Everywhere Home by Fenton Johnson

Author:Fenton Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781941411445
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Published: 2017-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

The vice president for marketing at a major New York publishing house told me some years back that no novel written from the point of view of an openly gay character, male or female, had sold more than ten thousand copies in hardcover. I found that fact worth pondering, since I take as a truism comedian Fran Lebowitz’s famous comment that if you removed Jews and gays from American culture all you’d have left is Let’s Make a Deal. Why is it that presumably straight Anglo readers revel in reading about the cultures of African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, Asian Americans, but resist reading books about gay culture?

I think it has to do with sex, a topic which renders the American soul as uncomfortable now as ever. A generation of lesbian and (especially) gay writers has not helped this situation. In our necessary efforts to shake ourselves free of oppression, we conveyed the notion that gay culture was only or primarily about sex, a narrow interpretation that right-wing fundamentalists were too happy to reinforce. In fact gay and lesbian culture is about desire—not the same thing as sex—and desire is about the theater of life and, as its portable stage, the theater of fiction.

Maybe the resistance of mainstream readers to what I’ll call a queer sensibility has to do with issues of certainty. America is a nation born of empiricists and we like our facts straight, so to speak. Facing what they perceived as wilderness, our forebears saw the imposition of order on chaos as our God-given calling. Americans have never much liked dwelling in the space between anything, most particularly the space between male and female. For if we cannot be certain of this basic “fact”—the “fact” of gender—what does that tell us about the rest of our carefully constructed illusions?

In writing this I realize that the law itself is a kind of drag, the imposition of a tailored suit over the crazy, tumbling, free-for-all chaos of life. I should make clear that by “the law” I mean not only that accumulation of precedent and power embodied in statute but the laws formulated by Aristotle and Newton and Darwin and Einstein. But Einstein was an outlier, growing closer to mysticism as he aged. In a letter sent six months before his death, he wrote, “For those of us who believe in physics, this distinction between past, present, and future is an illusion, however tenacious.” It’s the fiction writer’s job to trouble that tenacity, to enable the reader, through this tenderest of devices, to penetrate the veil of what the Hindus call maya— illusion—and see through to the truth of matter, which is the fundamental unity and fellowship of all creation, including time and place, including most especially the human race.

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