A Very Queer Notion About LGBT Literature

Entertainment Weekly's Pride Double Issue for June 2020 published a Q & A article by David Canfield called "The Library Is Open." These interviews involved four up and coming queer (I hate that term) authors and was conducted via Zoom.  (It should be noted that the authors--Nicole Dennis-Benn, Naoise Dolan, Akwaeke Emezi, and Garth Greenwell--are all under the age of 45.)

Sandwiched between the article title and Canfield's byline is a headnote briefly introducing the
four authors. The headnote immediately makes this startling statement--"There's never been a more exciting time for queer literature." I don't know who to blame for such a false pronouncement, Canfield or one of the magazine's editors. Whoever wrote that statement is clearly unaware of the enormous amount of gay and lesbian literature that came out of the 1980s and 1990s. During those decades, I was writing for the New York Native and the Lambda Book Report and was reviewing some of those books.

In the 1980s and '90s,  there was an explosion of novels, short stories, plays, and poetry coming from black gay writers, for example. Melvin Dixon, Randall Kenan, Thomas Glave, Assotto Saint, and Essex Hemphill are a few black gay names that come to mind. Plus there were several black gay literary journals that were being published back then. Among them were Blackheart, Pyramid Periodical, and Other Countries.

Other gay and lesbian writers included David Leavitt, Christopher Bram, Audre Lorde, Rita Mae Brown, Alice Walker, Felice Picano and his fellow Violet Quill writers.

Anyone who had ever set foot in a gay bookstore like the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore in Greenwich Village and its nearby competitor A Different Light and marveled at the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of LGBT books and periodicals on their shelves would scoff at the idea that today is "a more exciting time for queer literature."

A New Black Gay Literary Voice

Yesterday (May 12), I heard a very interesting interview on National Public Radio's Fresh Air with Terry Gross (heard in the New York area on WNYC AM and FM). The interview was with a young African-American writer named Michael Arceneaux (pronounced Ar-sin-noh), who in 2018 published a best selling collection of personal essays, I Can't Date Jesus: Love, Sex, Family, Race, and Other Reasons I've Put My Faith in Beyonce.

Arceneaux, who is openly gay, has published a new collection of essays called I Don't Want to Die Poor, which he discussed for nearly an hour on Fresh Air.

A 2007 graduate of Howard University in Washington, D.C., and now residing in West Harlem, Arceneaux's latest book is about his uphill battle to pay off his student loan of $100,000.

These two books by a new literary voice are ones I plan to look for.

Books On My Reading List

Four books I am eager to read this year, if and when bookstores reopen, are the following: Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu, a novel written in screenplay format; The Sword and the Shield by Peniel Joseph, a nonfiction book on Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.; Girl, Woman, Other by British-Nigerian writer Bernardine Evaristo. The novel was selected as the 2019 winner of the Man Booker Prize along with Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, the sequel to The Handmaid's Tale; and Andre Leon Talley's The Chiffon Trenches, a tell-all memoir about the fashion world.

They all sound like must-read books.