Gabrielle Bellot and Megan Milks: Baldwin, Machado, and Other Writers Who Made Us Bolder

“What do we want? Livable lives. Thriving communities. The right to our bodies and our desires. Love. Resilience. Possibility. Queer genius.”

In 2020, Catapult’s classes program will begin offering reading groups for writers. Gabrielle Bellot will be leading a reading group on James Baldwin in late January 2020, and Megan Milks will be leading a reading group for writers on queer and trans literature in February 2020.

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Gabrielle Bellot

Early in Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin’s seminal novel about an American in France who is in agonistic denial about his sexuality, the narrator, David, reflects on the first time he allowed himself to be with another man. David, who was then in Brooklyn, had spent the day with a friend named Joey, culminating in the two of them lying next to each other in his apartment. David was amazed at the serenity of letting his guard down, of “how good I felt . . . how fond of Joey.”

But not long after, a bed bug bites him, and he awakes in a fit of almost cosmic horror at the fact that he has given his queerness an outlet. The “body” next to him, David muses, “suddenly seemed the black opening of a cavern in which I would be tortured until madness came . . . A cavern,” he continues, “opened in my mind, black, full of rumor, suggestion, of half-heard, half-forgotten, half-understood stories, full of dirty words. I thought I saw my future in that cavern.” Far from a warm, well-lighted cave he could curl up in, his moments of intimacy with Joey have become an enveloping, enervating hole, a cavernous maw threatening to devour him. He renounces his queerness, denies it even exists—until he goes to France as part of a European trip with his girlfriend, where he finds himself alternately drawn to and repulsed by the eponymous Giovanni. David cannot stop looking into that cavern of himself, cannot stop wanting to spelunk into those warm depths for a bit—but he also cannot accept his bisexuality. As a result, he lashes out at everyone around him, becoming an unbearable, self-loathing, self-denying bête noire of a person.

Baldwin’s portrait of frustrated queerness spoke to me the first time I read Giovanni’s Room as a young trans girl of color; it was one of the first queer novels I read. Later, when I reread it, I was struck by how masterfully and poignantly Baldwin had caught David’s self-loathing; his hatred was painful to read, but, as someone who had lived in denial of my own queerness for years, I understood his sense of being trapped by the immense, oceanic pressures of wanting to conform to societal norms. Baldwin, who was also bisexual, had written a narrator as frustrating as he was illustrative of what happens to someone trapped too tightly in a small closet.

I’ve read Baldwin’s work over and over; it, too, is a cave I retreat into, a place that has come to feel like home. His magnificent essays, so full of fire and ire and compassion, still speak to me as if they were written today. His novels—particularly Go Tell It on the Mountain and If Beale Street Could Talk—are beautiful, striking, and moving, his language often quietly dense with the cadences of a great preacher—and this is no surprise, as Baldwin was apprenticed, as a teenager, to be behind the pulpit.

I often find myself wondering about his work when I write; he’s made me feel bolder as an essayist. He is inescapable—his work unflinchingly defines what it means to be a black American, as well as an American more broadly, still, to this day. And it speaks, too, to what it means to be an expatriate of color, and what it means to create art from within deeply, direly prejudicial systems.

I’ve read Baldwin’s work over and over. He’s made me feel bolder as an essayist. 

“It seems that the artist’s struggle for his integrity,” Baldwin declared in a 1963 essay on what it means to be an artist, “must be considered as a kind of metaphor for the struggle, which is universal and daily, of all human beings on the face of the earth to become human beings.” Later in the piece, he added a quick but devastating coda to his definition of what artists are supposed to be. “Art is here to prove,” he said, “and to help one bear, the fact that all safety is an illusion.” Perhaps this is it most of all: he has helped me work towards writing that kind of free, unsafe art, even as his work has helped me find a warm and well-lit place to lie in.

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Megan Milks

I sometimes have a hard time naming and pursuing desire. Writing—the space it makes for fantasy—gives me ways to explore what I’m not (yet) able to in life.

Queer and trans writers have always had a lot to say about desire, perhaps because there is always so much to want—for ourselves and for our communities. The authors of the four books I’ve chosen for the Reading New Queer Lit for Writers group use various modes of fantasy to express new/old desires, to walk them through in the space of story. From Larry Mitchell’s utopian vision to Andrea Lawlor’s shapeshifting aesthete, from Kai Cheng Thom’s “dangerous” trans story to Carmen Maria Machado’s illusory Dream House, these books show us a lot about the generative power of queer desire.

It’s been a long time since the last revolutions and the faggots and their friends are still not free. So begins Larry Mitchell’s The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, originally published in 1977, reissued in 2019. A bit of a cheat, perhaps, calling this “new,” but it’s the kind of book that renews itself. Fabulist manifesto? Polemical fable? Mitchell’s pre-AIDS fable of queer solidarity and anti-patriarchal, anti-capitalist communal praxis balances the documentary with the utopian. To read this visionary dispatch from the past is to imagine new queer futures for today.

Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl also creates something of a temporal wormhole, with ’90s queer politics refracted through contemporary queer and trans discourse. Paul is an historical creature, made in and of the ’90s, where he hops restlessly between queer cultures from Iowa City to the Michigan Women’s Music Festival, from Provincetown to San Francisc. He’s also a gender-fluid fantasy: a queer shapeshifter who can change his gender at will. Paul belong[s] in all the genders.

To read Larry Mitchell’s visionary dispatch from the past is to imagine new queer futures for today.

Where Lawlor invents a fantastic body, Kai Cheng Thom invents a fantastic world populated by mermaids, a ghost, a living statue. Throughout Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir, magic helps Thom’s characters—almost all trans women of color—survive in a world that otherwise doesn’t support them. So does story: the novel is a fictional autobiography, a “dangerous story” in which our narrator leaves home, joins a girl gang, and tries on a fairytale romance while making an argument for flooding trans narratives with community and adventure.

I daresay you have heard of In the Dream House? It is, as you know, a real place. In her inventive memoir, Carmen Maria Machado also plays with genre, pulling on numerous fictive outfits while telling a story of queer partner abuse. Digging into the archive, she finds little in the written record that mirrors her experience. So her book becomes a story machine: drawing on tropes from fairy tales, horror, and romance to alternately outfit her experience in story and strip it of romantic fantasy. Even as story collapses again and again, Machado keeps building it back up, shaking off one plotline for another, one trope for the next: an urgent effort get out of one story and into one she can live in.

What do we want? Livable lives. Thriving communities. Deep archives. Dangerous stories. The right to our bodies and our desires. Love. Resilience. Possibility. Queer genius. These writers remind me to always want more, and they leave me wanting to write.