Reading My Way Into a Queer Literary Lineage

For queer writers, the discovery of this literary lineage is essential to our very existence, to our very expression of self. We can’t find the words without them.

Fourteen

I’ll never remember exactly how I got the book. My mom must have given it to me. Or I stumbled over it on one of her shelves. It is an old copy, paperback, with some of the pages falling out. The small volume has that odd musty scent, slightly sweet, that worn books with yellowing pages always seem to have. It is an immediately mysterious book. It whispers to me in a language I don’t yet understand. It murmurs hidden histories that I have yet to uncover.

When I grew up, where I grew up, we didn’t read queer books. At least, we didn’t think we did. But our teachers were handing us Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman and Thornton Wilder and, at home, my former English major, former librarian, theatre-loving mom had shelves full of everyone from Oscar Wilde to Tony Kushner. I’m convinced that none of the adults really understood what they were doing when they gave me these books by queer (or likely queer) authors. Most didn’t realize they were queer books at all. So much of queer literature has existed just under the surface of things: either pushed to the margins or hiding in plain sight. I grew up in a place and a time before queer YA was a genre teachers actively sought out for their classroom shelves. But I’ve been reading queer books all my life.

When I first held Orlando, I didn’t know how much Virginia Woolf would come to influence me in both my life and my writing, how her portrayals of queerness would help me to understand my own, or how so many of her books would come to shape my aesthetic ideals, that her ways of writing trees and waves and the movements of streets would help to shape my very perceptions of consciousness. I didn’t know, when I first read Orlando, that this book would fundamentally shape my notions of gender as not binary and fixed, but fluid and changeable. I didn’t know that, when my wife came out to me as trans, I would be able to give her a copy of this book and that that would be the perfect thing or that, as I began to explore my own genderqueerness, I would come to appreciate how lightly this book held the heaviness of gender, how playful it was with seemingly unquestionable binaries. All I knew, when I first held this book at fourteen, was that I loved it. It spoke to me in ways I wouldn’t be able to articulate until much much later.

It feels fitting that my first introduction to Virginia Woolf came from my mom’s bookshelves, that, in fact, most of the first writers who I think of as my queer literary lineage, came from these familial shelves. Any avid reader knows that, in some special books, one finds a sense of kinship, that feeling that the book recognizes some part of you and you recognize some part of it and, in that recognition, you both are expanded. For queer readers like myself, who have to seek our queer lineage outside of the families we are born to, this feeling compounds. Queer books, like queer friends who become family, create doorways through which we discover our histories, learn our presents, and imagine our futures.

For queer writers, the discovery of this literary lineage is essential to our very existence, to our very expression of self. We can’t find the words without them.

*

It’s easy to hide in the writing, to tuck oneself snug between the pale blue of college-ruled lines and two cardboard covers. There’s a me that lives caught in the ink of it, guarded by cold metal spirals, contained. It’s easier to give everyone else the surface they expect, keep the rest of it safe in these notebooks. On the surface I am everything right: good girl, nice girl, straight A. So when I wear my black eyeliner, they tell me I’m pretty (not disturbingly witchy). When I cut my hair short, they tell me I’m cute (not confusingly handsome). I learned this trick from the books that they gave me: it’s only the surface they’ll read. I am hidden so well, I often lose sight of myself.

When I discover The Picture of Dorian Gray, I know exactly what Oscar Wilde is writing about. The story is brilliantly hidden. I carry it around in my backpack and my teachers are impressed by my voluntary reading of classics. They think it’s a book about morals, about the destruction wrought by leading an immoral life. It is almost biblical in the good lesson it teaches by way of its magical metaphor: Don’t be bad like Dorian. Evil ruins the soul.

Almost all the queer stories I knew growing up were tragedies told in the language of shame.

But I read it differently. I read it as a book about queerness, about the necessity of hiding it, about the psychologically disfiguring shame of it all. The book will stay with me forever as one of the foundational texts that explores that weighty sense of guilt, that unshakeable sense of queer doom. Almost all the queer stories I knew growing up were tragedies told in the language of shame. Orlando was the exception. Dorian was the rule. So many of the queer stories we inherit are stories of violence and sadness. These tragedies, that home I made in hiddenness, haunt me, haunt so many of us, even now.

Thirty-Four

Everyone in this room knows I’m queer but I still feel that sharp hidden thrill as I listen to queer books at work, like I’m holding a secret between my ears. As my coworkers listen to true crime podcasts or music or NPR, I hear the voices of our queer future while I data-enter. Every part of myself hears them differently: the woman-self, the man-self, the guilty-self, the proud-self, the lonely-self, the hopeful-self, the adult-self, the teenage-self, the child-self, and the part where all these selves merge in the middle, crossing all these self-divisions, coming together into a new language that can hold them all at once.

Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater shook me. I listened to the audiobook, read by the author, and felt myself caught in the best kind of ways. Its rendering of queer gender and sexuality in the language of Igbo ontology—this book does not view gods and dreamworlds as metaphor, but as inescapable reality—made me think with a new kind of freedom about my own writing, my own language, my own expressions of queer realities.

So often, in the dominant modes of thought in the contemporary US, our language of gender and queerness is based in medicine. We categorize ourselves with Latinate names. We rate ourselves on scales. This is not un-useful language. In fact, it is often essential. Naming and categorizing can help us to understand ourselves and to find each other. We need a more medicalized language when seeking medical care. It’s also extremely useful when attempting to convey our queer experience in a society made for straight people, when we are seeking acceptance or safety. Medical language can serve to desexualize sexual experience, to un-strange strangeness, to make what is weird to the world feel un-magicked, and therefore unthreatening.

But, to many of us, this practically useful language of queerness, if it becomes the only queer language we use, can begin to feel overly rigid, a trap that turns into its own kind of hiding. Freshwater, by using another language of queerness, suggests that we might forge our own queer languages to express our experiences and perceptions of queerness instead of shaping ourselves to fit into the language we know.

*

There’s really no way to describe it, this medical witchery we’ve managed. I can write fertility treatments. I can write IVF. I can write a nonbinary trans woman and a genderqueer woman-like person got pregnant. But none of those terms really contain the experience. They don’t describe the way the potions made my body become not my body or the procedures that dropped visions of trees overburdened with fruit inside me. They don’t describe the divisions of self, the way carrying this fantastical fetus puts so many mes back to sleep, a whole hidden castle of dreamers, hormonally ensorcelled, waiting for birth the wake up. I don’t know the words yet to write it. But I’m certain that someday I will.

Reading Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties, a book of magically genre-bending stories, made me consider my embodied experience in ways I hadn’t ever really felt that I could before. It made me wonder about the language and stories I’ve been given for my body and how that language and those stories have shaped my perceptions, creating artificial boundaries. In “The Husband Stitch,” we follow the mind of a woman trapped in the stories she’s been told, struggling to express herself in them. In “Mothers,” two women become pregnant together. Because why not?

Queer experience doesn’t follow straight lines. Sometimes we need strangeness to express it.

Queer experience doesn’t follow straight lines. Sometimes we need strangeness to express it. We need to turn the old stories new. We need to find what was hidden inside them and pull it to surface. This is one reason I think we so often tend toward hybridity: mixing genres, mixing forms. We write prose poetically. We fragment things. We make our fairy tales realistic, turn our realism fantastical. We turn tales inside out, stitch them sideways. Sometimes all we can write are the hints of it. Sometimes all we can do is gesture toward it. Because we don’t have the language yet. We don’t yet have all the stories we need to tell what we know. What we know is another reality.

Future

At the AWP conference this year, I went to a panel where Lidia Yuknavitch, Carmen Maria Machado, Alexander Chee, and Garth Greenwell—all beloved LGBTQ authors—talked about sex. This wasn’t a niche panel. The audience for it was huge, the authors all literary heavyweights both inside and outside of queer reading communities. There I was, sitting with writer friends, trying not to be embarrassed as I teared up at an AWP panel. And I wished, as I watched them, that I could go back in time and tell my teenage self about this future we would live in, that I could let my early writing self, the one that scribbled away queerness to hide it, know: soon we’d all be reading and writing in a time when overtly queer authors shaped the realities of mainstream literature.

At this panel, Garth Greenwell talked about language, about the importance of having the words to describe one’s experience, one’s existence, about how today’s LGBTQ writers are making a new language of queerness—one that isn’t born of the pathologizing of queerness we were taught in the past but of something else, something different. And I wonder what this language will be, how this language, how these stories, will shape us. And these queer youth of the future—the ones who will be shaped by the queer literary lineage we are, all of us, building right now in the present—Who will they be? How will they be? What homes, what stories, what worlds will they be able to create?

In this room there are so many voices, a chorus of ghosts trailing memories made word. I hear Woolf here and Wilde. I hear James Baldwin and Audre Lorde and Gloria Anzaldua and W.H. Auden and Countee Cullen and Elizabeth Bishop and so many more. Our queer past flowing into queer present. Often I hear these voices echoing out of readings, out of panels, out of new queer books. There are moments when I hear them while writing and they sound like the rushing of waves. In these moments I feel myself as a tiny drop in a wide stream of queer literature, moved along by the work that surrounds me, here making my own tiny ripple, a single moment coming out of our past, disappearing back into our future.