In the effort to be less ‘gay’ and less ‘reclusive,’ I’m ‘rebranding’ with a new blog written by ‘Matthew Gallaway’, which not coincidentally is the name I’ve used for my novel The Metropolis Case, which will most likely publish at some point in 2k10. I hope you’ll join me there! Please let me know if you love/hate the new design, or if you have any technical difficulties with feeds/subscriptions/linkage. Hope to see u soon — miss u! xoxo TGR

I’m going away for a few days/weeks/months. Hope you have a beautiful spring (via the mythical Helibores)! xoxo TGR

The Chaos Detective: City of Dreams (Part 1)

In this episode, CHAOS — the quasi-governmental entity “Computer Hardware and Operating Systems” (or so he has been told) — has given Detective Lasalle his first assignment, which is to go to Vienna and follow a man in a fur hat. Lasalle has taken this job without knowing exactly who he’s working for and exactly what he’s trying to find; these questions and others will be explored and maybe answered in subsequent episodes.

We hope you enjoyed it. Obv we’re just taking baby steps here, so bear with us! xoxo TGR

PS. Umm, we’re already aware of KAOS…

The other day we wrote about how depressingly straight the New York Times 2008 Notable Books list appeared to us. Guess what! Others agreed, and obv better informed than us, went one step further to recommend several gay-oriented titles deserving recognition:

Among the missing are National Book Award winner Mark Doty’s poetry Fire to Fire, National Book Critics Circle Award winner Daniel Mendelsohn’s essay collection How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken, NBCC winner Edmund White’s Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel, Benjamin Taylor’s novel The Book of Getting Even, David Ebershoff’s The 19th Wife, and Scott Heim’s We Disappear… UPDATE: Charlene reminds me I forgot Andrew Sean Greer’s novel The Story of a Marriage. Overnight I remembered John Rechy’s memoir, About My Life and the Kept Woman.

(From Band of Thebes, via Are You Outside The Lines)

We’ll definitely be checking out some of these titles in the near future and will keep you posted! We encourage you to do the same and let us know what you think.

Charles Blow/Gay Marriage and a Moral Minority

The Short Version: The gays are not about to win over black women — who statistics show are stupid, bitter, homophobic cows — by appealing to equality. Better to appeal to reproductive health!

In his words: “More specifically, blacks overwhelmingly say that homosexuality isn’t morally acceptable…So pitch it as a health issue.”

The Score: F (Fuck off!). In this piece, Blow displays a remarkable insensitivity w/r/t the premise of civil rights generally and the gay version specifically. Let’s begin with his premise that gays need “to pitch” the idea of marriage to anyone, and especially the few hundred intolerant, hypocritical black church ladies upon whom Blow obnoxiously ruminates. (And here we cannot resist offering another lol-quote: “Women who can’t find a man to marry might not be thrilled about the idea of men marrying each other.” Ha ha, that sounds like a SATC episode, Charles!). While it’s undoubtedly true in the most mercenary sense that gays do in fact need to sell the concept of marriage (or as we prefer, civil unions for all) to various constituencies, in a representative democracy, we are not obligated to appeal to those most hostile to our cause (and we certainly don’t need to hear it blithely framed in these terms from some tool making questionable extrapolations from a CNN poll). What Blow — who from his pic appears to be an African-American dude and from his bio appears to be straight (or at least a father of three children) — might like to consider is how he would have felt if in say, 1958, we had suggested that black leaders reframe the fight for desegregation in more palatable terms to a group of KKK members, whom surveys revealed to be omg rather racist. In short, just as the promulgation of civil-rights laws were not dependent on changing the views of asshole racists, enlightened observers will understand that the same should hold true for asshole homophobes; it’s not our job to teach or sell the idea of equality to those who are obviously incapable of grasping it and for Blow to suggest otherwise is insulting.

Last November, we published an essay on the suffocation of the gay voice in American literature, and not much has happened in the past year to change our opinion of this bleak, dreary landscape. The New York Times Book Review recently published its annual selection of notable books for 2008, and although we’re not familiar with all of them, as so often happens when confronting such lists, we were struck by an apparent lack of anything on the fiction half of the list — characters, themes, authors — that could be considered even remotely gay. Similar observations hold true for Janet Maslin and Michiko Kakutani‘s respective top-ten lists.

[A few preliminary notes/disclaimers: On the non-fiction side, there is a biography of Rudolph Nureyev, whose relatively unapologetic and well-documented appetite for men and death from AIDS makes the issue impossible to ignore completely (this is somewhat akin to real gays we sometimes see on reality teevee, which are so different than the usual stereotypes offered up by the networks, see e.g., every show ever made except maybe Six Feet Under!); in terms of the fiction list -- our primary concern here -- it's possible that some of these books do in fact deal with gay subtexts and themes (and if so, we'd like to hear about it!), but we could not glean anything along these lines from the capsules included.]

Which — i.e., this lack of “gay” — is kind of telling, given the range of other topics and themes we encounter while glancing through the list, e.g., we find authors confronting racism and ethnic stereotypes and politics and war and crime and terrorism (9/11!) and suburban/domestic ennui and the usual host of marriage/love problems. While all of these are admittedly compelling (or can be, in the right hands), we cannot help but ask: “If we were an alien coming to earth and knew nothing about humans except for these books, would we have any clue about the existence of homosexuality?” In this case, sadly enough, the answer is no, we wouldn’t.

This begs the question of wtf why, which in turn suggests three possible answers: 1) gay themes don’t really lend themselves to literature, 2) gay themes are less important than all of the above, and so we shouldn’t be any more disappointed not to find them covered here than we would if say, we were passionate about golf and found no novels on the topic in any given year; or 3) whether important or not, there were no outstanding works of fiction published in 2008 dealing with questions of gay identity.

As to whether gay themes are appropriate to literature, to say they are not would seem quite plausible if you were relying on the post-war American literary canon, because hey, there’s nothing gay about it, so it couldn’t be that important, right? This of course is casuistry; beyond obvious reference to literary masters both near (Michael Cunningham, Andrew Holleran) and far (Marcel Proust), there is a case to be made that homosexuality is the most universally reviled trait in the history of humanity — cutting across class, ethnicity, organized religion, gender and nationality — and thus the perfect window through which to examine well, pretty much anything, or at least anything related to a fundamental understanding of who we (collectively) are, which is certainly one plausible purpose (or at least effect) of fiction. (And we would go so far as to say that writers who ignore this do so at their peril, and that their works will be dismissed and forgotten as epitomizing the unenlightened tendencies of the dark ages in which we now but perhaps will not always live.)

Moving on to the importance of question number two, beyond the obvious hey-we’re-gay bias we bring to the table, we cannot help but look at the national socio-political-economic landscape of the past twenty years or and wonder if the issue of homosexuality — as much as race, class or gender — has not defined (albeit in many cases, in a largely unconscious manner) the national “dialogue” in ways that have had disasterous effects on all of us. We think back to how Reagan and Bush actively ignored the holocaust of gay men that took place on their watches, and then we observe the manic behavior of our country under the Clinton and Bush II administrations — the economic frenzy, the ascendancy of Moral Politics, the embrace of the sickeningly masculine culture of SUVs and rigidly stereotypical gender roles in Hollywood movies, etc. etc. — and we wonder if, at least in part, this could not be attributed to the failure of our country (outside of a few marginalized communities, obv) to truly acknowledge what happened twenty years ago, much less grieve or examine it in a meaningful way. Maybe it’s just us, but when we consider New York City, we are often left with the sense that there’s still a pervasive grief that hovers over a city where something like 100,000 people (mostly gay men) died, many at a brutally young age; it’s the skeleton in our closet that nobody really wants to talk about because it’s painful and depressing, but our guess is that until we address this in a broad, public forum, we will continue to be srsly fucked up in ways that both are and aren’t obvious.

As gay forces mobilize in the fight for marriage equality (or as we like to refer to it, civil unions for all), there seem to be practical implications to the sadly straight state of American literature in 2008, namely in the startling lack of stories (by which we mean the literary fictive kind) upon which this movement can turn for solace and inspiration; where, for example, is our James Baldwin? Sure, there are big gay filmmakers on the cultural landscape, but isn’t there something a little unsettling about throwing money at an industry where out gays cannot be considered for leading roles? Where we have to rely on Sean Penn — who omg was willing to “play gay” — for distribution? Whatever the case with movies, the desperate fervor with which these crumbs are gulped down by the gays suggests a strong demand that is largely unmet in the literary context.

Moreover, what books offer that movies do not is the ability to present characters as multifaceted, complex distillations (or reflections) of the kind of people we meet in the real world, i.e., those who do not conform to stereotype and generalization. Relevantly, this includes depictions of gay sex! Because high-minded notions of equality to the side, it’s also important for some significant percentage of the population — i.e., certainly more than could be said to exist now — to understand that cocksucking and assfucking (and whatever gay ladies do) are — or can be — equally valid means of sexual expression, as much as anything our straight peers might want to entertain among themselves, even if it leads to procreation. Bottom line: to be successful politically, we gays need to fight the “ew” factor, and having straights pretend on film is more of a disorienting spectacle than an honest depiction of this fairly serious aspect of our humanity (i.e., something that both separates us and brings us together, to be kind of “Hallmarky” about it!).

Except all of that said — and most depressing of all for us to consider — we have no obvious candidates for inclusion on the sad NYT “notably straight” list. It’s not like we’re outraged that ______, the new novel by _______, in which issues of gay identity are eloquently explored in the context of ______, was left off the list. (But if we’re missing something here — and it’s possible, because we’re not professional critics — please let us know!) The point it, it seems like a ridiculous state of affairs that there are not at least a handful to pick from every year, and we find the absence of gays no less startling that we would if the same were true of women or ethnic minorities. Until we see these books written and accepted (i.e., both critically acclaimed and commercially successful), and in a consistent, regular manner, there will continue to be a somewhat grotesque quality to how we’re viewed by those on whose good will (at least in part) we depend for the political reform we seek.

So today we were reading about the new Thomas Pynchon novel, which is going to be released next year.

Like so many adolescent boys we’ve known, we went through a serious Pynchon phase.

His maddeningly complex yet (somehow) crystalline prose managed to resonate with the best of 1960s counterculture while nevertheless steering completely clear of the empty ideals of the hippies (or better yet, mocking them!).

He wrote about sex and drugs and punkish rock (although music was never a strength, because his prose was too frigid and aloof to describe anything with true emotion, as good music-writing must), and his obvious mastery of high-minded science (omg physics!) seemed to predict our cultural obsession with the titans of Silicon Valley. He made paranoia and conspiracy — particularly as these forces manifest in corporate America — seem fun! Also: his characters had “hilarious” names (our favorite was always Helga Blamm). We drifted through many classes in college making up Pynchonesque character names for all the Pynchonesque novels we planned to write at some point.

Yet as much as we once loved him, we’re almost never inclined to revisit the works we read (V, Gravity’s Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland). Perhaps our memory is cloudy, but we’re struck by a certain disdain Pynchon seems to hold for his characters, and by extension, his readers. His unrelenting emotional distance seems emblematic of a society we’ve come to think of as srsly fucked up; true, he’s deconstructing this same society, but not in (the psychological) ways that ultimately interest us.

There’s also the fact that nothing/nobody he ever described resonated with anything we would describe as gay in any good sense of the word. In a way, we think this explains in part his popularity among boys of all ages in our obsessively homophobic culture: he’s a relentlessly straight literary writer who it’s quite “safe” to admit to liking — much like (huge asshole) David Mamet in the theatrical context — without calling into question your own sexual orientation. Which is very important for guys who want to express some creativity or emotion without seeming gay!

In short, Thomas Pynchon might be a recluse.

But he’ll never be a gay recluse, which places him — like so many others from his generation — firmly inside the fortress walls we are still dreaming to tear down.

So guess what? We now have a Twitter and a Tumblr and a Facebook!

Sometimes we feel like the oldest person in the blogosphere.

If we were a bird, we’d probably just fly away.

Hey, so The Manhattan Times wrote a charming (if we say so) piece on The Metropolis Case. If you’ve never read the uptown weekly, you’re missing out (and really, we’re not just saying that!). In this week’s issue alone, there are excellent articles about Andy Linares of Bug Off (at St. Nicholas and 163rd), who coincidentally we were just talking to last night (sadly buying glue traps to catch a mouse), and another about Tony Serio, yet another George Washington Bridge obsessive/artist. You can pick up a free copy pretty much anywhere uptown — it’s kind of like reading the Internet, except on paper! — or catch up with a PDF version by clicking here. Below is the cover of this week’s issue, which features your favorite gay recluse on Page 6 (but not that Page 6, obv).

A shot of the article can be found below. It was pretty much perfect in our opinion, except for the heading under the photo where they wtf refer to the book as “The Metropolitan Case.” (Maybe that’ll be the sequel, ha ha.) Oh well, whatevs, it kind of adds to the charm. In the version below, we used Photoshop to somewhat clumsily paste in the correction, but if you’re having trouble reading it, you can click on it for larger version or check out the PDF here: post-war-literature-paris-washington-heights-and-a-cat.

Thanks for press, Manhattan Times! (And best of luck in this economy — god knows, we all need it!)

So OMG did everyone hear that Keith Olbermann had a “special comment” last night (or was it two nights ago, whenevs) about Prop 8 and gay marriage? Chances are, if you spent five seconds on the internet today, you did!

We were told not only to watch it thousands of times, but to send it along to all of our closest friends and relatives! If KO can get it, so can they!

And in truth, it’s not a bad clip. Even though KO makes a wtf point at the beginning when he notes that his family and personal life are not tainted by the presence of any gays, he does make an earnest and at times moving if melodramatic and overwrought appeal to the idea that love between two people of any gender is something that should be allowed to burn, or at least not be actively extinguished.

So our reservations here really have nothing to do with KO, even though we can’t help but ask why he couldn’t have made the point last week if he felt so strongly about it. But hey, better late than never — and trust us, this is going to be a national issue, so there will be plenty of opportunity for him to reiterate — and obv the world would be a better place if even five percent of the political shouting heads on teevee expressed themselves as eloquently as KO, and shared his socially liberal mindset. Maybe a few of them even have some gayz in their families!? Can’t wait to find out.

What struck us as kind of sad, however, was the fervor with which the appeal was made by some of our gay friends in their pleas to watch and forward this around. There was an aura of redemption, as if to say: “You see, this aggressively straight network teevee man with a deep, sexy voice understands, so now we are truly worthy. Finally — validation!”

This is a completely understandable impulse, given the extreme and oppressive levels of hatred we have all grown up with and still live under 24/7. Even if we’ve been “accepted” by our families and friends, it cannot be disputed that we are by and large considered disgusting freaks by what at most times feels like 100 percent of the population, as watching a few hours of network teevee (and the associated advertising) quickly proves. This is still a country — no, a civilization — where a gay kiss on the cheek is beyond the pale of most shows and advertising.

On some level, we too wish to be loved and accepted. We want our loves (and our fucking) to be appreciated or at least understood, we want acknowledgment that our forms of these passions are no worse than anyone else’s.

This is why KO’s message reverberated so strongly, we think. But if KO changed one person’s mind on this issue, we would like to hear from you, e.g., “I hated the gays and voted for Prop 8, but after hearing KO, I wish I could vote against it now.”)

The love and acceptance we crave is beyond the ability of KO or anyone else to grant, and so we try not to attach too much importance or expectation to what he or anyone else says. This is why KO’s gesture is kind but ultimately irrelevant and superficial.

We’re not talking about a political truth but a philosophical one, rooted in the notion that life is the heaviest of burdens, and our only task is to live it.