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.