Once upon a time my diet of fiction was huge. In grade school I was a voracious reader of it, much to the annoyance of my teachers who often caught me at it in class when I should have been paying attention to them. Once a dour old history teacher of mine, a man who could make World War II seem boring, caught me reading a western behind my text book and berated me for a good ten minutes in front of the whole class. He demanded to know if my copy of Louis L’amour’s Flint was more important then history class. It was all I could do to keep from telling him no, just his history class.
But as I have grown older my diet of fiction has dropped severely off. Where I used to go through one or two fiction books a week, now I’m doing good if I read one or two a year. It isn’t that I’ve stopped reading altogether. Far from it. I read constantly. Between the web and the few magazines I still subscribe to, my eyes are constantly scanning words. And I always have a book I am digesting, sometimes several, on the side table in my office with bookmarks carefully inserted. But these are non-fiction titles. A history of German-English relations, Death of the German Cousin, by Peter Edgerly Firchow. A history of Walt Disney Word, Since The World Began, by Jeff Kurtti. A history of the anti-gay witch hunts of the 1950s, The Lavender Scare, by David K. Johnson. These are the sorts of books I read now.
I think I know why, and it’s why I don’t like watching movies all that much anymore, or TV shows that, once again, aren’t non-fictional. I can watch The Science Channel and The Discovery Channel and The History Channel for hours. But very little else. Fiction mostly bores me anymore.
At work, there is a little bookshelf in one corner of the cafeteria where staff can leave books they are finished with, for others to pick up and take home and read. It’s a kind of informal book exchange. When I first joined the Institute ten years ago (has it been that long?), it was just a small stack of books on a window ledge. One day someone had left a few there with a note saying anyone who wanted one could have it. Over the next few months some books disappeared and others were deposited to take their place. Eventually the stack outgrew its window ledge and a small bookshelf was installed.
I check it daily, and have even fed from it a time or two. But as I hardly read any fiction anymore my interest was mostly curiosity as to what my co-workers were reading. As you might expect, the mix is largely science-fiction and computer technology. There is an old Word Perfect manual there, and a Turbo-C manual, that have been waiting for a hand to lift them off the shelf and take them home now for almost as long as the exchange has been going. About half of it cycles quickly and the rest just sits and waits for the recycling bin to come along. But they’re like me there…loath to toss out a book that might possibly still be useful.
The other day someone left a small collection of science-fiction hardbacks, their dust covers looking almost like new. But it was older stuff…stuff from my kidhood, when I read it voraciously. I sorted through them and saw an interesting cover. It was of an older man sitting in a rocking chair his front porch, reading a book to a companion who stood nearby with a coffee cup in one hand. The man in the rocking chair seemed to be a farmer of some sort…you could see fields of wheat going off into the distance just off the porch. His companion was a grey skinned, pointy eared bug-eyed alien. The two of them were enjoying a restful moment looking over the book the farmer was reading.
I picked it up…it was by Clifford D. Simak titled, Way Station…I’ve never read him…and on a lark brought it home thinking I could always take it back if I got a few pages in and lost interest.
That’s been my pattern lately with fiction and I know why. Even back in my kidhood, most of what I read was very light on the romantic interest. My favorite authors, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Hal Clement, and others, seldom spoke of that baffling dating and mating game, which suited me fine then, and ironically enough still would, although for a very different reason. Action writer Alistair MacLean (of Ice Station Zebra and Guns of Navarone fame), whose books I devoured, once averred that the love interest just slowed down the action. I wondered since if he wasn’t simply, as Clarke was, a gay man who couldn’t bring himself to write about love as he knew it, and simply left it out of his writing altogether, but I read now that he was married twice and had three kids.
Clarke, let it be said, wrote one of the most touching same-sex love stories in science-fiction in Imperial Earth. But even then he had to make his main character bisexual, not gay and there is a female love interest too. I pretty much just glossed over those scenes, which were gratefully few. The scenes between the two male characters had real emotion to them. Or at least, they did for me.
That’s been my pattern. I pick up a book that looks interesting and as soon as it gets to the love interest I put it down. Okay…I get that I’m living in a heterosexual world. But it is the rare straight writer who can hold my interest while I’m reading about it. And come to think of it, those writers have all been women. And as more and more science-fiction writers became comfortable, insisting even, with writing about sex too, I just lost interest. I suppose I can appreciate that heterosexuals probably don’t want to read about gay sex either. But it would be nice if their gay neighbors had the same kind of depth to their fiction shelves. Mary Renault is dead. Mercedes Lackey only wrote one set of stories featuring a gay male lead. It was wonderful, absolutely wonderful. But then there was no more. The various gay authors I’ve read have been mostly one hit wonders, and there is no good gay science fiction to speak of. None. Most of what I read these days that is fiction, are yaoi manga from Japan. I have a bookshelf practically filled with those damn things.
So I picked up this Clifford D. Simak novel hoping that at least it was representative enough of its time that its love interest was minimal. I got about thirty pages into it when I stumbled upon The Mute Free Spirit Girl In The Woods and thought…yeah…here it comes. But then I did something, probably out of shear frustration, that I’ve always done when listening to pop music. I mentally switched around a few pronouns and read it as The Mute Free Spirit Guy In The Woods and kept on reading. What I found was I could empathize with the main character’s feelings once more, and my interest in the story perked up considerably. And thus the pages kept turning.
I do this all the time with pop music. It’s not always easy, particularly with rock songs that are über masculine male meets über feminine female. But it is do-able. Sometimes I need to substitute genderless pronouns to make the song make sense. But in years of doing this, it comes to me almost as second-nature now…
You are all the woman I need
And baby you know it
You can make this beggar a king
A clown or a poet
…runs through my mind as…
You are all the lover I need
And baby you know it
You can make this beggar a king
A clown or a poet
…so easily now I hardly think about it. This is how I cope with living in a world where 99 44/100 percent of the songs about love are songs about heterosexuals in love. Sometimes I wonder if this is why my imagination is so potent. I’m constantly re-imagining my pop culture environment to suit myself. But no…I’ve been a day dreamer since well before puberty. The imagination has kept me sane all these years. Or at least, pleasant company.
So I try this out on Way Station and find myself not putting the book down after all. It’s more difficult then with rock songs, as I have to buffer the images in my mind as the words create them, then re-build them with the new pronouns, before actually looking at them. I’m editing it on the fly and taking it in as I’m editing it.
It’s…do-able, but hard. With music it’s more the direct emotional content and the words are poetry and their images are meant to free-associate in your mind anyway. You’re not building any specific image in your mind. With a novel you are and re-casting an opposite sex love interest as a same-sex one is more mental gymnastics. And I don’t have the genderless pronoun out I do with rock songs, when explicitly switching gender won’t make any sense. On the other hand I don’t have to worry about how the words scan to a beat either.
It is not that much harder, really, then what I do for a living when I’m trying to visualize program flow from computer code. And I don’t have to do it everywhere in the novel, just when the love interest shows its face. It’s work…I think it’s cutting my reading speed in half…but as time goes on I’ll probably get mentally faster at it. As long as it doesn’t involve any actual sex scenes.
I have a confession to make. I do this all the time with favorite movies. Not in real time though…that’s more then even my hyperactive imagination can handle. But there are titles I could tell you about, some blockbusters, some just little niche films I happen to have liked a lot, that I have recast in my mind, mentally changing a pronoun as it were when the love interest appears, sometimes mentally re-writing huge sections of the plot, to satisfy my need for some reflection of my life and my own romantic desires in the pop culture. I daydream these rewrites constantly, refining them a little every time I replay them in my head. With the iPod, I can even daydream them to their actual background scores too. These are favorite movies, but if you look on my video shelves you won’t see any of them there because I have them all stored inside my head, just the way I want them.
They say gay folk are more creative. I think that’s more myth then fact, but if there is some truth to it, it’s because we need to be to survive. We live in a world that is hostile at worst, and uncaring at best. I wish there was more gay fiction out there. There are probably tons of good gay writers out there…but it isn’t gay folk who run most of the publishing houses, let alone the Hollywood film studios.
