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Gay Literature

Monthly Archives: April 2014

What’s up with Gay Vampires?

30 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by Martin Davies in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

alien, Gay, gay literature, gay vampires, genre literature, homophobia, m/m romance

To anyone who has been following the recent years’ development of what passes as ‘gay literature’, I am sure that the great proliferation of gay vampires, werewolves and other such exotic creatures has not passed unnoticed. When I first bumped into these books, I must admit I was fairly pleased. Coming from a time when books with gay characters had to be hidden from view, epitomised in Giovanni’s Room, through the age of kindle, where you can hide your cover from your fellow passengers on the train, or, as a matter, not even go to a shop to buy a book, the explosion of such life (or death) forms on the ‘literary’ scene was, at first, refreshing.

i attempted a few, diligent and gay as I am, thinking that I would enjoy them. And in a way I did, more as comedies than what they purported to be: erotic romances. For anyone who has had a male gay experience in life, it is clear that these books are not written for us gay men. in reality, I see that many of them are not even written by gay men, but often by pen names who, on closer scrutiny, appear to have no experience whatsoever of what it means to be gay. They certainly have a macho vision of what it means to be gay, as the apparatus necessary for such sexual feats is, in fact, superhuman. So, how did this craze come about, and what have been the consequences on gay literature?

I have done a bit of research, mainly asking readers on various sites, nothing scientific, but mainly anecdotal, but the maths seems to work. The suspicion arose when I read in one f the biggest forums dedicated to this ‘genre’ (it’s not a genre, I am well informed by experts, but merely a tag) a thread asking if anybody knew any gay people. Then, only then (silly me), I started checking the profiles of the people taking part in the forum: mainly women, mainly from the US, with a few exceptions. I have nothing against women fantasising about gay sex, don’t get me wrong, and I need to owe to them that they do not call this format ‘gay’, but m/m romance. Still, if you look up gay, you will find m/m romance as the biggest and first choice. And this is what I resent. As a gay man, mine is a matter of gender and sexuality, not of a sexual encounter. Sexuality runs deep in the foundations of personality, occasional (even if repeated) sex gets swept under the carpet of denial and soon forgotten.

Personally, I do to fantasise about lesbians having sex. If I did so, I would consider doing the honourable thing and having the operation, then living the life I dream of. But I am not here to tell people they should be living by my principles. If they prefer to read about gay vampires having sex (though I keep feeling vampires must be ridden with all sorts of venereal diseases, due to their eating habits), then transport their imagination into the bliss of their marital bed, good for them.

What I object to is the representation of gay men (vampires, werewolves etc) as ‘others!. A quick flick through any literary handbook, and the idea that vampires and the like (seen from a psychoanalytic and post colonial perspective) is exactly the same of ‘the madwoman in the attic’, of the creole, the foreigner with dark skin and a deranged personality we find in Jane Eyre. I resent being described, yet again, as ‘the other’, ‘the alien’ and ‘the exotic’. This creates a wall between the reality of our situation and the way we are perceived which, in it’s own way, is no less homophobic than calling people ‘faggots’ or ‘poofs’. I am not different; I’m an individual. 

Can we blame fantasies? Certainly not. Yet feminists, post-colonial critics and others have argued along these exact same lines against prejudice, and why shouldn’t we? Why should feminists have a right to say that women are presented as weak, irrational etc in books, and we gay men not have a right to say that we are yet again presented as weird, not human and ‘other’?

My last point concerns literature. What has this explosion of gothic gay sub-human characters brought about in terms of gay literature? Real, honest gay literature, even very creative in some cases, is out there, but the names of gay writers, or writers who discuss gay issues in their novels are overshadowed by the incessant flow of quickly produced gay vampire novels, written by people who often won’t even put their real names to the stories they write (maybe ready to change pen name and move to the next craze, a bit like vampires sucking lord out of their victims?) that the mainstream readership sees as ‘gay novels’, thus again giving gay people a stereotype they never looked for, imposed by others and by fashion…sex addicts from beyond the grave… Will this stereotype stick with us like campiness etc? I hope not, but I fear so. 

 

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Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley

30 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by Martin Davies in Uncategorized

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If you get past the language, which can be a bit of an issue, not because it is difficult, but because it can become a bit tedious, especially given the preference for reported speech over direct speech, and a certain limitation of vocabulary, Frankenstein regales you with the beauty of its structure of stories within stories, a bit like pictures containing other pictures, of narrators narrating other narrators’ stories, which makes the reader lose the perspective on what is true and what is not, which is at the centre of the novel.

It also regales readers with a feeling of doom , the feeling of the fight of humanity against powers too big for our scale to comprehend, and a series of themes such as the growth of science, ‘playing God’, being a parent, education, the need for companionship, appearance vs reality, physical appearance and real personality judgementalism etc.

Where I think Frankenstein is relevant to gay literature is that it portrays the ‘different’, the Creature (not monster, please!) as amiable, as not so different: the difference is in Victor’s eyes, as well as in the reader’s eyes. In this, the novel is a classic in acceptance, not a surprise coming from a real lady like Mary Shelley.

FRANKENSTEIN ON AMAZON

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Frankenstein-Wordsworth-Classics-Mary-Shelley-ebook/dp/B00I0621VC

Boy Meets Boy

30 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by Martin Davies in Uncategorized

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Tags

Boy Meets Boy, David Levithan, gay literature, utopia

This is not so much a review as a justification of my opinions on the novel:  it’s well-written, even interesting, but in my view, too unrealistic. I don’t mean that it’s style is not realistic, on the contrary, it is very much so. It is unrealistic in the situation: a world a world where homosexuality is fully accepted…. It has not been like this since classical times, and while the books of Mary Renault get rid of homophobia by being set in Roman, Greek and Persian times, this is set in an unrealistic American village and in my view, this is not a utopia, but a romance which forgets the pain and plight of gay people. It lacks the dreamlike qualities of a fantasy and it lacks the necessary explanation of how things have come to be so good you need in a utopian novel; the main flaw of this book is that it ‘strips’ the contemporary world of a believable society but does not replace it with anything, leaving a huge gap at its core.

David Levithan, I believe, makes a huge mistake in presenting a world where transvestites can freely play football, or American football, without explaining the history of how the world has reached such level of tolerance and respect. As a gay man, I would love to see the day when we can freely be ourselves, everywhere, every time, yet, I fear if I played football in drags I would have to have an army of friends to protect me from abuse and violence. Proposing a utopian world has nothing intrinsically wrong, but it risks alienating the very same people it ‘liberates’: the world is far too divided on the issue; Putin wants to make mincemeat of all of us… So, how do we get to this gay paradisal state? A utopian novel is basically impossible to pull off, as I have said, more so if you forget the whole journey from reality to utopia: it becomes a joke, a cabaret act with no foundations.

I wonder what possessed Levithan to write such a dysfunctional novel: Mary Renault had, in a way, proposed gay Utopias in the past, but her work was grounded on the great sexual freedom for gay men in antiquity, and based on a lot of historical research, Boy Meets Boy, I am afraid, is the shadow of a fable, nothing more.

BOY MEETS BOY ON AMAZON:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Boy-Meets-David-Levithan-ebook/dp/B00CKDYWGS

The Fault in Our Stars

30 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by Martin Davies in Uncategorized

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Tags

cancer, John Green, novel, The Fault in our Stars, YA, young adult

A well-written novel about the search for hope in a situation which seems to make no sense to anyone with a humane spirit: having cancer when a teenager. The characters are not presented as heroes capable of conquering any obstacle, but as real people, with their weaknesses and their doubts. This makes them much more believable and easy to identify with than if they had been presented in an idealised way. The story is longish, but I think that adds to the length of suffering which comes with cancer. At times, it is hard to hold your tears. I have read reviews that say that this is not a story written with the heart, that the motivation of John Green for writing this book is questionable: I personally do not see that,; I believe that this book has at it’s heart a real concern for the main topic as well as for the presentation of lives shaken by something so big and incomprehensible such as cancer at a young age.

On the other hand, some readers have pointed out that if a teenager is hit by such a catastrophic tragedy, the likelihood of him/her acting as if he/she were Socrates looking at death from a philosophical perspective and with a detailed and, I must say often witty, analysis of the moral and ethical consequences of what destiny has cast upon us is nigh on nought. Does this make the characters ‘not believable’? I would say more, Augustus, not just pretentious by name, though he seems to try to redeem himself and join us earthling patronisingly calling himself ‘Gus’, which reminds me so much of Drop the Dead Donkey, and, in the end, his language is not less ‘arsey’ and fake than the media ‘I’m not here’ bum-wipe of Sir Royston, is not just little believable, but obnoxious, irritating and annoying. I feel I’d like to tell him to shut his trap and start crying, give himself up to despair, act human.

This novel has certainly been a great commercial success, but I wonder how far it has fed off ‘good-ism’ and used a very serious topic to its advantage, and how far the story is really heart-felt. I strongly lean towards the former. I do not feel that there is any clue that Green has put any real emotions in the story, nor that there is any personal connection to its plot and characters…

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