Friday, June 01, 2007
The Aesthetics and Economics of Sexuality
I'm the kind of writer who likes to work on two books at once, so I've been playing around with the beginnings of my fourth book, while finishing my third. One of the decisions I've been recently struggling with is whether to make the protagonist of the book gay.
My first book, a collection of stories, had roughly half gay main characters, half straight, a ratio that apparently made the entire book gay because it was larger than the ratio of gay to straight people in the population as a whole. My second book, a novel, had two protagonists, one gay male and one straight female. Again, the book was considered "gay" and not "straight" or "female" for similar reasons.
I'm not complaining, though it is a bit silly to think of a book as having a sexuality or a religion or an ethnicity. No one says, "Oh, Chekhov, that's just for Russians." I love to read Anne Tyler, Mary Gordon, Mary Gaitskill, Lorrie Moore, and Jean Stafford. Does that mean I love "women's writing"? I thought the point of literature was to expand the range of what we know, not to confirm what we already think we know.
But I've been wrong. If a book is identified as "gay" or "Jewish" or "black" or "female," chances are readers who pick it up will fit into one of those categories. Therefore, if I make the protagonist of my new novel gay, I need to be aware that this is the audience I'm most likely going to be writing for. And given the number of straight people out there and the number of gay people out there, this may not be the wisest decision in terms of marketing.
It also may not be the wisest decision for me technically as a writer. I've done my fair share of gay protagonists, and straight female ones too. Shouldn't I (gasp) attempt the unthinkable, and branch out a bit by trying to write a straight man?
Then again, no one says to Philip Roth, shouldn't you try to branch out a bit and try to write about the goyim? What is it that people find so "limiting" about writing about gay people, but for any other identity group you're "finding the universal through the lens of the particular"?
Anyway, thinking about the economics of book publishing in this climate is like counting grains of rice. What's the point?
I haven't made up my mind about Davey, the main character of my new novel, who might be straight or might be gay or something in between. (In any case, I see him as a guy who doesn't get it on very often, with either sex.) The funny thing is, I thought I was going to end this blog with a ringing endorsement for exploring new themes in gay literature, which is only in its infanthood, and has plenty of new territory left to explore. Yet as I get to this point, I keep wondering, "What would happen if...?" Who knows? Maybe I'd just better write the damned thing both ways and figure out which works best.
posted by aaron hamburger at 8:56 AM
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