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duskpetersonExciting discussions! I'm happy to see that you guys have been busy in my absence.
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yonmei:
"You want to identify yourself as '50% gay and 50% heterosexual' rather than bisexual - and therefore include yourself out of the category LGBT writer because you identify yourself as too heterosexual to fit inside it?"
Is that a hypothetical example, or did you think that was what I meant? I'm an LGBT writer by virtue of the BT part of the equation. "Bisexual" and "heterosexual" are overlapping categories, not mutually exclusive ones, just as "bisexual" and "gay/lesbian" are overlapping categories.
"Secondly: once a writer - or any public figure - is dead, however they chose to identify themselves in their lifetime, we their readership have a perfect right to discuss their sexual orientation / gender identity in terms that make sense to us."
We're straying from the topic, I think (though the topic you mention is an interesting one, and I'll be glad to discuss it if you want). My point is this: I was concerned when you seemed to be adopting the attitude that writers of LGBT literature must be assumed LGBT until proven heterosexual. That seems to me to strain credulity, given that we have tons of evidence in the current day that many very straight writers enjoy writing about LGBT characters.
If you want to label those past authors as "unproven either way," I'll readily agree with you. I think that, in most cases, it's difficult to ascertain the sexualities of people in the past. But that doesn't detract from the argument I was making, which was that the Lambda Literary Foundation, by refusing to give awards to anyone but out of the closet LGBT writers, was exiling most of the past classic writers of LGBT literature - and, quite likely, many of the future classic writers of LGBT literature. (Leaving aside straight authors of LGBT literature, there are still a heck of a lot of closeted LGBT writers.) So I really don't see much value in the Lambda Literary Awards as future indicators of excellence in LGBT literature.
"I get the impression from this discussion that you admire neither their courage nor their writing, but prefer to promote heterosexual writers."
I've promoted LGBT writers extensively, both as an editor and as a Webmaster. I've also written editorials that take a hard-hitting stance against prejudice against gay writers. In this particular thread, I didn't feel any need to defend the courage of LGBT writers because that hadn't been called into question by the Lambda Literary Foundation. The courage of straight writers of LGBT literature had been called into question, so that's what I wrote about.
"Why claim him as heterosexual if you're ignorant of his life and don't know?"
But I never said that I was ignorant of his life. I've read his memoir, I've read his fiction, and I've read biographical writings on him. That was why I was puzzled that you were calling his announcement he was heterosexual into question.
The only publicly known homosexual relationship by Alec Waugh occurred when he was a teenager at an English public school (where same-sex romances have been a rite of passage for many students who have gone on to live thoroughly heterosexual lives). He died in 1981, well after gay liberation made it easier to come out of the closet. Since that time, all those literary historians who are eagerly turning up evidence of his brother's gay relationships have failed to turn up any evidence of Alec Waugh having been gay. From what I can tell, he only wrote one barely-gay novel, about his experiences in public school. I say "barely-gay" because, in an era when it was considered quite legitimate to write at length about male romantic friendships, Waugh showed little interest in the subject of male/male love. If one compares Waugh's novel to E. F. Benson's David Blaize, which was published in the previous year, or Ernest Raymond's Anglo-Catholic novel Tell England, which was published five years later, the contrast is quite striking; male/male romantic love is central in the latter two novels in a way that it isn't in Waugh's novel. The literary evidence is that Waugh's homosexual relationship was a minor episode in his life that he probably would never have written about if he hadn't been thrown out of school because of it. (Which just goes to show that kicking a student out of school for homosexual activity is a really, really bad PR move.)
All of this suggests to me that, if Waugh was still stating near the end of his life that he was heterosexual, he probably was. There's no absolute certainty in any aspect of literary history, of course, but I think the odds are in favor of heterosexuality in this case.
It seems to me that, when someone states what their own sexuality is, the onus is on the person who is contradicting their statement to put forward proof. That's why I asked you to do so. So I turn your own question back at you: Why are you so upset at me accepting Alec Waugh's publicly stated self-identification of his sexuality when, by your own admission, you aren't familiar with his writings?
"That [the fact that Rosemary Sutcliff didn't say much about Alcibiades's gay life in her novel about him] if anything seems like evidence on the other side."
Well, it might have been if she hadn't included a gay subplot in that novel. :) If she was a closeted bisexual trying to stay strictly in the literary closet, she didn't do a very good job of it.
In any case, we're in agreement about the heterosexual evidence of her memoir.
"I'll e-mail your apprentice when the long story's done."
Yay! Because I gobbled up the other installments when I got offline and am now sitting at the edge of my seat, waiting for the denouement. (I assume it's a denouement?)
Reply to these comments by mightymaeave, dharma_slut, and Rose Red:
I haven't read yet the article that dharma_slut recommended, so the best comment I can offer on this interesting thread is that it's exceedingly difficult to place a solid line between minority and majority. Both mightymaeve and I have made the same point: How does one classify people who are partly in the minority and partly in the majority? For that matter, how does one classify people who have erotic fantasies that don't fit what is considered acceptable for their particular sexuality? There's a lot of discussion in the slash community as to whether being a slasher makes one, by definition, queer (as opposed to GLBT). I'd hate to apply that label to all slashers, because some slashers are the equivalent of those heterosexual guys who jerk off to lesbian porn and then go engage in homophobia. There is homophobia in the m/m writing community, alas. But I've also heard about a lot of cases where writing slash forced so-called straight authors to give greater consideration to the complexities of their own orientations and gender identities. (I'm one of those authors: entering the slash community helped to force me to come to terms with my gender identity.) Even if a heterosexual writer of m/m is simply the literary equivalent of a fag hag - someone who centers much of their life on people who are of a different orientation - they're treading ground that is often considered taboo for their orientation.
People who think it's always easy to write GLBT literature if one is straight . . . Well, I suspect that they just haven't talked to enough straight writers of GLBT literature about their experiences. And that's exactly the same mistake that most people who are prejudiced against GLBT folk make: they don't take the trouble to ask other people about their experiences before drawing broad conclusions about those other people's experiences.
Now, about Uncle Tom's Cabin. That would be the right analogy for straight writings on GLBT experiences in some cases. But I think that, in other cases, the right analogy would be a memoir by a 1960s civil rights activist who happened to be white. That activist might well have undergone brutal violence alongside the black civil rights activists. So if he chooses to write a tale about the black civil rights movement, he's in a very different position from Harriet Beecher Stowe, who never worked alongside the slaves she wrote about. His background won't be exactly the same as the blacks' - he won't have grown up in a society that condemned him for his skin color - but his experiences will have overlapped enough with the blacks in a particular sphere (civil rights activism) that he can tell an important part of their mutual story - and perhaps even provide a helpful glimpse of their story.
Another analogy - forgive the egotism here - is Twenty Thousand Gold Stars. I'm not a BL; I can't write from their perspectives. But I dwelt in their online communities for four years, so I can legitimately write from the perspective of a member of those communities. Likewise, someone who has lived amongst gays and listened to their stories and witnessed their experiences can tell readers what it's like to live in a gay ghetto as written from the perspective of someone who isn't gay himself. And that's no small gift. Much of the great literature of the world - including 99% of journalism and historical fiction - has been written from the perspective of sympathetic outsiders.
And honest to goodness, sometimes it's impossible to tell the difference between literature by minorities and literature about minorities by non-minorities, even when the non-minorities only have book-knowledge of the minorities they're writing about. Time and again, I've been defeated in trying to guess the gender and orientation of writers of m/m literature. Good m/m writers cover their tracks. :)
If we can't tell, by reading it, whether a gay novel is written by a gay author, what exactly is the point in giving an award to that novel only if the author says, "I'm gay"?
If one's purpose is simply to honor out-of-the-closet GLBT writers, then for heaven's sake, give out awards to the writers themselves. I would be delighted if the LLF started a set of awards honoring writers who have shown particular literary courage. But I think that is quite a different thing from requiring to know an author's orientation before judging whether their book is worthy of an award. I believe that good books stand on their own, without reference to the author's biography.
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maevele:
"nobody is forbidding anyone from writing whatever the fuck they want, they just want the awards to be for queer identified people."
First of all, I'd appreciate it if you would go back and read (or re-read, as the case may be) "The Susan Rules" in the profile for his journal, particularly the last sentence in Rule 3. Once we know each other well, I can tell in what spirit your profanity is intended; but if you don't post here regularly, it's best for you to err on the side of netiquette.
Secondly, the awards, until now, have been for the best GLBT literature. Period. Straight authors have been honored by the Lambda Literary Awards in the past. So it's a bit disingenuous to say that the Lamda Literary Foundation folks "just want the awards to be" for out-of-the-closet GLBT writers. This is a massive change in the foundation's stated mission; they're excluding many of the best works of GLBT literature from an awards ceremony that is supposed to honor excellence in GLBT literature.
It would be nice to think that the LLF's decision will have no impact on the ability of straight writers of GLBT literature to write. But the fact is that a goodly number of publishing companies pay attention to awards when deciding which books to publish. If a certain book isn't eligible for a very prominent award in a publishing field, then that book is less likely to get published. And if a professional writer can't get a certain genre published (e.g. GLBT literature), they're unlikely to write in that genre. So I do believe that this decision by the LLF will have a negative effect on the ability of straight writers to produce GLBT literature.
I don't believe that the GLBT literary community's best interests are served by the LLF taking an action that is likely to discourage the writing of GLBT literature by straight authors. And I believe that a reason put forward by the LLF for this change - that GLBT writers face danger, and that, by implication, straight writers of GLBT literature don't - is horrendously wrong. Some straight writers of GLBT literature have undergone job loss and loss of friends and family as a result of their decision to write about gays and lesbians. I wouldn't be at all surprised (based on my own experience of being a reporter on sexualities other than my own) if some straight writers of GLBT literature have had their lives threatened. So I think that the "we're endangered, you aren't" argument has no legitimacy.
Reply to this comment by
yonmei:"You want to identify yourself as '50% gay and 50% heterosexual' rather than bisexual - and therefore include yourself out of the category LGBT writer because you identify yourself as too heterosexual to fit inside it?"
Is that a hypothetical example, or did you think that was what I meant? I'm an LGBT writer by virtue of the BT part of the equation. "Bisexual" and "heterosexual" are overlapping categories, not mutually exclusive ones, just as "bisexual" and "gay/lesbian" are overlapping categories.
"Secondly: once a writer - or any public figure - is dead, however they chose to identify themselves in their lifetime, we their readership have a perfect right to discuss their sexual orientation / gender identity in terms that make sense to us."
We're straying from the topic, I think (though the topic you mention is an interesting one, and I'll be glad to discuss it if you want). My point is this: I was concerned when you seemed to be adopting the attitude that writers of LGBT literature must be assumed LGBT until proven heterosexual. That seems to me to strain credulity, given that we have tons of evidence in the current day that many very straight writers enjoy writing about LGBT characters.
If you want to label those past authors as "unproven either way," I'll readily agree with you. I think that, in most cases, it's difficult to ascertain the sexualities of people in the past. But that doesn't detract from the argument I was making, which was that the Lambda Literary Foundation, by refusing to give awards to anyone but out of the closet LGBT writers, was exiling most of the past classic writers of LGBT literature - and, quite likely, many of the future classic writers of LGBT literature. (Leaving aside straight authors of LGBT literature, there are still a heck of a lot of closeted LGBT writers.) So I really don't see much value in the Lambda Literary Awards as future indicators of excellence in LGBT literature.
"I get the impression from this discussion that you admire neither their courage nor their writing, but prefer to promote heterosexual writers."
I've promoted LGBT writers extensively, both as an editor and as a Webmaster. I've also written editorials that take a hard-hitting stance against prejudice against gay writers. In this particular thread, I didn't feel any need to defend the courage of LGBT writers because that hadn't been called into question by the Lambda Literary Foundation. The courage of straight writers of LGBT literature had been called into question, so that's what I wrote about.
"Why claim him as heterosexual if you're ignorant of his life and don't know?"
But I never said that I was ignorant of his life. I've read his memoir, I've read his fiction, and I've read biographical writings on him. That was why I was puzzled that you were calling his announcement he was heterosexual into question.
The only publicly known homosexual relationship by Alec Waugh occurred when he was a teenager at an English public school (where same-sex romances have been a rite of passage for many students who have gone on to live thoroughly heterosexual lives). He died in 1981, well after gay liberation made it easier to come out of the closet. Since that time, all those literary historians who are eagerly turning up evidence of his brother's gay relationships have failed to turn up any evidence of Alec Waugh having been gay. From what I can tell, he only wrote one barely-gay novel, about his experiences in public school. I say "barely-gay" because, in an era when it was considered quite legitimate to write at length about male romantic friendships, Waugh showed little interest in the subject of male/male love. If one compares Waugh's novel to E. F. Benson's David Blaize, which was published in the previous year, or Ernest Raymond's Anglo-Catholic novel Tell England, which was published five years later, the contrast is quite striking; male/male romantic love is central in the latter two novels in a way that it isn't in Waugh's novel. The literary evidence is that Waugh's homosexual relationship was a minor episode in his life that he probably would never have written about if he hadn't been thrown out of school because of it. (Which just goes to show that kicking a student out of school for homosexual activity is a really, really bad PR move.)
All of this suggests to me that, if Waugh was still stating near the end of his life that he was heterosexual, he probably was. There's no absolute certainty in any aspect of literary history, of course, but I think the odds are in favor of heterosexuality in this case.
It seems to me that, when someone states what their own sexuality is, the onus is on the person who is contradicting their statement to put forward proof. That's why I asked you to do so. So I turn your own question back at you: Why are you so upset at me accepting Alec Waugh's publicly stated self-identification of his sexuality when, by your own admission, you aren't familiar with his writings?
"That [the fact that Rosemary Sutcliff didn't say much about Alcibiades's gay life in her novel about him] if anything seems like evidence on the other side."
Well, it might have been if she hadn't included a gay subplot in that novel. :) If she was a closeted bisexual trying to stay strictly in the literary closet, she didn't do a very good job of it.
In any case, we're in agreement about the heterosexual evidence of her memoir.
"I'll e-mail your apprentice when the long story's done."
Yay! Because I gobbled up the other installments when I got offline and am now sitting at the edge of my seat, waiting for the denouement. (I assume it's a denouement?)
Reply to these comments by mightymaeave, dharma_slut, and Rose Red:
I haven't read yet the article that dharma_slut recommended, so the best comment I can offer on this interesting thread is that it's exceedingly difficult to place a solid line between minority and majority. Both mightymaeve and I have made the same point: How does one classify people who are partly in the minority and partly in the majority? For that matter, how does one classify people who have erotic fantasies that don't fit what is considered acceptable for their particular sexuality? There's a lot of discussion in the slash community as to whether being a slasher makes one, by definition, queer (as opposed to GLBT). I'd hate to apply that label to all slashers, because some slashers are the equivalent of those heterosexual guys who jerk off to lesbian porn and then go engage in homophobia. There is homophobia in the m/m writing community, alas. But I've also heard about a lot of cases where writing slash forced so-called straight authors to give greater consideration to the complexities of their own orientations and gender identities. (I'm one of those authors: entering the slash community helped to force me to come to terms with my gender identity.) Even if a heterosexual writer of m/m is simply the literary equivalent of a fag hag - someone who centers much of their life on people who are of a different orientation - they're treading ground that is often considered taboo for their orientation.
People who think it's always easy to write GLBT literature if one is straight . . . Well, I suspect that they just haven't talked to enough straight writers of GLBT literature about their experiences. And that's exactly the same mistake that most people who are prejudiced against GLBT folk make: they don't take the trouble to ask other people about their experiences before drawing broad conclusions about those other people's experiences.
Now, about Uncle Tom's Cabin. That would be the right analogy for straight writings on GLBT experiences in some cases. But I think that, in other cases, the right analogy would be a memoir by a 1960s civil rights activist who happened to be white. That activist might well have undergone brutal violence alongside the black civil rights activists. So if he chooses to write a tale about the black civil rights movement, he's in a very different position from Harriet Beecher Stowe, who never worked alongside the slaves she wrote about. His background won't be exactly the same as the blacks' - he won't have grown up in a society that condemned him for his skin color - but his experiences will have overlapped enough with the blacks in a particular sphere (civil rights activism) that he can tell an important part of their mutual story - and perhaps even provide a helpful glimpse of their story.
Another analogy - forgive the egotism here - is Twenty Thousand Gold Stars. I'm not a BL; I can't write from their perspectives. But I dwelt in their online communities for four years, so I can legitimately write from the perspective of a member of those communities. Likewise, someone who has lived amongst gays and listened to their stories and witnessed their experiences can tell readers what it's like to live in a gay ghetto as written from the perspective of someone who isn't gay himself. And that's no small gift. Much of the great literature of the world - including 99% of journalism and historical fiction - has been written from the perspective of sympathetic outsiders.
And honest to goodness, sometimes it's impossible to tell the difference between literature by minorities and literature about minorities by non-minorities, even when the non-minorities only have book-knowledge of the minorities they're writing about. Time and again, I've been defeated in trying to guess the gender and orientation of writers of m/m literature. Good m/m writers cover their tracks. :)
If we can't tell, by reading it, whether a gay novel is written by a gay author, what exactly is the point in giving an award to that novel only if the author says, "I'm gay"?
If one's purpose is simply to honor out-of-the-closet GLBT writers, then for heaven's sake, give out awards to the writers themselves. I would be delighted if the LLF started a set of awards honoring writers who have shown particular literary courage. But I think that is quite a different thing from requiring to know an author's orientation before judging whether their book is worthy of an award. I believe that good books stand on their own, without reference to the author's biography.
Reply to this comment by
maevele:"nobody is forbidding anyone from writing whatever the fuck they want, they just want the awards to be for queer identified people."
First of all, I'd appreciate it if you would go back and read (or re-read, as the case may be) "The Susan Rules" in the profile for his journal, particularly the last sentence in Rule 3. Once we know each other well, I can tell in what spirit your profanity is intended; but if you don't post here regularly, it's best for you to err on the side of netiquette.
Secondly, the awards, until now, have been for the best GLBT literature. Period. Straight authors have been honored by the Lambda Literary Awards in the past. So it's a bit disingenuous to say that the Lamda Literary Foundation folks "just want the awards to be" for out-of-the-closet GLBT writers. This is a massive change in the foundation's stated mission; they're excluding many of the best works of GLBT literature from an awards ceremony that is supposed to honor excellence in GLBT literature.
It would be nice to think that the LLF's decision will have no impact on the ability of straight writers of GLBT literature to write. But the fact is that a goodly number of publishing companies pay attention to awards when deciding which books to publish. If a certain book isn't eligible for a very prominent award in a publishing field, then that book is less likely to get published. And if a professional writer can't get a certain genre published (e.g. GLBT literature), they're unlikely to write in that genre. So I do believe that this decision by the LLF will have a negative effect on the ability of straight writers to produce GLBT literature.
I don't believe that the GLBT literary community's best interests are served by the LLF taking an action that is likely to discourage the writing of GLBT literature by straight authors. And I believe that a reason put forward by the LLF for this change - that GLBT writers face danger, and that, by implication, straight writers of GLBT literature don't - is horrendously wrong. Some straight writers of GLBT literature have undergone job loss and loss of friends and family as a result of their decision to write about gays and lesbians. I wouldn't be at all surprised (based on my own experience of being a reporter on sexualities other than my own) if some straight writers of GLBT literature have had their lives threatened. So I think that the "we're endangered, you aren't" argument has no legitimacy.
From my perspective-- that of a woman who can assume straight privilege anytime she wants to-- that is what makes LLA's decision understandable.