Dispatch from the front: on tour across America, the author reflects on our truths and our fiction - gay literature in 1997 - Brief Article

How is this queer year unlike any other? Is the world 365 days safer for gay people? Or is it safer from us, my brothers who are sisters and sisters who are brothers?

I write you from the road. I'm out here reading from and overexplaining my new novel, Plays Well With Others. As usual in life and prose, looks like I've overpacked. Imitating the hero of some noir pulp paperback, I lurk in late-night hotels so, come morning, I can tell my tales to strangers. They stay put. Me? I move on.

Since my novel chronicles the pansexual party of Manhattan from 1980 to 1995, one interrupted by AIDS, I've insisted on visiting pansexual bookstores. Along with the main-event straight places, I find the gay shops. They are often the last sign of life in some slow-dying downtown. They yield such a humid sense of fugitive sanity and sanctuary.

Since my first novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, was a best-seller, I have a chance of reaching a wide audience. I want to bring heterosexual readers into these center-city gay stores. I picture readers wandering in, in tentative couples, holding hands. I want them to feel reassured, even in a shop whose reigning posters show Walt Whitman (his unkempt beard perfect as autumn) beside Jeff Stryker (all body oil, eyeliner, and stiffening mousse).

This year, this trip, I'll finally learn what, in our culture, is bridgeable. And what's just not translatable between the gay community and a mass culture that so benefits from our ornate, energized excesses.

In 1997 our literature has come of age. Once judged only beautiful and subversive, it now extends large lessons to all sorts of readers. Minority fiction usually begins as coded lingo known only to the initiated. To communicate with those beyond the ghetto is seen as mutinous. But after years of in-jokes, of bashing most straight people, we've sobered, noticing a bigger world parenthesizing the Castro and the West Village.

A cataclysm as improbable and cruel as HIV has deepened our brittle, buoyant, cavalier tone. Half against our will, a Whitmanesque generosity has overtaken gay fiction. If our literature started as parrot-bright as Carmen Miranda, it soon fell into a sparrow-brown grief. Only now is it regaining a spectrum less militantly artificial, far more lifelike, being oh-so-hard-earned.

Bernard Cooper, Christopher Bram, David Sedaris, Blanche Boyd, and our collective mentor, Edmund White -- they've all added to the luster of our minority finding its maturity, its majority. These writers each prove that a gay novelist's basic equipment must include a profound, detached intelligence and a raucous, evolved sense of humor. We can't survive without both. Comedy is homeopatic for homos!

Fourteen cities into touring, I'm sure my findings won't surprise you. Gay people come to hear me read in straight stores. But the number of straight readers willing to risk those inner-city queer shops, that's far smaller. Will our culture ever be bi?

And yet, as I do shuttle diplomacy with the aptly titled Plays Well With Others, I soon feel like the apostle Paul visiting the actual Corinthians. In all the bookstores there is such a hunger, such a sense of catacomb intimacy, such a yearning for fiction that -- across the barricades of sexual politics -- will speak the truth in love. We do need tellers and askers in this land named "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." Maybe we hear each other better when there's danger to all sides?

We learn to stay agile. We love each other more and learn to travel light. And though we still advance in centimeters, we now dream the dreams not of ghettos but of continents, of new worlds.

Gurganus is the author of Oldest Living Confederate Widow, Tells All, White People, and Plays Well With Others.

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