Glimpses of Utopia:

Celebration and queer temporality vs. the tragic gay narrative in post-Stonewall gay fiction

James Armando Dickson

A Thesis Submitted to the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the MA Degree

The University of Oslo

November 2018

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Glimpses of Utopia:

Celebration and queer temporality vs. the tragic gay narrative in post-Stonewall gay fiction

James Armando Dickon

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© James Armando Dickson

2018

Glimpses of Utopia: celebration and queer temporality versus the tragic gay narrative in post- Stonewall gay literary fiction

James Armando Dickson http://www.duo.uio.no/

Trykk: Reprosentralen, Universitetet i Oslo

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Abstract

In response to Garth Greenwell’s claims that Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 novel A Little Life is a subversive work of gay literary fiction due to its queer negativity and melodrama, I assert that tragedy has dominated the gay literary narrative over the past one hundred years. While acknowledging that tragedy is a warranted response to disastrous events in queer history, with the AIDS epidemic being my more frequent reference point, I intend to prove that what I describe as “celebratory narratives” are in fact more subversive. Celebratory narratives are distinguished by the ways they subvert heteronormative expectations and life patterns through humour, the reflection of contemporary or historical queer culture, and the ways in which they depict community, comradery and affection between queer people. To deepen my analysis, I have looked to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque as a subversive literary mode, which I use as a framework to analyse two works of celebratory gay fiction. As my thesis progresses, I expand upon this framework by including recent theories of queer utopia. I also draw upon Judith/Jack Halberstam’s theories on queer temporality to show how the use of time and space in celebratory gay fiction responds to significant moments in queer culture and history. I also engage with Lee Edelman’s theory of queer negativity, mostly in relation to how queer utopia acts as an alternate perspective on queer continuation and ideas of the future, but also the ways in which Edelman’s theory is misunderstood. In my first main chapter, I examine the ways in which celebration is manifested in Andrew Holleran’s first novel Dancer from the Dance (1978) and its disappearance from his later, post-AIDS work, Grief (2006). I also examine the ways in which the celebration of gay subculture creates ‘parallel realities’ between queer and heterosexual existence and how it changes in a post-AIDS setting, both in regard to the devastation of the gay community and the advancement of gay rights. In my second chapter, I compare the trajectory of tragic narratives in gay literary fiction to those in gay young adult fiction, and discuss the effect that the first work of celebratory gay young adult fiction, David Levithan’s Boy Meets Boy (2003), has had on this subcategory of fiction. To do so, I draw upon the framework from my first chapter and include recent theories of queer utopia. Lastly, I use the ideas that I have developed in the first two chapters to analyse the ways in which A Little Life not only fails to be subversive, but reinforces what I believe to be a troubling status quo in contemporary gay fiction. In particular, I look at the ways in which the novel creates a liberal setting divorced from queer history to manipulate the reader, in addition to the excessive tragedy that befalls

V the main character. Both of these, I believe, are problematic in the context of the history of gay literary fiction.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank most of all my thesis adviser, Nils Axel Nissen. Before I took his class on homoromantic literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, then another on post-Stonewall gay fiction, I had very little knowledge about the history of LGBT literature and had read comparatively few works. I now take great delight in sharing that knowledge whenever I can in my work as an activist. I have not yet ceased to enjoy the amazement and sense of validation it brings to people who were unaware of the rich literature that represents our community. Nils then took on the role of my thesis advisor not once, but twice, after a long but necessary break in my studies. Each time my ideas and writing were met with patience, support and encouragement. My husband of five years and partner of ten, Alexander, deserves credit for his encouragement, support and keeping me caffeinated. My mother, Linda, for telling me to go back and finish this degree. And my father, Armando, for insisting I attend university in the first place. And to Syd, my beloved Basset Artesian, who picked the perfect time to fall sick less than two months before the final deadline. It kept life interesting. Lastly, to the queer movers, shakers, and thinkers both past and present who influenced this thesis. In reference to a work by one of the author’s in this thesis: I tried, at least, to make more than dust.

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Table of Contents

Introduction ...... 1 1 “We would not stop dancing”: queer celebration and parallel realities in Dancer from the Dance and their disappearance in Grief ...... 10 2 “What a wonderful world”: Boy Meets Boy’s utopic vision, subversion, and the rejuvenation of gay young adult literature ...... 31 3 Outside of Queer Time: narrative manipulation, ahistoricity and the prevalence of the tragic narrative in A Little Life ...... 54 Conclusion ...... 77 Works Cited ...... 82

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Introduction

After taking an engaging class in post-Stonewall gay literary fiction one semester, I began to observe a certain reoccurrence: out of the eight books on our syllabus, six included either a dead main character, a dead secondary character, but all of them dealt with some sort of tragedy. This wasn’t surprising. Another class I had taken many years earlier on homoromantic literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth century revealed that one, two out of the four the books concerning homoromantic male pairings ended in death. My investigations into material that wasn’t on either syllabus didn’t fare much better. Men loving men had always existed in literary fiction, but even in liberal periods in history, gay literary narratives relied on subtext, or existed as romantic friendships. There was, however, a price to pay for its existence. I knew, of course, that this was not always a purposeful artistic choice. Tragedy has been the condition for the queer narrative’s existence in the first place, impressed upon authors by publishers and societal attitudes at large. That’s not to say there have been no examples of gay literary fiction where the character or characters in question survive. Such novels have existed more and more often from the early twentieth century onwards. They did, however, tend to be received poorly by critics and occasionally to the detriment of their authors. Bertram Cope’s Year is one such example, with Henry Blake Fuller having to essentially self-publish and his reputation affected afterwards, and Maurice by E.M. Forster us another, written in 1913-14 but published posthumously in 1971 out of fear of some kind of reprisal. I am also well aware that global gay communities have faced incredible historical obstacles in the past century and continue to do so despite the decriminalization of homosexuality in many countries and relaxation in social attitudes in the past fifty years. It would be absurd to insist they should not be reflected in literary fiction. Tragedy, I also realise, does not necessarily make for bad literature. However, this line of questioning truly reached a peak moment when I first read Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 novel A Little Life. I was curious why the author had chosen to write a novel where her protagonist is exposed to a life of protracted misery and suffering and I was left more curious still to realise this had all been a purposeful choice to manipulate the reader’s emotions. This effect was what contributed to its vast readership and nomination for several prestigious literary prizes. Yet I had been left unphased. On reading the criticism, I was especially perturbed when I read Garth Greenwell’s critical support, heralding it as ‘the great gay novel,’ and stating it to be a subversive work of

1 fiction due to its portrayal of “the social and emotional lives of gay men,” but also its extended depictions of queer suffering. Subversive, as I have always understood the word, means undermining the status quo. Surely, I reasoned, a literary history that overwhelmingly portrays the death and suffering of male characters cannot be subverted by more of the same. Although Greenwell was the only critic to argue that A Little Life was a work of gay fiction, others noticed the same-sex relationships but never questioned the treatment of gay characters and history. I cannot presume to know why Yanagihara felt the need to saturate her novel with tragedy, beyond the few articles and interviews where she revealed her inspiration and writing process. It is almost fifty years after the Stonewall riots, I thought, and more than twenty years since the peak of the AIDS epidemic, yet the excessive torture and death of a queer male character has gone, for the most part, unquestioned. Even if we leave aside the question of whether it’s in good taste, or ethical, no one has considered whether it’s clichéd writing at this point. I do believe that when we keep telling the same story often enough, the danger is that it stops being merely a literary or fictitious narrative and starts to become the narrative. I also believe that it is our responsibility to ask why that is. I discovered I was not alone in some of my observations. Daniel Mendehlson questioned the excessive suffering in the novel and was openly challenged about it by Yanagihara’s editor. Cultural critic Daniel D’Addario has also noticed a discernable lack of gay fiction being published in recent years that moves beyond the scope of failed romance, characters living with HIV or AIDS, or bourgeois white middle-class protagonists. If this was the status quo in gay literary fiction, I began to wonder what a subversive narrative would look like. With the exception of AIDS fiction, or other gay fiction that defiantly responds to the persecution or suffering of the queer community, and I would argue that the tragic element is more concerned with catharsis. A subversive work of gay fiction, however, wouldn’t mean more tragedy, it would mean works of fiction that disrupt both heteronormative expectations and the literary narrative that has come to dominate twentieth and twenty-first century gay literary fiction and nineteenth-century homoromantic fiction. It would mean acknowledging that, for over one hundred years, the literary establishment made up of large publishing houses and award committees and critics, has insisted on or sidled towards literary works where men loving other men have ended up dead.

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However, there was very little research or insight into what this disruption might look like. I turned, then, to two sources of theory. As anyone can imagine, after deciding to cover gay fiction, I first turned to queer theory and realise that queer positivity was a concept that sat uneasily with queer theorists and critics alike. In his article “Queer Prospects for Narrative Temporalities,” Jesse Matz described how the rise of the It Gets Better narrative, an online movement that was begun by activist and writer Dan Savage and his husband Terry Miller. Although noble in its intent to inspire young people and discourage them from suicide, it was criticized for a certain disingenuity, or the way it came across as very “glossy,” in Matz words. It is promoted by rich and beautiful celebrities and although some of them may be queer, or queer icons, their lives were now far removed from the impact of harsh, daily discrimination that many young queer people face. As Matz also claims, the sense of waiting inherent in the phrase ‘it gets better’ can suggest waiting instead of doing, and that this sense of passivity aligns itself with conformity. From Matz, however, I discovered there were two narratives that had arisen when it comes to envisioning, or not envisioning, the future of the queer narrative. One was Lee Edelman’s theories in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Edelman isn’t concerned with queer positivity, so much as queer negativity, which was a term I had seen cited in Greenwell’s praise of Yanagihara. Queer negativity is the idea that participation in politics and society is motivated by a belief and desire to create better futures for a rhetorical child. This rhetorical child was a defense that often arose in moral panic arguments against queer people as homosexuality began to be decriminalized. In several instances in the 1970s during the advancement for queer rights, coalitions of conservative politicians and religious evangelists believed it came at the detriment of children’s safety, believing that homosexuals would somehow influence or corrupt them into becoming gay themselves. The idea that someone can be ‘made’ to be homosexual has been discredited in the subsequent decades. Edelman calls this drive to create a better, heterosexual future for the rhetorical child reproductive futurism, and it is the idea that there can both be a better future and that it is linked to heteronormative ideas that heterosexuality, home-making, and child rearing as the natural and right way to be. The opposite of heteronormativity, he theorizes, is queerness, both because queer life structures don’t follow heteronormative life patterns and because any alternative to heteronormativity’s vision reproductive futurity is not considered possible. In a sense, participation in reproductive futurism prioritizes the Child over queerness. Edelman of course encourages us to step away, to refuse, to stop centering the idea of the child or The

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Child above everything else. Instead, Edelman suggests we should do what we can to embrace an absence of future, or the ‘death drive.’ Although Edelman states that he does not expect or even advocate LGBT people to abandon hope or child rearing, but to engage with queer negativity to challenge our ideas of futurity, Matz notes that Edelman’s insistence on no hope has posed a problem for activists. And while not a direct response to Edelman’s queer negativity, movements like the “It Gets Better” campaign have arisen as a result of the negativity directed towards queer people, particularly queer youth. Matz believes that Muñoz’ theory of queer utopia can reconcile Edelman’s negativity with the needs of real queer people, Muñoz’ theory that queerness is an ideal “distilled from the past and used to imagine a future” (1) directly challenges Edelman’s negativity. He also dismisses positivity, believing that “the recent calls for gay or queer optimism seem too close to elite homosexual evasion of politics” (Cruising Utopia 3). For a utopia to be stable, it must relate to historical struggle, which Muñoz traces in the utopic energies present in artistic works before, around the time, and a short while after the Stonewall riots. I came to see that the opposite of tragedy would not be a glossy positivity, nor more negativity. The opposite of themes of tragedy, shame and death were celebration, joy and existence, Little, I realised, had been written about any of these subjects in relation to gay fiction. I had thus come to my line of inquiry: in tandem with proving that tragedy cannot be used subversively in contemporary gay literary fiction, I would like to prove that celebration is can be a subversive literary element in gay fiction. Of course, I had known I was not the first to consider celebration a subversive literary mode. I had been familiar from past reading with Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories on the carnivalesque, a literary mode he developed using the images of the carnival from the Medieval works of François Rabelais. The carnivalesque, Bakhtin theorizes, was “opposed to all that is finished and polished, to all pomposity” (3). In medieval culture, folk humour and laughter were only given a place during carnivals or feast days. As a result, they “opposed the official and serious tone of medieval ecclesiastical and feudal culture” (4), Celebration, in short, subverted the dominant culture through humour and chaos. But even though it ran parallel to an everyday society that was more sombre and concerned with the rituals of religious life, celebration was seen as a necessary part of medieval culture. Everyone took part in it, including the higher echelons of society. It provided a much-needed break from the

4 rituals and drudgery of religious everyday life, to the point where carnival and feast days in total took up three months of the year. This, I realised was very similar to gay night life, parades, and gay community. I realised, however, that even though celebration as a communal event is something LGBT culture is commonly associated with, there was very little of this depicted in gay literary fiction. Every year, headlines are made in mainstream and LGBT media alike, when a notably intolerant place manages to host its first Pride, or else attention is gained when a city won’t allow any sort of parade, or present some sort of opposition. There often arises the question of why there can’t be a heterosexual Pride, before being met with the answer that heterosexual love is shown everyday openly and in cultural representations without any discouragement or discrimination. In other words, heterosexuality is the dominant culture, in a way that’s similar to the ‘everyday’ and ‘officialdom’ Bakhtin discusses in Medieval culture. The eternal question that seems to arise each year, after all, in articles and opinion pieces, or comments on social media, is whether Pride is a parade or a riot. In “Queer Teenagers and the Mediation of Utopian Catastrophe,” an article that discusses a similar conflict between queer negativity and positivity as Matz, the dichotomy in the LGBT or queer community is represented quite significantly in two common symbols: the rainbow flag and the pink triangle. One is used as a symbol of hope and celebration, while the other is a marker of queer defiance. Queerness, I believe, is both and I intend to argue that queer celebration is as disruptive a force as queer rage, and certainly more subversive than tragedy. It’s difficult to find celebration in a literary tradition that has occupied itself with tragic narratives, but not impossible. One work that came to mind was Andrew Holleran’s debut novel Dancer from the Dance, a novel published in 1978 that depicts gay life in New York’s Lower East Side in all its sleaze but also the freedom it symbolized for the men engaging with scene life. Published nine years after the Stonewall riots in a city where activists had been campaigning for recognition for over a decade, it is very much a response to this cultural zeitgeist. There’s never been a work of contemporary gay literature that has depicted the celebration of gay life since Dancer in quite the same way. This, I believe, is due to the brief window that it occupied: after riot, but before the AIDS epidemic. After I had reached a decision to analyse the celebrative elements in Dancer, I drew a blank. I had decided to keep the scope of my research within contemporary gay male fiction, since it was this category that seemed to be the most critically well-regarded but also had a prevalence of tragedy. I am, however, aware that in the past several years there has been a

5 slight but noticeable influx of celebratory depictions of gay men in other media and an increase in queer characters in TV and cinema. I had also decided to exclude examples of lesbian literary fiction. I began to quickly realise that while gay and lesbian, or homoromantic friendships between women, or between men before Stonewall often shared tragic outcomes up until The Price of Salt by Patricia Highwater published in 1952. From Stonewall onwards, lesbian literary fiction tended to depict the problems that lesbians faced both as women and sexual minorities, but from my observations there were less tragic narrative outcomes in fiction. There had been a burst in production of historical fiction and fiction with philosophical, magical realism and surrealist elements from British lesbian writers towards the end of the twentieth century. Tragedy had, however, prevailed for queer women in televised and cinematic works. Essentially, I came to the same conclusion as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Between Men: lesbians and queer women deserved their own consideration. Although gay literary fiction is found wanting for celebratory narratives, I realised they were available in other examples of contemporary gay fiction. Celebration has arisen in surprising ways in young adult fiction in the past twenty years, but it was often dismissed as a genre because of the age of its intended readership. Over the course of my research, I came to realise, however, that a significant portion of gay young adult fiction readers were adults. I also discovered the little-known historic and narrative parallels between gay young adult fiction and gay literary fiction. The first ever work of gay young adult fiction, for example, was published in June 1969, the same month as the Stonewall riots and I was reminded of Muñoz theory on the historic nexus of cultural production. But as young adult fiction, it was focused on its pedagogical role warning adolescents about the perils and shame associated with homosexuality and seldom mentioned the gay adult male community. This, however, began to change towards the end of the millennium. The younger generation of gay men had inherited the homophobic narrative that politicians and media had spun during the AIDS years and suffered because of it. I believe the momentous push for the recognition of gay issues following the 1980s and the spate of violent, highly publicized murders of Matthew Shepard and Brandon Teena created a similar historic nexus of cultural production to Stonewall. This led to the proliferation of non-tragic narratives in young adult gay fiction, but especially so in Boy Meets Boy, by David Levithan, which is the first celebratory narrative within gay young adult literature. This, I decided, would be my second work for comparison. I also came to realise that in responding to their individual moments of historic cultural production, both Dancer and Boy Meets Boy are in a sense two novels concerned with

6 time, or temporality. I came back to queer theory and examined Jack/Judith Halberstam’s ideas on queer temporality, which were the ways in which queer life disrupted the linear heteronormative life patterns of birth, childhood, adolescence, marriage, parenthood and death. I came to see that while this, in a sense, was true in both Dancer and Boy Meets Boy, each narrative created a separate reality of sorts to support a celebratory queer existence. This, I came to realise, was because even though there had been a contemporary relaxation towards homosexuality at the time each novel was written, this growth in tolerance did not necessarily mean acceptance. Gay culture in Dancer exists parallel to heteronormative life, as its own alternative reality, which I realized was not dissimilar from what Bakhtin’s descriptions of how carnival feast days and low culture were allowed to exist in their own time and space. I decided, then, that I wanted to use the hallmarks of the carnivalesque to create a framework in which to theorize celebration through a close reading of Dancer. I also thought it would be appropriate to address how that celebration vanished, both in the decade after Dancer was published and from gay fiction, in order to situate my theory of celebration within its cultural- historical context. This is why I also chose a close reading of Holleran’s last novel, Grief, to complement my reading of Dancer in the first chapter. Published in 2004, it is a work after the peak of the AIDS epidemic and the main character is focused on his own personal sorrows. However, the presence of AIDS is still felt in the background of the novel. In these two works, Holleran depicts a cultural shift from a situation where homosexual existence was relegated to night life and an everyday existence was only beginning to emerge to a singular and open existence, where the privileges gay men have acquired have come at a cost. Boy Meets Boy is different, however, partly because the development of gay young adult fiction exists parallel to gay literary fiction within its own cultural nexus. Celebration of gay identity was very much present, but in different ways. However, it lacked the hedonism prevalent in Dancer, which would have been considered highly unsuitable for a teenage readership. While adult gay male culture in Dancer had its own time and space for existence, that still didn’t exist for queer youth in the early millennium. In his attempt to create a celebratory narrative, Levithan had to challenge the idea of what a queer time and space might look like. The result is a fictional, queer-friendly town, one that merged the parallel realities of gay night life and everyday life that had just begun to emerge and were hinted at in Dancer. In an article that predates Cruising Utopia, Amy S. Pattee describes it as utopic. I decided, then, to expand upon the framework I had built using the carnivalesque and include the differing theories on queer utopias in my reading. I then engaged in a close reading of Boy

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Meets Boy, comparing the ways in which its celebration is both similar and different from Dancer. Having laid the groundwork for an understanding of how narratives in gay fiction respond to queer history and contemporary queer culture, I turned at last to A Little Life. In its first section, it establishes a setting that includes gay characters and creates a liberal, everyday, gay-accepting setting in the first section of the novel. Unlike either Dancer, Grief or Boy Meets Boy, however, I realised that as the novel progresses it never provides any reference to queer history or queer culture. In fact, I came to realise it made little reference to any history, which was particularly strange given its New York setting and no mention of the 9/11 terror attacks. The problem, I realised, was that it still referred to the historical consequences that have arisen from homophobic discrimination in order to further its tragic narrative. I came to realise that engagement with queer history and the ways in which a text engages with ideas of queer time and space, however, is at least one of the defining qualities of gay or queer contemporary literary fiction. This, I realised, was what distinguishes fiction that merely contains gay or queer characters from gay literary fiction. This relation to history, I believe, should include the ways in which a work does or does not respond to other words in the gay literary canon, such as an awareness of the literary history of the tragic narrative outcome in gay fiction. I asserted both of these concepts in order to challenge the assertion made by Garth Greenwell that the tragedy in A Little Life, or any tragedy for that matter, is a subversive element in gay fiction. In the following thesis, I will examine these four novels in relation to relevant queer theory and theory on celebration as a literary mode in order to assert my claim that celebratory works of gay fiction are subversive. In Chapter 1, I will provide a close reading of Dancer from the Dance alongside Bakhtin’s requirements for the carnivalesque, creating a framework with which to understand celebration in gay fiction and its parallel narrative realities. I will also refer to the contemporary historic events that affected the characters in both Dancer and Grief, and how the impact of the AIDS epidemic impacted celebration in gay fiction as I provide a close reading of the latter novel. In Chapter 2, I will provide a brief history of gay young adult fiction, both how it emerged around the Stonewall period, the pedagogic purpose of their tragic narrative outcomes, and the reasons why this began to change at the turn of the millennium. I will continue to use the framework I established in my first chapter and expand upon it using theories of queer utopia to provide a close reading of the novel and its unique setting.

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In Chapter 3, I will examine the critical praise and criticism of A Little Life and the author’s description of the ways in which she used suffering within her novel for aesthetic effect and to emotionally manipulate the reader. In particular, I will engage with Garth Greenwell’s article and provide counter-arguments on how queer suffering is not subversive. I will also examine the ways in which the novel’s ahistorical setting and lack of acknowledgment of queer history and culture creates a problem in regarding it as a work of gay literary fiction. Throughout each chapter, I will also engage with theories on queer temporality and queer negativity where I have considered it significant, or if it has been referred to in a secondary source. In each chapter, I will also discuss and engage with the reception of each novel, in an effort to understand the persistence of tragic outcomes in the gay novel and a more dismissive attitude towards the significance of ‘celebratory’ gay fiction. My conclusion will briefly discuss the outcomes from my line of inquiry, namely that a work of gay fiction must in some way respond to the queer history and the queer present, and that celebratory themes and outcomes in gay fiction subvert the tragic status quo. It is worth noting that in the course of my work, I often go between the terms LGBT (or a variation of LGBTQ, or LGBTQIA) and queer. In the cases where I use the acronym, this is often because I am referring to an instance where it’s been used as a specific choice of words in a secondary source. I am aware that using a variation of the acronym or queer seems to be a topic of discussion that arises every so often, with the use of ‘queer’ being debated since it is seen as slur by some. Others prefer the use of queer both in a sense to reclaim the term and because it both defines someone as non-heterosexual, and not necessarily gender conforming, without having to enter into the particulars of their identity. For the most part, I use the term queer when referring to the broader LGBTQIA community, believing it lends a certain synchronicity seeing as I refer so often to certain notable works of queer theory. When I refer specifically to gay men, however, I use the term gay or gay community as a subset of the queer community in order to distinguish historical or cultural outcomes which affect gay men in particular. Lastly, I understand that there has been very little research done on the four novels I discuss in my thesis. This, I believe, is because three of them have been published in the last eighteen years, but also because queer fiction needs more attention as a field of study. I understand how this limits my project, but my intention was to provide not only a literary analysis in my thesis, but bring my own ideas to an area of study I feel has been overlooked.

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1 "We would not stop dancing": queer celebration and parallel realities in Dancer from the Dance and their disappearance in Grief

Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance is unique. It is one of the few gay literary novels that has an ambiguous ending instead of outright tragedy and depicts love and sex between men with unrepentant joy. Critics and readers both past and present tend to be thrown when they are greeted with details of fetishes and sex work in the first few pages, or the “act of communion” (117) that dancing and gay nightlife could play in the lives of gay men. This depiction of celebration is no small feat. In a recent interview, Holleran remarked that when he first began to write in the 1960s, “you couldn’t write about gay life” and “gay writers had to change pronouns in [their stories]” (Miksche) in order to be published, although there were, of course, exceptions. In spite of these limits Holleran, persisted in writing about gay night life, which he credits as both the source of his inspiration and solace as a young man, even though he grew to understand, in his own words, the ‘not nice’ parts. Holleran was aware that he was charting fairly unexplored territory in gay literary fiction. As such, the novel is very much a response to the change in queer culture that arose as a consequence of the Stonewall riots. Holleran was aware himself that the gay narrative in fiction has, for the longest time, been tragic. It’s something that his novel is self-aware of, in a sense, in the epistolary section that frames the main narrative. The two letter writers, one still entrenched in New York scene life and the other retired to the Deep South with his lover, discuss the novel that the former is working on. The problem, he finds, is that he has started to write “a gay novel,” but that “the world demands that gay life…be ultimately sad” (14). The two letter writers agree with one another that, for the most part, gay men lead boring, normal lives where they live discreetly but on their own terms. But no one, they agree, is interested in that reality. Instead it is the queen “who puts the car in gear and drives right off the cliff” (18) who is fascinating. The framed novel is about gay scene life and centered around the life of Malone, a beautiful man and one of those fascinating ‘doomed queens.’ It’s narrated by an extradiegetic, heterodiegetic narrator, who has the focalization of a traditional omniscient narrator, but other

10 times is identifiable as Malone’s fellow bystanders in New York scene life – the other dancers from the dance. The narrative follows Malone’s life non-linearly, beginning after Malone has disappeared, before going back to trace his life from childhood up to when he left a successful career and quiet life on accepting he was homosexual. After an initial first relationship that ends when his boyfriend becomes abusive, Malone is befriended by Sutherland, a drag queen who acts as his fairy godmother and initiates him into the hedonistic excesses of gay scene life. Malone, however, is never able to find the one thing he constantly chases after: love. Eventually Sutherland attempts to pimp Malone to a young millionaire who is infatuated with him, only for Malone to reject the arrangement. By the end of the novel, Sutherland has accidentally overdosed at the party he has thrown to celebrate Malone and John Shaeffer’s union. Malone is reported as going for a late-night swim, never to be heard or seen again. The second epistolary section sees the two letter writers discussing various Malone sightings, and whether or not he has died or simply abandoned his former life. If it doesn’t sound like a happy ending, that’s because it’s not. It’s vague, almost dream-like, and it doesn’t tell us what happens to Malone. In fact, it’s debatable whether or not Sutherland is dead, since he’s still spoken about in the second epistolary section. But it’s not tragic, either. The narrator undermines what could be an incredibly melancholy story of Malone’s life with exaggerated, camp humour or trivialization, and descriptions of how happy gay men were to see one another and be in each other’s company. The recurring theme for both the narrator character and the ups and downs in Malone’s life is to go celebrate and dance and make the best of life as you can. Celebration as a subversive element in literature has never been about the neatness of a happy ending. It is really only Mikhail Bakhtin who has explored this in his theory of the carnivalesque, which he developed based on the works of François Rabelais. What Bakhtin found was that carnival spirit and celebration depicted in Rabelais’ works originated from medieval feast days, where low culture was allowed to thrive. These feast days “opposed the official and serious tone of medieval ecclesiastical and feudal culture” (4), to the point where feast days took up three months of the year and everyone from the peasant class to the higher echelons of society took part. They were a space and time set aside where profanity and degrading humour could exist, where people could and were expected to celebrate the baser elements in life together. I believe that Dancer depicts queer celebration in much the same way as Rabelais depicts medieval carnival. Holleran identified the festivity of gay night life as a paradise, a

11 space where gay men were allowed to be themselves. Queer culture, a culture on the margins of society, was both perceived as a ‘lower’ form of culture and embodied vulgar humour, hedonism and community. But instead of specific days set aside out of the year, the New York of the late 1970s depicted in the novel had discotheques and bath houses. Gay scene life is the carnival; it is described as one party continuing into another: “We would not stop dancing. We moved with the regularity of the Pope from the city to Fire Island in the summer, where we danced till the fall, and then, with the geese flying south, the butterflies dying in the dunes, we found some new place in Manhattan and danced all winter there” (111). Even the cyclical nature of party life in the novel resembles the periods where carnival took place, since they did not correspond with sacred history or saint days, but were related to nature and moments of change and renewal in the cycle of the year. In the medieval period, this was due to the absorption of Roman and other pagan celebrations into Christian culture, as it exerted a stronghold over Western Europe. Pagan symbolism is a frequent occurrence in the novel. In connection with Malone’s presence at parties and bath houses, he is constantly referred to as a worshipper of Priapus, the Greek god of fertility. I believe, however, that there’s are grounds for an even stronger comparison between queer celebration and the medieval carnivalesque. According to Bakhtin, the carnivalesque manifested itself in three ways that often overlapped with one another: ritual spectacle, comic verbal compositions, and coarse or abusive language. Each of these shared elements of degradation and the bodily grotesque. In the following, I will demonstrate and provide examples of how these same three manifestations occur in Dancer. In the medieval carnival, ritual spectacle worked in two ways: it meant the parodying of the religious rituals of everyday life, or an exaggerated performance. There are three scenes in the novel that fall within a more modern understanding of a significant, or serious, that become subverted by comic exaggeration. The first is Malone’s sickbed scene in the hospital, after he has been beaten up by two hotel security guards and arrested. Instead of the solemnity such an occasion would inspire, which is meant for rest and visits from relations, it becomes a festive affair drawn out over several days. When Sutherland finds out what’s happened, he visits Malone and attends to him in a nurse’s outfit from the Crimean War and reads The Jungle Book by his bedside. The hospital room is perpetually “jammed” and everyone who seems to know Malone comes to pay their respects, or as the narrator terms it, their “little society” who have the “disposition to turn everything into a party” (162.) The room is cluttered with leftover flowers, caviar and champagne from work events that bartender and

12 wait-staff acquaintances have worked at. A mix tape made by a popular DJ is being played and the attendees sit around sharing gossip with one another. Once the first round of visitors leaves, another group of visitors cram themselves into the room in order to pay homage to Malone. To throw this scene into sharper contrast, it takes place over the Christmas period, a time of year that was mentioned earlier in the novel, when Malone had travelled back to the Mid-West to be with his family and felt like his being gay kept him separate from their existence. The second instance is the Pink and Green party that Sutherland throws on Fire Island. The location itself has become iconic: Malone is described as first believing it to be Paradise and that it took him several summers before he began to think otherwise, but he still went, because “nowhere else on earth was natural and human beauty fused” (207). It’s a place that sees a hundred parties each summer, but that Sutherland’s party each year was particularly anticipated. The preparations include, of course, green and pink panels, “sculptures made of teaspoons” and “sacks destined to release carnations, glitter, and pills on the guests” (208). Guests are reported as having spent a week’s salary on their costumes. It’s this that the narrator and Sutherland frequently refer to as the site for Malone’s ‘wedding’ to John Schaeffer, although nothing that resembles the traditional ceremony is intended to occur. It’s an ironic affair, of course, because it’s partly intended as a means for Sutherland to pimp Malone to Shaeffer as a way for his friend to find love and for him to retire, and because gay men couldn’t actually marry one another at the time. In the end, Malone rejects John on the grounds that he’s a seasoned queen and jaded by scene life, whereas young John still has years of his life ahead to enjoy himself, make mistakes, and find himself tired in turn. The last of these rituals, of course, is Sutherland’s funeral. The narrator mentions that Sutherland had originally wanted to be “laid out on the high altar of the cathedral of Cologne, while an orchestra played “Pavane for a Dead Princess” (233). This has usually been reserved throughout history for Bavarian royalty or high members of the clergy, and so Sutherland both pokes fun at the sanctity afforded to such an affair and tilts the typically somber nature of a funeral towards the operatic and melodramatic. In the end, he is “sent off at Frank E. Campbell’s on Madison Avenue” (234). Despite not fulfilling his elaborate wishes, it is described as “the sort Sutherland would have loved, attended by everyone he considered beyond the pale of simple good manners, but who could have danced him into the other world” (234). Only one member of his family attends; the rest of the mourners and attendees are ““the hard-core tit-shakers” with whom he had danced for nearly twenty years” (234).

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They are comprised of “the models, illustrators, pimps and hustlers, the boys like Lavalava and Spanish Lily who lived only to dance, the yoga gurus and brahmacharyis, the antique dealers and screenwriters, the jewelry designers and doctors, the psychiatrists and weight lifters, the waiters and the copywriters.” (234). It’s an extensive list that puts the reader in mind of a parade, instead of anything serious. In a sense, however, the novel itself embodies a sort of exaggerated performance. Literary fiction is often considered a higher form of art and more often than not we’ve come to expect a novel’s reflections on social commentary, political criticism, or the human condition to be wholly serious. Dancer manages to do all of these things, but it subverts our expectations by presenting solemn moments – like funerals – as joyful occasions, or distasteful, or even dangerous moments as ordinary occurrences. This trivialization acts as a type of exaggeration by undermining mainstream cultural sensibilities for comedic effect. One of the best instances is presented to the reader in the epistolary section and immediately sets the tone for the novel. At the start of the novel and the letter dialogue, the first letter writer gives a beautiful description of “the azaleas in bloom” and the “rust-red moon” (10). It creates a very romantic atmosphere which we associate with the countryside and the sleepy life the letter writer lives, where not much happens other than some instances he describes helping his neighbours. But in the second letter, the natural imagery of the Deep South is quickly contrasted with an opposing description: It was spring here, too, last week –Sunday afternoon I walked down the stepped off Columbus Circle into Central Park and the odor of piss rose up from the rest rooms, and I knew a year had passed. And down in your old neighborhood, darling, the bag ladies were sleeping outside again on the steps of the St. Marks Dispensary, and the whores were in hot pants… Everyone thought spring had come! And then it dropped thirty degrees in one afternoon, snowed the next morning, Bob was mugged on Ninth Street, and we are right back to a New York Winter. (12) Judging by the first description, we might think we are about to read a very different kind of novel, one that follows the first letter writer in the haze of the Deep South. But the heralding of spring in the countryside is quickly replaced by the sounds of the city, where milder weather means homeless people can sleep outside again, and the cold air no longer hides the pungent smells of neglected places. If that wasn’t enough, there’s a second comical turn when the temperature suddenly drops and all of this quickly reverses and a friend of theirs, Bob, is

14 reportedly mugged in a way that makes it sound like mugging is a regular enough occurrence. The quick, record-scratch moment where the Deep South becomes the Lower East Side creates an immediate twist that sets the tone for the kind of novel Dancer will be: unafraid to talk about homelessness, sex work, desperation, and people living on the margins of society. Flowers blooming and dusky evenings are the sort of descriptions we expect in a novel, not depictions of a subculture and not in the context of springtime. But as much as the seedier side of the city is amplified and used to trick the reader, there’s no pity or scorn for what is being described. The novel’s dark humour laughs with the misfortune it describes and joins us together in laughter. A similar instance, which also gives us an excellent example of a comic verbal composition, occurs in chapter five when a man threatens to shoot up a movie theatre where Sutherland and Malone are in attendance. With a gun toted in his direction, Sutherland sits there straight-faced and tells the man: “Shoot me, darling, I’m on so much speed that the only thing that could possibly bring me down now is to have you blow my head off… Blow my head off, darling, and leave me just a highly sensitized anus!” (138). It’s coarse, it subverts the seriousness of such a moment, and the image of destruction and being remade as a sensitive anus is as good an example of grotesque humour as there ever will be. According to Bakhtin, “carnival laughter is the laughter of all the people. Second, it is universal in scope; it is directed at all and everyone, including the carnival participants. . . . Third, this laughter is ambivalent: it is gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding” (12). Sutherland’s quip belittles the gun man, who isn’t taken seriously in the slightest, and the movie theatre erupts into laughter. But as much as Sutherland’s joke is directed at the incensed gunman, it’s also directed at himself. What Bakhtin believed was important about the people’s festive laughter was that it differed from modern satire, which “places [the satirist] above the object of his mockery.” Sullivan’s jibe has a similarity to “the people’s ambivalent laughter” and is at the expense of himself, the gunman and the frightened people around him. But it brings all of them together through laughter for, as Bakhtin says, “he who is laughing also belongs to [the laughter]” (12). Laughter was one way in which degradation could manifest itself, but Bakhtin also places emphasis on the importance of the body and its grotesque functions and imagery. In everyday medieval life, bodies were viewed in terms of the labour they could produce, or else ecclesiastical life stressed a greater significance on the state of a person’s soul. In carnival imagery, however, bodies were important, because they presented a common uniting factor.

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Everyone was in possession of one and everyone used theirs for the same purpose: consuming, defecating and performing sexual acts. This idea was the foundation for what Rabelais termed ‘the bodily principle,’ where all that was spiritual or noble was reduced to the material level. As a result, during carnival periods what were commonly thought of as baser acts were not seen as disgusting or shameful. They embodied a “coming down to earth” and to degrade the body in this manner, according to Bakhtin, was “to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring forth something more and better” (21). They allowed the social system to renew and regenerate, whereas we tend to associate such concepts with continuation and futurity through the nuclear family unit, child bearing and rearing. In medieval life, although the body was a common factor, it was transient. Individual bodies were constantly born, lived and died. But the persons who made up a community, would continually grow and renew themselves by coming together during carnival. This is reflected in Dancer: bodies engage in sex, dancing and are degraded as the ‘people’ in the carnival site of gay scene life. At the end of the novel, Malone and Sutherland observe the younger men coming to Fire Island for the first time and we see that the queer body does not reproduce in the traditional sense, but by bodies joining, doing and living. In this sense, queer existence becomes its own reproduction. Medieval carnivalesque is very much contextualized by its historicity, however, and my comparison is only meant as a framework to highlight how Dancer shares the same subversive power of celebration. Other than historical context, another important distinction is the time and space that medieval culture gave to high and low culture. Bakhtin acknowledges that, as much as the carnival celebration inherent to feast days disrupted the regulations of everyday feudal life and officialdom, they existed parallel but equal to one another. Eventually low culture and the carnival were pushed to the margins of society, as the Middle Ages ebbed and the Renaissance period followed. Queer culture in the twentieth century, however, was never on an equal level with the heteronormative status quo, because queer people have always had to exist on the margins. Instead, both queer culture and existence have always been defined in opposition instead of parallel to heterosexual existence, which is considered by society to be the default, normal state of being. The idea of heterosexual life as the ‘everyday,’ or to use the framework of the carnivalesque, the life of officialdom and normalcy, is demonstrated throughout Dancer. After the epistolary section, the narrator introduces Malone in the framed novel while he is passing through the suburban hamlet of Sayville in New York. It is a place of large houses,

16 perfect lawns and perfect families, “the sort of scene Malone turned sentimental over” (24). In the analeptic flashback to Malone’s past in chapter three, he is shown as having lived a very different life prior to realising he was a homosexual and having “done all those things a young man was supposed to do” (58). These are explained as coming from a good family, exceling in his studies and work, and managing to be naturally handsome and effortlessly popular, all of which, the narrator remarks, is so important to Americans. The only problem is he’s unable to proceed in a successful adult life without going through certain rites of passage that are invariably heterosexual. A friend of Malone’s remarks that “he thought everyone should be married before the time they’re thirty” (68) and later in the novel he’s also asked by a young female relative “When are you going to get married?” and “Why don’t you have a car?” (102) These, the narrator explains, are “the two things in her five-year-old mind that constituted adulthood in America” (102). Malone continues to reflect on how he wishes he could leave gay life behind him and settle down in the suburbs, wishing he could get a job “in a little town with big front lawns” and “to live in a big white house and sit on my porch and see fireflies blinking in the evening, and smell burning leaves in the fall, and see my children play on the yard” (142). Sutherland, however, is quick to point out that children require a womb and there’s the problem with the ten-year gap in Malone’s resume. Queerness, then, was and has often been conceived of as the opposite of a heteronormative life. Alongside Malone, various characters share the sentiment that a heterosexual life is better. John Shaeffer goes so far as to remark that, “I don’t think two men can love each other…in that way. It will always be a sterile union, it will always be associated with guilt’ (169). But that’s only the perspective of certain characters and it’s never quite believable. Despite John Schaeffer’s melancholy, he still hopes that he can find a deep and abiding love with Malone. Ironically, even though this could lead to some kind of semblance of a quiet, stable life for Malone, he rejects the offer. This is one of two such offers he receives in the novel. The other was his first relationship when he came to New York, with Frankie, who had a vision of the two of them living together and co-raising his son. Unsatisfied, Malone pursued sex with other men, before Frankie threw him out and he pursued the hedonism of gay scene life himself. Rather than believing that heterosexual life is actually better, the characters are shown as struggling with the idea that it’s what’s expected of them. In contrast to the negativity of various characters in comparing gay life to heterosexual life, the novel writer in the epistolary section merely toys with the notion of “a house in the

17 suburbs, 2.6 kids, and a station wagon” (17). When he describes himself as “completely, hopelessly gay!” (17), it’s with a sense of comic self-deprivation or a tacit acknowledgment that life would be a little easier, as opposed to any real melancholy. A monogamous, heterosexual life of marriage and children is never actually posited at any point in the novel as the way to live life. If readers find themselves taking those moments of reverie too seriously, they need only look as far as the narrator character in the bracketed novel subverting this idea, where he describes being a gay man as wonderful, as freeing, in spite of the obstacles that they face. This joy is described in one fantastic moment, when the omniscient narrator breaks from following Malone and declares: What queens we were! With piercing shrieks we met each other on the sidewalk, the piercing shriek that sometimes, walking down a perfectly deserted block of lower Broadway, rose from my throat to the sky because I had just seen one of God’s angels, some languorous, soft-eyed face lounging in a doorway, or when I was on my way to dance, so happy and alive you could only scream. (114) It’s an important moment, because although sexual attraction and sex between men is a significant part of gay male life in the novel, especially in Malone’s journey, there’s also an emphasis on meeting and recognizing other gay men. Love between gay men exists in many forms. For Malone, sex is synonymous with love, which is why he keeps hooking up with men, despite his desire for a quieter life. Love exists between lovers, in non-monogamous endeavors and close, non-sexual friendships, like Malone and Sutherland. It also exists in the distant friendships between characters who only see one another while dancing or as part of the scene, such as the dancers observing Malone. Even though the novel often places both main and background characters in absurd or dramatically exaggerated scenarios, they also care for one another during fights with lovers or trips to the emergency room. The dramatic effect may be trivialized for comedy’s sake, but the sincerity is real. That in itself is remarkable, because even though men loving one another is the reason we have homoromantic and gay narratives, it has, as I’ve mentioned often, only been explored in subtext. Paradoxically, gay narratives have been far more focused on gay death than gay love. This love, this joie de vivre, exists in strange places: parks and brownstone stairways, in clubs and on Fire Island, even in the men’s toilets at Grand Central Station at rush hour. This is similar to Judith/Jack Halberstam’s theory of queer temporality, where “queer uses of time and space develop, at least in part, in opposition to the institution of family,

18 heterosexuality, and reproduction” (1). Despite times where the characters feel guilt for not living a heterosexual life, or know it’s what’s expected of them, they live their lives as gay men or pursue love with other men anyway. And while they don’t celebrate gay life, necessarily, the narrator character does. The novel, then, is similarly concerned with how queer life develops outside the scope of heteronormative life patterns, and how “they develop according to other logics of location, movement and identification” (Halberstam, 1). Much like Halberstam, Edelman’s theory of queer negativity has a similar conception of queer existence as a disruption in opposition to heterosexuality. But since queerness naturally opposes heteronormative life patterns, Edelman theorizes that it acts as its own death drive since it is unconcerned with reproduction and futurity through the nuclear family and child rearing. Celebration as a subversive force has a different, if complimentary, relation to temporality. It manages to be both a disruption and a parallel existence to the normative. And this, I believe, is what queer celebration does as a subversive force in Dancer’s narrative: it expands the horizon of the gay narrative in literary fiction. It presents both the heteronormative narrative, the life that Malone leaves behind, and the negativity of the ‘doomed queen’ narrative, that the epistolary letter writer references, and disturbs both of them through its use of humour and spectacle, coarse language and grotesque imagery. Through these methods, the letter writers in the epistolary exchange and the occasionally pluralized narrator of the bracketed novel create a new narrative reality. We have one letter respondent who has retired from scene life to live quietly in the rural Deep South, who mentions someone we can presume is a boyfriend, or long-term partner. He’s forged an existence as a gay man outside of scene life, where he can live openly, or for the main part undisturbed. While he’s tired of scene life, but he does not demean it. Retirement is a sentiment echoed in the framed narrative, albeit by minor characters. Archer, a writer who Malone and Sutherland know in passing, mentions that at one point he was a recluse due to being “burned out” (167). But he’s also able to step back into scene life, instead of wholly committing to it like Malone, hinting that a queer everyday has begun to exist far more openly. These parallel ‘realities,’ were soon disrupted. The eighties saw the onslaught of the AIDS epidemic, which gave rise to a narrative wielded by conservative politicians and mainstream media: that a plague had come about because of and to punish gay male promiscuity. Queer communities responded by organizing amongst themselves and lobbying

19 politicians and policy makers. There was also a great artistic response from gay men who were individually affected by the disease or had lost or were on the verge of losing their partners, friends and community. Holleran’s last novel, Grief, was published twenty-six years after Dancer and after a long break in his writing career. Since it does not engage with the AIDS epidemic during its peak years, but the effect AIDS has had on gay community and culture after the 80s and 90s, I believe it is more accurately described as a post-AIDS novel. The novel itself consists of one singular narrative, which revolves around an unnamed protagonist narrator who has moved to Washington D.C. for a temporary teaching position after the death of his mother, who he has looked after for many years. Both his landlord and his friend, Frank, implore him to move on in life. Instead he spends his time alone, perusing the many monuments and museums and developing a small obsession with Mary Todd Lincoln. Her inability to move on from her husband’s death mirrors his own inability to move past his mother’s death and the fact that he never came out to her. Instead, he attempts to integrate himself into his landlord’s life, before Frank points out he is attempting to displace his need to be needed. Ultimately, the narrator is unsuccessful and he parts ways both with his landlord and the city, before returning to the house left to him by his parents and an unknown future. While Grief is still occupied with many of the same themes that were central to Dancer, such as the contemporary reality of gay men’s lives and the search for love, studying the two novels reveals the remarkable changes in gay culture. Gay life is much more public in Grief than it ever was in Dancer, but that ‘publicity’ has come about from a sense of devastating loss. The voyage of sexual discovery that Malone embarks upon is completely erased and while that can partly be attributed to older and wiser characters, who know they desire intimacy and company, we also know from AIDS literature contemporary to the epidemic, such as David B. Feinberg’s Eighty-Sixed, that there was a re-evaluation of attitudes towards sex in the gay community. Along with the cultural change regarding sexual proclivity, any celebration we found in Dancer is well and truly gone: the parties and night culture, the doomed queens, an entire generation of gay men has vanished and only a sense of solemnity and raw tragedy with very little trace of camp (in)sensibility remains. There are no longer multiple parallel contemporary queer existences, because they have come so close to the eradication of all queer existence. The narrative is still engaged with questions regarding queer time and possibilities for both the present and the future, but it is much bleaker in outlook.

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Gay life, insofar as it is presented in Grief and can be seen as a progression from Dancer, has become somewhat gentrified. Just as Dancer was self-aware of the ‘doomed queen’ narrative, this novel is self-aware of the shift in gay culture. One character summarizes it succinctly with the observation that “everyone here is so middle class, even the fags want to be married” (22). The trajectory of Malone’s life, where he travels from straight life and embraces a hedonistic pursuit of love in New York, now belongs to a different era, one before AIDS, and one that neither the narrator nor his friends wish to partake in both because of their age and because of the dangers they managed to survive. There is a complete lack of reference to sex work, fetishes, or camp sleaziness. There’s also a tension between this new gay, ostensibly white middle-class and the black community. At the beginning of the novel, the D.C. mayoral office is brought up via a newspaper article the narrator character busies himself with, where a white employee used the word ‘niggardly’ during a budget meeting, with the black community calling for him to be fired and the gay community calling for him to be re-hired. Later, when a black homeless man repeatedly comes to their front door trying to panhandle money with various excuses, he’s initially met with sympathy from the protagonist, then growing cynicism and refusal by the second time. Interestingly, this behavior is not so different from the exaggerations or schemes of gay (white) characters in Dancer with Sutherland having shoplifted, effectively pimped out Malone for a retirement fund, and other questionable activities to remain financially solvent. Meanwhile, the landlord is given to protest, “People like me, the ones who marched in all the civil rights marches in the sixties, have become discouraged… Most of us who were behind civil rights from the beginning have just about given up on the whole thing” (11). Dancer was far from engaged with equal rights or concerned with being polite, but there wasn’t any sense of mean spiritedness behind Sutherland’s broad descriptions of ethnic groups, humorously despairing and praising “Why are [blacks] the better dancers? […] They get away with things here that no white boy could in a million years. And why do they get to wear white hats? And all the outrageous clothes?” (48) and “Latins, my dear, are the only ones who take love seriously” (56). If anything, Holleran often seems to be making fun of white people with more favourable comparisons to other racial groups. Dancer’s narrative revealed that various people of all races, creeds and sexualities intermingled as part of the lower echelons of society. In Grief, gay men, or at least the middle-aged white gay characters in the novel, are removed from such poverty and the social stigma around gay men has lessened to some

21 degree. The protagonist is openly gay without repercussion from his employers and can teach a college course about AIDS. He has inherited his mother’s house and has the means to buy property in the future, but for now rents from a gay landlord in a neighborhood more affluent than New York’s Lower East Side. Later in the novel, he briefly meets a couple who have adopted a child together and his closest friend, Frank, is considering marrying his boyfriend. All of this is presented as either a real prospect for everyone, or on the verge of becoming real and the possibility of universal some day. Although the narrator’s landlord seems to be worried about lingering discrimination towards the gay community, with the narrator remarking he was “still so sensitive to denunciations of homosexuality” (46), and even though the road is still long towards equality, there is a sense that a great deal of ground has been gained in equal rights for gay men in the twenty-six years between novels. Or at the very least living life as an out homosexual is not the ruinous choice that it once was, with Sutherland once remarking to Malone “the only thing you could do at this point…would be to say you’ve been a prisoner of war in Red China” (Dancer 142), rather than out himself to his parents and try to resume a regular life. It cannot be ignored either, that this notion of equality for gay men closely resembles the heteronormative life patterns that queer existence has always been in opposition to. In the course of Grief these life patterns are presented not only as viable options, but also options that the narrator should consider pursuing instead of immersing himself further in his prolonged mourning. The new middle-class, more openly gay life serves more as a backdrop in Grief, however, and the bereavement of the protagonist narrator occupies the novel in the same way that celebration and hedonism occupied Dancer. The melancholic tone of the novel is derived from many sources, but the one that affects the narrator character more directly is his mother’s death. It is a subject that he is both trying to come to terms with, but cannot help picking at sub-consciously. At the airport in the opening of the novel and – as we find out later – one of the last places they had a happy outing as a family, he describes it as “that womb, that amniotic fluid, in which the traveler floats” (5). Similar eerie comparisons are used while describing much of Washington D.C, such as the city being called “a one company town or a cemetery.” The museums are likened to morgues and the television cameras and microphones, constantly present and covered outside the White House when not in use, are described as “a cluster of tombstones” (24). Life for the narrator is a half-existence between his job and his accommodation and traipsing around the memorials and museums of the city, to the point where it seems like limbo did not end at the airport, but is something he is

22 continuing to walk through. If we follow Halberstam’s idea that queer uses of time and space develop in opposition to the institution of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction” (1) and “queer subcultures produce alternative temporalities,” (3) we are left to wonder what happens when those subcultures are left decimated. Lewis Gannet, however, manages to capture the answer in his review of the novel: “the story of Grief seems not just . . . the loss of the narrator’s mother, or over the history of gay life over the last 20 years, but over the loss of intimacy.” Instead of establishing any sort of meaningful relation to the city, the protagonist narrator continues to wander around the memorials and museums that are a large part of the city scape. He has one friend in Frank, but otherwise, instead of connecting with other people, develops a hyper fixation with the life of Mary Lincoln after her husband’s death and Henry Adams and his wife. Running parallel to his own existence is that of his landlord, which teeters between seeming normal – he has his work, routines and habits, dog and interior decorating – and stranger details such as admitting “I always buy a ton of chicken parts and boil them all at once, so I can live on them for a month and always have something to eat” (13). The landlord also vents his frustrations while on a quest for companionship, but contrarily keeps his tenant at a distance. Even if they are not interested in one another sexually, there is no place either for the sudden, platonic intimacy gay men engaged in with one another in Dancer. There is an impregnable heaviness in this text compared to Dancer that is conveyed in the personal grief of the protagonist narrator, the end of gay subculture in the 1970s, and Washington DC’s portrayal as half-city, half never-ending mausoleum. Time is different within this novel: it manages to drag in the minutiae of its protagonist’s life and observations, but contracts when we consider it spans winter to spring. There is no mention of holidays, or months, no cycles of the year are observed. There is no break from mourning, from officialdom or the everyday. The novel begins by describing the habits of the landlord and the airport, sources of observation the narrator often comes back to without any pattern. There are no chapters to break up the narrative, only breaks in the text. When spring finally does come with the herald of crocuses, tulips and the promise of summer, it seems to touch everyone but the narrator. The landlord “seemed heartier, his laugh louder” (133) as the weather grows warmer. Frank intends to enjoy the summer months as best as he can, seeing as his doctor has told him his cancer has a forty percent chance of reoccurring. The narrator, however, returns back to his empty family home and drops to his knees to say a prayer for his parents. Unlike

23 the queer temporalities exhibited in Dancer, time and space in Grief also seem effectively dead, with Gannet referring to the city as a “necropolis.” As much as the novel deals with all kinds of grief – historic and present, something that spans sexualities – AIDS is not something that truly occupies the novel or the concerns of its characters. Instead it is more of a lingering specter. While the narrator left gay scene life behind to care for his mother, he finds himself struggling to readjust later as a middle-aged man, both to the loss of his family and the lack of gay community to return to. The landlord, on the other hand, is spoken of as having once been a fixture of gay night life in D.C., but has rejected it for fear of infection and is now “one of thousands of gay men who survive AIDS only to realize that they are completely alone and have nothing to live for” (50), having known 300 or more people who have died. Both the narrator character and the landlord feel left behind, having “survived something so many of our friends had not” (73). The narrator character notes that the “gay gym had since moved on” (37) and cruising in bars, public toilets or other places have been left to the wayside as a way of meeting men for sex, from the association and fear of infection. The two of them express their frustration later on discussing the rare, longing glances from other men, with the landlord venting, ““What were you supposed to do?” he said “Stop and turn around and say: “Are you in a hotel?” I don’t think so! Do you suppose anyone still does that anymore? As if the past never happened. As if everyone wasn’t dead!”” (56). The epidemic has left such a rapid cultural change, that the gay men who have survived it find themselves struggling to adapt. The protagonist also struggles to impart the effect of the AIDS crisis to the next generation. In his class, he notes: “I was sitting in a room once a week at a long table talking about something that for these students was simply a historical event” (74). The dialogue he has with one student, highlights the very real problem that people have in perceiving AIDS: “But then why were they so promiscuous?” “They thought they could get Love from sex!” “But sex gave them AIDS!” he said. “But they didn’t know that,” I said. “It was being spread when no one knew it existed. “But they should have known!” (77) Because they hadn’t lived through it, they are unable to understand that the present education around sexual health did not exist in the seventies or eighties and was slow to be disseminated. And while we discover the student had a brother who died of AIDS, the

24 dialogue belies a tell-tale attitude of morality and judgment that became de facto towards people who had no way of knowing the disaster that was about to befall them. Later, when the narrator comments “real catastrophes, horrible accidents, always do… They affect not only the person who is actually hurt, but those around them… There’s a ripple effect. Everyone around the victim is affected” (85), he may be referring to Mary Todd Lincoln, but there is a deeper sense that he is creating a parallel between the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and how it affected the public consciousness and how the AIDS death toll and media scrutiny affected the gay community. Lincoln by this point is a well memorialized figure in history – his clothes and personal effects now on display in museums, his monument a prominent tourist attraction in Washington D.C. – and AIDS too is becoming memorialized, taught in college courses and something the narrator character is unsure he is being ironic about when he describes it as ‘over.’ If we return to the assessment that Dancer is about the emergence of an open, everyday existence for gay men, then Grief portrays a discontentment about this everyday, and how it has been shaped by the effect that AIDS has had on gay culture and community. The narrator character is clinging to his grief and ignoring the advice of his friends, rather than moving on to a life filled with bought houses and personal advertisements in newspapers for someone to share it all with. In a sense, the narrator character’s grief embodies the ‘death drive’ that Edelman theorizes. He is resistant to follow what has now become expected of gay men: a life of houses and relationships and children and success and a disavowment of the past, even though the past was by no means perfect. That being said, he is not completely reliable as a narrative source in the sense that he is constantly trying to mirror his own feelings in the circumstance of others, to the point where he doesn’t care if that misery exists or if it as deeply felt as his own. Whether fervently watching the comings and goings of his landlord or the landlord’s dog and anticipating their emotional states, he eventually realizes that both of them – if not leading perfect lives, if not completely happy – are able both to accept and find their own amusement in life. At the beginning of the novel, there is speculation that the landlord “like many gay men of a certain age [was] celibate – because of AIDS, or an inability to attract the partners they wanted, or simply diminishing interest” (47) and speculating with Frank that many gay men who survived AIDS simply do not know what to do with themselves, or what to live for. But by the end of the novel – despite complaining on everyone’s part about how difficult it is to establish a relationship and trying group meetings and newspaper personals – the landlord is

25 caught naked crossing the landing, another time a stranger is waiting for him downstairs. The dog, too, chooses to obey its owner and plod about its indoor existence, despite the narrator character’s speculations and originally describing its bark as “something so full of longing and frustrated desire” (53). It is Frank who reveals directly that “I think the landlord’s dog is you.” It would appear that the protagonist is trying to create the three of them – himself, landlord, and dog – as an ersatz family unit, even at one point reflecting that the three of them were like a family, while the landlord and even the dog regarded him as a transient figure in their lives. Frank is the one who comments on the narrator character’s fixation on the memoirs of Mary Todd Lincoln. According to Frank, the main character is obsessing because “One, you’re grieving and that’s, from what you tell me, what she apparently did with the rest of her life after the White House. Two, you get to feel sorry for someone who was worse off than you – which is the use we eventually put most of our public figures to. And three – she reminds you of your mother!” (138). Mary Lincoln cuts a camp figure to everyone else and only the narrator character is unable to see it. The landlord remarks, “What a scene in a movie that would make! . . . Why has no one written an opera on this woman?” (84); and later, “Have you ever…read such an insane mixture of self-pity, melodrama, camp and real grief?” (147). Even so, the narrator character keeps attempting to tie a deeper meaning to it all. The protagonist may be wallowing – deservedly, it could be argued – but on closer inspection, there are enough narrative foils in place that undermine part of his seriousness. Despite this tongue-in-cheek approach and the identification of Mary Todd Lincoln as a camp figure, the excessive grief depicted in the novel does not provoke laughter in the same manner as the degrading humour in Dancer. There are no doomed queens; they have vanished and their absence is palpable. There is now no break, no escape to low culture and folk humour, no carnivalesque or queer carnivalesque. Neither form of carnivalesque, it should be noted, has lasted. According to Bakhtin, “during the domination of the classical canon in all the areas of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the grotesque relation to the culture of folk humor was excluded from great literature; it descended to the low comic level.” He continues: during this period (actually starting in the seventeenth century) we observe a process of gradual narrowing down of the ritual, spectacle, and carnival forms of folk culture, which become small and trivial. On the one hand the state encroached upon festive life and turned it into a parade; on the other hand

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these festivities were brought into the home and became part of the family’s private life. The privileges which were formerly allowed the marketplace were more and more restricted. (33) But while the medieval carnivalesque was something that gradually declined as feudal rule and church dominance began to evolve into statehood throughout Europe, the decline of queer carnivalesque was perhaps swifter, because queer subculture has seldom been allowed to exist openly. The decriminalization of homosexuality in certain American states did not change social attitudes. When AIDS was first reported it was largely ignored, because it was mostly affecting the homosexual male population. Once it grew to epidemic proportions, it became another excuse for bigotry towards the LGBT community from conservative media and politicians. This presented itself in a lack of involvement when it came to healthcare and research for a cure, the lack of promotion in accurate education, and the further stigmatization of gay sexuality. The celebration of gay life in Dancer could be considered excessive by many and there’s a reason why several of the characters felt ‘burnt out.’ Even gay writers and critics have found fault with it, as I will address towards the end of this chapter. I can’t help but wonder, if this criticism is influenced by the historical vantage point the critics had after the AIDS crisis and the taboos that arose concerning the sexual practices of gay men. There’s always been moral judgment of homosexuality, but AIDS provided a real consequence and not conjecture about fire and brimstone. However, AIDS narratives, or post-AIDS narratives like Grief that focus on the aftermath of the epidemic, reflect something that was experienced by the gay community and which affected attitudes of acceptance and intolerance and was the driving force behind so many strides in gay civil rights. It has become a narrative in gay literary fiction, because it has deeply affected the lives of gay men and the history of the LGBTQ community. This is in contrast to the tragic outcomes in homoromantic fiction before the mid-twentieth century, which were coerced by publishers and society’s contemporary attitude towards homosexuality. As such, Holleran’s novel does not try to tell anyone how to respond to that tragedy. The grief and bleak pessimism of the narrator character in Grief is not presented as a solution to life, just as Malone’s hedonistic existence and disappearance in Dancer was not some sort of recommendation. Just as the landlord’s life runs parallel to the narrator character, so does his friend Frank’s.

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Frank is the character who has the most joie de vivre of the three, the one who displays the most camp humour and a personality that is closest to the characters in Dancer such as Sutherland. He is also the strongest advocate for moving on in the novel, despite suffering the most – he has cared for and buried a lover, been diagnosed with cancer and had treatment, watched his mother die, only to have his cancer return once more and now knows that he is dying. But despite the sadness in Frank’s circumstances, he still proclaims “I’m counting every chit I get! I want it all,” (21), determined to live as full a life as possible in the time he has left. He embodies the idea of queer time that Halberstam comments “emerges most spectacularly, at the end of the twentieth century, from within those gay communities whose horizons of possibility have been severely diminished by the AIDS epidemic” (2). Concepts of longevity and futurity are less important than the amount of living one does in the time left. Neither does that life hinge on markers of success or culture; Frank remains elusive about accepting his boyfriend’s marriage proposal and would rather see an action film than attend a chamber orchestra concert. He also goes so far as to imitate his mother’s voice, that of an old lady needing to apply cream when she’s sick, conjuring wicked camp imagery, rather than consider some subjects too sacred for humor. For him, joy and humour are a matter of survival, as opposed to clinging to grief. That is how we know that, when he encourages the narrator character to settle down and get married, it is not necessarily serious – simply that he must do something with his life, that “we all need a little drink of water. A little bit of love!” (36). Or as Halberstam states, “queer time even as it emerges from the AIDS crisis, is not only about compression and annihilation; it is also about the potentiality of a life unscripted” (2). Life – for Frank, for the temporalities created by a world with AIDS – is what you make of it. The ending of Grief does not try to offer some positive message that this too will pass, or get better, or even to suggest that things will remain terrible. The narrator character returns to his mother’s house and we do not learn whether he sells it to buy his own property in Washington D.C. after all, or if he continues on with life in Florida as it had been prior to his sojourn in Washington. An end – other than to the text – is not signaled, and so life presumably continues. It is not so different from the ending of Dancer, where the writer remarks to his friend that, “We don’t have to do anything with our lives. As long as you are alive, there’s an end to it” (250). What has changed is the narrative forces that shape gay literature. Gay literature had only just broken away from the shadow of the tragic narrative around the time of the Stonewall riots, only to have to understandably turn back to it in the 1980s. AIDS fiction

28 takes up a generous section of what could be considered the post-Stonewall canon of gay literary fiction and unsurprisingly there is no such thing as a celebratory AIDS novel, although there are some comedic examples. If AIDS is not the central subject of a novel, such as the second half of Feinberg’s Eighty-Sixed, then it some sort of presence, whether it is the lovers of Nick Guest either contracting HIV or dying of AIDS in Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, or the secondary character Richard in The Hours, who commits suicide in the late stages of AIDS. While we must consider that his technique as an author has developed with his life and writing experience, the shift in Holleran’s subject matter from celebration to mourning and the way those different narratives are received, what they are criticized or praised for, reveals a critical bias in favour of tragedy in gay literary fiction. In The Gay Canon, Robert Drake describes Dancer as disingenuous and that “the characters wallow in pretensions” and that “if written as a satire then it is indeed a good book, a pastiche of ridiculously hollow ambitions . . . yet it creates such a frustration in the reader that he may as well hurl the book across the room” (406). He further condemns it with the words: “Perhaps the novel is a tribute to when superficiality ruled over substance and gay men were so preoccupied with worthless pursuits that their lives were meaningless and that “it should be kept around to serve as a reminder of what happens when we praise books because of their timely politics instead of their timeless, transcendent literary worth (406). Drake’s criticism seems particularly harsh, but he is not alone. David Leavitt writes that “the only choices for gay men were to either demonstrate ‘chilly perfection. Inaccessibility. Disinterest’ – or ‘suffer from these unpleasant qualities’” (xvii). Having read it as a young gay man, and noting that it is often the first gay book most young American gay men read, at the time Leavitt had “read it as premising a gay world in which ‘only the most exceptionally beautiful gay men were entitled to erotic fulfillment’” (xviii). In contrast, Caryn James describes Grief as “slender, elegant,” instead of remarking that it is merely a novella, and writes that the central character here is a gay man looking for love, and he has finally found it: he is in love with his own grief. Oddly, though, this book seems richer if you have the luck to approach it, as I did, without having read those earlier books first. Only then does the narrator . . . reach beyond his own mourning and speak movingly about universal emotions.

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Apparently, hedonistic sex while pursuing love is neither universal nor moving enough. James later admits that “Holleran’s earlier novels can seem so determined to speak for their disenfranchised gay characters that the works become inaccessible to everyone else.” Perhaps it would be simpler to say that it’s easier for readers to make a connection over losing a loved one, as opposed to being true to one’s self at the cost of being outcast from society, or participating in a lifestyle that includes a lot of drugs, sex and illegal activity. Despite Dancer’s brief respite of celebration, we are left with an overwhelming amount of gay literary fiction with a tragic outcome. If the dominant queer narrative is already negative, regardless of whether it came about through the cathartic quality of AIDS fiction, we are left to wonder whether more negativity goes against the status quo or in fact enforces it. The temptation with tragic narrative outcomes – as I will touch on in chapter three – is to regard them as emulating Edelman’s theories on queer negativity, simply because there’s a degree of queerness and negativity involved. This understanding ignores how, at the heart of Edelman’s concept of queer negativity, the focus was on the heteronormative status quo and how it viewed queerness as a threat to its continuity.

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2 “What a wonderful world”: Boy Meets Boy's utopic vision, subversion, and the rejuvenation of gay young adult literature

It’s interesting to note that carnival, low humour and grotesque aesthetics fell out of favour in society and literature, much like how celebration and hedonism in tandem with camp humour have fallen out of favour in gay literary fiction, albeit the causes are very different. Bakhtin noted that as the state encroached more on festive life, where it shifted from public to private sphere, while the carnival lost its tie to the people but was preserved in literature. Among these literary works, he mentions through the commedia dell’arte, Molière’s comedies and the works of Voltaire, Diderot and Swift. The grotesque, however, was excluded from the classical canon although there was a resurgence of sorts in the early nineteenth century Romantic and gothic grotesque. Bakhtin considered this a reaction against the self-importance of the Enlightenment with its “cold rationalism” and “official, formalistic, and logical authoritarianism” (37). My point in recounting this is that the suppression of celebration both in folk culture and the ways in which folk culture’s relation to literature means it eventually finds a way to re-emerge. This, I believe, has occurred in gay literary fiction, too. While the majority of gay fiction in the 1980s focused on AIDS and contemporary gay fiction produced after the peak years of the epidemic have still been concerned with its effects on gay life, a subcategory of gay fiction began to flourish parallel to its more established counterpart. Although they were not imbued with the hedonistic aesthetic, I have demonstrated was very similar to the carnivalesque, this subcategory eventually began to produce celebratory works. I am talking, of course, about young adult gay fiction and in the forthcoming chapter, I will discuss the very first of these works: Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan. Alongside my comparison with the carnivalesque in the first chapter, I also focused on how Dancer engaged with a setting contemporary to when it was written and how its queer celebration existed alongside parallel realities of heteronormative mainstream society and an emerging queer every day existence. Boy Meets Boy, however, uses a setting that is not quite contemporary, but could be, to envision a celebratory narrative. This is reminiscent of what José Esteban Muñoz would describe six years later as the then and there in Cruising Utopia. Muñoz’ theorized queerness as an ideal and structured “mode of desire” (1), that allows us to

31 see beyond the present to glimpse and conceive of different futures from our own points in time. In a much more simplistic fashion, Levithan describes the intent behind his debut on the “About” page of his website as I basically set out to write the book that I dreamed of getting as an editor – a book about gay teens that doesn’t conform to the old norms about gay teens in literature [i.e. it has to be about a gay uncle, or a teen who gets beaten up for being gay, or about outcasts who come out and find they’re still outcasts, albeit outcasts with their outcastedness in common] I’m often asked if the book is a work of fantasy or a work of reality, and the answer is right down the middle – it’s about where we’re going, and where we should be. (italics mine) Although her article pre-empts Muñoz’ book by a year, Amy S. Pattee hits upon the same word for Boy Meets Boy, one that describes a work that re-imagines a future close at hand and which celebrates queerness: ‘utopic.’ The novel itself is reminiscent of the romance in a Shakespearean comedy with the amount of twists and turns it takes. It follows the extradiegetic homodiegetic narrator Paul, a gay sixteen-year-old who lives in an incredibly queer-accepting small town in New Jersey. On a night out trying to cheer up Tony, a friend with homophobic parents who lives in a much less accepting neighbouring town, he meets Noah and they eventually start to date. As their relationship progresses, his ex-boyfriend Kyle attempts to reconnect with him and apologize for spreading the rumour that Paul had ‘tricked’ him into being gay once they had split up. He comes to Paul because he feels alone and depressed, a favourite aunt having died recently, and he has no one else he feels he can talk to in regards to feeling confused about his sexuality. Paul is cautious but understanding and the two become friends, only it begins to affect Paul’s relationship with Noah when Paul and Kyle’s reunion is spread around school. This confuses Noah, who at first believes that Paul is interested in pursuing a romance with Tony, which Paul reassures him as a non-issue, but becomes insecure on finding out Paul is maintaining a friendship with his ex-boyfriend. They split up and his friend group fractures on account of these tensions and because his best friend, Joni, has submerged herself in a relationship with her new boyfriend to the exclusion of all others. After taking time to think, Paul realises what he has to do. He lets Kyle down when it becomes clear Kyle still has feelings towards him. He sets about apologising to Noah through creating homemade gifts and giving him time. However, the continuation of their relationship depends on Noah understanding that Paul will continue to support both Tony and Kyle as they respectively deal with family and figure out

32 their sexual identity. Joni, too, is confronted on account of her behaviour. The novel ends when, on the way to the school dance, they take a detour and create their own pre-dance party in a clearing. It is, as it sounds, an overwhelmingly positive novel when compared with the overabundant tragic narratives of not only gay literary fiction, but gay young adult fiction. It is no surprise that its positivity is one of the first things critics remark upon, either to rail against how unrealistic such a town would be in the time contemporary to the novel, or to concede that Levithan is making a point by suspending the negative elements which might make the storyline impossible. The temptation both when it was first published in 2003 and now, I feel, is to be almost dismissive of its optimism. Of course, we think as adults fifteen years later, gay fiction written with a teenage audience in mind should perhaps avoid tragic outcomes both for ethical and pedagogical reasons. Much like in Matz discussion of the “It Gets Better” narrative, the present consensus is that we don’t want queer youth to despair and think their queerness is some kind of failing. Then we summarily dismiss the literary importance and the cultural impact that young adult fiction has, precisely because of its audience. This, I believe, is wrong and to demonstrate as much, I must deviate from my analysis of the novel and give a capsule history of sorts of gay narratives in young adult literature. Before the early twenty-first century, gay young adult fiction followed tragic narrative patterns in much the same way as gay fiction pre-Stonewall. Gay literary fiction that referenced homosexuality, sexual acts or unnamed love between men, as I have mentioned, was more often than not tragic and established a narrative tradition before the Stonewall riots. The Stonewall riots, as I have explained, were not the first act of protest in gay rights, but became the catalyst for change. It was because of this cultural zeitgeist that gay literary fiction could respond with depictions and themes centred around celebration of gay identity. Similarly, it is no coincidence in June 1969, the same month as the Stonewall riots, that the first young adult novel to reference homosexuality was published. I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip was written by John Donovan, himself a gay man and member of the Children’s Book Council, a non-profit trade association which promoted children’s books and reading. Unfortunately, the novel did not receive much of a fanfare: it was mentioned in passing in anthologies of children’s literature, but was largely re-discovered in the early twenty-first century and reprinted in 2010. A belated, positive reception of gay literature is not unusual: Patricia Highwater’s The Price of Salt, which I have referred to before, was

33 published in 1953 and republished in 1969, before falling out of print until the 1980s with a revival of lesbian literary fiction. Other than gaining attention when it was published as the first work of gay young adult fiction, I’ll Get There made more of a critical impression in the gay young adult fiction of the 1990s and post-millennial wave of gay young adult literature than it did in the year it was published. However, the fact that it was published at all and the dual significance of the month it was published reflects a relaxation towards the inclusion of homosexual subject in literature. Something that may have contributed to its lack of success or even notoriety is the fact that its homosexual content is often absented in favour of ellipses, whereas its homophobic violence was described in full. The characters engaging in such action do not die, but the main character suspects his dog has been killed as a punishment from God for his behaviour. His mother reacts with homophobia and religious damnation, while his absentee father chimes in that such behaviour is common among adolescent boys. Even then “the shame outweighs the assurance,” which Roberta Seelinger Trites reflects is a sentiment that holds true for the few young adult novels with homosexual themes without tragedy in the following decades (146). In this respect, gay young adult literature follows similar tragic narrative patterns as pre- Stonewall and later post-Stonewall gay literary fiction for the remainder of the twentieth century. While the existence of gay young adult fiction is a reflection of the changing attitudes towards homosexuality, they were still subject to the same unwritten publishing standards as pre-Stonewall gay and homoromantic literature of the nineteenth century. There was to be no mention of sex, especially give the age of the intended readership and the “Think of the Children” cry of moral outrage levied against children coming into contact with homosexuals, or content that referenced homosexuality. Celebration of gay identity was out of the question. It bears note, that the majority of titles Kirk Fuoss discusses in his critical assessment of gay young adult before the twenty-first century were written by (presumably straight) women, which is a writing and publishing trend that has continued into the twenty-first century. It is a contrast to pre-Stonewall gay literature, or homoromantic literature in the nineteenth century, which tended to be written by men who conducted romantic and sexual affairs with other men or else it is a detail left unspecified. As Fuoss reflects, “If the past twenty years have led to an increase in the number of young adult texts that include homosexual ‘ingredients,’ this increase is not as much a cause for optimism as one might initially have imagined,” because “it’s one thing to permit talk about homosexuality, it is quite another to permit a homosexual

34 to talk” (165). Homosexuality could only be a source of negativity, if not outright tragedy, in young adult fiction. Of course, that is not to say that anyone who is not a gay man cannot write realistic or believable gay young adult or literary fiction, but it does mean they more often than not lack certain insights that can only be gained through interacting with or heavily researching queer subcultures. This lack of understanding or empathy reveals itself in a very significant absence: gay young adult fiction published in the 1980s and 1990s did not reference gay communities or the AIDS epidemic at all, not even to castigate homosexuality, as it almost always did. The subject of AIDS, in fact, was not to be found in gay young adult literature until 2001. Considering young adult fiction was expected to perform an educational role while also refusing to condone homosexuality, one would think the mention of a plague would be incredibly effective. I believe, however, that fundamental to the lessons that gay young adult fiction could impart was the need to keep youth in a completely separate sphere from the context of gay men and the gay community. There are, after all, long held homophobic assumptions still present today that homosexuality can be learned, or that gay youth are somehow corrupted. Sexual identity, especially then, was not considered some intrinsic part of who gay teenagers were. Young adult fiction acknowledged that boys sometimes desired one another, but it was not to be condoned, nor could such fiction be sexual or show long- lasting love. All of this began to change between 2001 and 2003, with first instalment of The Rainbow Boys trilogy by Alex Sánchez, which explored the contemporary issues gay teens face. They follow the coming-out narrative along with the inevitable themes of homophobia and acceptance in terms of family, school and the beginnings of planning out adult life. Then, two years later, came Boy Meets Boy and, in the same year, five young adult lesbian and gay novels were published by mainstream publishing houses. This is a significant number, perhaps even the sum of what might have been published in previous decades published in one year. However, unlike Dancer, there was no clear hallmark moment like the Stonewall riot, there are no definitive answers what prompted this sudden turnabout. Mainstream heteronormative society is seen as simply becoming more tolerant around the turn of the millennium, as though homophobia were a centuries long case of the flu it had finally decided to start shaking off. What I believe remains consistently ignored is the dissent taking place before the Stonewall riots and the greater organized activism that took place in the 1980s and 1990s by

35 the queer community. The demand for better treatment, education and prevention of AIDS, and the legal rights of gay people by the queer community was what led to the beginnings of tolerance in the early twenty-first century. In 1995, The New York Times reported that AIDS has become the leading cause of death among all Americans ages 25 to 44 (Thirty Years of AIDS). It was a tolerance that came at the cost of thousands upon thousands of lives and the emotional toll of the survivors, which we have previously seen reflected in Grief. As the older generation of gay men died, the generation of gay men coming-of-age in the nineties by this point knew the risks of HIV transmission, which diminished the rates of infection. Unfortunately, this new generation of young gay men had inherited the homophobic narrative spun by politicians and the media demonizing the gay community. There were several highly publicized murders of LGBT youths in the 1990s: for example, Matthew Shepard, and Brandon Teena, a transgender man. They did not exist in a cultural vacuum. “Think of the children!”—a narrative once used by conservative politicians and moral majority to keep queer people and culture and children separate—was now reflected back on itself: what about queer children? As Lee Edelman remarks with scorn in No Future, Matthew Shepard’s brutal murder could not be reported as the murder of a gay man. Instead the focus lay on his grieving mother who had told the hospital spokesman to “go home and give your kids a hug and don’t let a day go by without telling them you love them,” because “the proper mourners” were defined as “those who had children to go home to and hug” (116). Shepard’s death was only palatable when mirrored through heteronormative culture’s concerns with family, reproduction and futurity, because his life as a gay man was, paradoxically, considered a threat to that very same heteronormative family and social order. But the perception of queer youth as children, or someone’s child, rather than sexual perverts with no attachment to the heterosexual order began to alter the narrative. There was, after all, very little queer community left that could be accused of being a corruptive force. This gave rise to the idea that queer children were not made; they were born this way. Meanwhile, young adult fiction was undergoing its own cultural shift. The Harry Potter series had become so successful that The New York Times created its own list dedicated towards bestselling children’s fiction in 2000. Suddenly, there was an unprecedented demand for children and young adult fiction and publishers were interested in finding what might be the next multi-million best seller. But the Harry Potter series was responsible for much more. It created a global pop cultural frame of reference for a generation who were able to contact one another much more easily thanks to the internet. It also provided

36 an already built world and a cast of characters for queer teenagers to project their romantic longings onto through writing fanfiction. In his examination of queer theory’s analysis of children’s literature and the emergence of gay young adult literature post-Stonewall, Kenneth Kidd surmises that “online fanfiction may be the queerest children’s literature of all,” since slash fanfiction – re-imagined same sex relationships between heterosexual characters – was often highly eroticized and written by teenagers. In an interview following his being given the Margaret A. Edward Award, Levithan notes the concern behind the sudden post-millennial spate of LGBTQIA young adult fiction that “they wouldn’t sell or there would be protest or that kids would be too afraid to pick them up. And then, collectively, the books proved them completely wrong; there was a huge audience for them.” Not just among gay teenagers, Levithan notes, but straight teenagers who were simply interested in reading a broader range of stories. The children, in other words, were tired about what was being thought about them. Luckily, the literary world was beginning to catch on. With this in mind, we come to realise that contemporary gay literary fiction, regardless of its intended audience, is dependent on and a response to contemporary attitudes of tolerance and discrimination. If it had not been for the efforts of the Mattachine Society and the Stonewall riots which led to the decriminalization of homosexuality in New York, then the formation and success of an openly gay writer’s group like the Violet Quill would not have been possible. Nor the celebration in Dancer from the Dance. Likewise, if it had not been for the decades fought for queer rights and dissatisfied, newly emerging generation of queer youth, Boy Meets Boy might never have existed, or exist as joyfully. In Cruising Utopia, Muñoz first described how an expression of queer utopianism found within “a historically specific nexus of cultural production before, around and slightly after the Stonewall rebellion of 1969” (3). I believe this is similar for the queer cultural climate at the turn of the millennium and the production of gay young adult literature. As a result, Boy Meets Boy is significant not only as a work of gay young adult fiction, but gay fiction. It may not be the first celebratory narrative in gay literature, but like Dancer, its depiction of that celebration is unique both in the use of its setting, its references to queer culture, its focus on queer friendships and how gay characters are depicted in loving relationships. Like Dancer in the previous chapter, I will proceed by demonstrating the ways in which the celebration in Boy Meets Boy subverts the established narratives of gay young adult and gay literary fiction. In addition to comparisons of Dancer’s carnivalesque elements,

37 however, I will also include theories of queer utopia to show the ways that this celebration differs from Holleran’s work. There is a dark irony that the very reason gay literary works exist are because men are attracted to other men, but their focus is more often than not on their deaths than their love. Love, or the romance central to Boy Meets Boy’s narrative, is what Pattee believes is at the centre of the novel’s utopia. She argues that heterosexual unions within the romance genre “draw upon dominant discourses of gender and sexuality and serve to normalize and reinforce the acceptability of heterosexuality.” As a result, “the traditional [heterosexual] romantic utopia” found in the majority of romance fiction “invalidates the experiences of gays and lesbians as it reifies and glorifies sexual romance” (156). I would argue, however, that this process of normalization and reinforcement of heterosexuality is present in most literary genres that contain romantic sub-plots, not just romance novels. In any case, Boy Meets Boy subverts the compulsory heterosexuality we have come to expect by placing a gay relationship front and centre in the narrative. The interruptions we have come to expect will interfere with a romantic, gay relationship – homophobic parents, peers, or society at large – have been removed from the focal setting, the queer friendly town where Paul lives in. With the caveat that there are more tolerant places or gay neighbourhoods in countries where gay rights have advanced in the twenty-first century, it’s a place that doesn’t exist and has no real- world counterpart. Pattee describes Levithan’s intention as the creation of “an ideal world that could exist but has not been realized” (157), which wishes to re-imagine the status-quo. The idea of a setting that is an imagined utopia is very different from Dancer, our other source of celebratory gay fiction. The Lower East side and its gay scene are contemporary to Holleran’s writing and as much a part of the novel as any character. But while 1970s gay scene life was not half-imagined, it was in a sense a ‘half-utopia.’ In a recent interview, Holleran recalls the first time he encountered the gay scene in Philadelphia as “absolutely paradise,” where “you felt you’d finally found the world you wanted to be in, and I could stand in those places for hours” (“How Dancer Changed”). The bars and baths were the only spaces where men could be in the company of one another, either to pursue love, cruise as they pleased, or greet one other as the ‘screaming queens’ they were on the way to dance. But as opposed to half-imagined, gay scene life was half-utopic, with Holleran remarking that “after having gone to [the baths and the bars and Fire Island] for that period of time I began to be critical and I began to see all the things that weren’t so nice about it.” Even

38 then, those ‘not so nice’ aspects do little to detract from the sense of joy he communicates in the novel. By contrast, there were very few places for gay youth to exist openly and happily even by the time Levithan wrote Boy Meets Boy. School clubs and youth organisations were just beginning to emerge, but were still a point of contention for many parents and grown-ups. At the turn of the millennium, the gay bar was still a focal point in what was left of gay communities after the height of the AIDS epidemic, which presented a challenge to queer youth. Levithan, then, had to look beyond the contemporary reality for gay teens if he wanted to write a novel that broke with the heteronormative constraints placed on gay life and gay narratives. However, Boy Meets Boy does not ignore the ‘not so nice’ side to gay life that was the reality for many. Paul, for example, has still faced discrimination: in the second chapter, he remembers being attacked by two high school wrestlers, but was luckily in the company of his friends on the fencing team, who defended him. In elementary school, he runs for class president with the slogan “Vote for me, I’m gay!” an upbeat if tongue-firmly-in-cheek acknowledgement of political issue voting. Even though it works in Paul’s favour when his opponent calls him a fag, claiming it won him “the girl vote, the open-minded guy vote, the third-grade closet-case vote, and the Ted-hater vote” (12), everyone knew it was a word meant to hurt him. Despite the lingering remnants of a more intolerant world in the early years of Paul’s life, he reflects on the atmosphere of his town and how it has changed over a period of eight years. One progressive sign is his recollection of not coming out, but reading “Paul is definitely gay and has very good sense of self” (8) on his report card. His teacher’s observation is simply that: an observation. They have a brief interaction, with Paul asking what gay is (and told it means boys liking boys). When pointing to another classmate and asking if he is gay, he is met with a significant reply of “No… At least not yet” (9), indicating that being gay is something one becomes aware of even if one cannot identify it yet and others can. The ‘we knew all along’ reaction is a phenomenon many queer people experience, typically meted out with a certain element of smugness to someone when they come out to friends and family, without any suggestion that they might have broached the subject to make the coming out process easier. At other times, children and teenagers’ non-normative behaviour is identified and becomes a source of bullying. But here there is no malice.

39

Paul continues with his memory and recalls how, at the time, he had found it all very interesting: Mrs. Benchly explained a little more to me – the whole boys-liking girls thing. I can’t say I understood. Mrs. Benchly asked me if I’d noticed that marriages were mostly made up of men and women. I had never really thought of marriages as things that involved liking. I had just assumed this man-woman arrangement was yet another adult quirk, like flossing. (8) For the first time, a gay novel presents an innocent and hilarious contrast to the conservative, morally outraged perception that all children are born blank slates devoid of sexuality – with, of course, the unspoken implication that the default option is heterosexuality. Very seldom does anyone stop to consider that queer adults or teens once felt attraction to children of the same gender, or that their non-conforming behaviour began early. Nor do they think how the institutions that make up adult life seem abstract to children. Remembering his five-year-old logic prior to all of this, Paul recalls: I just assumed boys were attracted to other boys. Why else would they spend all of their time together, playing on teams and making fun of girls? I assumed it was because we all liked each other. I was still unclear how girls fit into the picture, but I thought I knew the boy thing A-OK. (8) The heterosexual-as-default assumption is delicately subverted by drawing attention to how gender normative behaviour can, at times, revolve around homosocial relations. The most earnest and positive part of the exchange, however, is when asking his teacher if what he feels is right, he is told “for you, yes. . . What you feel is absolutely right for you. Always remember that” (9). It is the sort of conversation that would have been considered unfathomable between an adult and a child in the real-world contemporary to Levithan’s writing, both because of the child’s age and the positivity it imbues. But while we consider this exchange unrealistic1 and imagine what would happen in the opposite scenario, we begin to see our ‘reality’ in its monstrosity: that contemporary society would try to insist a child was something he was not and tell him he was unnatural. Parallel to Paul and his town is the life of his friend Tony, who lives in the markedly less tolerant neighbouring town and whose parents are both extremely religious and homophobic. In Levithan’s own words, the book “isn’t about the bubble of Paul’s town,”

1 Ironically, in the 2013, 10th anniversary edition of the novel, Levithan reveals in an interview that “it happens to be one of the few completely autobiographical details in the book – my kindergarten teacher really did out me to my parents.” 40

(“And now a few words from the author approximately ten years later”) or at least not only about Paul’s town. Instead, it is as much about the tension and the journey and how that violence can dissipate. Whatever occurs to transform the town from one where children can freely use the word fag, or get beaten by their peers, into a queer friendly community is left out. It would seem like as thought the journey begins, like the novel, when violence is set adjacent to creating the kind of relationships Paul finds with his teacher, his fencing friends and his accepting and fellow queer classmates. As a result, “there isn’t really a gay scene or a straight scene in our town. They got all mixed up a while back, which I think is for the best” (1) by the time Paul is sixteen. In a span of eight years, they have gone from a place where “the older gay kids” needed to “flee to the city for entertainment,” or make their own fun, but now it is simply “all good” (1.) Paul reflects on this on the first page while with a mixed crowd of gay and straight friends, on the way to a night out at a bookstore that is hosting a Gaystafarian music gig. Straight boys flirt with the bookstore clerk, a little girl is in attendance with her two mothers, and Paul “dance[s] like a madman” (3) in the Self-Help section of his local bookstore. Much like how the descriptions of the Deep South contrasted with the sleaze of the Lower East Side gives the reader an immediate footing with the camp subversion and headfirst plunge into gay scene life in Dancer, we get an immediate sense of what Boy Meets Boy is delivering. This is not a narrative trying to deceive the reader. Instead, it is promising something. As the main events in the novel proceed, the town is revealed as a wonderfully strange medley of queer and straight, celebration and everyday. Instead of a cheerleading team, there is a cheerleader bike squad replete with Harley Davidson formations that are reminiscent of Dykes on Bikes, a chartered lesbian motorcycle club that is a staple of Pride parades in the United States. In most North American high schools, the homecoming rally is normally a celebration on behalf of the football team, whose team members are often assigned a high social status within school social strata. In Paul’s town, they are given an equal place with the chess, cuisine and linguistics club demonstrations, who everyone cheers for equally. The Boy Scouts have been replaced by the Joy Scouts, due to the very real homophobic policies of the real-world scouting association. Long term gay couples with different tastes own and run music stores together, along with other quirky contributions like an ice cream parlour that always plays horror movies (called ‘I Scream,’ naturally), and fast food restaurants are rescued by vegan co-operatives (Veggie Ds.) The town it not only LGBTQIA-friendly, it is

41 very much queer in the way everyday places and events in small town life are subverted into something joyful and anarchic. This joyful, queer subversion shares many of the same hallmarks as the queer carnivalesque I theorized in the first chapter with Dancer. Comic laughter is provided by many of Paul’s droll observations, like when recalling his early childhood. One such episode is the decision to form his elementary school’s first gay-straight alliance club with three friends, not to battle intolerance but because “quite honestly, we took one look around and figured the straight kids needed out help. For one thing, they were all wearing the same clothes. Also (and this was critical), they couldn’t dance to save their lives” (12). By the time he is in eighth grade two years later, he had “a gay food column in the local paper – “Dining OUT” which he reflects on as “a modest success” (13). He has also “declined numerous pleas to run for student council president” solely because “it would interfere with my direction of the school musical” (13). It is all made to sound incredibly important in a way that is both grandiose and matter of fact, before the reader remembers all of this takes place from the ages ten to thirteen, when children are usually doing far different extra-curricular activities. The same camp humour is larger than life in the figure of Infinite Darlene, similar to Sutherland in Dancer. A transgender drag queen who is both the Prom Queen and star quarterback, she affects a manner like “Scarlet O’Hara” only “played by Clark Gable” (15). There are also a few elements of degrading laughter, but they are specifically humorous. After growing up and finding themselves on better terms with one another, Ted, the ex of Paul’s best girl friend who once called him a fag to score political points, now refers to him as ‘gay boy’ every time they meet. The difference is that with time and amicable proximity, the barb becomes more factual. Later on, it’s even used for comic effect, when Ted calls out to Paul and Joni’s jealous new boyfriend, Chuck, believes he is the one being ridiculed. Paul and Tony only look on as vaguely amused bystanders at the interactions of straight boys, before Paul corrects the fact that the remark is neither directed to Chuck nor is it an insult. While not necessarily a staple of Medieval carnivalesque, Boy Meets Boy does manage to continue one of the most important features of queer celebration: dancing. Dancing has a significant role in the novel; it begins the novel at the Gaystafarian gig in the bookshop, where we gain our first insight into the novel. This is the same gig Paul whisks Tony off to on a night where he is feeling miserable from “that nameless empty” (2) and must lie to his parents that they are having a Bible study group. The happiness they eke out from one

42 another’s company and dancing is described as “the closest we’ll ever come to a generous God” (1). Queer space and company are depicted as their own kind of communion, a sentiment that is shared in Dancer. It is also at this gig, while dancing, that Paul first meets Noah, which sets off the forward movement of the plot. There is one more important function that dance has in the novel, which centres around the school dance. Paul is selected to organise this event, which has become a standard feature in the All-American high school narrative. As part of this narrative, it usually concludes a series of events, as it does in Boy Meets Boy. More often than not, the school dance enforces the kind of ‘traditional heterosexual romantic utopia’ Pattee theorizes, and in cinema the school dance is usually some kind of penultimate moment where the teen couple express their affection, or triumph as Prom king and queen. It’s only been in the decades after Boy Meets Boy was published that both school codes and movies have relaxed their attitudes towards same-sex couples, transgender Prom kings and queens, or gender non-conforming formal wear. The school dance has, in a sense, become its own kind of ceremony in the American (and now global) cultural mythos, as a rite of passage into early adulthood and where heterosexual teens couples are ‘finalized’ in their transition to adulthood. The novel, however, inverts this narrative in several ways. In his agreement to be the dance ‘architect,’ Paul renegotiates his friendship with Kyle since they are both part of the dance committee. This newfound closeness is what leads to Kyle kissing Paul, which sparks Noah’s insecurity over their relationship, rather than cementing it. However, it’s also via the school dance that the novel’s various plot points and the tensions between the various characters are resolved. Paul begins his long apology and wooing of Noah’s affections, culminating in their being one another’s date. It also becomes the reason for the final standoff in the novel, where Paul rounds up all his friends (including Joni, after some admonishment for her behaviour) and they go as a group to Tony’s house and convince his parents to let him attend. The most subversive moment of all, however, is the choice not to close the novel in the traditional gym hall bespangled scene we have come to anticipate from teen movies. Instead, Paul and his friends delay their attendance at the school’s formal dance to hold their own impromptu pre-party. The formal affair is juxtaposed with, “the dirt is our dance floor. The stars are our elaborate decoration. We dance with abandon – only the happiness exists for us here” (164) and “during the fast song, all those thoughts disappear and there’s the giddy exhilaration of being a part of a crowd, a part of the music, a part of all our differences and all the things we share” (164 - 5). The queer teens reject the heteronormative ritual they are

43 normally excluded from in order to be with one another in the clearing, in essence reclaiming the original purpose of a dance: the actual dancing and celebration, which acts as their communion. The one hallmark of queer carnivalesque missing from Boy Meets Boy, however, is the degradation of the body. Perhaps this is not too surprising, given the novel’s intended readership, the anticipated backlash from parent organisations, and the uncertainty of whether or not the novel would sell. Although Paul and Noah’s fledgling relationship, absent of physical affection beyond kissing, stands in contrast to Malone’s ambling pursuit for love in Dancer, the success of the former has nothing to do with the lack of sex. Whether or not Levithan would have wanted to mention sex between adolescents, even in passing, is difficult to say. It does appear in later novels, simply to show the reality of teenage lives, although it never goes into any deep description. There was, after all, only so much that could be forgiven in a novel that depicted gay teens positively, even in 2003. Levithan also intended the story to have a romantic focus, since it was originally conceived of as a Valentine’s Day present among friends. And while there was a relaxation towards homosexuality, given the visibility of gay rights in the 80s and 90s and the reaction towards recent highly publicized homophobic violence committed against young queer people, there was still a strict sense of what could and could not be said and done in a gay young adult novel. Writing a book about happy gay teens was controversial enough. In comparison, Holleran stated in a recent interview that “you couldn’t write about gay life” in the 1960s. Period. It was “a time when gay writers had to change pronouns in their stories if they wanted them to be published, obscuring the same-gender romances originally at their cores” (“Why Dancer from the Dance Changed Queer Literature Forever.”) It was monumental enough for both Levithan and Holleran to write the sort of novel they each wanted, never mind having to contend with their various contemporary heteronormative cultural attitudes. Instead of anything sexual, the connection between the lead couple in Boy Meets Boy is described by other means. After their initial spark of attraction, Paul truly starts to fall for Noah, when he realises they share the same sense of ‘randomness,’ meaning there is something ineffable about the other boy that resonates with him. They express this through appreciating one another creatively. On their first date of sorts, Paul is enchanted by Noah’s three-dimensional town and matchbox car mural he has built and glued to his bedroom wall. Noah proceeds to his studio by gaining access to his attic space via his closet, which is no accident given the significance the closet has in queer culture. There is also a playful

44 comparison to the journey into Narnia from C.S. Lewis’s famous children’s series. In this manner, the closet is changed from a symbolic site that has traditionally been associated with hiding and shame, to the gateway to a teenage boy’s artistic soul. Creativity is something Noah encourages Paul to share with him, when they begin to paint abstractly to music. It is later reciprocated when, after their first falling out, Paul dedicates seven days to winning Noah back via handmade efforts: a bouquet of paper flowers, heartfelt letters, as well as giving him time and space. The love between two gay boys is not presented as perverse, or a mistake to be corrected through death or separation, but a self-made magic. Setting aside politics of sexuality and narratives of tragedy, there is a stark difference between what little romance is present in Dancer and the love story in Boy Meets Boy. Compared to the latter, there is only one relationship given any in-depth romantic detail in Dancer: Malone and Frankie. Their early days together take up pages in describing their reverence for one another. The novel details how Malone was unable to “allow Frankie to sit down opposite him without getting up and going over to embrace him” (83) and spends his time thinking up new ways to please his lover. Frankie is equally besotted, described as both adoring Malone and having left a wife and child for him. But as the novel continues, the situation becomes abusive when Frankie discovers Malone’s infidelity. It is lazy thinking to point the finger of blame at Malone and resort to stereotypes about ‘promiscuous gays.’ The real culprit is the perseverance of heteronormative standards in a queer relationship. After Malone finally breaks free of a heterosexual life and meets someone he connects with, Frankie insists they live together monogamously and share custody of his son. Making a home together, living as an exclusive couple, and raising children are the symbols of what a ‘real’ relationship should look like, both in the reality contemporary to Dancer and today. Likewise, threats of violence are often considered an acceptable response to infidelity, something reinforced by (hetero) normative romance clichés. Frankie also insists on remaining aloof from gay scene life: “he had never gone to a bar, had never wanted to, had heard of Fire Island but considered it “a bunch of queens” and lived a life that, save for the fact he slept with Malone, was hardly homosexual” (82). But in the late 1970s, these were the few spaces for gay men to be openly themselves, precisely because of the way they threatened heteronormative mainstream life. Considering Frankie met Malone at a clinic where they were both being tested for sexually transmitted diseases, it was not the promiscuity in these places that was the problem. It is the disregard he has towards “a bunch of queens,” that betrays Frankie’s own internalized homophobia towards effeminate

45 gay men. As a result, Malone is cut off from forming other relationships, whether romantic or platonic, or any sense of community. There is no room to negotiate or explore an arrangement that will work for the two of them beyond the template that has always existed. There are, of course, hints in the epistolary sections that successful relationships between gay men are to be found, but not in the main novel. Within the main narrative, romance either exists by the standards of heteronormative existence, or the transient, queer sexual encounters in gay scene life. The two realities that are kept parallel and separate. Utopias, however, exist as sites where new possibilities are created. By suspending heteronormative reality, Boy Meets Boy has created a site where a romantic relationship between two boys can exist, but it also presents alternatives to heteronormative romance narratives and tragic homonormative narratives. Paul and Noah’s relationship is doubled with two others: Joni and Chuck, the only heterosexual relationship in the novel, and the remaining tension between Paul and Kyle, his ex-boyfriend. With the latter, we learn that Paul and Kyle had a seemingly happy teenage relationship until Kyle split up with him, began dating a girl, and spread rumours that Paul had somehow ‘made’ him gay. It is a scenario much more aligned with the treatment and outcome of same gender relationships in pre-millennial gay young adult fiction that I have previously described, where homosexuality is allowed to exist, but successful relationships are not. Within the world of such novels, the failure of the relationship can be attributed to the homophobic setting, but in others – as with the Kyle’s motives – it is down to confusion over sexual identity and internalized homophobia. Outside of a utopic setting, however, such narratives are often laid to rest once the relationship ends, and if no one dies it might even be considered progressive by critics. But Boy Meets Boy is insistent on trying to re-imagine such dilemmas. As a result, Paul wrestles with his feelings of betrayal and lingering romantic tension, but helps Kyle, who has done his best to make amends by helping Paul with the school dance. The two are granted closure and are able to build a friendship, an outcome that is not normally granted in gay romances that end on such terms. This outcome is greatly contrasted with Joni and Chuck, the only heterosexual relationship in the novel, and the triangulation of Joni/Chuck/Ted (Joni’s ex-boyfriend.) Despite being one of Paul’s longest friends, Joni fails to tell him about her new relationship, which greatly surprises him. Part of that is because, in the past, Chuck had feelings for Infinite Darlene, and when she rejected him he began to spread rumours about her. Joni’s relationship with Chuck betrays her friends both by ignoring his ill behaviour towards one and

46 keeping this a secret from the other. To make matters worse, they are nauseatingly obnoxious with one another, a fact obvious to everyone except the two of them. After an initial meeting to get to know Chuck better for Joni’s sake, Chuck is mildly offensive, qualifying the statement “I don’t like fruit” with “no offence” (56), speaks poorly about Infinite Darlene and keeps the conversation entirely focused on his interests. Meanwhile Paul notes Joni, “She’s nodding along. She’s not saying much. She holds his hand and looks happy” and that “every plan Joni and Chuck mention starts with the word we” (58). In a sense, they almost morph into one another, and Joni begins to lose all sense of self in the relationship, choosing instead to defer to Chuck’s interests. Joni continues to brush aside her friends concerns and withdraws from them, beginning when she stops making a “point to connect over the weekend” (58) with Paul, but does not seem to notice. Towards the end of the novel, she almost goes so far as to opt out of supporting her and Paul’s mutual friend, Tony, in standing up to his parent’s homophobia. When giving her reasoning to Paul, she constantly uses ‘we’ instead of ‘I’: “I might have been able to rearrange things. But we made promises, Paul. We made plans. I can’t just back out” (177). Paul, eventually, crosses some unspoken line to ask “Why – won’t Chuck let you?” (177) which prompts a warning from Joni not to go there, though they both know that’s the case. Chuck, meanwhile, is both continually jealous of Joni’s friendships and her continuing contact with her ex-boyfriend. This stands in stark contrast to Paul and Noah, when Noah initially believes Paul is romantically attached to both Tony and Kyle, with Kyle having particular significance since he and Paul share a romantic past. What bothers Noah most about the situation is being lied to, rather than any kind of possessiveness on his part. This is the opposite of Chuck, who acts out aggressively when confronted by romantic rivalry, a cliché which is romanticized far too often. In comparison, once Paul clears up the fact he only has platonic feelings for both boys, he explains to Noah that he will not cut Tony or Kyle from his life over Noah’s insecurities and that Noah will simply have to trust him. This is a healthier resolution to the love triangle dynamic than the one played out between Joni, Chuck and Ted. Love triangles are become something a staple of romance in young adult fiction. The most famous, perhaps, is the Twilight series by Stephanie Myers, published two years after Boy Meets Boy, but they were already present in the Harry Potter series and both set a trend that would go on to be replicated in The Hunger Games. Whether classic literature or young adult fiction, one thing is clear: nearly all such triangulations and their rivalry are

47 heterosexual. Most often a female character has to choose between two male suitors or, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has suggested in Between Men, the triangulation acts as a way to root male-male desire or bonding via a female, under the guise of socially acceptable pairings. The triangle between Joni, Chuck and Ted, however, is neither a desire for homosocial or homoromantic bonding between Chuck and Ted, and Joni has already made a choice. Instead, the triangle showcases the heteronormative idealisation of jealousy in romance clichés, which the Paul/Noah/Kyle triangle undermines through their more open (although not initially perfect) communication and trust. As Pattee reminds us in Queer Utopia, gay relationships in fiction have never been allowed a site to explore what a successful relationship might look like, because traditional contemporary settings do not allow for the suspension of heteronormative reality to make such romance possible. The utopic setting in Boy Meets Boy, however, allows us to reimagine a way of doing relationships outside of traditional toxic heteronormative romance patterns. Where Pattee and Muñoz differ, however, is in the different ways they see utopia being structured. For Pattee, the idea of utopia is one of happiness, one that usually belongs to heterosexual couples, and it is sufficient that Boy Meets Boy “articulate[s] one of many “other” dreams” (156). Muñoz, on the other hand, turns to Ernst Bloch’s critical distinctions that there are two kinds of utopia; one that falters and one that doesn’t, and that ‘concrete utopias’ are “relational to historically situated struggles” (3). It’s not enough for utopias to come about from the cultural zeitgeist produced by historic struggles, they must also relate to them in some way. What Pattee describes is an “abstract” utopia, one that mostly focuses on queer optimism and fails to identify the quality that makes a “concrete” utopia. As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, there has always been a lack of queer history or older queer culture in young adult fiction and Boy Meets Boy at first glance seems to show a certain level of historical absence or opacity. The town is certainly queer, but there is a pre-made quality to its community. As Paul says, everything seems to have gotten mixed up a while back, creating the impression that people flocked there because there was a tolerant town, not because they struggled to make the town tolerant. There is, of course, Tony’s home town, but both its lack of queerness and geographical adjacence makes it a place that exists in the present, rather than in the past or the utopic future. There are no mentions of Stonewall, nor any other historical protests or places, although they do presumably exist in the world of the novel, just not in the novel’s immediate setting.

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The importance of queer history and the fear it will be forgotten by queer youth is an insecurity and cause of resentment felt by older generations of LGBT people, according to J. A. Bennett. In Queer Teenagers and the Mediation of Utopian Catastrophe, he notes that in the first decade of the twenty-first century, media focus depicted queer youth as either politically engaged but otherwise separate from earlier LGBT movements, or else disinterested in queer politics and solely desiring to assimilate with heteronormative culture. Matz also notes that this disinterested assimilation is the root of unease felt towards the “It Gets Better” movement – that queer teens will expect a discrimination free future that has already been won, in part, thanks to the activism of the past. Queer history and queer culture are, however, present in the novel. They work around the constrictions placed on previous works of gay young adult fiction absence of history with a series of for the queer reader to piece together and discover the culture created by the queer generations that have come before them. The cheerleaders on motorbikes reminiscent of Dykes on Bikes were a previous example I have referred to, but there are many more. Another is musical theatre, even if it is perhaps one of the more obvious nods to gay culture. The first suggested theme for the dance, for example, is The Wizard of Oz and the previous year it had been The Sound of Music. At one point in the novel, Paul also observes “The Old Queen,” a prominent enough figure in the town, who sits on ‘his’ bench and reminisces about Broadway in the late 1920s. More subtle but clever nods are the Club Kids – not some teenage imitation of the New York dance club personalities, famous for their flamboyant behaviour and outrageous costumes, but teens flitting from one extracurricular activity to another. They do so in order to have an impressive resume for their college applications and are a source of annoyance for Paul, who needs more committed helpers to organize the dance. There are also references to queer culture contemporary to when the novel was published. Tony’s mother, for example, discovers her son is gay by finding a magazine in his bedroom. Not the kind of magazine we’d expect could out a gay teen, but an old issue of The Advocate in his bedroom, the oldest and largest LGBT publication in the United States. Priscilla, Queen of the Desert the 1994 comedy-drama about two drag queens and a transgender woman touring across the Outback is name-dropped, but also Boys Don’t Cry, the dramatization of Brandon Teena’s life and death. There’s also an in-text reference to the importance that literature can play in the lives of gay men, when Paul remembers how he met Tony in a bookshop looking for a copy of The Lost Language of Cranes. The novel by David Leavitt that deals with a young gay man who has difficulty coming out to his parents, much

49 like Tony. Even though there is only one copy in the book store, Paul lets Tony take it, sensing that he needs it more. The history is there, if you know where to look for it. To return to Bennett, he continues to analyse the fear that queer youth will disregard the past as an inability on the part of older generations of queer people to realise that queer youth won’t follow the same narratives. This unsettles both queer forbearers and media consumers, who want to “nostalgically envision teens in [familiar stories]” (469). Older queer people do this because they don’t wish to imagine an end to their way of life, whereas heteronormative media does this because it’s threatened by a queer narrative outside the one it has come to understand. Yet queer culture, as Bennett astutely notes, has never been a synchronised monolithic culture, that not everyone “worships divas at the altar of pop culture” (471) and not everyone has been in political agreement. He accuses consumer culture of promoting a divorce of queer identity from queer community and that is creates a binary between young and old. I have to agree. While it’s true that there are undeniable hallmarks of queer culture, it’s gotten to a point where those hallmarks have become synonymous with ‘being gay.’ This has led straight celebrities in the past few decades to ‘come out’ with tone deaf sentiments that they are practically gay due to their interests. Except, of course, for the part where they’re only interested sexually and romantically in cisgender members of the opposite sex. Bennett’s point is that no one has been in agreement at all times. Queer youth, he concludes, have the power to regenerate a culture that has come to be considered monolithic and to reimagine a world free of past constraint. This regenerative quality, I believe, is present in Boy Meets Boy through the way its celebration subverts the established history of tragic narrative outcomes, its utopic vision, and the subtle way in which it refers to queer history and culture. Matz, meanwhile, saw a resolution in the way that history from the older generation to the younger in the “It Gets Better” narratives, where “people with experience in what we are likely to encounter can teach us futurity even though they tell us about their past experiences in the present” (244). In other words, older queer people imparting their life experience to queer teens give them a blueprint, of sorts, to navigate the future. Boy Meets Boy, I believe, fulfils this role in two ways: it demonstrates the problems queer teens are likely to face both in Paul’s past, before the straight and gay scene became ‘mixed up,’ and in Tony’s town, which exists parallel to novel’s utopic setting. Meanwhile, the town itself is a blueprint of the future. If queerness, as Muñoz asserts, is a horizon, then Boy Meets Boy simply envisions what might lie beyond but, in a sense, is already here. As Levithan notes in the 10th

50 anniversary afterword, “there’s no reason this town can’t exist. In fact, the people who live in that town exist – millions of them. They just don’t happen to all live in the same town.” In one sense the novel works as the parallel ‘celebration’ that queer teens can escape to. When it ends, there is a sense that we go back to the everyday, but we can come back to the utopia of Paul’s town when needed. I can’t help but see a parallel between the ways in which queer youth are dismissed on account of their refusal to follow the same narratives laid out by older generations of queer people and the dismissal, or lack of acknowledgment, of gay young adult fiction. In his 2013 piece for Salon, cultural critic Daniel D’Addario’s focused on the absence of recent gay literary fiction in his 2013 feature for Salon. He noted that while there had been an array of gay ‘themes,’ they unfortunately fell within clichéd territory. These amount to “sketchy and oblique” dating histories of gay characters compared to their heterosexual counterparts and brief mentions of characters with AIDS. Any gay characters are usually secondary to the main drama driven by heterosexual characters. Queer readers, he noted, specifically gay men, have been left dissatisfied. These recently published examples, “[catered] to the interests of an audience comfortable with gay people but not necessarily comfortable with stories that don’t cohere with a [recognizable mould].” Although he believed the culture of censorship by killing-your-gays has ended, publishers also “don’t want to tout anything too controversial.” These, however, were heterosexual writers – gay authors writing about gay themes and subjects saw their work marketed as ‘gay and lesbian’ fiction instead of simply ‘fiction,’ which sadly confines them to an overlooked sub-category. When they do gain recognition, as D’Addario also notes, they focus almost exclusively on the lives of middle class, urban dwelling gay men. However, in the decade between this article and when Boy Meets Boy was published in 2013, we have seen an unprecedented growth in the publication of queer young adult fiction. In his interview for the Margaret A. Edwards Prize, David Levithan mentioned five other queer young adult books featured that year, but according to statistics gathered by Malinda Lo, the number published by major publishers was closer to thirteen or fourteen. Between 2003 and 2014, the number has either reached lows of ten or as high as twenty-five. (“2014 LGBT YA by the numbers”). Since D’Addario’s article, seventy-nine works of queer young adult fiction have been published by mainstream publishers in 2015-2016 alone. Forty- three percent of those focused on the stories of gay males and over fifty-seven percent were contemporary fiction (“LGBTQ YA by the Numbers 2015 - 2016”). According to Caroline

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Kitchner, approximately fifty-five percent of young adult fiction readers are adults (“Why So Many Adults Read Young-Adult Literature”). While speculative young adult such as the Harry Potter, Twilight and The Hunger Games series may have sparked the genre’s popularity and its reputation for escapism, there is now an enriched and widely read literature portraying issues of racism, sexual assault, and sexual and gender identity. It’s this young adult fiction that is proving to be the most widely read amongst adults and teenagers, which are incidentally the subjects D’Addario refers to as being considered too controversial for literary fiction. Now categories like ‘new adult’ are being conceived for slightly older characters in their later teens and twenties, aimed at an older reading audience. Surely there has to come a point when literature needs to stop creating different youth categories and simply call a work literature. The temptation to side-line young adult fiction, once again I believe rests on its intended audience, its teenage focal characters, and the conclusion that it should have some kind of message to impart, all of which are seen as cancelling any claim that these novels possess literary merit. But the temptation to ignore gay young adult fiction specifically, I believe, is because of the aforementioned reasons and their ‘positive’ narrative outcomes, or happy endings, which are often considered critically inferior. If this seems like conjecture, we need only look at the criticism of Dancer from the Dance compared to Grief, where the former was criticized for its celebration of gay culture which was deemed frivolous, whereas the latter appealed because of its tragic subject matter. Yet post-millennial gay young adult fiction appeals to readers of all ages, precisely because it embraces and celebrates gay identity and, since the turn of the millennium, has provided something other than a tragic narrative outcome. This, I believe, aligns with Halberstam’s idea that “the line between youth and adulthood simply does not hold, and queer adolescence can extend far beyond one’s twenties” (176). The emphasis on queer youth creates a divisive binary that sets up ‘queer youth’ and ‘queer adults’ as antagonists, instead of examining the ways in which subcultural activity creates a space for an extended adolescence. The reason why so many adult queer readers enjoy reading queer young adult literature is precisely because they were not afforded a literature directed to their needs when they were teenagers. Now, as I have already explained, gay young adult literature often explores a range of themes but it is that broader scope which is considered too controversial. Gay literary fiction, on the other hand, is continually shoehorned into tragic narratives and bourgeois leanings. Even with the limitations of the teenage focal characters, there is still a

52 broader narrative scope for the gay experience found in young adult literature that should not be dismissed or ignored. Nor should the impact of celebratory narratives.

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3 Outside of Queer Time: narrative manipulation, ahistoricity and the prevalence of the tragic narrative in A Little Life

In the past two chapters, I have spoken about how the few instances of celebratory gay fiction have arisen to reflect a cultural pushback against injustice, producing what José Estaban Muñoz termed a “historical cultural nexus.” During the period 2009–17, however, the United States saw an extraordinary period for LGBT rights under President Barack Obama’s administration, which influenced legislation and cultural attitudes towards gay rights across the world. In spite of this incredibly favourable cultural climate and the ways in which it has produced a ‘golden age’ of sorts for young adult gay fiction, there have been few examples of gay literary fiction that have received critical acclaim, or become culturally significant in some way. There are several nominees each year for the LAMBDA book award, but the majority haven’t been recognized beyond this prize, and have usually fallen quickly into obscurity. There are even fewer gay literary works nominated for or having won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and Man Booker Prize, which we tend to consider as works of significant literary merit. Among the few nominated titles, AIDS is still an important feature in, for example, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998) and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004). Even though I have criticized Daniel D’Addario for overlooking the increase in gay young adult literature, I can understand the question he poses in his piece for Salon: where exactly is the buzzed about gay novel? Garth Greenwell responds in a piece for The Atlantic that it can be found in Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 novel A Little Life, praising it with the headline, “The Great Gay Novel Might Be Here.” The cultural impact of A Little Life has been broad in both literary circles and popular culture. It was nominated for the Man Booker Prize and remained a bestseller even though it did not win, perhaps the first novel with gay literary themes to do so since Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. It even managed to feature in the 2018 Netflix reality makeover show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, when one of the cast members was seen sporting a t-shirt listing the names of the novel’s main characters, leading to subsequent interviews on literary tastes. It seems to have everyone’s endorsement. I will concede to Greenwell’s point that the novel moves the gay literary narrative away from the AIDS

54 epidemic. The problem is its plot takes us back to tragedy, focusing solely on the escalating suffering of its gay or sexually ambivalent male characters. Perhaps worst of all is that this tragedy has been hailed as something spectacular, with Greenwell in particular naming it subversive. Very few, it seems, have considered that the gay literary narrative has been tragic for the better part of the past hundred years. To call a tragic novel with gay characters subversive seems oxymoronic. It’s not going against the status quo of the tragic narrative; it’s enforcing it. Yanagihara seems unaware of any of this. In an article for Vulture, she discussed the art work that served as a visual inspiration board for her writing process. One of these images was Chip Kidd’s cover for the November 10 1996 New York Times Magazine’s “When AIDS Ends,” which was a picture of one of the paragraphs of the accompanying article by Andrew Sullivan. The photographed text reads in full, A difference between the end of AIDS and the end of many other plagues: for the first time in history, a large proportion of the survivors will not simply be those who escaped infection, or were immune to the virus, but those who contracted the illness, contemplated their own deaths and still survived. Particular significance is given to the font, which gradually changes from blurry to clear. Whatever one feels about Sullivan’s conservative politics, his essay is an interesting piece that contemplates having lived through and survived the AIDS epidemic from the perspective of someone who is HIV positive. We may not agree with Sullivan’s ideas on where the LGBT community is headed, but the essay talks about how the cost of the future has come at the price of a third of a million dead men, an estimate that has actually shifted to half a million after the essay was written in 1996. It seems rather in bad taste that Yanagihara saw this cover, could choose to understand the history and the death toll behind it, but instead was inspired to “create a protagonist who never gets better,” and dies by the end of the novel. Instead, Yanagihara focuses far more on using gay characters for aesthetic effect: the narrative was to have “a sleight-of-hand quality” where The reader would begin thinking it a fairly standard post-college New York City book (a literary subgenre I happen to love), and then, as the story progressed, would sense it was becoming something else, something unexpected… One of the ways I’d always described the book (to my editor and to my agent) was a piece of ombre cloth: something that began on one end as a

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bright, light bluish-white, and ended as something so dark it was nearly black. (Vulture) Despite being the first critically lauded novel with gay or sexually ambiguous male characters in over a decade, it completely fails to recognize the importance of gay history, or gay literary history. It raises the question of whether Yanigihara even intended for her novel to be a work of gay literary fiction and, if not, why she felt the need to write about queer men, or why it has been received so well. I believe that Yanagihara lulls the reader into a false sense of security by establishing a setting that frequently mentions queer identities, the friendships between queer men, and a spectrum of relationship structures that exist outside the heteronormative focus on monogamous couples, or the nuclear family. Using the ideas I have outlined in the past two chapters, I plan to examine the novel’s narrative structure and how the liberal setting absent of LGBT discrimination we are introduced to at the start of the novel is not ideal, but an indeterminate ‘post’ queer society that ignores the importance of queer history. Lastly, I intend to engage with Greenwell’s argument and examine the many and sundry examples of tragedy in the novel and whether or not they fit within theories of queer negativity and broader concepts of queer melodrama. In its first section, A Little Life begins as a chronicle of four young men who have formed a close friendship at an unnamed but prestigious college and are embarking upon adult life in New York. They are “a pleasingly diverse crew,” as one New Yorker review describes them, who represent the contemporary population of New York and the problems of millennial readers (Michaud). There is JB, a black artist and second-generation Haitian immigrant, who is raised (and spoiled) by a sprawling, matriarchal family. Malcolm is a biracial architect from an upper middle-class family, uncertain of his ability to find his own success in life, or independently advance his career without relying on his family. Willem is a handsome actor from the Midwest and son of working-class, pan-Nordic ranchers, who grew up as the main source of emotional care for Henning, his older brother with cerebral palsy. Lastly there is Jude who is – rather impressively – a brilliant lawyer, baker, mathematician and vocalist with an ambiguous racial identity and, as we later discover, an abusive past he tries to keep secret from his friends and the couple who adopt him as an adult. At the onset of the novel, these men are embarking upon their adult lives full of uncertainties and undiscovered promise, before each eventually becomes a cultural icon in his respective field. But while friendship is a recurring theme in the novel, we never understand

56 why the core quad characters bond with one another. It’s not because they happen to be either gay men, or men who are ambiguous in their sexuality, like the queer friendships and varying kinds of community in Dancer, Grief or Boy Meets Boy. They don’t seem to have any shared experiences. The exception, perhaps, are Jude and Willem, who are both orphans stuck in an environment with peers who are overwhelmingly supported by their families. There are no defining moments like Sutherland helping Malone when he’s been thrown out by Frankie in Dancer, or chance meetings and initial sparks between friends in Boy Meets Boy. Their friendship seems to be based on the fact they all shared a college dormitory suite. It’s the kind of reason for friendship that’s so mundane, it seems perfectly reasonable. Anything deeper, we are led to believe, will be revealed to us in time. The quad characters aren’t just pleasingly diverse, they’re also four male characters that cover a spectrum of sexuality without comment or judgment from any other characters or the narrator. This is still comparatively rare within gay literary fiction, which nearly always focuses on the experience of white, middle-class gay men. In the first section, JB in particular is given a lot of attention. He is the one character who overtly embraces his queer identity, which he bucks against Daniel D’Addario’s complaint that most gay characters in literary fiction are either secondary characters, or questionable stereotypes. He is a young black Haitian-American man, the son of immigrants and fiercely proud of his racial identity, but does not feel a part of the first-generation immigrant community he sees socializing on his commutes. He commiserates with his friend, Asian Henry Young, ““There but for the grace of god” and JB had understood exactly the particular mix guilt and pleasure he felt” (26). JB is by no means perfect and reflects upon how, at his fee-paying school, he exaggerated and even lied about racial stereotypes expected of him and his family to get attention from his white peers. He also displays argumentative, spoiled, and bossy behaviour. In his defence, he also tries to do well by his friends, or at least up to the point where his drug addiction begins to affect his rationality. He is there to give advice, support their careers, and prompt them into attending social gatherings. His being gay is a part of him, as is his race, but they are not parts so much as interweaving aspects that make up a whole. In JB, at least in the first two sections of the novel, we are given a multi-dimensional gay male character. Another remarkable feature that puts the reader at ease is that JB’s family not only accepts him for who he is, but that his aunt is another openly queer, accepted member of his family. The depiction of multi-generations of queer people is seldom seen in literature before the turn of the millennium and not always as positive or as matter of fact as with JB’s family.

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Indeed, the novel is peppered with references to lesbian college friends, or gay colleagues coming out through e-mail chains and denouncing the Republican party. Even with the advancements in gay rights up until the year A Little Life was published, being openly queer could and can still be fraught with the possibility for tension in one’s nuclear or extended family and in the workplace, if not overt harassment or violence. It’s not quite the queer utopia of Boy Meets Boy, but it’s something that feels like it might be significant in the novel’s world-building. Especially when Willem and Jude realise they are one another’s most successful and long-lived romantic relationship, even though up until that point Willem has only ever been shown to be romantically and sexually interested in women. When the two men do take their relationship to the nest level, they discover sex isn’t an issue for Willem but it is for Jude, given his history of sexual abuse. They end up in a non-monogamous arrangement, where Willem is free to pursue sex with other people, but they remain one another’s primary romantic partners. In a post-AIDS world, though, there’s stigma against men in multiple relationships with other men, and despite the B in LGBT, there’s also the other stigma of being attracted to more than one gender. The novel doesn’t draw any attention to this, but makes it seem as though it’s natural. There are already non-nuclear, queer-friendly family constellations in the novel, thanks to JB’s family, but the idea that there are other ways to ‘do’ family continues when Jude is adopted as an adult by his former law professor, Harold, and his wife Julia. The father- mother-child status quo is still technically present, but it is changed by the fact that they are choosing to enter into this arrangement as adults, where they can no longer shape or raise Jude in any way, removing both the reproductive element (adoption) and the futurity (they will not extend themselves either through Jude’s biology or by raising him). There is also the fact that while Julia is the one to stress friendship to Jude, the relationship truly lies between Harold and Jude. Even though there is nothing sexual between them, it is acknowledged that “there was an uncreative and obvious joke to be made, about how much like a marriage proposal the event seemed, but he didn’t have any heart to make” (183). It’s is a touching relationship, because we’re made aware that Jude doesn’t feel good enough, even going so far as to believe his prospective parents would change their minds if they knew the ‘truth’ about his abusive childhood. His adoptive parents don’t change their minds, of course, when they do eventually find out, even though there are points where Jude almost sabotages their relationship by keeping them at arm’s length.

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The concept of found families and alternate relationship structures are important for queer people, who often face strained family ties after coming out, if not outright disownment by some or all biological family members. We only have to look at Malone leaving his ‘straight’ life behind as evidence of this, or the narrator regretting never having told his mother he was gay in Grief. But A Little Life appears to take it one step further by repeatedly showing that biological ties are not this immense and important part of human connection. In the first of several extradiegetically homodiegetically narrated chapters interspersed throughout the novel, Harold reflects on the loss of his biological son and how, when it happened, there was a sort of relief. It’s described as “the moment you have been expecting, been dreading, been preparing yourself for since the day you became a parent, has come” and that afterwards “you have nothing to fear again” (164). It’s also clear that Jude isn’t a replacement for his son and at one point he explains that, “I have never been one of those people . . . who feels the love one has for a child is somehow a superior love, one more meaningful, more significant, and grander than any other” (163). The idea that loving one’s child is not the be-all, end-all of love is not a common admission, in fact it’s almost a taboo in itself to question it. Harold does clarify that loving a child “is a singular love,” as it doesn’t rely on attraction like most relationships do. Instead it is borne from the responsibility and fear of something terrible happening to the child in question. For Harold, though, that’s not a fear that applies solely to biological children. The importance of the nuclear family takes a further beating with the Ragnarssons, Willem’s parents, who serve as a sort of dark inversion of Harold and Julia and their affection for Jude. Having already lost several children as infants, in Willem’s memory they were no longer capable of any nurturing capacity by the time he and Hemming were born. Both brothers’ physical needs were met, but the two of them were left to take care of their emotional needs themselves and for the most part that responsibility one-sidedly fell on Willem. It raises certain ethical considerations of why have people have children. The answer seems to be don’t bother doing it out of any heterosexual imperative. Speaking of which, there’s a distinct lack of importance placed on what Halberstam calls heteronormative life patterns in general in A Little Life. Malcolm is the only character who gets married and none of the main characters become parents. The quartet are accused of being “a bunch of Peter Pans” (225) by Malcolm’s father, Mr Irvine, which leads to a long introspection on Willem’s part. His relationship with his last girlfriend had failed, because he had refused to commit solely to her and pull back from his friendship with Jude, instead of

59 creating a future where both of them would have a meaningful place in his life. He wonders “was couplehood truly the only appropriate option?” when it came to relationships, laments to Harold, “thousands of years of evolutionary and social development and this is our only choice?” and finally asks “why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship?” (225). It’s a question worth asking. In the example of Jude’s adoption, it’s described as “more ceremonial than truly sociologically significant” (187), but it begs the question of how sociological significance occurs and how certain relationships and ways of being seem to become more significant than others. All of these examples – the array of queer, diverse characters with unspecified sexual identities, the ambivalence to heteronormative life patterns – create a pleasant, liberal landscape in the novel. These elements are strongest in the first section of the novel and last throughout the second and third of the novel’s seven parts. After the first section of the novel, however, the narrative shifts. Up to this point, the extradiegetic-heterodiegetic narrator has focalized on Willem, JB and Malcolm, but never Jude. The only insight we have into him is what we perceive through his friends. From the first Lispenard Street section onwards, however, it is Jude who becomes the focal character (with the exception of two extradiegetic- homodiegetic chapters narrated by Harold). The rest of the novel centres on revealing his mysterious past in the remaining 620 pages of a 703-page novel. That past is mainly concerned with trauma. Jude, as we learn, was not only raised in an abusive monastery after being found abandoned, but raped by the monks as punishment for misbehaving. He was later trafficked and prostituted by one of the monks, who deludes himself into believing they are engaging in a loving relationship, before being ‘rescued’ and placed into an abusive group home for boys. These moments of tragic analepsis are broken up by a return to the present – where Jude experiences even more trauma. Either he inflicts it on himself in gruesome descriptions of self-harm, or he enters into a relationship with a violent and sexually abusive gay man, Caleb. To literally add insult to injury, at some point in Jude’s past he sustained nerve damage to his legs, which make is increasingly difficult for him to walk, and which he unintentionally often worsens through his self-harm. This, Jude’s scars, and his continuing reliance on a wheelchair for mobility are the target of Caleb’s ire, and in one memorable instance Caleb confronts and openly leers about the domestic abuse to Harold. It’s only later in the novel that we learn that after running away from the group home, Jude was kidnapped and tortured to the point where he was left with debilitating leg and nerve injuries, that left him with chronic

60 pain. The one person who knows about his past – his social worker – dies from cancer, leaving him with no one to persuade him into pursuing therapy. He tells what little he can to his friends in order to assuage their curiosity, but keeps his distance in order to continue his self-harm without intervention, a practice at times so dangerous it’s a surprise he doesn’t die of sepsis. His self-hatred from his early life is so strong, that he both continues to injure himself and refuses to take any medication to ease his pain. By this point in the novel, the trauma he has teetered from excessive to implausible, especially when the reader considers that Jude has managed to endure all this and become wildly successful in his profession, education and hobbies. There is only a brief section, appropriately termed ‘The Happy Years,’ where Jude finally begins to obtain happiness. After Caleb, he enters into a relationship with Willem, who after an emotional climax demands to know about his past and keeps pressing for him to seek help. His days of continual pain from his nerve damage stop once he amputates his legs. Successful in his career and his personal relationships at last, Jude’s short-lived happiness ends abruptly when Willem, Malcolm and Malcolm’s wife Emma die in a car crash. It’s the final straw for Jude before he commits suicide, something we discover posthumously from the perspective of Harold in the last section in the novel. It is clear given Yanagihara’s commentary that the extremity of these accumulated atrocities is meant to evoke an emotional response in the reader and I think it’s successful with most readers – it is, after all, what has garnered her so much critical acclaim. But when viewed as a list instead of something slowly eked out over 700 pages, it becomes clear that some of these scenarios are plausible individually or in combination with one another, but in combination with the extremes of Jude’s success they border on the absurd. He’s not only a lawyer at the top of his field, who ends up making partner in his firm, he also holds a second master’s degree in complex mathematics for the fun of it. In his free time, he manages to bake at a professional level and is a proficient singer. Where on earth he finds the energy despite debilitating disabilities and unresolved complex PTSD, we never know – it’s practically superhuman! Either the reader will be drawn in by Yanagihara’s acclaimed ‘dial turning’ method, or it will stretch even the most willing reader’s suspension of belief. This kind of graphic tragedy has become increasingly popular in contemporary popular media, especially in speculative genres. Both the television adaptions of The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones are the two biggest offenders and have occasionally been likened to torture porn. This is a comparison that Jon Michaud also makes, and he points out that it’s

61 extremely rare to see such violence depicted in literature. “Novels that deal with these matters often fade out when the violence begins,” he observes, and “you are more likely to find sustained and explicit depictions of depravity in genre fiction, where authors seem freer to be less decorous.” The aforementioned popular, critically acclaimed shows have faced accusations of departing from the books they were based on to make their narratives even grimmer, often through physical violence or sexual violence towards minorities and women. Whenever anyone questions a literary work or television show about its violent nature and whether or not its in bad taste, the same old argument seems to be trotted out: it’s a work of art. And works of art are meant to provoke a reaction, in fact for many they succeed so long as they provoke a reaction. Yanagihara even states that this is part of a purposeful technique done precisely to try and shock and provoke emotion. Michaud, however, believes the excessive violence is what makes the novel subversive. He argues that it “uses the middle-class trappings of naturalistic fiction to deliver an unsettling meditation on sexual abuse, suffering, and the difficulties of recovery” and adds that “Jude’s suffering is so extensively documented because it is the foundation of his character.” The problem that no one seems to consider is that Jude is someone who may not be defined in the text as gay, but who nonetheless engages in consensual romantic relationships with men. Homoromantic characters have a long, chequered history of suffering and abuse throughout fiction that extends beyond literary narratives. I think it’s more appropriate to say that Yanagihara’s boiler plate method creates tension that lures in the reader, then adds more tension when the abuse and self-harm are revealed. The tension is heightened even more when we try to come to terms with the depths of the abuse. It may be done to prompt the reader to meditate on sexual abuse, suffering and the lack of recovery, but it pre-emptively suggests that the reader is not expected to be someone who will deal with these issues. It becomes a question of whose narrative is it trying to subvert and one answer is certainly not gay literary fiction. It is difficult to subvert a narrative tradition that has a foundational pillar of suffering by piling on more of the same. That is why I believe that, even though A Little Life has gay characters and a broad spectrum of queer male sexuality, it was never meant to be a work of gay literary fiction. Garth Greenwell’s review for The Atlantic disagrees, and even goes so far as to announce it might be the “big, ambitious novel about gay life in America,” that same absence which Daniel D’Addario lamented in his essay for Salon. Greenwell brings up many of the same points I have in the first half of this chapter: the spectrum of male sexuality, which he notes as

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“the most ambitious chronicle of the social and emotional lives of gay men to have emerged for many years” and which he believes elevates them from the ‘window dressing’ fate as flat or tertiary characters in recent literary fiction. Likewise, he puts stress on the bonds of friendship between the male main characters. Where we depart in our perception of the novel is that he stresses that Yanagihara has an edge by not being a gay man, since readers expect novels with gay characters to be written by gay men and “plausibly confessional,” citing both Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story and Justin Torres’ We the Animals, examples where “gay men and their lives have often been more or less easily mappable onto the author’s biography.” By being a presumably heterosexual woman, Greenwell considers it a mark in Yanagihara’s favour that she can avoid such pitfalls. Another is that she avoids the coming- out narrative or the AIDS novel, instead creating a new approach to the collective traumas that have shaped modern gay identity. None of the characters have any anxieties about their sexual identities and, other than a passing mention, HIV/AIDS is absent from the ahistorical New York City setting of the novel. The queer suffering at the heart of the novel becomes, according to Greenwell, “an extreme iteration of the abandonment, exploitation and abuse that remain endemic in the experience of queer young people” and a contrast to the “It Gets Better,” marriage equality, homonormative narrative that has begun to dominate the popular perception of gay culture. According to Greenwell, what makes A Little Life queer is “the novel’s exaggeration and its intense, claustrophobic focus on its characters’ inner lives requires recognizing how it engages with aesthetic modes long coded as queer: melodrama, sentimental fiction, grand opera.” It embraces the monstrousness, self-loathing and freakishness which he suggests we have been encouraged to forget. The problem in Greenwell’s claim that the negativity in A Little Life is queer is that it’s somewhat shallow compared to the ideas of queer negativity outlined in recent queer theory. Edelman’s position for example, places more importance on the ways in which queerness is meant to be opposed to the heteronormative social order, a self-propelling structure that exists for a rhetorical child and to one day be continued by the rhetorical child. Edelman’s point is that “the cult of the Child permits no shrines to the queerness of boys and girls, since queerness, for contemporary culture at large . . . is understood as bringing children and childhood to an end” (19). In other words, the social order does not allow the queering of children, since queerness is seen as the antithesis of childhood innocence.

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Considered in this context, Jude’s childhood abuse becomes incredibly problematic, because the ‘queerness’ that brings Jude’s childhood to an end is his continued rape at the hands of paedophiles, which ignores the historic detrimental association of homosexuality and paedophilia. Even the fact the paedophiles are monks does not help, due to still pervasive homophobic theory that becoming a member of the clergy – or, as is the case with monks, a member of the Church’s religious life – was a means to hide away homosexuals, who then took out their sexual urges on children. If anything, the novel demonstrates the problem with only paying service to the idea that we must “think of the children,” because of the stigma associated with sexual abuse. After he’s ‘saved,’ Jude is shuttled to a group foster home, out of sight and out of mind in a society that only cares about the idea of The Child but not actual children. Adolescent boys in particular have faced a certain judgment having experienced sexual abuse at the hands of men, or other boys. They fall into a strange, Schrödinger-esque paradox: they are victims because they’re children, but they have enough first-hand experience with sex to be ‘tainted’ by queerness. One refrain that often haunts queer people on coming out is whether a sexual trauma ‘caused’ our queerness, which is the rather murky problem with A Little Life. We never find out whether Jude identifies as something other than straight outside of his trauma, because his trauma and his self-destructive tendencies, as Greenwell argues, make up the bulk of his character. This is cleverly manipulative, because the suggestion hovers there if examined closely enough, but it is a suggestion that is neither confirmed nor denied on a narrative or authorial level presumably because of the backlash if it were confirmed. It would be less disturbing, if it had not already occurred as a motif in Yanagihara’s debut novel, something which does not escape Daniel Mendehlson’s attention in his review. One further way the book fails to align with queer negativity is in its death drive, or as Edelman says, “what is queerest about us [is] to insist the future stop here” (3). In a sense, this occurs with Jude’s suicide and is reinforced both by his initial doctor, followed by his doctor and friend Andy, that he will never get better. But the death drive and queer negativity all rest on a clause: embracing that negativity. Or as Edelman states, “rather than rejecting, with liberal discourse, the ascription of negativity to the queer, we might, as I argue, do better to consider accepting and even embracing it” (4). A Little Life does not embrace its negativity. It may be the queen “who puts the car in gear and drives right off the cliff” (Dancer 18) that everyone wants to hear about, but Jude doesn’t exactly do any driving. There’s a sense of doom about him the further the novel goes, but there’s no doomed queen-ness about it. That

64 would require a level of irony and humour, of self-sabotage, that simply isn’t present in the novel. Nor does Jude ever accepts his freakishness, what makes him different, until one moment almost at the end. He hides it from his friends and continues the upkeep of his successful veneer, even hoping that he can afford surgery that will remove scars while continuing to aggravate them through self-harm. In addition, we follow Jude’s thoughts about himself through the distance of a heterodiegetic narrator, meaning that both narrator and readers are made into observers. We are always observing Jude, whether in the beginning, where he is being viewed by his friends through the third-person narrator or Harold’s homodiegetic sections. The monstrousness that Greenwell suggests the novel works to embrace is in fact never embraced, but a constant source of objectification. Greenwell’s other argument is that “to understand the novel’s exaggeration and its intense, claustrophobic focus on its character’s inner lives requires recognizing how it engages with aesthetic modes long coded as queer: melodrama, sentimental fiction, grand opera.” In this case, the engagement is with the revulsion we are meant to feel when reading about the sum total of Jude’s suffering. But we cannot say something is queer just because it follows an aesthetic long embraced by and long associated with queerness in the same way we cannot say something is queer because it is negative. Both revulsion and melodrama need balance to make them work as queer aesthetics; in other words, to make them camp. According to Susan Sontag, “artifice and exaggeration” (53) are at the essence of camp and its love of the unnatural as well as “the spirit of extravagance” (59). At a glance, A Little Life holds all of this. It is exaggerated and extravagant in its extremes of success and suffering and Yanagihara’s cranking of the emotional dial certainly counts as narrative trickery to lure the reader to keep reading. There are, however, two traits of the novel that undermine Greenwell’s assessment that the novel’s tragedy is subversive. The first is its seriousness. While it is true that “art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ‘too much’” (284) can be camp, the novel is a rare instance where it both seems to take itself seriously and it taken seriously because it is too much. Part of what Yanagihara strives for and what Greenwell defends is that readers will be lured in by the narrative emotional manipulation. Melodrama, sentimental narratives and opera can be queer, but it is not tragedy that makes them successfully queer or at least not tragedy alone: it is failure. In The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam states that, “we are all used to having our dreams crushed, our hopes smashed, our illusions shattered, but what comes after hope?” The answer is that we need “[to lose] the

65 idealism of hope in order to gain wisdom and gain a new spongy relation to life, culture, knowledge and pleasure” (2). It does not necessarily matter whether failure eventually leads to success – Malone never feels fully satisfied in Dancer and in Grief the unnamed narrator never decides to move on with his life. The point, as Halberstam indicates, is in the doing rather than the ending. Failure is one thing there is not much of in A Little Life. The main characters are not only successful in their chosen fields, they are cultural icons who appear on billboards and in glossy magazines and art galleries. They never encounter any sort of stumbling block in their success, either: it takes a long time for Willem’s acting career to take off, but after that it never falters, JB manages to be a successful artist using the same theme his entire creative life and Jude’s unresolved trauma never undermines his professional life. Jude is possibly the most aggravating case of all four characters simply because he never has any obvious flaws. Malcolm and JB squabble and JB has a falling out with all three of his friends at some point over the years, but Jude’s only flaw is his stubbornness in never accepting his trauma. It is never some fault that comes internally from him, but something that has been pushed upon him, so in a sense it does not count as a character flaw. Other than that, he manages to be a lawyer-mathematician-baker-vocalist, who can carry on excelling despite the exceptional amount of physical and emotional pain he is in. It is the same for Willem, who really only seems to exist to compliment and eternally support Jude, to be the leading man he pines for and eventually gets, only to be killed off for yet more suffering to ensue. The only character to fail is JB, when he both develops an addiction and, while in the throes of it, calls Jude a cripple in a move that finally sees the other three cut him out of their lives. Even then, he is still a famous artist. And while they may not be following some heteronormative plan of reproductive futurity, success really has become the new post- millennial norm, or at least the appearance of success on social media. Meanwhile, all the characters hold onto the hope that Jude will get better, either mentally for Willem, Andy et al, or physically and cosmetically for Jude himself. In a sense, it does taunt the North American affliction of “positive thinking”, which Halberstam cites as “a mass delusion that emerges out of a combination of American exceptionalism and a desire to believe that success happens to good people.” Failure, in this line of thought, is “a consequence of a bad attitude rather than structural conditions.” Health become “a matter of attitude” (3) and positive thinking will overcome everything. But the negativity that the characters and Jude encounter are external events that happen to them, as opposed to anything they bring on themselves and that causes

66 any kind of internal reaction or reflection on their part. No wisdom is gained. The problem is not that their success is unbelievable or that the novel is purposefully grandiose, it is that making Jude and the narrative’s sole focus revolve around his trauma does not miraculously elevate it to something more than one-dimensional than if it was focused only on joy and happy endings. Nor does it make more queer. To come back to male friendship, which is the one aspect of the novel that Greenwell held in its favour regarding the initial arguments for its queerness. At the start of this chapter, I addressed how male friendship was used to lull the reader in the beginning of the novel. By the end of the novel, it has endured some heavy fractures. Despite waxing poetically about friendship in general in the narrative prose and in the thoughts of the characters, the quartet begins to disintegrate in a way it never quite recovers from. Subtle warning signs appear when Jude and JB argue about his use of Jude’s image in his paintings, occasioned by JB wanting to exhibit a portrait Jude does not like at a gallery show. By the point in the novel where JB drags the other three to a party with their old college friends, the reader is given more substantial evidence that not all is completely well with JB. Willem reflects that “he knew that JB was lonely, and unhappy, and uncertain, and that none of those sensations were familiar ones to him” (222), before we find out JB has increased his use of narcotics. The dynamic between the four of them is altering and their expeditions to meet old friends are described as “dropping bundles of kindling onto a barely smouldering black smudge of fire” (221). All three of them are said to have noticed it, but Jude makes fun of JB’s efforts, does everything he can to back out of the social gatherings he arranges for them to attend, and presses Willem for them to stop going altogether. On the one hand, it is understandable given their college crowd think badly of his profession and being too curious as to why he is using a wheelchair. But really it is a case of JB and Malcolm being further pushed to the side, as Jude and Willem draw closer together. Worst of all is that, in a later section of the novel that closely follows JB’s perspective, we discover that it is this sundering that has led to his spiralling downwards. There are hints peppered throughout the novel from the moment he decides to focus his work on his friends and finds his strongest source of inspiration in Jude and his reaction to hearing that Jude and Willem are a couple, that he is a little in love both with Jude and Willem. He is, in a sense, the one to point out their queerness: he playfully calls Jude ‘Judy,’ he thinks of them as “bustling lesbian couple” (31) when they cook together in their shared apartment, and refers to them as “lovers” the night before Jude’s adoption. He is the one to find Jude’s femininity and

67 androgyny beautiful when Jude despises it. In a sense, it almost works as a strange inversion of Sedgwick’s theory of homosexual triangulation, where desire between two male characters is triangulated through the pairing of one with a spare female character – usually someone close to the other male. Here, however, we have three male characters who are all decidedly non-heterosexual, and so the problem is not the sexuality but the triangulation. Jude and Willem can be in a romantic non-sexual relationship with one another, with Willem pursuing sex with women. No triad arrangement is permitted to flourish between the three of them – even close friendship. That can only belong to Jude and Willem. JB is always described as someone who may be argumentative, abrasive and spoiled, but Willem reflects on his positive traits, such as “an ability and willingness to be wholly silly and frivolous” (38) and JB’s concern over Willem’s slow-to-start career. Despite making fun of Malcolm for his privilege as a biracial middle-class man, JB defends him against other black students. And while he is certainly narcissistic, he muses on how he had wanted to take his friends with him on his journey of success. However, after this initial wrong-doing, the narrative shifts to a strange passive aggression as the focalization rests on Jude’s thoughts relayed via the heterodiegetic narrator, as opposed to earlier sections where other character’s perspectives were included. Jude views the moment regarding the portrait as a ‘fulcrum,’ that indicates that their relationship has shifted from one thing to another. He reflects that, “It would have been too melodramatic, too final, to say that after this JB was forever diminished for him. But it was true that for the first time he was able to comprehend that the people he had grown to trust might someday betray him anyway” (177). Suddenly, all of JB’s jokes are unfunny and it seems he can do no right even when trying. It may seem justified by the time JB ultimately betrays him, but also premature. The betrayal itself seems uncharacteristic and solely for the purpose of creating more drama and forcing JB without a doubt from any triangulation. JB’s attraction towards Jude has never been out of pity, nor predatory in the manner of the abusers who single him out. It has been out of a sense of protecting Jude – noting earlier on that he subconsciously steps closer to him like the others when the pavements are slippery – and the appreciation for some innate beauty he holds. It is again peculiar when, under the influence, he hones in and reduces Jude to his physical disability with a cheap, mocking imitation of a disabled person. What is also strange is that none of his friends ever try to help JB up until the point of this intervention, even though they notice he is struggling beforehand. As JB astutely notes, that is a sentiment usually reserved for Jude. Through the beseeching of his family and the

68 thoughts of the others, JB’s self-loathing is balanced against Jude’s and found wanting, because he had an easier start in life, as though support in mental health should be some kind of strange tally or tragedy Olympics. What eventually happens is an awful transgression of friendship, but JB is set up for the fall long before this point and there is a sense from the first incident that anyone who does not live up to Jude’s golden standard ends up narrowly beside the column of ‘men who have betrayed him.’ Eventually they all become friends again, but there is always a certain taint to the arrangement, evidenced by Jude thinking he would gladly swap JB for Willem when the latter dies in a car crash that JB was not involved in and all JB wants to do is support his friend in his grief. Friendship is not a transaction, but there is certainly an uneven balance between what Jude expects of other people and what he gives in return. Granted he is a good friend in the sense that he makes an effort to take care of his friends, but even Willem points out that this is not what friendship is about and he is not their servant and – in the lead-up to the adoption proposal – we are shown this behaviour is part of Jude’s anxious disposition. But that is before we reach the mental exhaustion obviously felt by the few people in Jude’s life who do know of his past and his self-harming. Even Willem, his strongest supporter, at one point thinks “the year-after-year exhaustion of keeping Jude’s secrets and yet never being given anything in return but the meanest smidges of information, of not being allowed the opportunity to even try to help him, to publicly worry about him. This isn’t fair, he would think. It’s something but it’s not friendship” (228). Or as John Taylor, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and an instructor at Harvard Medical School, writes for the Morning News Tournament of Books: While internally, Jude is complicated and struggling to survive, his outward presentation is that of a high-maintenance enigma. Surely his three college roommates, all later charismatic and bizarrely successful, would have tired of Jude. Same for his mentor and primary care physician Andy (which, by the way, I’ve yet to meet the orthopaedic surgeon who would run a single-patient practice and would let this go on for years without psychiatric intervention). Subsequently Taylor goes on to berate Yanagihara, because Jude would never have been able to achieve success with the severity of his mental health problems and physical ailments. From a critical and medical perspective, Taylor believes that “in writing a novel rooted in sexual trauma, Yanagihara has a responsibility to portray the entire realistically traumatized life.” There is a dishonesty, he believes, in depicting childhood sexual abuse and a battered

69 psyche in so detailed a way, only to create an “adult life with Vaseline on the lens” and that “the inexhaustible sympathy and patience Jude finds in others is wishful, but a fantasy.” To Jude, “for everyone who might fail him in some way, there was at least one person who never would” (177) and “his affection for them was perfect” (176). But while Jude thinks himself unworthy of their affection, he expects their affection for him to be perfect, too. There is never anything in the narrative to show this expectation is unrealistic or ultimately an unhealthy portrayal of friendship, beyond some worry on Willem and Andy’s part before they scurry to Jude’s side once more. It’s as though Jude is both wrapped up in his own self-hatred and thinking he is unworthy of affection, but is simultaneously pushing the boundary with his self-harm to see if they will eventually be disgusted with and abandon him. This is a form of abuse in itself, that is only jokingly acknowledged at times, like when Jude gifts Andy and his family a vacation and he playfully retorts it was hardly worth all the times his advice was ignored. Then, in her Vulture article, Yanagihara describes the book as “largely concerning itself with male friendship”; and in a Kirkus interview, she asserts that men are given “such a small emotional palette to work with” and “have a very hard time still naming what it is to be scared or vulnerable or afraid, and it’s not just that they can’t talk about it—it’s that they can’t sometimes even identify what they’re feeling. . . . When I hear sometimes my male friends talking about these manifestations of what, to me, is clearly fear, or clearly shame, they really can’t even express the word itself.” While possibly true for straight male friendship, this appears to be a rather disingenuous idea about queer male friendship. Queer comradery, as I have said, acts as a balm against fractured family relationships and a shared outlet for heartaches and frustrations unspeakable elsewhere. In any case, on closer inspection the novel’s understanding of friendship as an all-saving grace is found wanting. While examples of male friendship could be used to argue for the gayness of the novel, there is a great deal which is questionable. To take up my earlier point on objectification, let me return us once more to the medieval carnivalesque and my earlier theory on the queer carnivalesque, namely in relation to degradation. There’s no doubt that the novel is solely engaged with Jude’s degradation, which he’s forced to endure over and over again. Therein lies the problem: it is something that happens to him, never something he undertakes, which is the difference between objectification and spectacle. There is no trace of indulgence, no celebration of low acts or low culture, both for Jude or in the novel as a whole. The parties that JB makes the other three

70 attend can hardly be called parties, either. They seem to be large affairs where people stand around and talk to one another about their achievements, or what they’re doing at work, as opposed to anything that actually involves celebration. There’s one occasion where JB convinces Willem to go see a terrible punk band, where they make the best of a bad situation and enjoy themselves anyway. That’s about it. Any other ‘celebrations’ – such as Jude’s adoption, or holidays – are cosy domestic affairs within their self-made family structure. Any scenes that promise humour, such as when the quad lock themselves out of the Lispenard Street apartment and Jude insists on dropping down onto the fire escape to open a window and let them in, becomes another anecdote about Jude’s chronic pain and Willem’s insistence on being there for him. That is not to say that every claim to queer or gay novelhood needs a bathhouse scene, or even sex either. But once we examine how warped male friendship is in the novel and how Jude really does his best to keep everyone at arm’s length, we see that there is no connection or reconnection to life and a sense of greater community that Dancer was imbued with. This is not the opposite of the font in the Chip Kidd cover that Yanagihara was inspired by, where someone who starts out healthy gets sicker: this is a character who is set up to be sick and is happy to stay sick, but puts on a façade of wellness and success and belonging to the status quo, who even admits he does not know whether he is gay or attracted to men, because he was so broken by the sexual abuse men inflicted on him. This is the very opposite of queer or gay. The one character who is gay ends up a secondary character, which confirms D’Addario’s point that Greenwell based his argument for A Little Life upon. Jude is, as Mendelsohn refers to him, “a pill.” The only grounds we are given to care about him is the suffering he endures, which in the end is not written to be realistic. Christian Lorentzen enlightens us further on this matter, beginning his review with It’s useful to know on opening Hanya Yanagihara’s second novel, A Little Life – currently, a month before the winner is announced, the 3/1 favourite to win the Man Booker Prize – just how much research she did into the experiences and psychological background of Jude St Francis, the book’s central character: ‘No,’ she told an interviewer, ‘I didn’t do any research; Jude came to me fully formed.’ When confronted with readers who empathize with the novel due to their own experience, all Yanagihara had to say was All you can say in the moment is that you wish them the best. But there is a strange quality to these types of confessions. You wonder if it is the first time

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they have spoken that aloud. But I don’t think fiction can stand in for therapy. I think they are still on their own with it. (“I wanted everything turned up”) Realism, we can safely say, has never been part of the outcome. When that is pointed out, dissenters are smugly met with the adage that the novel is not meant to be realistic. Are we meant to derive some message about how society endorses us to sustain hope despite ignoring or never experiencing suffering, and the fact that some sick people need to die? That nearly 700 pages of graphic, horrifying events are worth enduring, because the prose is well written? If so, it is a message wasted on a gay or queer audience and returns us to “a pre-Stonewall plot type in which gay characters are desexed, miserable, and eventually punished for finding happiness – a story that looks less like the expression of ‘queer’ aesthetics than like the progression of a regressive and repressive cultural fantasy from the middle of the last century” (Mendelsohn). To create a character that is the sum total of his trauma and has no personality beyond it does, as Taylor states, a disservice to portraying said trauma. Before we forget, queer theory’s concept of negativity was about queer existence standing as a contrast to the continuation of heterosexual existence, no matter if it was shortened by AIDS, the threat of murder, suicide, and in spite of any need or drive to reproduce. While what happens to Jude is outside the norm, from beginning to finish, the way he lives the remainder of that life is never in opposition to any normative standard but abiding by it dully. Even his suicide via narrative observation caters to a silent, normative gaze, not dissimilar to the gaze that allowed millions of gay men to die of AIDS. The basic problem, I believe, is the novel’s ‘post-queer’ landscape. When I say post- queer, I mean that the setting of the novel laid out to comfort the reader in the first section creates an impression of a world where being queer is of little or no consequence to anyone. It appears to be a sort of fulfilment of the queer every day I discussed in the first chapter, because it is both so normal and at the same time ‘queers’ the concept of the every day, of the normal, by its casual presence. This is helped by the lack of time markers, where Yanagihara scrubs her prose of references to significant historical events. The September 11th attacks are never mentioned, nor are the names of the Mayor, the President, or any recognizable cultural figures who might peg the narrative to a particular year. The effect of this is to place the novel in an eternal present day, in which the characters’ emotional lives are foregrounded and the political and cultural Zeitgeist is rendered into vague scenery” (Michaud).

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This effect is not only achieved through the absence of topical references to politics or current events; there is cleverly never any mention of technology either, beyond the sort developed in the twentieth century and that we take for granted. While Boy Meets Boy, published in 2001, just missed a crucial point in gay subculture, by the time A Little Life was published in 2015 technology had come to play an important role in the evolution of global culture, but also gay culture. As David Levithan states in the acknowledgements to his later book, Two Boys Kissing, “My gay ‘generation’ is a very short one – I came of age in the five or six years that existed between the height of the AIDs epidemic and proliferation of the Internet, the former defining the generation before me and the latter defining the generation after me.” The rising availability of the internet at the turn of the millennium provided new, anonymous outlets and new ways and spaces for queer culture to survive, invent and flourish. There is a brief mention of Jude receiving work emails, and a prank played by grad students that involves drones, but not much beyond that. It seems stranger still for Willem and JB, given their level of celebrity, which exists within galleries and studios, on filming locations and interviews in publications. That timelessness, too, is aided by the use of prolepsis, with a speculation on behalf of the narrator or a flash forward, and analepsis, with flashbacks and continual reference to the past marking the distance between moment of writing and the event being written about. At first, we have characters unconcerned about their sexuality unless wondering what that sexuality might be. There is no hint of worry at the repercussions from their families and society at large and there are blasé narrative mentions of same-sex couples who make up family, extended friend circles, and colleagues. Later in the novel, however, we have two instances where that illusion is fractured: one is Willem coming out to his agent. Kit, in a manner we do not even blink at, is alarmed once it is revealed that Willem and Jude have established a romantic relationship and what it could mean for Willem’s career. It’s brushed off by Willem, who carries on with a successful career and even continues to play gay roles, without any detriment to his box office appeal. There’s a sense, both from Willem and the narrator, that Kit’s worry is out of place, something leftover from a more intolerant climate. Yet in 2015, when A Little Life was published, while it’s certainly true that there are a number of out actors, very few have managed to have a career as a leading man that spans both mainstream movie franchises and the arthouse titles Willem commits to. If they have, they remain open but quiet – there are rarely magazine pieces featuring them and their spouses. It’s become a political point in the

73 past five years, that heterosexual actors can win acclaim for playing LGBT roles, while queer actors are still overlooked. Kit, Willem and Jude, however, still have this out of place, anxious moment, even though everything else so far leads us to believe the novel is set in some sort of post-homophobic utopia. The novel specifically uses the ‘moment’ to underscore Willem’s love for Jude and to create another moment of self-pity for Jude about whether or not he’ll have a detrimental effect on Willem’s career. The second instance occurs when, despite a character in a play being briefly referred to as having AIDS, there is no mention of the height of the epidemic. That is fair enough; once more I can agree with Greenwell that not every example of gay literature needs to be about AIDS. But we do need to understand it was a period that it intractable from history and even Yanigihara, for all her attempts, cannot extricate that legacy from her novel, especially when Jude’s venereal diseases act as a minor but nonetheless present reminder of his abuse and physical suffering. These STDs are never mentioned precisely, we know it’s not HIV or AIDS, especially given how Caleb and Willem have no qualms about sleeping with Jude once they find out. But the reaction to knowing Jude has several STDs cannot exist without the mark AIDS has made on our culture and the subsequent awareness it brought about STDs. Without the context of the sexual abuse Jude has suffered, his abusive ex-boyfriend Caleb remarks, “Jude St. Francis, a slut after all” and Andy tells him that “even if you hadn’t been a kid, even if you had just been some horny guy who wanted to fuck everything in sight and had ended up with a bunch of STDs, it still wouldn’t be anything to be ashamed of” (193). But the shame is felt by Jude, even if Greenwell insists that the characters “suffer relatively little anxiety about the public reception of their sexual identities.” However, we know from Dancer from the Dance and other gay literary works between Stonewall and the height of the epidemic, that STDs were not really given the concern they were after AIDS. In this sense, the novel is flawed, because it tries to create a setting that is removed from queer history, but requires the reader’s contextual knowledge to fill in the gaps. The setting in this novel is presented as a world where men do not experience anxiety over coming out or existing as gay or queer, but if something can be added on to Jude’s anguish, or the possibility of that anguish, then it will happen. That is why I believe that A Little Life was never meant to be ‘The Great Gay novel,’ as Greenwell argues, or even intended as gay literary fiction. Beyond that first glimpse of its smorgasbord of male sexuality, those first impression of male friendship, and some interesting non-normative relationship practices, I do not think the book is much of a gay novel or a

74 queer one. It does not fit within the scope of queer negativity, a queer aesthetic or a queer historical context, and I do not believe it was meant to. Instead, I believe the attempt at the post-queer creates a strange sense of straight-washing, despite the presence of gay characters. This kind of post-queer world is a heteronormative fantasy – one where gay people exist, but where the trials that queer people face either do not exist or do not manifest themselves. These are trials that heteronormative society presently likes to believe no longer exist, which was a sentiment not uncommonly felt towards the end of the Obama administration when the novel was written, which stands as the friendliest administration towards LGBT rights to date. Legislation for same-sex marriage in the United States occurred the same year the novel was published and afterwards there was a palpable sense that the fight for gay rights was over, never mind problems that homeless youth or young male sex workers faced. Those situations seemed to serve only as exaggerated, piled-on tragedy fodder. Heteronormative society forgets, if it ever knew, that marriage equality arose from of a lack of spousal rights for the partners of people with AIDS, as previously mentioned. There is likewise something tone-deaf about someone who twenty or so years on looks at a piece of art that expresses relief that AIDS’ apocalyptic rampage in gay communities is over and thinks “I wanted . . . to do the reverse: to begin healthy (or appear so), and end sick” (Vulture). We do not yet live in post-queer times and in a literary sense it is contradictory to create something post-queer or at least intentionally omitting queer history, only to refer to issues that evolved as a consequence of queer discrimination. Suffering and dead queer men are still perceived as artistic almost fifty years after the Stonewall riots and the end to publishing restrictions on gay fiction. That in itself adds to a troubling historical narrative that encompasses both fiction and non-fiction. Out of all the critiques the novel has received, however, Greenwell is the only one to actually comment in depth about the gay characters in the novel. Everyone else seems to treat it as a non-issue. The dissenters focus on the torture, but not to whom the torture is being done. Its supporters, meanwhile, believe that what’s most important is the emotional effect the novel creates. In the course of his critique of the novel, Mendelsohn described Yanagihara as ‘duping’ the reader and believes that A Little Life “[appeals] to college students and recent graduates who have been coddled by a permissive and endlessly solicitous university culture into “see[ing] themselves not as agents in life but as potential victims.” Yanagihara’s editor at Doubleday, Gerry Howard, hit back: “Nabokov on numerous occasions was pleased to remind us, art is at bottom an elaborate con game, but one whose techniques are designed to lead us

75 by degrees into a realm of authentic emotion and aesthetic bliss, which justifies the con.” He (rather pettily) answers back to Mendelsohn’s claim that the novel’s main readers are college students and recent graduates that, “This suggests that we should perhaps sticker the copies of A Little Life that we are shipping to college bookstores with the newly fashionable trigger warnings.” He continues: at a hefty price of $30.00 full retail I doubt that A Little Life has found all that many buyers among the perennially cash-strapped postgraduate set. Secondly, I’ve received a simply extraordinary flood of e-mails from readers of, ahem, mature years, people who have been around the block and presumably made of sterner stuff than those putative softies, testifying to the powerful effect the book has had on them. Hardened souls and hard ones to dupe. No one, it seems, has considered where the novel stands in contrast to gay literary fiction, or – since I have disavowed it being of this category – its depictions of gay characters. No one it seems has stopped to think if tragic narrative outcomes for gay characters at this point are becoming tired. Possibly by doing so, we run the risk of sounding like ‘triggered victims.’ If, however, a novel is supposed to lead us into a realm of authentic emotion and aesthetic bliss, what does it say that feelings of bliss come at the price of the torture, rape and death of gay characters? What does it say that it was allowed to be published without this kind of consideration? This, I believe, is why we do need to consider queer history, queer theory, and narrative traditions. Up until the mid-twentieth century, the final say on gay characters, or gay literary fiction, was not often left in gay hands. Now we’re left with a canon that reads like an obituary. To return to Greenwell, the idea of a ‘Great Gay Novel’ is an obvious homage to the idea of the Great American novel, the idea of a novel of high literary merit that shows the culture of the United States at a specific time in the country’s history, from the perspective of the common citizen. We think of The Great Gatsby or The Grapes of Wrath. The idea of a Great Gay novel, then, should incite a similar idea: it should be a novel that depicts gay culture contemporary to when it was being written. I cannot fathom how a novel that barely acknowledges its protagonist’s sexuality and gives him a history of rape and abuse, that doesn’t interact with any ideas of gay community or subculture contemporary to 2015 can truly reflective of gay life in the twenty-first century. Nor can I fathom how, given the history of the gay literary narrative, it could be considered subversive.

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Conclusion

There are two points, I feel, that need to be made in concluding my enquiry. The first is that, in order for a work to be considered contemporary gay fiction, it is not enough for it to simply contain gay themes or gay characters. It needs to respond in some way both to queer history and the queer present. Although Muñoz theorizes that this is important in avoiding vague utopias, I believe that it’s necessary to gay literary fiction that isn’t concerned with utopic settings or outcomes as well. I believe that even engaging with tragedy requires an awareness of how global gay communities have been impacted by intolerance, or the long history of tragic outcomes in gay literary fiction. Otherwise, there’s an increased chance the author will end up repeating narrative patterns and falling into negative stereotypes and tired tropes. In effect, we end up with a kind of stagnancy, which was part of Daniel D’Addario’s original complaint: that there are few works of gay literary fiction produced in the twenty-first century, or fiction that includes gay characters, attempting to break away from established narrative outcomes. In many cases, we are left with a story or sub-plot where someone comes out, has problems in establishing a long-term relationship (in comparison to their happier heterosexual counterparts), lives with AIDS, or dies. In most cases, it might even involve more than one or all of the above. When this same repetition occurs in literary fiction that focuses on heterosexual romance and other aspects of social commentary, we are far more critical. Yet we’ve come to accept this repetition in gay literary fiction. While it’s true that these are themes which can feature prominently in the lives of gay men, reducing the lives of gay men to these parameters denotes a lack of imagination. The successes of Dancer, Boy Meets Boy and Grief, however, go beyond a basic understanding of the climate of tolerance contemporary with their time of publication. These novels show a deeper understanding of gay subculture. They demonstrate the importance that queer friendships and community can play in the lives of gay men, either through the ways in which they are present in Dancer and Boy Meets Boy, or the ways in which they are absent in Grief. They understand the spaces in which gay culture can, or could exist, the aesthetics and the humour. This, I believe, is where A Little Life fails. Yanagihara more or less ignores the importance of all of this, as well as striding into a narrative that is ignorant of the stereotypes that have arisen in narratives about gay men and the limits that have been imposed on gay literature. That is, of course, with the exception of friendship. However, her focus on male

77 friendship as opposed to queer male friendship creates a situation where four men simply become friends because they’re in close proximity with one another. Dancer and Boy Meets Boy, on the other hand, show the ways in which queer friendship – and community – are forged through what we have in common and what connects us. I must stipulate that it is not my intention to advocate for any kind of ban on tragic narrative outcomes. Some of the greatest works in the canon of English literature, after all, are tragic in nature. I even believe the thoughtful exploration of the more tragic chapters, or tragic outcomes in gay lives are necessary. Grief and other fiction produced as a response to the AIDS epidemic are good examples of this, but there are many others. Only last year, I came across This Is Where It Ends, another work of young adult fiction, which deals with the tricky situation of a high school shooting and a subplot involving a relationship between young queer women and the impact of male violence and corrective sexual assault. We cannot live in a world where even recently we have events such as the Pulse nightclub massacre and resolve only to write about happy endings. This brings me to my second point: I’ve wanted both to show the ways in which tragic themes and tragic narrative outcomes have dominated contemporary gay literary fiction, and that celebratory themes and outcomes subvert the tragic status quo. However, just as I do not want to advocate for the end of tragic gay narratives, I do not want to advocate for an endless continuum of happy endings. Much like how Bakhtin demonstrated that the celebration during the medieval carnival had the ability to renew society, I believe celebrating queerness in the novel both responds to queer historicity and creates new narrative temporalities for queer realities to exist uncompromised. That’s not to say that I believe less celebratory narratives haven't been successful in how they have interacted with concepts of queer time, or how they have queered time in the narrative. Nor do I believe they've necessarily been poorer works of literature. But I do agree with Bakhtin that the subversive nature of celebration has become sorely underestimated and undervalued in literature more generally. And I do think there has been an oversight by not asking why the tragic gay literary narrative persists. I can understand the historic reasons: the challenges that authors faced, the critical and public reception, and the consequences of political climates that ignored the needs of the gay community. But the tragic gay narrative continues to persist post-Stonewall and, while there have been exceptions, still tends to dominate gay literary fiction and steer the fate of gay characters. In fairness, a great deal of literary fiction with heterosexual characters or heterosexual implied characters has also been

78 occupied with tragedy, or negativity, when we look at the list of Booker Prize and Pulitzer nominees and recipients. It’s seldom, however, that all the heterosexual characters in works of literary fiction die, or are depicted as completely miserable, or their lives depicted as more difficult because of their heterosexuality. Nor are their deaths accepted so easily. I honestly believe that Dancer from the Dance wouldn't have been alone if the AIDS epidemic hadn’t impacted gay communities the way it did, given how the Holleran and other members of The Violet Quill were choosing to write less tragic-centred narratives prior to the onslaught of the epidemic. Perhaps we would have acquired at least one or two more works of literary fiction that truly celebrated queer identity and at the very least we would have seen an increase in experiment with gay narrative outcomes. That's certainly been the case for young adult fiction and, while not solely down to the existence of Boy Meets Boy, Levithan’s career as an editorial director for Scholastic Press and his example has certainly helped to pave the way for others. The rejuvenation of young adult literature has brought about a golden age of sorts within its scope as a subcategory of literature, which I believe is a more appropriate classification than regarding it as a singular genre. And while there are works that are pedagogical in their role, there are many others which are far more nuanced. Nuanced or not, however, is now young adult fiction and not gay adult fiction that’s beginning to influence the gay narrative beyond literature. In 2017, we've seen two critically and financially successful film adaptions of young adult novels; Love, Simon (its novel title being Simon vs. the Homosapien Agenda) and The Miseducation of Cameron Post. The first is about a sixteen-year-old, middle-class gay boy being outed by a classmate and proceeding to make the best out of the situation, including forging a relationship with an anonymous pen- friend. Suffice it to say, it falls very much into the category of the “It Gets Better” narrative. The second, however, is about a young queer woman who, after being caught in a sexual encounter with another girl, is sent to a gay conversion centre by her aunt in order to ‘cure’ her of her sexuality. Eventually she runs away with two other camp attendees. Although the protagonist-narrator in the novel (and focal character in the film) is a young queer woman, there’s a significant focus on queer youths of all identities, including a Native American two- spirit individual. What both of these novels show is that queer young adult literature, but really queer literature in its entirety, need not be overwhelmingly positive or tragic. Nor does it need to keep following the same narrative trends, as I’m given to understand there’s very little in the way of fiction that depicts conversion therapy, but it can if it chose to. My point is

79 that it can be both. Surely the raison d'être of queerness, if we think back to Halberstam’s theory that queer time opposes normative life patterns, is to refuse to be any one thing. Beyond queer young adult fiction, I can’t help but wonder if the reason why other recent examples of gay literary fiction tend to be set in earlier points in history, unless it’s to escape the narrative outcomes that plague contemporary set literary fiction. David Leavitt’s The Two Hotel Francforts springs to mind, which focuses on the sexual liaisons and romance of two married men against the backdrop of the Second World War in Lisbon and the troubled relationships they have with their wives and one another. Other examples are the lesbian or queer women focused on in much of Sarah Waters’ published works set anywhere from the late Victorian era to the 1940s. Greek myth and history have been another choice, with Mary Renault’s work focusing on Alexander the Great just before and after Stonewall, and The Song of Achilles by Madeleine Miller published recently in 2011. Having read them I have noticed that moving the setting from the present or more recent decades to earlier points in history, historically set fiction often avoids the narratives that contemporary set gay fiction often repeats. It can show the possibilities in which queer people did exist, which have been ignored, erased, or undocumented, or only written about obscurely in subtext. These historic settings aren’t always celebratory, but neither do they necessarily end in tragic outcomes for the gay characters. It would certainly be interesting to do a closer analysis of their narrative outcomes and what queer temporalities there may be in comparison with contemporary fiction published within the same period. Finally, I can’t help but wonder what the unfolding present might mean for gay literary fiction. As I have written this thesis, I have watched LGBT rights become undermined by the efforts of President Donald Trump’s administration over the last year and an increase in news coverage of LGBT discrimination. But there has also been a substantial global outcry in regards to the sexual harassment that women face, brought about in part because of accusations against Trump and recordings of his own derogatory remarks. Subsequently, the winning novel of the 2018 Man Booker Prize is about the sexually abusive relationship experienced by a young woman during the Troubles in 1970s Ireland, which has reference to the ‘Me Too’ movement against sexual harassment and assault. I can’t help but wonder if A Little Life would have received nearly the same amount of praise in 2015, if it had been listed for the prize now, given how it has little regard for realism and its depictions of sexual assault. I also can’t help but wonder if there will be any forthcoming gay or queer literary

80 response to threat of infringement on gay rights and what the narrative outcome might be in future gay literary fiction.

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Works Cited

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Bakhtin, M. (1984). Rabelais and his World. Indiana University Press.

Bennett, J. A. (2010). Queer Teenagers and the Mediation of Utopian Catastrophe. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 455 - 476.

D'Addario, D. (2013, 31 07). Where's the Buzzed About Gay Novel? Retrieved 08 31, 2018, from https://www.salon.com/2013/07/31/wheres_the_buzzed_about_gay_novel/

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