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Queer Lit

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berto:
I thought I'd start a new thread about queer books. Not necessarily über-serious treatises on What It Means To Be Gay, or whatever, but just a sort of catch-all thread. Books you have read and loved, books you haven't read yet but think might be interesting (such as the one below), light fiction, biographies, novels, fantasy, science fiction, humour -- even short stories. Whatever, as long as it's by a queer and/or about a queer.

I'm not familiar with this Sessums fellow, but this review sounded interesting. For some reason I picture this guy as looking and sounding like that short little actor who had a recurring role as Karen's nemesis on "Will and Grace" -- not that I've watched "W&G" in a long time, mind you, but I did at one point. Anyway, this pint-sized actor had a southern-sounding drawl, and was usually given screamingly funny lines to skewer the "Karen" character, and I used to love episodes that he was on. My favorite put-down by the character was one time he came strolling across this party to the bar, to where Karen was, and drawled, "Ahhh, Karen... I thought I smelled the reek of gin and regret." (I howled. :mrgreen: )

Anyway, I'm prolly waaaaaay off on what this Sessums guy is really like, but that's what this review reminded me of. It sounds like it might be an interesting book, though, so I thought it might do to kick off a "queer lit" thread. Anyone else have any submissions?

Mississippi Sissy by Kevin Sessums:


--- Quote ---Trouble followed Sessums always. At 13, he was molested by a charismatic Billy Graham-like preacher who relied on his profession to cloak suspicions of wrongdoing. At 19, just before he left Mississippi for a new life in Manhattan, Sessums' best friend and mentor, Jackson Daily News arts editor Frank Hains, was bludgeoned to death. It was Sessums who found the body, bound and gagged with silk scarves, and briefly became the prime murder suspect.

Some of the book's chapters are light and bubbly: Sessums warmly remembers the bourbon-fueled party atmosphere at Hains' home where Eudora Welty, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a Jackson resident, joined a cadre of local wits and theater professionals for bracing repartee.

Other passages in "Mississippi Sissy" leave chills. In 1964, two weeks before his mother's death, Sessums insisted, against his grandmother's wishes, that he dress as a witch for a Halloween carnival. He describes the townsfolk, many of them already disgusted by his "sissy" behavior, looking on in "appalled silence." Provoking that reaction made him feel "powerful," Sessums says...

[...]

The book is tough, frank, even if it sometimes reads like a beautifully phrased pity party. Sessums holds nothing back, even details of his sexual abuse at the hands of the preacher and, on another occasion, by a violent stranger in a movie-theater restroom.

"It upsets me when people say there's so much sex in the book," he says. "Molestation is not sex; it's a physical act that is a perversion of trust." Describing those episodes so graphically was important, he believes, "because a lot of times people abstractly talk about being molested -- because there is so much shame involved in it. I wanted the reader to know exactly what happened and wrench any shame I had left over from its memory by being very specific and very clear."

[...]

Reactions to "Mississippi Sissy" from Sessums' family have been mixed. Brother Kim, 49, a conservative Republican, obstetrician-gynecologist and sculptor, objected to the vivid descriptions of sex with Frank Dowsing, the first African American football star at Mississippi State. Sister Karole, 47, he says, "wrote me a beautiful letter about what the book meant to her and said, 'You brought Mommy and Daddy alive for me.' She has no memories of them at all."

Sessums wells up remembering the words of his sister, who was 4 when their mother died and the three "Sessums orphans," as the local newspaper called them, went to live with their grandparents. He mentions that Karole lives in Vicksburg, Miss., with her female partner of 17 years -- and that their brother has been married to the same woman 29 years.

"I used to say to my shrink, 'Why have my brother and sister had successful, fulfilled personal lives while I've never been able to have a boyfriend that I've lived with. I've never -- I've just had intimacy issues and abandonment issues all my life. I mean, if you want to know why I'm a lonely old homo with a Chihuahua on his lap, just read the book."

The shrink had an answer: "You still don't understand, do you?" he remembers her saying, "You were just old enough to get it. You were blessed that you were smart and sensitive and had a brain and sort of a way to understand this. But they were too young to really understand."

[...]

"I hated being called a sissy," Sessums says. The word marginalized him but, at the same time, he had a mother who told him not to be ashamed but to embrace his uniqueness.

[...]

Most reviewers have liked his book, he reports, but the one review that probably matters the most, in the New York Times, took him apart. It was written by Norah Vincent, author of "Self-Made Man," her chronicle of spending a year in male drag.

"In the realm of worst-childhood one-upmanship," Vincent wrote, "Sessums ... can surely compete." His work should appeal, she snarled, to "voyeuristic trauma gluttons."

"I was very upset by it, for the first couple days," Sessums admits. "But now I've summoned my inner Scarlett, torn the drapes off the windows and made my gown and I'm holdin' my head high. I don't want to sound self-aggrandizing, but one of my best friends said, 'Look, if one frightened, freaked-out teenage gay person finds this book and doesn't kill himself or herself, it's worth any review the New York Times could ever write.'"
--- End quote ---

Feral:

--- Quote ---"I thought I smelled the reek of gin and regret."
--- End quote ---


OMG is THAT where this line comes from?

It was practically a habitual greeting among some of my co-workers a few restaurants ago. It makes perfect sense of course... the gang were much amused by the show. They could not fathom why I did not watch it. As one of the waitresses once said, "I love Jack. I wish I had a Jack." What could I say? It's a TV show... there is no "Jack." I seriously question whether the young woman in question could survive the attentions of the real-world version of what is being portrayed there for very long.

Anyway...

All the works of Christopher Bram (who has been busy writing while I have not been busy reading). Much to my surprise, I have not read about half of his books (and here I thought I had read them all). At the moment, I am recommending Father of Frankenstein. Indeed, watch "Gods and Monsters" with a masterful performance by Sir Ian, and consider the metaphor of "the monster" as it is employed in each. (I'll not make you write a paper on it :) )

Mr. Bram has a talent for history. Not that dry, fact-ridden history that so many complain about, but the flavor of history.

One can find a great deal of gay literature (and other treasure) at JClark Media's gay and lesbian reading group.

berto:
Authors campaign to save Britain's only gay bookshop

(I am aghast... Britain only has *one* gay bookstore?!)


--- Quote ---Authors are campaigning to save the UK's only dedicated gay and lesbian bookshop, threatened with closure because of rising rents and pressure from the internet.

Gay's The Word, which has been selling books in Bloomsbury, central London, since 1979, is hoping to secure its future by raising £20,000 to pay the rent, building a strong internet presence and beefing up community activities.

[...]

American novelist Edmund White, author of A Boy's Own Story, said: "It's a shop that keeps gay titles on the shelves for years in a way no regular bookshop, even one with a gay section, would ever do. The staff know the books and can give advice. It would be very sad to see it go."

Booker-nominated novelist Sarah Waters said: "For me it's more than a bookshop. It was one of those places you went to when you first arrived in London; it had its noticeboard and it was a meeting place. It felt very empowering that it was here and it is still important that there is a visible place for people to go."

Andrew Johnson, a librarian from Birmingham, said while browsing the shelves: "I always make a point of coming here because it stocks such a great range. I'm holding a novel - Armistead Maupin's Further Tales of the City - but in the past I've bought lifestyle titles, non-fiction books. This is one bookshop that covers a multitude of interests." The range of titles, described by manager Jim MacSweeney as everything "from academic studies to trash", includes Sodomy in Early Modern Europe, edited by Tom Betteridge; The Gendering of Men 1600-1750 - The English Phallus, by Thomas A King; and The Clitoral Truth: The Secret World at Your Fingertips, by Rebecca Chalker. Then there's Charles Anders's The Lazy Crossdresser, the favourite title of assistant manager Uli Lenart.
--- End quote ---


"The Lazy Crossdresser" ... LOL :mrgreen:

berto:
Why don't straight people read gay books?


--- Quote ---As a gay man, I actually read very little "gay literature". There isn't that much gay lit published these days, especially since the demise of Gay Men's Press, and anyway I consider myself a citizen of the world, not a member of some exclusive fragment of society called the gay community.

Furthermore, I have no problem relating to the characters in heterosexual fiction: the fundamental desires for love, justice, health and enlightenment are the same whichever camp you're in. Far from putting me off, in fact, that which is different is of interest to me. I don't, in a nutshell, need to read about me. I need to read about you, precisely because you are different.

When I started writing, I wrote mainly about gay characters. Why? To start with, in all fiction there is an autobiographical element which can't be denied, but it honestly struck me that there were aspects of my gay life that were uniquely interesting, funny and sometimes tragic - and I thought that this very difference, this shift of perspective, would be interesting to the residents of straight land.

I first started to realise that heterosexuals were less interested, less open to, or perhaps even embarrassed by my world when a close friend declined to read my book. "Well," he said simply, "I'm not gay."

I accepted his refusal at face value for a while, until the day someone offered me the latest "brilliant" TC Boyle novel, when the full absurdity of his position suddenly dawned on me. It's exactly the same as me passing on Boyle's book on the grounds that "I'm not straight, you see".
--- End quote ---

Feral:
The author might better ask "why don't Gay people read Gay books?" Of course, the answer is that tired old canard about being a 'citizen of the world.'

Get over yourselves, Sweeties -- you are not either.

Funny how this peculiar affectation of reading straight books inevitably precludes reading much of anything Gay.


--- Quote ---I actually read very little "gay literature".
--- End quote ---


"There isn't that much gay lit published these days?" Just how would a person who reads very little of it know anything of the sort? It would take little trouble to jot down a reading list that would take two years for most people to get through.

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