Larry Benjamin's Blog: Larry Benjamin's blog - This Writer's Life - Posts Tagged "lgbt"
Defining Marriage
What can I say at this moment? I love you? Thank you?
―those are but pauper words forming an impoverished language,
making it impossible to tell you what is in my heart.
Because of you, I am better than I was, more than I am.
Because of you, who I am now, is who I wanted to be.
Because of you, I am stronger than I used to be.
If I could, I would pull the moon from the sky and lay it at your feet.
If I could, I would give you a lifetime of sunny days and dreams that come true.
None of these are mine to give.
Instead I ask you to accept this ring―this endless circle of gold―which, like my love for you, knows neither beginning nor end.
With this ring, I promise to be your lover, your best friend, your life’s companion.
With this ring, I promise to walk by your side all the days of my life, bound and freed by our love.
Accept this ring, then kiss me and free me.
Last week the Mister and I celebrated our 15th anniversary. For fifteen years without fail, the Mister’s mother has sent us an anniversary card; she is only person who does so. As I read her card, I thought about how much this simple gesture of support means to us. That got me thinking about marriage.
We’ve been together fifteen years. Already we have outlasted 50% of all first heterosexual marriages and 25% of all second marriages. Yet our marriage isn’t recognized, is in Pennsylvania, where we live, and most states, not legal, is perceived by some as a threat to the sacred union between one woman and one man. I don’t intend to argue that point here but instead want to focus on what marriage—any marriage—is.
Mrs. Moon, Daphne’s mother on Frasier, once said famously, “You young modern people think marriage is some sort of promenade through paradise, when it's more like a march through Hell with a man strapped to your back and a litter of nasty babies swinging from your teats!” I love that particular rant of hers, though I think marriage is neither. So what is it? It’s his cold feet pressed against your warm ones on a winter’s night and you not pulling away even though you want to. It’s gently telling him, “No honey, you’re not dying; you’re hung over. Remember last night?” It’s having sex in the morning when you’d rather do it at night so you can fall asleep afterwards. In short, it’s gentleness, it’s compromise. It’s a willingness to commit to each other even though no societal pressure comes to bare. It’s a willingness to commit even though no law in the land supports or recognizes that commitment. It’s a promise between two people and only those two people.
As with Matthew and Thomas, the main characters in my novel, What Binds Us, the idea to get married sprang up organically. Though I’d written What Binds Us before the Mister and I started dating, it hadn’t occurred to me that we would get married. One night over dinner, he mentioned he thought we should get rings. I asked how he imagined us exchanging rings as I didn’t see us simply handing them to each other across the counter of Tiffany. He raised an eyebrow at the mention of “Tiffany.” “Okay so I only intend to do this once; I want a ‘good’ ring,” I told him. As a result I would only consider purchasing a ring from Caldwell’s, Bailey Banks & Biddle or Tiffany.
Ours was a simple ceremony—at home before less than two dozen friends and family—a far cry from the fairy tale wedding of Thomas and Matthew:
“Dondi had had the interior of the ruined church whitewashed and as the building filled with dusk, two hundred beeswax candles were lit, giving off a delicate peach glow. Two dozen delicate gilt chairs with red velvet cushions were lined up in neat rows. A neat, highly polished parquet floor had been laid over the dirt. A woman in frothy lace sat holding an oboe. Behind her were four tuxedoed men with violins. Ten thousand pale pink roses—an entire crop from Holland flown in that morning—gave the stark whitewashed space an air of magnificent opulence.”
In an example of art imitating life, the vows they exchange are the vows I wrote for my own commitment. One real couple, one fictional couple, one couple with great wealth, one couple saving to buy a house. Life and fiction were vastly different save for one detail common to both: “He slipped the narrow gold band on my finger as I looked at his beloved face, the contours and textures of which I knew as well as those of my own. I looked into his shining silver eyes and knew absolutely that I was loved.”
Yet to say that marriage is about commitment tells only half the story. Traditional marriage also carries with it certain rights and protections, which as gay men, we do not have access to no matter how committed we are, no matter how long we’ve been together. My mother does not speak to my brother’s wife. Yet my brother’s wife does not have to worry that if something happens to Michael, she will be denied her place at his bedside; she will not have to battle our parents for his remains, for the house they own together. My mother does not speak to the Mister. Why does he not deserve the same peace of mind my sister-in-law does?
―those are but pauper words forming an impoverished language,
making it impossible to tell you what is in my heart.
Because of you, I am better than I was, more than I am.
Because of you, who I am now, is who I wanted to be.
Because of you, I am stronger than I used to be.
If I could, I would pull the moon from the sky and lay it at your feet.
If I could, I would give you a lifetime of sunny days and dreams that come true.
None of these are mine to give.
Instead I ask you to accept this ring―this endless circle of gold―which, like my love for you, knows neither beginning nor end.
With this ring, I promise to be your lover, your best friend, your life’s companion.
With this ring, I promise to walk by your side all the days of my life, bound and freed by our love.
Accept this ring, then kiss me and free me.
Last week the Mister and I celebrated our 15th anniversary. For fifteen years without fail, the Mister’s mother has sent us an anniversary card; she is only person who does so. As I read her card, I thought about how much this simple gesture of support means to us. That got me thinking about marriage.
We’ve been together fifteen years. Already we have outlasted 50% of all first heterosexual marriages and 25% of all second marriages. Yet our marriage isn’t recognized, is in Pennsylvania, where we live, and most states, not legal, is perceived by some as a threat to the sacred union between one woman and one man. I don’t intend to argue that point here but instead want to focus on what marriage—any marriage—is.
Mrs. Moon, Daphne’s mother on Frasier, once said famously, “You young modern people think marriage is some sort of promenade through paradise, when it's more like a march through Hell with a man strapped to your back and a litter of nasty babies swinging from your teats!” I love that particular rant of hers, though I think marriage is neither. So what is it? It’s his cold feet pressed against your warm ones on a winter’s night and you not pulling away even though you want to. It’s gently telling him, “No honey, you’re not dying; you’re hung over. Remember last night?” It’s having sex in the morning when you’d rather do it at night so you can fall asleep afterwards. In short, it’s gentleness, it’s compromise. It’s a willingness to commit to each other even though no societal pressure comes to bare. It’s a willingness to commit even though no law in the land supports or recognizes that commitment. It’s a promise between two people and only those two people.
As with Matthew and Thomas, the main characters in my novel, What Binds Us, the idea to get married sprang up organically. Though I’d written What Binds Us before the Mister and I started dating, it hadn’t occurred to me that we would get married. One night over dinner, he mentioned he thought we should get rings. I asked how he imagined us exchanging rings as I didn’t see us simply handing them to each other across the counter of Tiffany. He raised an eyebrow at the mention of “Tiffany.” “Okay so I only intend to do this once; I want a ‘good’ ring,” I told him. As a result I would only consider purchasing a ring from Caldwell’s, Bailey Banks & Biddle or Tiffany.
Ours was a simple ceremony—at home before less than two dozen friends and family—a far cry from the fairy tale wedding of Thomas and Matthew:
“Dondi had had the interior of the ruined church whitewashed and as the building filled with dusk, two hundred beeswax candles were lit, giving off a delicate peach glow. Two dozen delicate gilt chairs with red velvet cushions were lined up in neat rows. A neat, highly polished parquet floor had been laid over the dirt. A woman in frothy lace sat holding an oboe. Behind her were four tuxedoed men with violins. Ten thousand pale pink roses—an entire crop from Holland flown in that morning—gave the stark whitewashed space an air of magnificent opulence.”
In an example of art imitating life, the vows they exchange are the vows I wrote for my own commitment. One real couple, one fictional couple, one couple with great wealth, one couple saving to buy a house. Life and fiction were vastly different save for one detail common to both: “He slipped the narrow gold band on my finger as I looked at his beloved face, the contours and textures of which I knew as well as those of my own. I looked into his shining silver eyes and knew absolutely that I was loved.”
Yet to say that marriage is about commitment tells only half the story. Traditional marriage also carries with it certain rights and protections, which as gay men, we do not have access to no matter how committed we are, no matter how long we’ve been together. My mother does not speak to my brother’s wife. Yet my brother’s wife does not have to worry that if something happens to Michael, she will be denied her place at his bedside; she will not have to battle our parents for his remains, for the house they own together. My mother does not speak to the Mister. Why does he not deserve the same peace of mind my sister-in-law does?
Where Are Our Gay Heroes?
After the passing of Sally Ride last week, I read an article in which the writer stated Sally Ride will be a hero to LGBT youth who can now point to her and say there’s another one of us in history. The article left me sad. Sad because Dr. Ride, for whatever reason, did not come out publicly until after her death, and thus lost the opportunity to be a positive influence on a generation of youth at a time when we had even less LGBT role models than we have now. Sad because, to me, remaining in the closet sends a bad message to our LGBT youth: I am afraid. I am ashamed. And you should be, too.
Undeniably Dr. Ride is a role model, a hero even, for young women everywhere and certainly she inspired a generation to “reach for the stars.” But what about our LGBT youth? To my mind she is no more heroic than the star athlete who comes out after he has left the game. Or Anderson Cooper—where is the heroism there? He has a bazillion dollars and a huge fan base. Even if CNN were inclined to axe him for his rather belated coming out, they wouldn’t, not with that large a fan base, not with that much revenue at stake.
To my mind a hero is a person—man or woman, young or old—who risks a great deal, if not everything, for a cause he or she believes in or to takes a course of action he or she deems necessary; often the hero gains a whole lot more than he risked losing through that act of heroism.
I try to temper my feelings with the fact that Dr. Ride had a right to privacy, that her security clearance could have been revoked had she come out publically, that she could have been fired from NASA (currently employers in 29 states can fire a person because he or she is gay). And I get that. I do. But I still don’t think she’s a gay hero.
So who do I consider a gay hero? The out gay men and women who live out loud. The out gay men and women who do not shout yes, I’m, gay from the covers of a glossy weekly but instead tell their story quietly by living out, living authentically. Every. Single. Day. And the 22 openly gay athletes at the 2012 London Olympics. And Frank Ocean. And a seven year old boy who already identifies as gay, who I’ve read of but will probably never meet. And his parents, who champion and celebrate his right to be himself, openly, freely, whoever that self turns out to be. These are my heroes.
People often ask me about my own coming out and in truth, I never came out because I was never “in.” I’ve always been who I am, have always lived my truth. Why did I choose to always be out? Because I don’t know how to be any other way. Is it sometimes harder? Sometimes, probably. But it’s probably harder to pretend to be someone, something I am not. And I feel I have a responsibility to the generation of LGBT youth who come after me, a responsibility to help them not feel they need to blend, to be invisible to make their way in the world. And I get to feel good when I see the look of relief on the fearful, unhappy face of the 12 year old gay boy in the supermarket whose face lights up when he realizes that Stanley and I are shopping together, that a ring flashes dull gold in the light as our hands reach in and out of our shared shopping cart, that we look happy, that no one is chasing us down the aisles calling us names.
When I was growing up, there were no gay role models, no heroes for us. There were those who were suspect, who were whispered about, but no one who stood up and said, “Yes. I am.” Fortunately I discovered gay novels. They helped me feel that I wasn’t alone, that I would one day find my tribe. Perhaps that’s why I write gay fiction—to help others learn that they are not alone, that their tribe is out there waiting to embrace them.
When I was writing What Binds Us, I struggled with the need for the characters to come out to their parents—Dondi come out boldly, spectacularly but he could afford to, he had a trust fund backing him up and was fiercely independent to begin with. Matthew was already alienated and desperately lonely so he was willing to risk losing his family in order to love and be loved. To me it is Thomas who is the true hero because he as has so much more to lose than either Dondi or Matthew. As he says: “Growing up an only child, without cousins or close friends, my parents were everything to me. Having seen how Mrs. Whyte reacted to her gay sons, I worried that they would behave similarly…Matthew reached over and squeezed my knee but said nothing. I looked at his profile as he stared at the road ahead, knew suddenly that if tomorrow the whole world around me fell away and only he remained, I’d still have everything.”
I don’t pretend to be in a position to tell anyone when, or even if they should come out—that is, after all, an intensely personal decision—but for me not being out wasn’t an option. As I told one closeted boyfriend-to-be, “I am no one’s dirty little secret. I am no one’s shame.”
I am my own hero.
Undeniably Dr. Ride is a role model, a hero even, for young women everywhere and certainly she inspired a generation to “reach for the stars.” But what about our LGBT youth? To my mind she is no more heroic than the star athlete who comes out after he has left the game. Or Anderson Cooper—where is the heroism there? He has a bazillion dollars and a huge fan base. Even if CNN were inclined to axe him for his rather belated coming out, they wouldn’t, not with that large a fan base, not with that much revenue at stake.
To my mind a hero is a person—man or woman, young or old—who risks a great deal, if not everything, for a cause he or she believes in or to takes a course of action he or she deems necessary; often the hero gains a whole lot more than he risked losing through that act of heroism.
I try to temper my feelings with the fact that Dr. Ride had a right to privacy, that her security clearance could have been revoked had she come out publically, that she could have been fired from NASA (currently employers in 29 states can fire a person because he or she is gay). And I get that. I do. But I still don’t think she’s a gay hero.
So who do I consider a gay hero? The out gay men and women who live out loud. The out gay men and women who do not shout yes, I’m, gay from the covers of a glossy weekly but instead tell their story quietly by living out, living authentically. Every. Single. Day. And the 22 openly gay athletes at the 2012 London Olympics. And Frank Ocean. And a seven year old boy who already identifies as gay, who I’ve read of but will probably never meet. And his parents, who champion and celebrate his right to be himself, openly, freely, whoever that self turns out to be. These are my heroes.
People often ask me about my own coming out and in truth, I never came out because I was never “in.” I’ve always been who I am, have always lived my truth. Why did I choose to always be out? Because I don’t know how to be any other way. Is it sometimes harder? Sometimes, probably. But it’s probably harder to pretend to be someone, something I am not. And I feel I have a responsibility to the generation of LGBT youth who come after me, a responsibility to help them not feel they need to blend, to be invisible to make their way in the world. And I get to feel good when I see the look of relief on the fearful, unhappy face of the 12 year old gay boy in the supermarket whose face lights up when he realizes that Stanley and I are shopping together, that a ring flashes dull gold in the light as our hands reach in and out of our shared shopping cart, that we look happy, that no one is chasing us down the aisles calling us names.
When I was growing up, there were no gay role models, no heroes for us. There were those who were suspect, who were whispered about, but no one who stood up and said, “Yes. I am.” Fortunately I discovered gay novels. They helped me feel that I wasn’t alone, that I would one day find my tribe. Perhaps that’s why I write gay fiction—to help others learn that they are not alone, that their tribe is out there waiting to embrace them.
When I was writing What Binds Us, I struggled with the need for the characters to come out to their parents—Dondi come out boldly, spectacularly but he could afford to, he had a trust fund backing him up and was fiercely independent to begin with. Matthew was already alienated and desperately lonely so he was willing to risk losing his family in order to love and be loved. To me it is Thomas who is the true hero because he as has so much more to lose than either Dondi or Matthew. As he says: “Growing up an only child, without cousins or close friends, my parents were everything to me. Having seen how Mrs. Whyte reacted to her gay sons, I worried that they would behave similarly…Matthew reached over and squeezed my knee but said nothing. I looked at his profile as he stared at the road ahead, knew suddenly that if tomorrow the whole world around me fell away and only he remained, I’d still have everything.”
I don’t pretend to be in a position to tell anyone when, or even if they should come out—that is, after all, an intensely personal decision—but for me not being out wasn’t an option. As I told one closeted boyfriend-to-be, “I am no one’s dirty little secret. I am no one’s shame.”
I am my own hero.
What does writing GLBTQ literature mean to me?
To celebrate their new book review site Rainbow Book Reviews invited GLBTQ authors to blog on the subject of “What does writing GLBTQ literature mean to me?” for their “Follow the Rainbow Blog Hop.” The following post is part of that Hop.
I write because I want to tell stories but I also want to be read (let’s face it, what writer doesn’t?). But I have no interest in writing common denominator fiction—that is, fiction that becomes popular by appealing to the broadest possible audience. There’s nothing wrong with writing popular fiction that appeals to a broad audience but I want to tell my stories, share my truths—these truths that are borne of who I am, what I have experienced. Writing GLBTQ stories from my perspective as a gay black man, allows me to raise a voice for those of us outside the white heteronormative narrative. That is what writing GLBTQ literature means to me.
There is such a rich tapestry of GLBTQ experience from which to draw, that I feel no need to switch to mainstream fiction. My generation alone has seen so much—Stonewall, the birth of the gay rights movement, the declassification of homosexuality as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association, AIDS, gay marriage, "Will & Grace," the beginning of a national conversation about GLBTQ people.
I believe writing of the GLBTQ experience from the GLBTQ perspective is important because studies show that people exposed to other races, sexualities, are more likely to support equal rights for these groups. I hope by opening a window onto the GLBTQ world, I can educate, open some minds, change some opinions. The chance to educate, to change minds—that is what writing GLBTQ literature means to me.
I think that people are open, now more than ever, to sharing experiences different from their own even if they don’t necessarily wish those experiences for themselves. This willingness to experience another’s worldview is, I believe, in part responsible for the success of books such as “The Help” and “Fifty Shades of Gray.”
GLBTQ literature could well be the next door to be opened by an insatiably curious, questing, reading public. Thus the time is now. Words have the power to make you feel, to make you see but they also have the power to change. So, I must use my gay voice to speak up, speak out for in silence lies death. Just as you can’t lead change from the back of the bus, you can’t change minds if your story is untold; if you remain silent, you remain invisible. (Read my July 25 blog post about “silence” here: http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...)
What does writing GLBTQ literature mean to me? It means I’ve only just begun. There are so many stories to be shared, so many minds to open. With two GLBTQ books already written, I know I must keep writing because, as one of the characters in my current work in progress, says “When I was done fighting the idea that I love you, that I was gay, I thought I was done fighting but, the fighting had only just begun.”
This post is part of the “Follow the Rainbow Blog Hop." Check out why other writers write LGBTQ literature at http://rainbowbookreviews.wordpress.com/
Check out my GLBTQ fiction at http://www.larrybenjamin.com/
I write because I want to tell stories but I also want to be read (let’s face it, what writer doesn’t?). But I have no interest in writing common denominator fiction—that is, fiction that becomes popular by appealing to the broadest possible audience. There’s nothing wrong with writing popular fiction that appeals to a broad audience but I want to tell my stories, share my truths—these truths that are borne of who I am, what I have experienced. Writing GLBTQ stories from my perspective as a gay black man, allows me to raise a voice for those of us outside the white heteronormative narrative. That is what writing GLBTQ literature means to me.
There is such a rich tapestry of GLBTQ experience from which to draw, that I feel no need to switch to mainstream fiction. My generation alone has seen so much—Stonewall, the birth of the gay rights movement, the declassification of homosexuality as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association, AIDS, gay marriage, "Will & Grace," the beginning of a national conversation about GLBTQ people.
I believe writing of the GLBTQ experience from the GLBTQ perspective is important because studies show that people exposed to other races, sexualities, are more likely to support equal rights for these groups. I hope by opening a window onto the GLBTQ world, I can educate, open some minds, change some opinions. The chance to educate, to change minds—that is what writing GLBTQ literature means to me.
I think that people are open, now more than ever, to sharing experiences different from their own even if they don’t necessarily wish those experiences for themselves. This willingness to experience another’s worldview is, I believe, in part responsible for the success of books such as “The Help” and “Fifty Shades of Gray.”
GLBTQ literature could well be the next door to be opened by an insatiably curious, questing, reading public. Thus the time is now. Words have the power to make you feel, to make you see but they also have the power to change. So, I must use my gay voice to speak up, speak out for in silence lies death. Just as you can’t lead change from the back of the bus, you can’t change minds if your story is untold; if you remain silent, you remain invisible. (Read my July 25 blog post about “silence” here: http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...)
What does writing GLBTQ literature mean to me? It means I’ve only just begun. There are so many stories to be shared, so many minds to open. With two GLBTQ books already written, I know I must keep writing because, as one of the characters in my current work in progress, says “When I was done fighting the idea that I love you, that I was gay, I thought I was done fighting but, the fighting had only just begun.”
This post is part of the “Follow the Rainbow Blog Hop." Check out why other writers write LGBTQ literature at http://rainbowbookreviews.wordpress.com/
Check out my GLBTQ fiction at http://www.larrybenjamin.com/
Let’s make this The Year of the People, The Year of Equality.
I don’t know how many of my readers live in Philadelphia but Lisa Scottoline, the author, writes a weekly column for the Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer. I read it each week and usually move on with my week but this week’s column—Year of the Women Who Are Fed Up—gave me pause. (http://articles.philly.com/2012-09-02...) Actually it incensed me. This blog post explains why.
Lisa writes, “They say this is the Year of the Woman…To prove that the Year of the Woman is here, they point out that the Augusta National Golf Club just allowed two women to join its membership, after 80 years of admitting only men.”
So women couldn’t join a golf club? WahWah. Frankly, I don’t give a crap; I can’t give blood or join the Boy Scouts of America. I did wonder, though, who these male members of the past 80 years were. What planet are they from? Do they not have mothers? Wives? Daughters? Female friends? I cannot imagine Stanley joining a club that wouldn’t allow black members. His sense of fairness is too strong, his respect for me as a human being, too great.
She also highlights the fact that the NFL just hired its first female referee—a job that said female has been doing for seventeen years. Big deal. In 29 states I can be fired from my job for simply being who I am.
Of course all of this led me to the battle over gay marriage in America, which Ms. Scottoline doesn’t address but I will.
When you tell me you’re against gay marriage what I hear is that you are for discrimination. And don’t defend your position by telling me you’re against gay marriage but support domestic partnerships or civil unions. That is the 21st century equivalent of telling me you support separate drinking fountains, separate bathrooms. We already know “separate but equal” isn’t. And don’t talk to me about the Bible and your “moral compass.” I don’t eat shellfish but I’m not attempting to make it illegal for you to do so. Also, please note, I have not accused you of inviting the judgment of God for tossing a living creature—one of His creatures—into boiling water so you can eat something the Bible says you should not. I have not called you an abomination.
I am sick of hearing how we are the greatest nation on earth—we’ll be a great nation when everyone—every one of us has equal rights. I don’t mean just the right to marry but also the right to equal pay for equal work, equal access to health care, equal opportunity to work and earn a living, equal rights to decide what happens to our bodies.
And while Ms. Scottoline is talking about women’s rights, I think the conversation actually needs to be about human rights, civil rights.
Like Lisa, like thousands of women, I want what I want when I want it. I want equality. And I want it now. As a citizen of the world, as a human being, I deserve nothing less.
Let’s make this The Year of the People, The Year of Equality.
Read Ms. Scottoline’s column here: http://articles.philly.com/2012-09-02...
Lisa writes, “They say this is the Year of the Woman…To prove that the Year of the Woman is here, they point out that the Augusta National Golf Club just allowed two women to join its membership, after 80 years of admitting only men.”
So women couldn’t join a golf club? WahWah. Frankly, I don’t give a crap; I can’t give blood or join the Boy Scouts of America. I did wonder, though, who these male members of the past 80 years were. What planet are they from? Do they not have mothers? Wives? Daughters? Female friends? I cannot imagine Stanley joining a club that wouldn’t allow black members. His sense of fairness is too strong, his respect for me as a human being, too great.
She also highlights the fact that the NFL just hired its first female referee—a job that said female has been doing for seventeen years. Big deal. In 29 states I can be fired from my job for simply being who I am.
Of course all of this led me to the battle over gay marriage in America, which Ms. Scottoline doesn’t address but I will.
When you tell me you’re against gay marriage what I hear is that you are for discrimination. And don’t defend your position by telling me you’re against gay marriage but support domestic partnerships or civil unions. That is the 21st century equivalent of telling me you support separate drinking fountains, separate bathrooms. We already know “separate but equal” isn’t. And don’t talk to me about the Bible and your “moral compass.” I don’t eat shellfish but I’m not attempting to make it illegal for you to do so. Also, please note, I have not accused you of inviting the judgment of God for tossing a living creature—one of His creatures—into boiling water so you can eat something the Bible says you should not. I have not called you an abomination.
I am sick of hearing how we are the greatest nation on earth—we’ll be a great nation when everyone—every one of us has equal rights. I don’t mean just the right to marry but also the right to equal pay for equal work, equal access to health care, equal opportunity to work and earn a living, equal rights to decide what happens to our bodies.
And while Ms. Scottoline is talking about women’s rights, I think the conversation actually needs to be about human rights, civil rights.
Like Lisa, like thousands of women, I want what I want when I want it. I want equality. And I want it now. As a citizen of the world, as a human being, I deserve nothing less.
Let’s make this The Year of the People, The Year of Equality.
Read Ms. Scottoline’s column here: http://articles.philly.com/2012-09-02...
It Doesn’t Just Get Better…We have to Make it Better
I watched this young man’s video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ee-Wa...
I think his message would have been stronger if he’d actually used his name but he’s young and I think he, at least gets it, he understands: It doesn’t just get better, we have to make it better. How? By coming out. By standing up. By fighting back. By supporting those who come out. By believing: I am who I was meant to be. I am perfect as my Creator made me. My creator holds me safe and cherished in the palm of His hand.
I believe this—it’s what forms the basis of my life and what drives my writing—and I hope what our LGBTQ youth will come to believe.
It Gets Better Project: http://www.itgetsbetter.org/
How to be Gay in High School (another young man who gets it right)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLzrzI...
RUCOMINGOUT
http://www.rucomingout.com/
I think his message would have been stronger if he’d actually used his name but he’s young and I think he, at least gets it, he understands: It doesn’t just get better, we have to make it better. How? By coming out. By standing up. By fighting back. By supporting those who come out. By believing: I am who I was meant to be. I am perfect as my Creator made me. My creator holds me safe and cherished in the palm of His hand.
I believe this—it’s what forms the basis of my life and what drives my writing—and I hope what our LGBTQ youth will come to believe.
It Gets Better Project: http://www.itgetsbetter.org/
How to be Gay in High School (another young man who gets it right)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLzrzI...
RUCOMINGOUT
http://www.rucomingout.com/
Ten Things I’ve Learned from Being Published
Tomorrow (9/19) mark six months since Carina Press released my debut novel, What Binds Us. In honor of the occasion I thought I’d share 10 things I learned from this amazing journey. And with my follow up, Damaged Angels, being released from Bold Strokes Books on October 1, I thought now would also be a good time to remind myself what I’ve learned.
1. The greatest words you’ll ever hear from a reader are: “I can’t wait to read your next book.” Which brings us to lesson 2.
2. You have to write another book. Basking in the afterglow of publication is all well and good and yeah I know you’re exhausted but, unless you’re Harper Lee and have a Pulitzer sitting on your mantel, you’d better get back to writing.
3. Start writing your next book. Now. The best thing you can do while waiting to go to publication is start writing your next book. Angela James at Carina Press was the first person I’d heard advise this and I thought she was crazy. Who could concentrate while waiting for release? But the truth is outside of edits there isn’t a whole hell of a lot you can do for your book in production so you might as well get to work on your next.
4. Not everyone is going to love what you’ve written. Bask in the good reviews and try to learn from the bad ones.
5. Not everyone is going to read your book. No one in my family has read it. Not even the Mister has read it. Suck it up—it’s their time, they can use it to read your work or not read your work. Move on. Focus on the people who actually read it.
6. People will get it wrong. Most famously, a reviewer quoted a line from What Binds Us, "Dondi became my guide, my Virgil, on my personal odyssey of self-discovery.” In a parenthetical aside she wrote: “It was Homer, by the way…who wrote the Odyssey. Virgil wrote the Aeneid.” She is correct. However, I was referring to Dante’s Inferno in which the poet Virgil acts as Dante’s guide through Hell. Yep, sometimes readers misunderstand you. As a writer you do not own the reader’s experience.
7. Talking about writing doesn’t make you a writer. Planning to write doesn't make you a writer. Having a book in production or published doesn't make you a writer. Only writing makes you a writer.
8. Writing is fun, cathartic, empowering. Promoting your book and your brand, not so much. Don’t publish if you don’t want to do the follow on work—promoting your book, connecting with readers.
9. Listen to your editor. Like your mother, she probably knows best. Remember she’s on your side—she wants your book to be the best it can be.
10. Your book is not you. Don’t hide behind your book. Readers love a good story. Tell them yours—let them see the person behind the book.
11. Being published doesn’t make you special. You’ll still have to brush the dogs’ teeth and scrub the toilets.
1. The greatest words you’ll ever hear from a reader are: “I can’t wait to read your next book.” Which brings us to lesson 2.
2. You have to write another book. Basking in the afterglow of publication is all well and good and yeah I know you’re exhausted but, unless you’re Harper Lee and have a Pulitzer sitting on your mantel, you’d better get back to writing.
3. Start writing your next book. Now. The best thing you can do while waiting to go to publication is start writing your next book. Angela James at Carina Press was the first person I’d heard advise this and I thought she was crazy. Who could concentrate while waiting for release? But the truth is outside of edits there isn’t a whole hell of a lot you can do for your book in production so you might as well get to work on your next.
4. Not everyone is going to love what you’ve written. Bask in the good reviews and try to learn from the bad ones.
5. Not everyone is going to read your book. No one in my family has read it. Not even the Mister has read it. Suck it up—it’s their time, they can use it to read your work or not read your work. Move on. Focus on the people who actually read it.
6. People will get it wrong. Most famously, a reviewer quoted a line from What Binds Us, "Dondi became my guide, my Virgil, on my personal odyssey of self-discovery.” In a parenthetical aside she wrote: “It was Homer, by the way…who wrote the Odyssey. Virgil wrote the Aeneid.” She is correct. However, I was referring to Dante’s Inferno in which the poet Virgil acts as Dante’s guide through Hell. Yep, sometimes readers misunderstand you. As a writer you do not own the reader’s experience.
7. Talking about writing doesn’t make you a writer. Planning to write doesn't make you a writer. Having a book in production or published doesn't make you a writer. Only writing makes you a writer.
8. Writing is fun, cathartic, empowering. Promoting your book and your brand, not so much. Don’t publish if you don’t want to do the follow on work—promoting your book, connecting with readers.
9. Listen to your editor. Like your mother, she probably knows best. Remember she’s on your side—she wants your book to be the best it can be.
10. Your book is not you. Don’t hide behind your book. Readers love a good story. Tell them yours—let them see the person behind the book.
11. Being published doesn’t make you special. You’ll still have to brush the dogs’ teeth and scrub the toilets.
You Deserve Better
The other day, my latest release, Damaged Angels, received a 5 star review from Debbie McGowan, owner of independent publisher, Beaten Track. (Read that review here: http://ow.ly/ejKk4)
In the review, McGowan says “…the author's extensive research and meticulous attention to detail pays real dividends.” That made me chuckle. I immediately sent her a note explaining that my “extensive research” was actually a three year relationship with a drug addicted hustler, who I'll call "Tomas." In essence I researched the book by living the stories in it. Certainly I didn’t get involved with him because I thought I would one day write of the experience. I got involved with him because I fell in love with him. And I thought I could save him.
I wrote the stories to purge myself of the experience and maybe to warn others. I don’t know. I just know I had to write it all down. He inspired four of the stories in the collection. Though no one story is about us, about him, specifically; I abstracted actual events and tried to reduce them to their core actions then recast them.
This book made me nervous. In part because it was so different from my first, What Binds Us. I worried about what readers of that book would think of this one. And in part because this was in a very real way, my story. Readers always ask which characters are most like you. In this case the main characters in all thirteen stories are hauntingly similar to me. To read this collection, if you read it closely enough, is to get inside my head. And that scares me: do I want anyone to know me that well?
My partner and I recently saw “Keep the Lights On” and that movie, about a documentary filmmaker and a crack-addicted lawyer, really resonated with me because I’d lived that story. I admit it was a hard film to watch for that reason—I know what it’s like to watch someone you care about disappear at the end of a crack pipe. The scene that rang truest was when Erik’s sister tries to get him to eat but he can’t eat because Paul is missing and then he dissolves into tears. Yep, been there. A similar scene appears in “The Seduction of the Angel Gabriel.”
“Let me make breakfast,” Gabriel tells him, pulling away and wiping his nose with his sleeve.
“Okay.”
“You want some?”
“Yes. Please.”
Gabriel turns around, eggs in hand. “I thought you told me you don’t eat breakfast.”
“I don’t usually.”
Gabriel is at once suspicious. “Did you eat dinner last night?”
“No.”
“You know, as skinny as you are, you don’t need to be missing any meals.”
“I couldn’t eat,” he blurts. “Not knowing whether or not you were hungry somewhere.”
Returning from one such bender, “Tomas” confessed to me that he always thought about me when he heard Anita Baker’s I Love You Just Because. And I understood that because I loved him just because. Everyone I knew looked at him and saw someone wholly unsuitable; I looked at him and saw…something…else. A woman I worked with, a Jehovah’s Witness, asked me once why I loved him and I answered “because he looks at me and I feel like a hero.” That line actually appears in the story “2 Rivers” because it is the only way Seth can explain his relationship with the hustler Jordan to Luke, the story’s narrator.
“Tomas” tried to kill himself one night by taking an overdose of prescription medication. I discovered him in a coma lying in bed beside me when I got up to go to work. That experience became “17 Days.”
When his best friend chastised him for taking a deliberate overdose, pointing out he could have died. His response chilled me: “Larry wouldn’t let me die.”
The relationship thrived—for a while. In my care, he got “clean,” learned how to drive, earned his GED, reunited with his family. His transformation was miraculous. He introduced me to his family, he held my hand in public, he made me dinner.
Then one day he hit me.
I threw him out. The next morning I found him on my doorstep. He cried. He swore he would never hit me again. He begged me to forgive him, to take him back. I did. After all we’d both been drunk and I’d made him mad. Since then I have learned:
1. If he does not care about you enough in a moment of anger to not hit you, he does care about you enough. Period.
2. If he hit you once, he will hit you again. And again. Until you put a stop to it.
The second time he hit me, I told his psychiatrist, who diagnosed Episodic Dyscontrol Syndrome. He was medicated. The third and final time he hit me, I went after him with a kitchen knife. That scared us both. That experience became a single incident of domestic violence in “2 Rivers”:
The storm clouds gathered at the edges of his consciousness. They occasionally skittered across the sky, blocking out the sun, leaving him to stumble in the sudden dark, getting bumped and bruised. Eventually, an eclipse of the sun will blacken his universe. When the moon has completed its turn around the sun, the light will reveal blood and his own hand clenched in a fist, raw and throbbing.
In that brief description I tried to capture that feeling of bewilderment that follows being hit by someone you love. What happened? How could he hurt me?
Unwilling to throw him out, unable to trust him, I, at knifepoint, made him take a double dose of medicine and watched him fall asleep. As luck would have it, we had an appointment with his psychiatrist the following morning. I remember I had to wear my glasses because my eyes were too swollen to get my contact lenses in.
Looking at my bruised, swollen face, his psychiatrist asked, “Did he do that?” He admitted him to their psychiatric ward. “You need to get away from him,” he told me. “You deserve better.”
If you’re in that situation, you shouldn’t need someone else to tell you you deserve better. You should know that, you should feel that in your bones: I do not deserve to be hit. Or yelled at or belittled. You should know that. I don’t know why I didn’t, why it took me so long to walk away. Why it took someone else telling me to walk away.
Once years ago, while crossing a water fall over a small creek, my dog slipped and fell in the creek. I reached down and caught his harness. Then I fell in. I sank like a rock. I can’t swim. I remember it was dark and bottle green beneath the surface. The current caught and pulled him from me but I hung on to his harness as tightly as I could. I remember thinking I couldn’t swim but I would do my best to save him. In that instant I made the decision: we would both survive or we would both drown or I would drown and he would survive but there was no way I would survive and let him drown. We both survived—a passing young man dove in and dragged us to safety. But with Tomas the current became too strong and I had to let him go. Or risk us both drowning.
In the acknowledgements in "Damaged Angels," I wrote “It takes a village to raise a child…and write a book”. I thanked several people, ending with: “And finally to all the men and boys who inspired these stories—you gave your all. I hope I gave as much.”
I realize now, in the retelling, I gave as much.
Read the first story from Damaged Angels: http://ow.ly/ejMfL
In the review, McGowan says “…the author's extensive research and meticulous attention to detail pays real dividends.” That made me chuckle. I immediately sent her a note explaining that my “extensive research” was actually a three year relationship with a drug addicted hustler, who I'll call "Tomas." In essence I researched the book by living the stories in it. Certainly I didn’t get involved with him because I thought I would one day write of the experience. I got involved with him because I fell in love with him. And I thought I could save him.
I wrote the stories to purge myself of the experience and maybe to warn others. I don’t know. I just know I had to write it all down. He inspired four of the stories in the collection. Though no one story is about us, about him, specifically; I abstracted actual events and tried to reduce them to their core actions then recast them.
This book made me nervous. In part because it was so different from my first, What Binds Us. I worried about what readers of that book would think of this one. And in part because this was in a very real way, my story. Readers always ask which characters are most like you. In this case the main characters in all thirteen stories are hauntingly similar to me. To read this collection, if you read it closely enough, is to get inside my head. And that scares me: do I want anyone to know me that well?
My partner and I recently saw “Keep the Lights On” and that movie, about a documentary filmmaker and a crack-addicted lawyer, really resonated with me because I’d lived that story. I admit it was a hard film to watch for that reason—I know what it’s like to watch someone you care about disappear at the end of a crack pipe. The scene that rang truest was when Erik’s sister tries to get him to eat but he can’t eat because Paul is missing and then he dissolves into tears. Yep, been there. A similar scene appears in “The Seduction of the Angel Gabriel.”
“Let me make breakfast,” Gabriel tells him, pulling away and wiping his nose with his sleeve.
“Okay.”
“You want some?”
“Yes. Please.”
Gabriel turns around, eggs in hand. “I thought you told me you don’t eat breakfast.”
“I don’t usually.”
Gabriel is at once suspicious. “Did you eat dinner last night?”
“No.”
“You know, as skinny as you are, you don’t need to be missing any meals.”
“I couldn’t eat,” he blurts. “Not knowing whether or not you were hungry somewhere.”
Returning from one such bender, “Tomas” confessed to me that he always thought about me when he heard Anita Baker’s I Love You Just Because. And I understood that because I loved him just because. Everyone I knew looked at him and saw someone wholly unsuitable; I looked at him and saw…something…else. A woman I worked with, a Jehovah’s Witness, asked me once why I loved him and I answered “because he looks at me and I feel like a hero.” That line actually appears in the story “2 Rivers” because it is the only way Seth can explain his relationship with the hustler Jordan to Luke, the story’s narrator.
“Tomas” tried to kill himself one night by taking an overdose of prescription medication. I discovered him in a coma lying in bed beside me when I got up to go to work. That experience became “17 Days.”
When his best friend chastised him for taking a deliberate overdose, pointing out he could have died. His response chilled me: “Larry wouldn’t let me die.”
The relationship thrived—for a while. In my care, he got “clean,” learned how to drive, earned his GED, reunited with his family. His transformation was miraculous. He introduced me to his family, he held my hand in public, he made me dinner.
Then one day he hit me.
I threw him out. The next morning I found him on my doorstep. He cried. He swore he would never hit me again. He begged me to forgive him, to take him back. I did. After all we’d both been drunk and I’d made him mad. Since then I have learned:
1. If he does not care about you enough in a moment of anger to not hit you, he does care about you enough. Period.
2. If he hit you once, he will hit you again. And again. Until you put a stop to it.
The second time he hit me, I told his psychiatrist, who diagnosed Episodic Dyscontrol Syndrome. He was medicated. The third and final time he hit me, I went after him with a kitchen knife. That scared us both. That experience became a single incident of domestic violence in “2 Rivers”:
The storm clouds gathered at the edges of his consciousness. They occasionally skittered across the sky, blocking out the sun, leaving him to stumble in the sudden dark, getting bumped and bruised. Eventually, an eclipse of the sun will blacken his universe. When the moon has completed its turn around the sun, the light will reveal blood and his own hand clenched in a fist, raw and throbbing.
In that brief description I tried to capture that feeling of bewilderment that follows being hit by someone you love. What happened? How could he hurt me?
Unwilling to throw him out, unable to trust him, I, at knifepoint, made him take a double dose of medicine and watched him fall asleep. As luck would have it, we had an appointment with his psychiatrist the following morning. I remember I had to wear my glasses because my eyes were too swollen to get my contact lenses in.
Looking at my bruised, swollen face, his psychiatrist asked, “Did he do that?” He admitted him to their psychiatric ward. “You need to get away from him,” he told me. “You deserve better.”
If you’re in that situation, you shouldn’t need someone else to tell you you deserve better. You should know that, you should feel that in your bones: I do not deserve to be hit. Or yelled at or belittled. You should know that. I don’t know why I didn’t, why it took me so long to walk away. Why it took someone else telling me to walk away.
Once years ago, while crossing a water fall over a small creek, my dog slipped and fell in the creek. I reached down and caught his harness. Then I fell in. I sank like a rock. I can’t swim. I remember it was dark and bottle green beneath the surface. The current caught and pulled him from me but I hung on to his harness as tightly as I could. I remember thinking I couldn’t swim but I would do my best to save him. In that instant I made the decision: we would both survive or we would both drown or I would drown and he would survive but there was no way I would survive and let him drown. We both survived—a passing young man dove in and dragged us to safety. But with Tomas the current became too strong and I had to let him go. Or risk us both drowning.
In the acknowledgements in "Damaged Angels," I wrote “It takes a village to raise a child…and write a book”. I thanked several people, ending with: “And finally to all the men and boys who inspired these stories—you gave your all. I hope I gave as much.”
I realize now, in the retelling, I gave as much.
Read the first story from Damaged Angels: http://ow.ly/ejMfL
On Gay Sons, Mothers & Fiction
My mother and I share a difficult, strained relationship. Lately, she has taken to ending our rare conversations with “I love you.” I dutifully respond, “I love you, too,” when in fact I want to ask: Do you? Do you love me? Do you even know who I am?
One Christmas a few years ago—one of the last we spent together as a family—my mother suddenly blurted, “You know I’ve only ever told one person you were gay.” Her words, like a sniper’s bullet tore a hole in my heart, all feeling draining away. That she said this without apparent malice did not lessen the hurt.
I know from my own experience, the relationship between mothers and their gay sons can be tricky, and painful. I’ve mentioned before that my experiences, emotions, and relationships often form the basis for my fiction. So, I thought I’d look at how my own mother has influenced my work and the way I portray mothers. Not surprisingly, the mothers in my writing all contain an element of my mother’s personality.
There are two different mothers in What Binds Us . Thomas’s mother is loving, and supportive, and means everything to Thomas, while Mrs. Whyte is so distant and formidable even her husband and sons call her Mrs. Whyte. Thomas’ mother becomes by default a surrogate mother to Dondi and Matthew in much the same way my own mother used to mother whoever we hauled home as she mothered us.
“In what alternate universe?” my friend, having met my mother, asked when I mentioned that Thomas’ mother was based on my own mother. “Thomas’ mother was not at all like your mother,” she insisted.
I was confused because Thomas’ mother was loving and supportive, just like my own mother. And then I realized, my friend only knew this newer, other mother, this changeling who’d replaced the mother of my youth.
The mothers in Damaged Angels cover a broader spectrum of motherhood and mothering styles, from the indifferent, absent mother of the hustler Jordan in “2 Rivers”―
It was as if his pregnant mother, feeling the pains of labor while out for an afternoon stroll, had simply squatted behind a bush, pulled up her dress, and birthed him. Then, the delivery made, had stood up, smoothed her hair, straightened her dress, and continued her walk, leaving the infant Jordan where he lay.
―to the domineering, overprotective mother in “Spam,” who, when her adolescent son attempts to escape her influence by descending into madness, simply follows him.
“Spam” was based on an incident involving my older brother and his best friend at the time, a boy named Angel. The incident has always intrigued me. I simply exaggerated it and took it to an outrageous conclusion. What I wanted most with writing “Spam” was to capture the insularity of Billy’s experience. He eats cereal with boiled milk and thinks nothing of it. My mother always boiled milk for our cereal; I was a freshman in college before I learned that cereal was meant to be eaten with cold milk.
The mother in “Chance’s Hand” is actually an amalgamation of main character Chas’ mother and father, merged into a single nagging, disappointed voice at the other end of the phone. Chas, slowly collapsing under the weight of his mother’s demands and expectations, describes his childhood:
Growing up seemed less a preparation for adulthood than a slow chafing away of childish desires (I want to be an astronaut, a painter), a flaying of the ego…a learning to do what was expected, be who you were expected to be.
Most telling of Chas’ relationship with his mother is a scene in which she questions whether or not he intends to leave his fiancé:
“Well, you can’t mean to abandon her. You gave her your grandmother’s ring!”
“No, Mother. You gave her my grandmother’s ring.”
In “The Seduction of the Angel Gabriel,” Gabriel frames his childhood for Malcolm by telling him the story of his mother’s attempted suicide.
Malcolm can see it now: a mother’s desperation; a child’s fear; and everywhere red blood, the color of loss. Although it was a man that he held in his arms, it was a child whose tears he wiped away.
Here, too, like Alfred Hitchcock, my mother makes an appearance in the form of her prom picture, which sits on a shelf in my office and which, in the story, Gabriel finds in Malcolm’s pristine white apartment:
He is holding an old black-and-white photograph of a slender young girl in a strapless gown with voluminous skirts leaning against a stone wall. Both girl and wall are drowned in moonlight.
In rereading these stories I can pinpoint the exact nature of my relationship with my mother at the time the story was written. Perhaps through writing mother-son relationships, I hope to understand my own relationship with my mother. Or maybe I just find mothers interesting characters because they are different, other, unknowable. Child birth seems to change women. In the farcical, “Howdy Billy, Cabbage Ma’am,” Billy writes:
“I once met a woman who had three sons, all of whom she named Pablo―Pablo Jose, Juan Pablo, and finally Pablo Pablo. Something must happen to women when they are carrying children.”
“Howdy Billy, Cabbage Ma’am,” was inspired by a single extraordinary sentence my mother once spoke. In fact that exact sentence appears in the book and baffles protagonist Billy as much as it baffled me:
“The Jews,” my mother announced, “love hard-boiled eggs.”
Later when Billy’s mother’s secret is revealed in a semi dark room, he says:
I confronted both my mothers at once.
Quite often in speaking to my mother I feel as if I am trying to reach two different women―the changeling and the original woman she was. I long, most, for the mother she was.
As I was working on this post, my mother called, unexpectedly, from Maryland, where they’d gone to spend Thanksgiving with my cousin. “Good morning,” she trilled, “I just called to check on you and see how your morning was going?”
What? Huh? Who are you? I wanted to ask. Then I realized it was simply my mother, the changeling.
Buy What Binds Us http://www.amazon.com/What-Binds-Us-e...
Read the first story from Damaged Angels : http://www.amazon.com/Damaged-Angels-...
Buy Damaged Angels : http://www.amazon.com/Damaged-Angels-...
One Christmas a few years ago—one of the last we spent together as a family—my mother suddenly blurted, “You know I’ve only ever told one person you were gay.” Her words, like a sniper’s bullet tore a hole in my heart, all feeling draining away. That she said this without apparent malice did not lessen the hurt.
I know from my own experience, the relationship between mothers and their gay sons can be tricky, and painful. I’ve mentioned before that my experiences, emotions, and relationships often form the basis for my fiction. So, I thought I’d look at how my own mother has influenced my work and the way I portray mothers. Not surprisingly, the mothers in my writing all contain an element of my mother’s personality.
There are two different mothers in What Binds Us . Thomas’s mother is loving, and supportive, and means everything to Thomas, while Mrs. Whyte is so distant and formidable even her husband and sons call her Mrs. Whyte. Thomas’ mother becomes by default a surrogate mother to Dondi and Matthew in much the same way my own mother used to mother whoever we hauled home as she mothered us.
“In what alternate universe?” my friend, having met my mother, asked when I mentioned that Thomas’ mother was based on my own mother. “Thomas’ mother was not at all like your mother,” she insisted.
I was confused because Thomas’ mother was loving and supportive, just like my own mother. And then I realized, my friend only knew this newer, other mother, this changeling who’d replaced the mother of my youth.
The mothers in Damaged Angels cover a broader spectrum of motherhood and mothering styles, from the indifferent, absent mother of the hustler Jordan in “2 Rivers”―
It was as if his pregnant mother, feeling the pains of labor while out for an afternoon stroll, had simply squatted behind a bush, pulled up her dress, and birthed him. Then, the delivery made, had stood up, smoothed her hair, straightened her dress, and continued her walk, leaving the infant Jordan where he lay.
―to the domineering, overprotective mother in “Spam,” who, when her adolescent son attempts to escape her influence by descending into madness, simply follows him.
“Spam” was based on an incident involving my older brother and his best friend at the time, a boy named Angel. The incident has always intrigued me. I simply exaggerated it and took it to an outrageous conclusion. What I wanted most with writing “Spam” was to capture the insularity of Billy’s experience. He eats cereal with boiled milk and thinks nothing of it. My mother always boiled milk for our cereal; I was a freshman in college before I learned that cereal was meant to be eaten with cold milk.
The mother in “Chance’s Hand” is actually an amalgamation of main character Chas’ mother and father, merged into a single nagging, disappointed voice at the other end of the phone. Chas, slowly collapsing under the weight of his mother’s demands and expectations, describes his childhood:
Growing up seemed less a preparation for adulthood than a slow chafing away of childish desires (I want to be an astronaut, a painter), a flaying of the ego…a learning to do what was expected, be who you were expected to be.
Most telling of Chas’ relationship with his mother is a scene in which she questions whether or not he intends to leave his fiancé:
“Well, you can’t mean to abandon her. You gave her your grandmother’s ring!”
“No, Mother. You gave her my grandmother’s ring.”
In “The Seduction of the Angel Gabriel,” Gabriel frames his childhood for Malcolm by telling him the story of his mother’s attempted suicide.
Malcolm can see it now: a mother’s desperation; a child’s fear; and everywhere red blood, the color of loss. Although it was a man that he held in his arms, it was a child whose tears he wiped away.
Here, too, like Alfred Hitchcock, my mother makes an appearance in the form of her prom picture, which sits on a shelf in my office and which, in the story, Gabriel finds in Malcolm’s pristine white apartment:
He is holding an old black-and-white photograph of a slender young girl in a strapless gown with voluminous skirts leaning against a stone wall. Both girl and wall are drowned in moonlight.
In rereading these stories I can pinpoint the exact nature of my relationship with my mother at the time the story was written. Perhaps through writing mother-son relationships, I hope to understand my own relationship with my mother. Or maybe I just find mothers interesting characters because they are different, other, unknowable. Child birth seems to change women. In the farcical, “Howdy Billy, Cabbage Ma’am,” Billy writes:
“I once met a woman who had three sons, all of whom she named Pablo―Pablo Jose, Juan Pablo, and finally Pablo Pablo. Something must happen to women when they are carrying children.”
“Howdy Billy, Cabbage Ma’am,” was inspired by a single extraordinary sentence my mother once spoke. In fact that exact sentence appears in the book and baffles protagonist Billy as much as it baffled me:
“The Jews,” my mother announced, “love hard-boiled eggs.”
Later when Billy’s mother’s secret is revealed in a semi dark room, he says:
I confronted both my mothers at once.
Quite often in speaking to my mother I feel as if I am trying to reach two different women―the changeling and the original woman she was. I long, most, for the mother she was.
As I was working on this post, my mother called, unexpectedly, from Maryland, where they’d gone to spend Thanksgiving with my cousin. “Good morning,” she trilled, “I just called to check on you and see how your morning was going?”
What? Huh? Who are you? I wanted to ask. Then I realized it was simply my mother, the changeling.
Buy What Binds Us http://www.amazon.com/What-Binds-Us-e...
Read the first story from Damaged Angels : http://www.amazon.com/Damaged-Angels-...
Buy Damaged Angels : http://www.amazon.com/Damaged-Angels-...
Unbroken
So, if you read this blog regularly, or you follow me on Facebook or Twitter, or even if you just ran into me randomly on the street, you know I’ve spent the last ten months writing my third book. And if you do any of those things, you know it was called “His Name Was Jose.” (see my earlier blog post for the reason why: http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...).
About halfway through writing the book, I changed the title because as I wrote the story it became clear to me the story was larger than Jose. In fact, it had three other titles before I landed on the final one. The story as it unfolded, as my characters told it to me, became more than just a romance between two young gay men. It became a tale of survival, of what it takes to hold on to love and each other in an often hostile, unwelcoming world. It examines the damage we, as a society, as parents, inflict when we pin our expectations and preconceived notions of what a boy (or girl) should be/do, on our youth. It looks at how that can break us, how we can be made to feel we are broken and, most importantly, how we have the power to unbreak ourselves. Thus, the new title is “Unbroken.”
"Unbroken," which spans 40 years, opens in 1964, when protagonist, five year old Lincoln de Chabert, a gentle effeminate boy, comes home from kindergarten and announces he will marry his best friend, Orlando, when he grows up. He is told he can’t marry another boy; the news baffles him: “Why not?” he asks “You said I could do anything. You said I could grow up to be President.”
His parents spring into action determined to unbend him― his father takes him to baseball games and the movie, “Patton;” it’s a battle of wills as Lincoln is determined to be himself at all costs.
When at twelve Lincoln falls in love with the new kid, Jose, he is confused:
“I had believed their lies, had ignored my own truth. I would change they told me, just wait and see. I would want to marry a girl, have children, and a dog, and a split-level house in the suburbs just like on The Brady Bunch because that’s what all boys wanted when they grew up and left childish things behind. Time, they said, would fix me, and I’d feel as other boys felt…Time had passed and I was still…broken.”
As I got ready to send the manuscript to my publisher, I realized I needed to describe the book’s genre. I ended up describing it as, “Part romance, part coming-of-age novel, part elegy.” But I think it is nothing so much as a love letter from my 12 year old self to the 12 year old boy I fell in love with in seventh grade. A boy, I suspect, who was barely aware of my existence let alone the fact that I was in love with him. A boy who smiled at me in innocence, and changed my life. It is a love letter lost for years and-finally delivered, by the post office, to that boy, 40 years late.
About halfway through writing the book, I changed the title because as I wrote the story it became clear to me the story was larger than Jose. In fact, it had three other titles before I landed on the final one. The story as it unfolded, as my characters told it to me, became more than just a romance between two young gay men. It became a tale of survival, of what it takes to hold on to love and each other in an often hostile, unwelcoming world. It examines the damage we, as a society, as parents, inflict when we pin our expectations and preconceived notions of what a boy (or girl) should be/do, on our youth. It looks at how that can break us, how we can be made to feel we are broken and, most importantly, how we have the power to unbreak ourselves. Thus, the new title is “Unbroken.”
"Unbroken," which spans 40 years, opens in 1964, when protagonist, five year old Lincoln de Chabert, a gentle effeminate boy, comes home from kindergarten and announces he will marry his best friend, Orlando, when he grows up. He is told he can’t marry another boy; the news baffles him: “Why not?” he asks “You said I could do anything. You said I could grow up to be President.”
His parents spring into action determined to unbend him― his father takes him to baseball games and the movie, “Patton;” it’s a battle of wills as Lincoln is determined to be himself at all costs.
When at twelve Lincoln falls in love with the new kid, Jose, he is confused:
“I had believed their lies, had ignored my own truth. I would change they told me, just wait and see. I would want to marry a girl, have children, and a dog, and a split-level house in the suburbs just like on The Brady Bunch because that’s what all boys wanted when they grew up and left childish things behind. Time, they said, would fix me, and I’d feel as other boys felt…Time had passed and I was still…broken.”
As I got ready to send the manuscript to my publisher, I realized I needed to describe the book’s genre. I ended up describing it as, “Part romance, part coming-of-age novel, part elegy.” But I think it is nothing so much as a love letter from my 12 year old self to the 12 year old boy I fell in love with in seventh grade. A boy, I suspect, who was barely aware of my existence let alone the fact that I was in love with him. A boy who smiled at me in innocence, and changed my life. It is a love letter lost for years and-finally delivered, by the post office, to that boy, 40 years late.
Writing About Sex
I didn’t sleep around much when I was young and single and this puzzled my friends. We were young and gay, after all, during a time when the prevailing wisdom suggested that once one had slept with all the available men on the East Coast, one simply moved to the West coast and started over.
For me desire has always come about as a result of something else; desire, for me, was an outgrowth of emotional attachment or personal attraction. Some friends pitied me for I clearly wasn’t good looking enough to join the party. Others, kinder perhaps, saw my refusal to join the fun as a confirmation of the fact that I did not understand the point of being gay. It was an unmooring from society, a freeing from responsibility, a denial of obligation, of fidelity to anyone or anything beyond the moment, beyond desire; it was a celebration of the absence of the need to build a lasting relationship, of the absence of the desire to commit.
I dared not tell them that I believed love and sex required us to be accountable—to ourselves, to those we loved and those who loved us. I dared not tell them that I had always dreamed of settling down with one person, that I had always dreamed of getting married, that when, at age twelve, I realized I was gay, that dream did not die.
Instead, I waited and I dreamed. And I read. A lot. Mostly the classics: The Brontes, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dickens. When I got to college, I discovered the gay writers: Edmund White, Felice Picano, Gore Vidal.
I still read a lot of gay fiction. One thing that burns me about a lot of gay contemporary fiction is the amount of sex they include. I tend to get bored with prolonged sex scenes; unless a sex scene is short, I skip over it. I recently finished reading a book which left me disappointed because while it had a promising premise it became quickly apparent that the “plot” was merely a device to weave a series of sex acts into a book.
When I read a book whose characters have lots of non-stop sex, I’m left wondering do these people ever sleep? go to work? do laundry? Most galling is descriptions of anonymous sex and numerous hook ups with virtual strangers. More than forty years into the LGBT battle for equality, more than twenty-five years into the AIDS epidemic, I’m left to wonder: have we come no further than this? Do people still believe being gay is only about sex?
This got me thinking about how I approach sex in my writing. I tend to write about romantic love which presents a challenge. I mean how do you write about two people in love and without writing about their sex life? When I write about sex, I try hard not to trivialize it. I try hard not to reduce it to some simple biological imperative requiring no more thought―and carrying no more meaning― than blowing one’s nose or scratching one’s ass.
In my first book, What Binds Us, I struggled with the problem of sex because it was important as it allowed the characters to connect with each other on a physical level which was a connection they craved.
In the book, it takes a long time for Thomas-Edward and Matthew to connect which irritated some readers and a few reviewers but I got an email from one reader who described herself as “a straight, white woman;” she wrote, in part, “By reading your story, I learned that real love does not have to be physical to be real…Reading this earlier could have changed everything for me…”
The first time Thomas sees Matthew naked he is stunned by how beautiful he is. He can’t help remembering how, longing for Matthew who slept in an adjoining room, he had been compelled to masturbate. He writes:
He did not possess the savage musculature of Michelangelo’s David, was more the David of Donatello’s imagination: slim, narrow-hipped, almost girlish. He was a beautiful white cat, lean and graceful. He had hair on his legs, long silky strands like climbing vines that only accentuated his nakedness. I thought of all those nights at Aurora when he’d lain on the other side of a door and might as well have been on the other side of the world. I thought of all those orgasms puddled on my stomach, damning as spilled milk, induced by just this image.
The story or Thomas-Edward and Matthew is mostly about the surprise they feel in discovering each other. When they finally come together, each is sure there is no one in the universe as magical and wondrous as the other. I imagined their sex would be romantic, almost poetic. I thought detailing the mechanics of their sex (i.e. who did what to whom) would interrupt the magic, so I wrote:
Flesh touched flesh. Limbs entwined: black, white, black; lips and tongue and teeth tasted flesh too long hungered for. We did everything. Nothing about either of us was forbidden the other. “No” was not in the vocabulary of our sex. I looked at his face through the V of my legs. I looked at his face above me and below me. I found I liked saying his name, said it over and over again. He said nothing, only smiled in the light and held me close.
Always before, sex had been a negating experience. With ejaculation came an end to desire, to intimacy. With Matthew, sex was an affirmation, a shouted yes. Afterwards, we stood on the threshold of something. Always before, the threshold had been behind me. And I’d stood alone.
Avoiding the description of sex in Damaged Angels, my collection of short stories, was considerably more difficult as several of the stories were about young men who worked in the sex industry. One story, “A Working Boy,” is told from the point of view of Pitch, a rent boy who takes us on a journey through a regular “work day.” He is on the cusp of committing to his quasi boyfriend, an older man he refers to as Loverman. While working one day he has an epiphany:
“I start thinking about quitting again. I guess I first started thinking about quitting after I met Loverman. Once, in bed with him, it occurred to me that we weren’t having sex, which is what I have all the time. It was something else. I mean, the moves were the same, but there was all this feeling. I remember thinking that maybe what we were doing was making love…
He goes on to explain:
When I first met him, I sold him my body, which didn’t surprise him. What I did that night was make him a present of my heart. Which surprised us both.”
In “Precious Cargo,” one of my favorite stories in the collection, the protagonist, yearning for his absent lover masturbates in the shower. I wanted to capture not so much the act of self-pleasure but the emotional vaunt of his need, the emptiness he feels in his lover’s absence:
“…I feel it pucker against my intruding finger. Open. Sucking. Greedy. Full of need. Quicksilver seed scatters. Sown on white tile. Fruitless. Sliding down the drain.”
Later when he and his lover come together briefly:
“He steps forward. Holds my head between his thighs. A pulse beats against my temple. The masculine scent of him fills my nostrils. My open mouth. Welcoming. The triumvirate of his manhood.”
For me, Damaged Angels was in many ways experimental—in use of language, subject matter and sexual portrayal. Coming between What Binds Us and the forthcoming Unbroken, both romances, with Damaged Angels, I wanted to step away and stretch myself in a different direction as a writer. I wanted to tell a grittier story to explore “dirtier” sex.
In Unbroken the sex is more complex because I needed to render a few different kinds of sex—first time sex, sex-for-its-own-sake, make up sex, sex within the context of a deep and abiding love and rougher sex within the context of that same love. The sex scenes were harder here because they needed to be described in detail but also needed to describe more than the mechanical aspect of sex, each act needed to reveal something about the characters’ emotions and state of mind. As a result, much of the sex in Unbroken left me breathless. I can only hope it does it same for my readers.
While all the stories I’ve written so far are about love and desire, not all explore the sex act. And that I think is as it should be. For me it’s always about the love, the characters and the nature and context of desire.
www.larrybenjamin.com
For me desire has always come about as a result of something else; desire, for me, was an outgrowth of emotional attachment or personal attraction. Some friends pitied me for I clearly wasn’t good looking enough to join the party. Others, kinder perhaps, saw my refusal to join the fun as a confirmation of the fact that I did not understand the point of being gay. It was an unmooring from society, a freeing from responsibility, a denial of obligation, of fidelity to anyone or anything beyond the moment, beyond desire; it was a celebration of the absence of the need to build a lasting relationship, of the absence of the desire to commit.
I dared not tell them that I believed love and sex required us to be accountable—to ourselves, to those we loved and those who loved us. I dared not tell them that I had always dreamed of settling down with one person, that I had always dreamed of getting married, that when, at age twelve, I realized I was gay, that dream did not die.
Instead, I waited and I dreamed. And I read. A lot. Mostly the classics: The Brontes, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dickens. When I got to college, I discovered the gay writers: Edmund White, Felice Picano, Gore Vidal.
I still read a lot of gay fiction. One thing that burns me about a lot of gay contemporary fiction is the amount of sex they include. I tend to get bored with prolonged sex scenes; unless a sex scene is short, I skip over it. I recently finished reading a book which left me disappointed because while it had a promising premise it became quickly apparent that the “plot” was merely a device to weave a series of sex acts into a book.
When I read a book whose characters have lots of non-stop sex, I’m left wondering do these people ever sleep? go to work? do laundry? Most galling is descriptions of anonymous sex and numerous hook ups with virtual strangers. More than forty years into the LGBT battle for equality, more than twenty-five years into the AIDS epidemic, I’m left to wonder: have we come no further than this? Do people still believe being gay is only about sex?
This got me thinking about how I approach sex in my writing. I tend to write about romantic love which presents a challenge. I mean how do you write about two people in love and without writing about their sex life? When I write about sex, I try hard not to trivialize it. I try hard not to reduce it to some simple biological imperative requiring no more thought―and carrying no more meaning― than blowing one’s nose or scratching one’s ass.
In my first book, What Binds Us, I struggled with the problem of sex because it was important as it allowed the characters to connect with each other on a physical level which was a connection they craved.
In the book, it takes a long time for Thomas-Edward and Matthew to connect which irritated some readers and a few reviewers but I got an email from one reader who described herself as “a straight, white woman;” she wrote, in part, “By reading your story, I learned that real love does not have to be physical to be real…Reading this earlier could have changed everything for me…”
The first time Thomas sees Matthew naked he is stunned by how beautiful he is. He can’t help remembering how, longing for Matthew who slept in an adjoining room, he had been compelled to masturbate. He writes:
He did not possess the savage musculature of Michelangelo’s David, was more the David of Donatello’s imagination: slim, narrow-hipped, almost girlish. He was a beautiful white cat, lean and graceful. He had hair on his legs, long silky strands like climbing vines that only accentuated his nakedness. I thought of all those nights at Aurora when he’d lain on the other side of a door and might as well have been on the other side of the world. I thought of all those orgasms puddled on my stomach, damning as spilled milk, induced by just this image.
The story or Thomas-Edward and Matthew is mostly about the surprise they feel in discovering each other. When they finally come together, each is sure there is no one in the universe as magical and wondrous as the other. I imagined their sex would be romantic, almost poetic. I thought detailing the mechanics of their sex (i.e. who did what to whom) would interrupt the magic, so I wrote:
Flesh touched flesh. Limbs entwined: black, white, black; lips and tongue and teeth tasted flesh too long hungered for. We did everything. Nothing about either of us was forbidden the other. “No” was not in the vocabulary of our sex. I looked at his face through the V of my legs. I looked at his face above me and below me. I found I liked saying his name, said it over and over again. He said nothing, only smiled in the light and held me close.
Always before, sex had been a negating experience. With ejaculation came an end to desire, to intimacy. With Matthew, sex was an affirmation, a shouted yes. Afterwards, we stood on the threshold of something. Always before, the threshold had been behind me. And I’d stood alone.
Avoiding the description of sex in Damaged Angels, my collection of short stories, was considerably more difficult as several of the stories were about young men who worked in the sex industry. One story, “A Working Boy,” is told from the point of view of Pitch, a rent boy who takes us on a journey through a regular “work day.” He is on the cusp of committing to his quasi boyfriend, an older man he refers to as Loverman. While working one day he has an epiphany:
“I start thinking about quitting again. I guess I first started thinking about quitting after I met Loverman. Once, in bed with him, it occurred to me that we weren’t having sex, which is what I have all the time. It was something else. I mean, the moves were the same, but there was all this feeling. I remember thinking that maybe what we were doing was making love…
He goes on to explain:
When I first met him, I sold him my body, which didn’t surprise him. What I did that night was make him a present of my heart. Which surprised us both.”
In “Precious Cargo,” one of my favorite stories in the collection, the protagonist, yearning for his absent lover masturbates in the shower. I wanted to capture not so much the act of self-pleasure but the emotional vaunt of his need, the emptiness he feels in his lover’s absence:
“…I feel it pucker against my intruding finger. Open. Sucking. Greedy. Full of need. Quicksilver seed scatters. Sown on white tile. Fruitless. Sliding down the drain.”
Later when he and his lover come together briefly:
“He steps forward. Holds my head between his thighs. A pulse beats against my temple. The masculine scent of him fills my nostrils. My open mouth. Welcoming. The triumvirate of his manhood.”
For me, Damaged Angels was in many ways experimental—in use of language, subject matter and sexual portrayal. Coming between What Binds Us and the forthcoming Unbroken, both romances, with Damaged Angels, I wanted to step away and stretch myself in a different direction as a writer. I wanted to tell a grittier story to explore “dirtier” sex.
In Unbroken the sex is more complex because I needed to render a few different kinds of sex—first time sex, sex-for-its-own-sake, make up sex, sex within the context of a deep and abiding love and rougher sex within the context of that same love. The sex scenes were harder here because they needed to be described in detail but also needed to describe more than the mechanical aspect of sex, each act needed to reveal something about the characters’ emotions and state of mind. As a result, much of the sex in Unbroken left me breathless. I can only hope it does it same for my readers.
While all the stories I’ve written so far are about love and desire, not all explore the sex act. And that I think is as it should be. For me it’s always about the love, the characters and the nature and context of desire.
www.larrybenjamin.com
Larry Benjamin's blog - This Writer's Life
The writer's life is as individual and strange as each writer. I'll document my journey as a writer here.
...more
- Larry Benjamin's profile
- 126 followers
