read it even before the election, just so it was fresh in my mind. After the election, I felt compelled to re-read it, and I did so knowing that I was not reading it for teaching. I was reading it looking for its singular vision of future hope.

 I'll conclude here where the play begins—with that rabbi at the funeral. He tells the story not of a woman but of a people who carried one world on their back and set it here to make a new world for their children; but the rabbi insists that their goals were not to cross a divide never to look back on what they left behind them. They wanted to bring with them what they carried, what they experienced, and what they knew. These are the things that made them who they were and in turn make their children who we (yes, we—all of us) are today. But we don't make that journey, the rabbi insisted, in fact we can’t make that journey. For the actual journey—all journeys of such enormity and significance—they no longer exist in the world, he says. Then the play proves him wrong, but with kindness and dignity. A night plane across America; a motley crew gathered by Bethesda Fountain in Central Park; angels in heaven, coughing in heavy coats and waiting for god to return (also, intentionally uncapitalized, god, that is).

 Somewhere Walt Whitman is thinking of his tan-faced children. Somewhere he is also reminding us that those of you 100 years from now are more in our thoughts than you know.

 So, this weekend, I'm re-reading Angels in America again, for the first time since the 2016 election. And I am thinking about our journey from that place to here. From here to tomorrow. From thence, on.  

Trees, 2020

 Adapted from "Trees" by Joyce Kilmer

I think that I shall never see

a poem lovely as a tree—

 

A tree that towers to the sky

but touches earth near you and I—

 

A tree that seems so strong and old

as fall approaches, turns it gold—

 

A tree that speaks in rustling leaves,

an Entish tongue, that also grieves

 

A tree that stood so very long,

yet comes a storm, and it is gone.

 

Poems are made by fools, like me,

who pause today to mourn a tree.

_______

This poem is just a little weekend exercise in romanticism. The pictures come from my neighbor's yard, where the derecho that hit the area on August 11, 2020 did significant damage to two of the beautiful old trees. Kilmer's original poem is a perennial favorite, and if it feels like it belongs on a Hallmark card, I try to remember that he wrote it during WWI, when the idea of a tree, say in that ruined space we call "no man's land," was a memory, not a reality; thus, the original poem reconstructs a tree via personification that, on analysis, is nonsensical. But then, that's the point, I think. It's a poem, the poet a fool. For the very religious Kilmer, trees are not something we can make or remake, but we can appreciate them.

As Shug describes it in The Color Purple:

    "I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you've found it. [. . . ] She say, my first step from old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people."

Yet how much I feel, per Celie's reaction to Shug's vision, that in this world we currently live in, I just want to conjure a rock and throw it.  

Supermarket of the Last Day of America

 for Ruth Bader Ginsburg

     Adapted from “Supermarket in California,” by Allen Ginsberg

 

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as I walk down the abandoned streets in the haze of smoke from distant fires with a heart so full I cannot look up to find the moon.

    In my pandemic fatigue, I am searching for small images—not store-bought nor meme-able nor enumerable, just one tender hope.

    What fall leaves and what shadows, but no families out to dinners nor students filling the bars on a vacant 2^nd street nor even, it seems, old poets, whose words feel so far away.

    But I saw you, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, old Jewish prophet, captured in the blue lights of social media, though I’m trying to avoid my phone.

    Do I need to ask these questions: should I walk ‘til dawn comes? What price tomorrow? If there is a heaven, then shouldn’t we abandon so cruel a God?

    I wander on, beneath a falling evening, followed in my mind by the faces I don’t see in windows—

    We live each day in a penumbra, but maybe somewhere back a ways we walked together through the last edge of outer dark.

   

    Where do we go now, Ruth Bader Ginsburg? There is no use in explaining—we know which way their mendacity turns tonight.

    (I rest in a park named after the people we stole this land from and feel absurd.)

    Walk with me, feisty lady? In darkest darkness, I don’t know what to do to carry on.

    Can you remind me of that lost America, or was there truly no epoch in this tattered history to draw aspiration from?

    Ah, dear soul bearer, icon, hero--courage teacher. Do you think we can reach a tomorrow after Charon poles us through these fires or will we drink the water of Lethe to forget these depths of pain.

Unsolicited Review: My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, Jenn Shapland (Tin House Books, 2020)

 

An unsolicited review--because every author deserves to have someone recognize the value of their work.

 It was already my intention to inaugurate this series of reviews with Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers this week. Then, as I sat down to write this afternoon, it was announced that Shapland’s book was longlisted for the National Book Award in non-fiction. Huzzah! A well-deserved honor, and not the first coincidence I’ve had with this autobiography.

 Jenn Shapland’s book is a good place to start this project of reviewing works relevant to southern queer identities, not the least of reasons being that, per my previous posts about the art of review, Shapland’s meditation on her own lesbian identity in communion with the revelation of Carson McCullers’ heretofore undocumented lesbian identity is distinctly non-pathologizing. It is an antidote to narratives of queer identity that pathologize queer existence as certain acts or a limited range of desires reducible to the pages of a diagnostic manual. Breaking away from a pathologizing perspective is no small feat given that much of Shapland’s evidence—to the extent her book is an archeology—comes from McCullers’s private conversations with a therapist, but not by way of diagnosis. Rather, McCullers shared and explored her lesbianism with her therapist, but nothing about the description that Shapland gives of their interactions reads like a medical effort at labeling disease. It was more a coming to self from a personal history not conducive to articulating positive queer identity.  

 Another reason why this book is such a good place for me to start is because of another coincidence that got me so stirred up about this book in the first place. In the early 2010s, I applied for a fellowship to study at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas. I did not get that fellowship and had no money to travel to Austin on my own, so I reached out to the Center for help finding, scanning, and, thus, acquiring some Faulkner materials as well as some items about Hubert Creekmore, a forgotten gay Mississippi author whom I was trying to connect to Faulkner. The public service intern who helped me was Jenn Shapland. Jenn even went so far as looking up some additional items on Creekmore housed in a separate collection that I hadn’t even thought to check. She made scans and sent them to me in case I might could use them. As it turns out, she sent me a letter by Creekmore that explicitly connected him to Faulkner and placed him in proximity to the “Southern Protective Association,” a group of Southern artists living in New York and looking out for each other. It was also a group who happened to be mostly gay.

 For anyone who has read Shapland’s book, you might recognize the similarities between this group and the February House, a milieu of queer writers into which McCullers immersed herself to nurture her creative energies. Other similarities between what I will call (just here, once) Lesbian McCullers and my own book, which I will call (just here, this once) My Autobiography of William Faulkner abound, but maybe it is all just coincidence, which extends even to the trajectories that landed us on such near publication dates. When I had my book near to print, I looked up Jenn to thank her for her help all those years ago. That is when I found out she had her own book coming out based, in part, on material she discovered for herself on McCullers in the HRC somewhere in and around the time she got a query from me about my project. My book would be published in January, hers in February of this year. Mine mostly aligns with the expectations of a “scholarly” study, which deserves the scare quotes because it is misguided to assume that scholarship is different from creative non-fiction or that genres of creative non-fiction are not works of scholarship. Case in point: Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, which is probably one of the best and most important works on southern queer identity that I’ve ever read.

 Shapland does not, however, mold herself to the expectations of scholarship. She briefly touches on her decision to leave academia towards the end of the degree program that led her to her job in the archives. She never clearly says what about academia didn’t suit her, but I’d offer that it is fair to say that “scholars” bar their doors to “writers,” and that is the fault of academics for limiting the scope of what we allow to be credited as genius. Of course, genius is, by definition, without preconceived limits on scope or insight, both of which are necessary tools for reconstructing queer lives.

 In the demands of “academic writing,” objective indifference is praised (such as the praise showered on white straight male scholars when they write about white straight male authors who are so amazing, so important). Standards of evidence are imposed mostly to deny a voice to possibilities. Queer life gets held down in the quagmires of “prove it,” which are just the banal repetitions of the epistemological somersaults required to justify all queer readings and which were summed up so deftly by Eve Sedgwick as the laconic “Don’t ask. You shouldn’t know.” Notably, heterosexual assumptions don’t face these burdens of proof.

 As seems to be eternally necessary for reclaiming queer lives, Shapland engages the problem of previous biographers who found euphemisms to avoid admitting what the evidence clearly showed about McCullers, if those biographers didn’t outright reject it. At one point she tells a story about having the director of a leading center for the study of McCullers tell her that the writer was obviously not queer—a story Shapland relates midway through her book and circles back to because of how it epitomizes the average response to projects that seek to claim queer identity for writers whom old guards have long tried to keep from depths that are far less gruesome and demeaning than they presume. Like, really, what do we lose when we say a writer was gay? Nothing. What do we gain? A whole new way of seeing.

 But seeing what? Answer: a lesbian. Among the many virtues of Shapland’s book is that she uses her lucid, nearly lapidary, prose to explore what it means to claim a lesbian identity for herself and for someone else, who also happens to be a pillar of the Southern Renaissance in letters.

 The former—claiming a queer identity for oneself—often proves vexing. From stories about her mother outing Shapland over breakfast because she read her daughter’s private writing while Shapland was away at college to her frank assessment of her complicity in constructing her own closeted life, Shapland’s personal coming out story provides a deeply human narrative of self. Her integration of the body politics of chronic illness into her coming out story elevates that story to the level of a treatise on the human condition. There are moments when she moves from archivist exploring the implications of a discovery to being the stone to step across the river between Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of One’s Self and Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor.

 There, a bridge in the middle, is Shapland, constructing a visible self in the words of an autobiography. But there is also Carson, whose story Shapland takes in her hand to help tend across that river as well.

 The latter—claiming a lesbian, or any queer identity, for someone else—is vexing because on the one hand there are intercommunity queer politics that justly limit our right to claim identity for someone else, especially posthumously. On the other hand, there is the tradition of denials that demand actual semen stains on a dress, salacious pictures, or loud and repeated declarations in print or on sound recordings of an author’s gay self. Anything less and maybe the scholar/writer is stretching, reaching, appropriating, or—as Shapland puts it—looting the evidence box of someone’s life for their own purposes. Apparently, it is just the most horrible sin to admit that your own identity shapes your understanding of the life of someone else, and accusations that your interpretations are shaded by your subjective position are yet again another way to undermine efforts at exploring queer lives. I have yet to understand what non-queer interpretations are based on, but I suspect it is more ephemeral than we’ve been led to believe.

 Shapland did have the experience of holding McCullers’s clothes in her hands, feeling and smelling them. Obviously, she wasn’t looking for semen stains, but then what evidence would we think that she would find there? Shapland finds memories of perfumes and the shape of a chronically ill body in housecoats slid on over nightgowns for when guests arrived or Carson had to pose for a publicity photo. No evidence emerges of someone else in Carson’s clothes. Yet, somehow, the self is never enough proof of who a person is, or was in the case of Carson McCullers. We always have to find the other, or so we think, but Shapland outsmarts us here.

 Which is not to say Shapland doesn’t find the other. At one point, Shapland literally makes a list of possible girlfriends/lovers based on her analysis of archival material viewed through a lens that allows such possibilities to inform her interpretations. The list is not short. Shapland does not, however, quote the source material that would be the proof of her assertions—a third of the way through her book, she flatly states the “gap in the transcripts is killing me.” The records she found are often more notes than novels, some evidence alluded to in the archives was purposely destroyed by its original owners, and some evidence she admits that she is just not allowed to cite directly due to rules of use.

 Shapland doesn’t need to quote from those primary materials. Her lapidary prose reads as plain language but with the effect that it is chiseled, with exquisite effort, from the most valuable stone, like one that we would place to build bridges upon. She says enough without footnotes or direct quotations from embargoed documents. In what she does give us, she and Carson emerge from that river crossing, both visible as simply themselves.

 There is that other party, though. There is us, the readers. You can’t be visible if no one is looking (there’s your truism for today). Reading Shapland’s book, one feels distinctly that we are an active party in this telling of self. We are not seeing explicit evidence, but Shapland explains that even that evidence “is slippery, and discoveries never final.” So maybe that forensic evidence is not what we really need to see. Nor does she show us lesbianism as sex act or sexual desire, though she never treats either as if they are wrong or bad or inappropriate. In fact, Shapland even makes a few jokes about sex, which credible sources say is a fairly common life occurrence—sex that is, though maybe also jokes about it. Rather, she makes visible something less readily discernible. “Nor can love be proven,” she writes. “It’s more complicated, harder to see than a ring, a marriage license, a description of any physical encounter.”  In laying bear the intangible, Shapland erases the euphemisms for the lives she examines. Then she reconstructs selfhood to allow the intangible to come alive, to live, to be seen. We see Carson inhabiting herself; we see Shapland inhabiting herself. We see them together in words, in inference, in deduction, and in insight. The scope of My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is not limited to a smoking gun admission, a letter to a Hyacinth, or a photo that proves it all. It is bigger—it is a life, two lives, queer lives, told with love and respect.  

 Which leaves us, queer readers, also more visible. We finish this book and realize we, too, have made a crossing, if we have been willing to follow. For we see that we are here and that we’ve been here. And we see that it is possible, powerful, productive, and marvelous to read away from objective indifference and read, instead, for ourselves.

The Art of the Review Part II: What Does It Mean to Review Responsibly?

 

In my post on Monday, I laid out how a pathologizing reviewer can miss the mark. I was prompted to write that post because of a pathologizing review written about my book, Gay Faulkner. The larger problem with that review needed to be addressed, but the publication of that review has also given me an opportunity to lay out the framework for what I think should be the role/goal of reviewing. I plan to use this blog to write reviews of my own. I'd like my reviews to be positive; I'd like that they not pathologize their subjects. Thus, I want my reviews to be "good." But what makes a good, which is to say responsible, review?

 Good and bad might not be the right terms here. There are good reviews and bad reviews. There are positive reviews and negative reviews. But to hell with all that. I want to approach reviews differently. I think there are pathologizing reviews and responsible reviews. This dichotomy most clearly structures the art of review, at least as far as I can see it. This post is intended to frame a mode of reviewing that is responsible for the subjectivity of its assertions—and, as such, is responsive to the subjectivity of the text.

 A review is never objective. Objectivity is privilege, and claiming objectivity is just a cover for applying pre-conceived ideas as truth to assert one's prejudices. A responsible reviewer accepts that their response to a text is fundamentally subjective, which does not mean a review should just be the performance of pure, unfettered opinion. No, to be responsible is to acknowledge one's subjective response and then work to understand where that response meets the subject of the work under review.

 My interest in articulating this approach to reviewing does not grow solely from the one pathologizing review published so far about my book. I've been chewing on this idea since around February as I've wondered if—or when—my book would be reviewed at all. Over the past few months, my internal monologue has turned into serious questions about why it hasn't been reviewed. Even in a world of pandemic, it feels like my book has just disappeared.

 So far, there are five reviews of my book, including two on Amazon, or at least five that I'm aware of since its publication on December 30, 2019. I did read the two reader reports for the manuscript (way back in the Fall of 2018), which serve as a kind of review, but I am not including those in these five. The first review (post-publication) came out in January in the Clarion-Ledger. A slightly longer version of the same review appeared on a personal blog page for the reviewer, but I think it is fair to consider this "one" review, just published in two media. The review was generous and positive. It did note that some readers would think I was reaching a bit in my analyses of Faulkner's work, but the reviewer immediately offered that the words and the meanings I derive from them are there for any reader to see—thus, what appears to be "reaching" is actually just clearer sight. I take that as a compliment.

 There was a key difference in the review as it appeared in the newspaper versus online. The newspaper version concluded with the statement that my book was important because it "pierced the hidebound conventions surrounding Faulkner," which is to say my work does something important to revise our understanding of an established (and guarded) member of the canon. Obviously, I found this statement deeply flattering. Online, this concluding statement was replaced by a still-positive statement about the value of the book, but one with less punch to it. Nonetheless, both versions made me feel quite good about what I'd done.

 Of course, this review did start on a note that I've been wondering about—whether this is a good or bad thing because it's not really pertinent to my goals. The reviewer told his personal story about questioning, when he was in school, if Faulkner's works had some homosexual elements to them. He implied that reading my book led him to recall his frustrations about the non-answer that often greets students when they press this point in a classroom, especially a high-school classroom. One key portion of my argument is that I re-frame the faulty answers that have greeted this question, but it is a bit off from my intention to say that my goal was just to revise the high school curriculum. The reviewer literally began his response to my book by framing it as a long-awaited response to his old high-school teacher, which does, admittedly, mirror many informal responses I've receive to the book. I am the antidote to those snooty high school teachers plaguing students with denial. Cool, but from my perspective, the value in exploring Gay Faulkner is not just to answer curious questions in a literature classroom but to assess a bigger epistemology and offer ways to see a world that such a limited epistemology occludes. I'm glad I'm giving high school students some ammo, but I had higher aims for my upward punch.

 Okay, I'm being a little shitty. The review was positive, and it was good. If your goal is to pierce hidebound conventions, maybe it takes a while to get over the hump of folks just saying how long they've wanted any answer beyond denial in response to so obvious and simple an inquiry as whether or not a major American author with an enormous oeuvre might have even a tinge of knowledge of sexual otherness. We must clear that proverbial huddle before the deeper implications can fully find space to land.

 Or, stated more laconically, it matters that a first response is "see, I told you so!" Such a response probably explains the emails I got from a high school teacher in California in February asking me if I'd help him answer a question from one of his students about Joe Christmas in Light in August. Said teacher had seen my book title, so when one of his students asked if it is possible JC is a closeted homosexual, the teacher looked me up and asked me to weigh in. I ended up exchanging a handful of emails with this teacher, because one of my actual goals in life is to get random emails from other teachers asking me for insight into things I've written about. This is not review, it is flattery, but whatever. I'm gonna take it and bask in its light.

 The two reviews on Amazon, posted in August, are very kind. Both give me five-stars! However, one of these reviews, even with five-stars, does admit to a flaw in the book, or at least spotted a tension in it. The reviewer mentions that I use the words "perform" and "self-perform" extensively, suggesting that these concepts are significant to my argument. But I never define them clearly. I say them as if readers will just naturally have context for what they mean.

 One of the reader-responses to the original manuscript actually praised the extent to which I did not bog down my writing with heavy theory and complex terms, which is not to say my work isn't informed by such things. I just don't spend time showing off about it. So, from this perspective, a virtue of my book is its accessibility and clarity.

 On the other hand, this approach does, at times, skip over the kinds of advanced critical conversations necessary for scholarly writing. Queer Theory can be an obnoxiously onerous rhetorical shitshow of fancy jargon, and many would-be Queer Theorists revel in their ability to say nothing but say it so complexly that no one notices that they've said nothing at all. Others recognize that language is the problem with articulating "queer" desire and identity, so they purposely write towards opacity to deconstruct the very notions of stability they are writing against. To this latter group belongs Judith Butler, whose theories about performative identities undergird my work, but I don't quote much Butler. Her writing is distinctly (famously) opaque, and I wanted my book more accessible. Thus, I use her ideas, but I don't explain them—this is a legit problem with the book.

 Still, said reviewer who questioned my lack of defining "perform" admitted that my motives were logical. To be more theory-heavy would make the book less accessible; to make it more accessible meant to make the book less theory-heavy. At which point the reviewer basically concedes this issue with the book derives from his own interest in Queer Theory and his own knowledge of the complexity of these words. His is a subjective response, more "I wanted to know more about this" than "this author made a mistake." As epitomes of the modes of review I am critiquing—the first phrase acknowledges the source of the criticism as an interaction between reader and book; the second states as "truth" that the author did something that is, objectively, insufficient. The first acknowledges that the perception of a problem resides in the reviewer's desires and, thus, leaves it for readers of the review to determine if this critique is valid and to what extent. The second states as fact that the book could have been better if written in some nebulously better way the reviewer demands despite not having the gumption to write the book himself.

 If your entire perspective as a reviewer, scholar, or critic of any kind can be boiled down to, "Well, that's not how I would have done it," and if you've never done it, meaning you didn't write the thing you think you could have done better, then don't write a review. Delete your account. You are spending so much time reviewing that you aren't doing real work. If you think you know a better way to do it, then do it. What's the point, even, of your review except jealousy and insolence? Maybe your mom cares, but probably no one else.  

 I tarry on these long discussions of my reviews to reach the point of my digression—the reviews that were not written about my book, and why that strikes me so hard.

 A low-key academic book from a university press rarely makes it to the pages of the New York Times Review of Books, except there is precedent with Faulkner. Sally Wolff-King's Ledgers of History received mainstream news coverage when it was released, despite being just an academic book from a university press, and I've always assumed that her subject, Faulkner, had appeal to the literati, regardless of their place, or not, in academia. So, I assumed my book on Faulkner might turn a couple of heads. Carl Rollyson's new biography of Faulkner, also from a university press and making no significant new claims about Faulkner, has managed some second-tier attention in non-academic review forums, which has left me a little apoplectic over the disregard for my work—which at least has the benefit of shock value for its novelty if nothing else. More significantly, Michael Gorra's pedestrian attempt to say the Civil War influenced Faulkner was released late this summer to reviews in The Atlantic and The National Review, among other mainstream media. Admittedly, Gorra's book is from a commercial press that probably paid for that publicity, but I did genuinely delude myself into believing my book would get a few reviewers to read it upon its release, just for the sake of its rarity value. It is not every day that someone can make an actual new claim about Faulkner, so if rehashed old claims make it to The Atlantic, surely a 140,000 word claim as unique as mine might turn even one elite East Coast head and elicit some response, however tepid.

 As for academic reviews in peer-reviewed journals, I can't really say what the future holds in that sphere of limited influence. Academic reviews tend to take longer, especially now that academic publishing has slowed down production during the pandemic. I will digress about my expectations for these at a later time. I have suspicions that things will not go very well.

 For what it's worth, I actually know that the University of Mississippi Press did me the courtesy of sending advance review copies (ARC) to several large newspaper and magazines, likely under the same assumption I made that a book making an original claim about Faulkner would turn a few heads and garner modest publicity. None of those reviews materialized, but something else did, which feels a lot like a justification for the claim the elite reviewers in mainstream media are just assholes of proportions as epic as the newly released trailer for Dune.

 In January and early February, I began getting calls to my work number from a retired English professor living in New York. He had read my book and was so moved by it and found it so awesome that he just wanted to talk to me about it. We played phone tag for a while before I finally got ahold of him one night in February. He talked my ear off singing the praises of my book. It was one of the most wonderful experiences a writer could have. I hope I am always available to return a call or answer an email if my book moves someone to the point they want to reach out to me. That's the height of fame and accomplishment that I prefer to attain—to do something good and have normal people want to talk to me about it . . . and never turning them away.

 The only negative from the experience—at least in its immediate context—was when he told me how he came across my book in the first place. He found it at The Strand. Apparently, this world-renowned bookstore has a small room out of the way in a basement area where they sell discarded ARC. This retired professor had found an ARC of my book in late December, which he purchased, read, and took the time to look me up and call me to talk about.

 But it also means some reviewer for one of those mainstream newspapers or magazines in the publishing milieu of New York City had gotten an ARC, never read it nor reviewed it, and dumped it off at The Strand before my book's official release date.

 The professor who called me did not share this information to ruin my day, and given the praise he heaped on my book just for the sake of saying he really liked it, I didn't feel too terribly let down when I heard about the ARC having been dumped like that. At least not at the time. Now, months later, when only one review of the book has appeared in a mainstream publication, the sting of this knowledge hurts more.

 But only in context.

 I need to pause here and  mention that there was another negative experience that emerged from that phone conversation with a retired professor living in New York City, beyond the immediate context of finding out some ass-hat reviewer sold off ARC of my book without ever bothering to read or review it. 

 At the time that retired professor called me, neither I nor anyone else, really, was talking about COVID-19, but about six weeks later, in those horrible days in April, when people over 65, especially men, and especially in New York City, became the frontline victims of this terrible terrible terrible disease, I spent a lot of time staring at walls and thinking specifically about the man who had called me about my book. I had—and still have—his phone number, but I have been afraid to follow up for fear I will find out he died. I also sometimes think of that high school teacher in California and his students. They lived near Los Angeles, and, surely, they struggled as numbers of infections in California rose precipitously. And, of course, while my home state of Wisconsin was complaining that bars weren't open, California went on legit lockdown. Where is that teacher now and where his students? What has become of these lives that I had the privilege to encounter because I wrote a book?

 Had I known then what was coming at us in the Spring and Summer to follow, I'd have stayed on the phone longer that night with that professor or written more follow-up with that teacher in California, not so they could heap more praise on my accomplishment. No, I just miss human contact and see its value in ways that I ignored prior to our current hellscape of lies, death, and misguided appeals to personal freedom. These two connections that emerged in the early days after my book's publication feel like the last tender mercies of humanity before the whole world turned inward to protect itself.

 I hope both men and those students are all making it through okay. They are in my thoughts often.  

 Experience and perception—and the knowledge we gain in life and refine through both—are at the heart of the art of review. Responsible reviewers pick works that align with their experience and perception—their knowledge—and bring to bear those twin engines to offer perspective on the value and viability of the work they've chosen to discuss. As I said in my last post, this is not, strictly speaking, scholarship. It is informed response helping frame newly released books to claim those books for their relationship to broader contexts, which helps make visible why the books matter and lays the groundwork for how to start sorting out what a book can mean. Not what they do mean—nothing means anything in and of itself. It only has a potential for meaning—it can mean. A responsible review considers what a book can mean when it speaks to readers strongly enough that they seek ways to respond to it.

 Some readers read reviews; others write then. The subject is the book; the subject is the reader. Responsible reviewers understand these levels of subjectivity and engage with the potentials of the work to hand.

 And my goal is to be responsible. Henceforth, I will begin writing a series of reviews of books that focus on queer southern identities, histories, and communities. I will review works of fiction and non-fiction, and in that latter category, memoir and scholarly writing. I will not review a work that I think is so problematic that I cannot give it a fair but positive assessment. I will not write a review that is intended to lord over work by another author as if I have more knowledge, a better grasp of content, or clever insights that would improve someone else's work. I will review work for what it is; I will consider it in light of its potential to reframe our current (and received) notions about queer identity in southern spaces.

 I will title these reviews "Unsolicited Reviews," and my ulterior purpose, which I'm pleased to state openly, will be to write reviews of works by authors whose projects speak to me and my interests. And do them the courtesy of complimenting and contextualizing their work.

 An Unsolicited Review: Because every author deserves to have someone recognize the value of their work.

 And they do, or at least "every author" who is working to carve out meaning in the field of queer southern studies does, from where I'm sitting (so does everyone else, but I have to establish some parameters due to the fact that, my lord in heaven, there are a lot of books in this world). I call these reviews "unsolicited" because in most cases I will have some connection to the author. In this field of queer southern writing and authorship, we are hardly legion even if our subject matter is vast; but I will not write reviews that are pre-approved by authors, nor will I review a work by request. I will set my own agenda for reviewing books as I encounter books to which I'd like to turn my attention because I recognize value in them—which is no doubt a subjective category, but that is the whole point.

 The art of review attains its status as art when we recognize that our position as subjects emerges from our engagement and interaction with others as subjects, not objects, in a complex but interwoven web of multiple voices. And not competing voices, but collective voices—we are in this shit together, and we only make it more than shit when we find our way to shared fires rather than cast ourselves alone into dark nights in search of phantasms of individualistic triumph, as if we survive independent of each other by the will of a lone torch. It may not be a room of our own, but it is a flame stoked by many hands that requires many more to gather fuel in what too many people have too long assumed were vacant lots. 

 And, finally, to be clear, this entire endeavor is built on subjectivity. That is not a flaw but a virtue—when we are responsible about it. When we review responsibly (if we can review responsibly), maybe more can emerge than repetitions of pathologies. If nothing else, I'll be content with that.   

The Art of the Review Part I: How Not to Review LGBTQ+ Writing

 

This post is the first of two this week about the art of the review. This post considers what happens when a reviewer makes a mess of things. The next post will reframe the following discussion—which I will admit freely is personal, since the thing made a mess of is my book—to think about what it would look like to write more responsible, less pathologizing, reviews of any book, film, art, or architecture—though most centrally LGBTQ+ themed books, films, and art. This reframing will be the lemonade I make out of a lemon, as my goal with this blog for most of this fall semester is to write reviews of recent queer southern writing. I’d like to address the values on which I will base those forthcoming reviews.  

 I guess that the only thing worse than a bad book review is not getting your book reviewed at all. Or so I’ve been told. This last week, the first national review of my book appeared in a major LGBTQ+ outlet. It is not a bad review, but it is a weird review, and one that makes a series of troubling assertions about queer desire. Since my book is about gay community, identity, and history, having a reviewer muck up a basic concept like queer desire really takes all the fun out of being reviewed. Maybe it would be better to have no review after all?

 Of course, a key element of writing a review is that the reviewer brings to the review their perspective, and inevitably a reviewer—or any reader—reads with their own eyes, not mine as the author. Writing is never without subjectivity because communication requires a subject. Someone is always writing; someone is always reading—it is why we click the box that says “I am not a robot” when we are logging into things. We are not robots. We are always the subject of our writing; we make ourselves the subject of what we read—sometimes intentionally and consciously, sometimes in subtle ways that seem so natural that we call them objective, as if we’ve made an object of the thing itself, outside of our experience of it.

 But objectivity is privilege. Objectivity is the assumption that an indifferent aesthetic creates the value of writing (or any form of art). This is an illusion from which readers need to be woke. The danger of a false sense of objectivity (transitive property: false sense of privilege) is that when a reviewer harbors pathologizing notions about the subject in question, bad shit can arise.

 When a reviewer out and out rips a book they don’t like to pieces, it can be pretty easy to dismiss their ravings as just hate. When a reviewer gushes over works they assure us are great just by virtue of their existence, we can usually sniff out their personal preferences easily enough to separate unearned from credible praise. Good reviewers should know better than to be giddily emotive in their reviews.

 Good reviewers, however, must have some basis for their response to a text. The challenge for a reviewer is walking the line where we mete out our subjective response while always being aware of the line, often unstable, between ourselves and the work we are reviewing.

 Failing to tread this line well leads to the untempered emergence of our deeply held prejudices under the auspices of detached, indifferent, “objective” truth. The end result of such failure is the pathologizing review. The pathologizing review disguises prejudice as knowledge. The pathologizing reviewer is the one who believes his twisted understanding of cause and effect in the world somehow applies to the perspectives and experiences of everyone else. Or, in this case, that the definitions of queerness, gay identity, or homosexuality are fixed in time and place, born of certain impulses inherent to all gay people and acted upon or not acted upon in relation to a rigid social morality and epistemology that always produces the same card in the game of Memory that structures our lives.   

 So, maybe the only thing worse than a bad review is no review, unless the review you get pathologizes your work. Maybe that really is the worst review of all.

 But then, what makes a good review? Not like a “good” review that praises a work as “good,” but a review that treads the line between reviewer and work under review to help create insight into the work on the front end of its existence because reviews come first; scholarship comes later.

 I don’t mean to create overly strict dichotomies here, but a review is not a work of scholarship, though a work of scholarship certainly shares many features of a review, and a reviews often parade themselves as a literary criticism. Still, a review is not a work of scholarship in our current modus operandi in the academic realms. It is an opinion piece, sometimes nothing more than a recommendation (and one can buy positive reviews or have negative reviews slung at you by folks who just like to take you down). A review allows significantly more explicit reader response and digression than “scholarship.” At its simplest, “reviewing” can be summed up in a model from a famous pair of film critics. The art of review is essentially telling people you’d give this work a thumbs up. Conversely, you’d give this other work a thumbs down.

 Or, in the case of the review of my book that has prompted these twin posts this week, thumbs “what the fuck are you even saying right now.” The only thing worse than a bad review is no review, except the only thing worse than no review is a pathologizing review—at least one that goes unchallenged or unremarked. So, alas, I turn now to the pathologizing review of my book, Gay Faulkner. I’ll try to keep the screaming turned down below 11, but really, y’all. This kind of shit needs to be called out . . .

           . . . I should have known something was up when the reviewer began obsessing over the youthful beauty of Ben Wasson. Yes, on the verdant campus of the University of Mississippi, Wasson’s angelic face made him a favorite among the (don’t call them gay) undergraduates, who apparently spoiled him with their attentions, but his meeting with Faulkner, at least as far as how I describe it, is a meeting of the minds, not the glands. It also is not a worshipful digression on Greek statuary; there are no gods growing jealous of the beauty of naked alabaster boys.

 However, to read Alfred Corn’s review of Gay Faulkner published on 26 August 2020 in The Gay and Lesbian Review is to dwell on that margin of boyhood and desire that feels a bit like Alison Bechdel finding her dad’s pornographic photographs of underage boys whom he seems to have been molesting. It’s not that there is no queer desire uncovered in such a discovery; it’s that the queer desire is salacious and its discovery criminal/sinful, depending on the particular perspective one wants to bring to bear on the line we define as the “age of consent.” No doubt, some gay men experience their desire through this lens of loathing the self for desiring young boys, but that is not the desire I uncovered for William Faulkner. I wrote a book on homosexuality in the novels and life of William Faulkner, not an essay on “Death in Venice.” Nor, for that matter, do I think that the only way to understand queer desire is through longing and repression, anxiety and self-hate.

 Gay life is not all tragedy—if you only cried during Brokeback Mountain at the end while Ennis straightened the collar on Jack’s empty shirt, okay, cool. It was sad and sad things make for one type of crying. I cried much earlier in the film, during the scene of their second night sleeping together with the warm lighting and tender kisses. Not all tears, nor all gay life, need be sad.

 Gay identity is not all about self-loathing repression—one of the key reasons the DSM redefined homosexuality out of its list of psychological disorders in the 1970s was that supposedly scientific studies about gay identity had until the time of this revision included interviews with gay men seeking psychiatric care or data collected on gay men in prisons. As it turns out, when you seek to hear stories from gay men who were less overwhelmed by morbid introspection or criminality, your confirmation bias might struggle to adjust. Even Freud understood that, regardless of the origins of homosexuality, the biggest problem gay men face in society is rejection by others, not naturally occurring self-hate.

 Gay desire is not all about older men chasing twinks—while there is significant money to made in the porn industry on idealized depictions of nubile boyhood, it is likely that this fetish stems from deeper ideological underpinnings of our current patriarchal order that equates youth with innocence and both as the rightful purview of masculinity. We might recall Mr. Compson explaining to Quentin what he perceives as the inherent value of maidenhead (for women/girls); we can also consider Quentin’s reaction to finding out Caddy is having sex (he eventually jumps off a bridge after kidnapping a young Italian girl for the day). The grotesquery that emerges here is of virile masculinity being heightened by proximity to young, innocent bodies in need of protection/defending. Unfortunately, this grotesquery can grow to such proportions that it fails to see the line between adult and child, at which point serious problems emerge. When desire for nubility becomes a religion, we are no longer talking about homosexuality or heterosexuality. We are talking about power, patriarchy, and abuse.

 And all three of the above paragraphs intertwine into the pathologizing perspective of Alfred Corn’s review of Gay Faulkner.  

 Corn’s review of my book does not rise to the level of unabashed praise that I had hoped would spew forth from the mouth of all the critics, but I cannot say that he rips my book to shreds. I think, in his way, he’s mostly being positive, or at least as positive as is possible for someone who clearly prefers queer desire that is salacious, illegal, sinful, and—in that woeful joy of gay men who get off on the idea that they are being illicit—repressed!

 The problem is that, if I do explain how Wasson’s memoir codes queer identity and desire in patterns similar to other gay memoir of his era trying to say, but not say, the love that dare not speak its name, Corn’s entire approach to queer desire and gay identity is antithetical to the book I wrote. I explicitly and intentionally wrote away from anxiety models of closeted homosexuality and homophobia—at great length, not through inference or implication. Corn, it seems, prefers books on gay identity that are both more poetically uncertain and prurient. Basically, he just wants to talk about all the beautiful boys. Even the ones who are not relevant.

 Corn begins his review by saying that he had never even remotely considered the slightest possibility that Faulkner could have been gay or that homosexuality might be relevant to his works. Since conversations about gay characters in Faulkner’s fiction go back to at least the 1950s, readers have long questioned Joe Christmas, Shreve, Quentin, Homer Barron, and, in the real world, the sexuality of Faulkner’s buddy Phil Stone has long been an object of speculation, it seems impossible to imagine that Corn is being honest about his surprise. Or he’s never actually read Faulkner, which would lead one to wonder why he was tapped to write a review of my book in the first place.

 This supposed lack of any awareness that such a category of inquiry could be applied to Faulkner does not, however, stop him from ruminating, “I might as well, in support of the gay surmise, make a couple of extra observations about Faulkner that Gordon doesn’t mention.” His first addition includes that I don’t discuss the novel Moby Dick, which is at best homoerotic, never explicitly gay. It seems to slip right past Corn that I do talk about some other gay novels, including The Lost Weekend and The Welcome, as well as Faulkner’s interactions with living gay authors from Tennessee Williams to Gore Vidal to Truman Capote and even to Thomas Hal Philips, who visited Faulkner at Rowan Oak as his own gay southern novel was coming to print.

 His second addition, however, is where the problem really emerges—and casts his interest in Wasson’s boyish beauty in a decidedly more troubling light.

 Corn decides that some missing information relevant to discussing gay Faulkner would be as follows: “One more thing: for a year or two in his early phase, Faulkner served as a scoutmaster, a role that doesn’t quite fit his pose as dandified bohemian poet—unless it does.”

 No, it does not. I did not dwell on Faulkner’s volunteering to be a scoutmaster—which, by the way, was likely so that he could spend more time with his nephews who were in the scouts—because it has no bearing on gay Faulkner. In all my research, I found no evidence that Faulkner was a pedophile; and if I had found that evidence, I would have published it. I would not have published it in gay Faulkner because it is not part of gay Faulkner. Being a scoutmaster does not make one gay. Gay men do not seek out roles as scoutmasters or elementary school teachers or church youth group ministers so they can prey on young boys.

 That Corn even believes this implication is relevant undermines everything else he says in his “review,” which at 1,100 words is mostly him digressing into seedy implications like the handful of Faulkner scholars whose work on homosexuality in Faulkner I deconstruct for its anti-gay puerility. Only about 500 words total in the review are about my book, and about 250 of those about the youthful beauty of Ben Wasson. But he finds time to comment on bohemian scoutmasters; and somehow the editors of the Gay and Lesbian Review didn’t cut it.

 Later in the review, as if to double-down on the inappropriate implications of his comments about scout masters, Corn goes full on Pope Benedict. For reasons that would mystify any scholar of Faulkner, who was not Catholic, Corn digresses to a discussion of Catholicism and repressed homosexual desire. He offers:

 If Faulkner never had sex with another male, was he gay? In contemporary Roman Catholic teaching, you are allowed to have queer thoughts so long as you never put them into action—a teaching that must have been greeted with sighs of relief by thousands of closeted priests, just as it struck terror into the hearts of those who had put their thoughts into action with minors.

 So, for starters, I actually write about the idea of “having sex” and its relationship to sexual identity, and in my introduction, I explain that I didn’t find those photos or semen-stains or whatever Corn thinks would qualify as admissible evidence before he decides Faulkner was bisexual, a point I also explain in that same 4-page introduction that Corn seems not to have read. But let’s get past that. Let’s think about those closeted priests and those minors.

 To be clear: gay priests do not molest altar boys. Pedophile priests do, and often and systemically and have been for a long, long time until, in recent years, this scandal has come to light. Certainly, gay men enter the priesthood. Certainly, some pedophiles hunt within their own gender. Certainly, the hyper-repression of normal sexual desire (such as homosexual desire) can lead to horrifying grotesqueries a lot like those described by Sherwood Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio, the first story of which, “Hands,” disrupts the narrative of pervy gay men being pedophiles to indict the townspeople for their homophobia, which leads to Wing Biddlebaum’s grotesque terror of touching boys at all (I write about this story in my book; it seems to have most directly influenced Faulkner’s writing in Light in August and way the town treats Gail Hightower after he hires a black man to do his housework).

 Corn does not dwell on such directly contextual information. He just repeats the anti-gay talking point that gay men prey on young boys, apparently in ways similar to scoutmasters.

 I did not write about Faulkner’s pedophilia because I do not think Faulkner was a pedophile (in fairness, some of his descriptions of young girls in Flags in the Dust and The Sound and the Fury do lend themselves to critical conversations about the ways Faulkner sexualized children, in both cases of the opposite sex).

 I also did not write about Faulkner the “pederast,” though one old Faulkner scholar, writing about “A Rose for Emily” has used that term to describe the possible sexual orientation of Homer Barron. That old scholar was wrong, as have been most efforts to discuss the implications of homosexuality in this particular story because a lot of scholars harbor very damaging and discriminatory opinions about homosexuality, to the point they can’t even imagine that their might be gay readers out there simply happy to find even a smidge of evidence that gay people do, in fact, exist. And aren’t overburdened by self-hate and oppression. And aren’t always given to tragedy. And don’t molest children as a regular part of their sexual acts.  

 It is entirely possible that Corn, a poet on the doddering side of his 70s, is still stuck in the quagmire of the antiquated view as that old Faulkner scholar who sees in Homer Barron, at best, a modern pederast. Meanwhile, I had just hoped I’d be assigned a more enlightened reviewer to reflect my attempts to have a more enlightened understanding of homosexuality. Corn does not suffice . . .

           . . . Like I said, y’all: pathologizing.

 But I can’t review my own book. I can only hope the next review, if it is not purely positive, at least won’t be disgustingly anti-gay.

 What I can do is try to make sure other works on LGBTQ+ communities, identities, and histories, especially ones that focus on the same Southern landscapes as Gay Faulkner, have a better eye trying to understand their significance and honoring the work their authors have done.

 That will be the subject of the second post on the art of the review. For now, I’m just gonna go find a quiet place to scream away the pathologizing perspectives that still haunt so much of gay life.