[ExI] commentary by one of ours

[Darren Greer]

I

On Sun, Dec 4, 2011 at 6:37 AM, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> I doubt if it is as easy as changing the plot to avoid gay characters.


> Textual analysis shows differences in style and word usage between
> male and female writers (and not just in the sex scenes!).
>
>
Perhaps. But gay men and women have been writing books for years without
being pigeonholed as gay writers and other than genre writing I'm not
certain that there is a particular style associated with gay authorship.
The idea that a writer is gay or not only emerged with the advent of a gay
subset of literature, which began in the eighties during the AIDS crisis.
The Canadian author Timothy Findlay avoided gay characters for precisely
this reason.

Of course it is a bell curve type thing, not an either / or choice.
>

I suppose it depends on what you're writing about. If you're writing about
gay culture, then it's going to be called a gay book. Unfortunately if you
add even one gay character it might also, which could drive off readers
who, like Spike, find it on LGBT lists think they may not be able to
relate. I once saw John Irving's A Prayer For Owen Meany on a gay
list because the friendship between two straight men in the book had
"platonic, but homosexual" overtones. I understand that at the time gay men
were starved for literature of our own, and we co-opted everything that
could give us an emotional thrill, a sense that we might be somewhat
normal.

I'm not even interested in exploring the world of gay culture, or coming
out, and if I do, it will be on my own terms. For about a year I've been
toying with the idea of a coming out novel of a boy in what appears to be
in a late nineteenth century village in Nova Scotia, Canada. The woods
surrounding this isolated little place are populated with strange  beasts
that prevent the inhabitants from leaving and anyone getting in and seem to
be interfering and monitoring with the everyday life of the commune. The
villagers refer to them as Sea-beasts. Eventually, of course, it will
be revealed that these animals are made of programmable matter, and the
village is not a village but a zoo or anthropological expereiment in a
post-singularity world. I tell this not because I wish to give away the
plot of a book that I haven't written yet, but to illustrate how sexuality
can enhance a plot, how it can act as a filter on what is otherwise a
common idea and give it a new twist. We use what is available to us, and if
I do end up writing this book, I would be curious to see if ended up on any
LGBT lists.


P.S. Another reason I want to write a book like this is I want to see what
a post-singularity world looks like by exploring what it doesn't look like,
via the village. The boy and his sexuality would act as a catalysis for the
r-emergence of these two worlds. I welcome feedback on this idea, as I'll
probably have to come to the group a lot anyway while writing it. I'm still
a newbie.

>




-- 
Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own
blood.

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