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No Harm To Lovers: A Marriage Trilogy Vol. I

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Back in the early 2000s, as a young person becoming more engaged in LGBTQ+ activism, the world felt like a very different place. First, we were still very immediately in the still long shadow casts by the murder of Matthew Shepherd, by the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act, and by the new wars we were fighting while also implementing Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Conversely, Lawrence v. Texas had very recently granted new rights to the community, but the backlash to that ruling was that, in 2004, 13 states took measures to ban gay marriage. All succeeded, including my native Tennessee.

 Meanwhile, despite Lawrence v. Texas, several states maintained their anti-sodomy laws, ostensibly unenforceable, in case the courts were to overturn Lawrence the way Lawrence had overturned Bowers v. Hardwick. Antonin Scalia actually predicted that without anti-sodomy laws, there would be no legal justification to outlaw same-sex marriage--thus, he predicted that it would eventually come to be. His warnings were heard by like-minded fascists.

 Also, meanwhile, as a young gay 20something in West Tennessee, soon to move to Mississippi, I believed some equality would eventually be gained, but late in my lifetime--certainly not by 2013 and 2015. I used to joke that global warming and gay marriage would come together in the narrative of my life. I'd defect to Canada to escape the oppression of the United States right around the time Canada became a warm, cozy place to live and  most of the mid-south turned into an expanded Gulf of Mexico. I was only partially vindictive, and mostly joking--and had no idea I'd be working in Wisconsin when I finally finished this book and got the courage up to self-publish it.

 It is probably the fate of most writers of fiction that their first book is autobiographical, but if I'm decent at this writing thing, then I'd also say that a *good* writer (generally--not necessarily *great*) knows how to--wait for it--turn the actual into apocryphal and so create a fictional cosmos all our own.

 Many of the details in these stories start with a loose connection to actual events from my life, but they turn deeply fictional very quickly. It is not so  much about making things up but starting at one point in time, imagining its implications and possibilities, looping outward and outward, until you spiral back down to the one point from which you began. The first point was a night at the gay club in Jackson, my hometown--I came home and wrote out my impressions of this stunning drag show I had just witnessed. It became to anchor to a story about the club, about the lingering fear of AIDS, and about coming of age in my hometown. Josh is not me, and many of his stories are stories I heard from others, fictionalized through the process of taking random bits of different stories, combining them, and trying to create a sense of how they'd shape a person's life.

 Then, in 2006, some friends of mine in grad school wanted a day out of Oxford right in early December. They were both women, both cis, both straight, so it wasn't exactly two boys on a date together. But the detail about Pontotoc is accurate--or was at the time. For a short period in the early days of what are now our longest wars, Pontotoc lost the most lives per capita of any town/city in the United States. I wrote most of the story--the first coherent draft that became this book--after that afternoon in December. To finish the story, I went back to Pontotoc a few months later. Four pictures were in that shop window. Those wars are still active engagements. Soldiers still die.

 Finally, the shock of the 2008 election--its elation for the country, its shattering outcome for same-sex marriage because of the vote in California. I experienced election night with a group of friends, every one of whom wept when the election was called for Obama. We all felt like we were seeing the advent of hope. Most of that group were straight folks, all of whom were allies who understood the pain experienced by the gay community a day later when the final vote on Prop. 8 was tallied. I had to remind myself of what I had experienced all those years earlier in a club in West Tennessee. I reminded myself that we would not see progress until late in my life time.

 This moment became the impetus to go back to those old notes about that drag show and revise them into a story about time, space, and sorrow. And then I went back to a work of non-fiction I submitted for a workshop when I was an undergraduate, also around 2004. In Martin, Tennessee, on a random day in April, the power went out for several hours. It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon, and after finding myself unable to focus on anything useful, I called some friends from our campus gay-straight alliance to join me for Mexican food at a little restaurant next to campus where we often went to hang out.

 The day was perfect, gorgeous, tender like spring, warm like coming summer. The power being out gave me an excuse to tune out schoolwork and focus on the joy of the moment. I drove in to town from my apartment a bit out in the boonies. Some of the other members of the group arrived at the same time. None of us presented outwardly as queer--at least not flamboyantly. At least not as far as we knew. Nonetheless, as we laughed and walked to the front door of the restaurant, resplendent in the glow of the early evening sun, a car drove by and yelled out at us "Faggots!"

 The day was shattered. We ate quickly. We all left in silence. No one commented on the beauty of that sunny April day.

 These stories all came together. Twist a little here, add there, create some new characters. Actual to the apocryphal, some writer one said.

 Et voila!

 This volume ends in 2008. Volume II moves forward to the days just before the big Supreme Court cases on gay marriage.

 But as a final note--I worked on revisions for this novella over the summer after releasing the whole trilogy together last year. That version had a lot of typos and other errors. By releasing it, I found some friends who helped offer constructive criticism of it. The giant edition that had all three volumes also got too bulky and it's binding wasn't what I'd hoped. So I decided to publish each of these separately and lower the cost. This is not a money-making venture. It's just self-publishing, which is not always a highbrow endeavor. Just a way to stay engaged in writing, I guess.

 I did not realize this book would finally arrive on my doorstep during a debate in the US Senate over installing a new Supreme Court justice who has been called "the female Antonin Scalia." Nor did I ever actually think that other justices would start the  month of October signalling that a new, conservative court was ready to take aim at marriage equality.

 And here I am in Wisconsin, looking north and wondering what the future holds.