Discover Important Queer Fiction (With Wieners)

Manners can be more than just good or bad. They can also be dangerous. I don't mean rules about which fork goes where or what to say when someone sneezes. But when a society has rules about who's allowed to fall in love with whom, that has the power to destroy peoples' lives.
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Manners can be more than just good or bad. They can also be dangerous. I don't mean rules about which fork goes where or what to say when someone sneezes. But when a society has rules about who's allowed to fall in love with whom, that has the power to destroy peoples' lives.

That was a lesson learned by Zan Christensen, my guest this week on The Sewers of Paris (a podcast about entertainment that changed the lives of gay men). Zan's founder of LGBT-friendly comic publisher Northwest Press. The first title he ever put out was Teleny and Camille, a book was written sometime around 1890, probably by Oscar Wilde and some friends -- but we'll never really know who the true authors are, because they had to keep their identities secret. The story centers around two men who fall in love and, times being what they are, endure blackmail and secrets and futile attempts to suppress their feelings. It isn't a happy story, and neither were so many same-sex relationships of the time. That's simply because society decided that that its rules, its manners, couldn't allow men to love men. As a result, we'll never really know how many crushes had to go unrequited, how many love affairs had to be stopped before they could even begin, how much companionship was lost.

That's what I mean when I say that manners can be dangerous.

On this week's show, Zan talks about why that was the first title he tackled when founding a queer-focused press. It was important to him that the work be treated as serious and important, even though, as he says, it has wieners.

I also want to recommend the fascinating book Gay New York, by George Chauncey. It's a scholarly work from a few years ago that paints a vivid picture of gay life in Manhattan prior to World War II -- and it's not the picture you might expect. According to Chauncey, there was a vibrant queer scene, and rules about who slept with who were surprisingly fluid -- to the point that same-sex romance was no big deal, and many people never even bothered to label themselves as gay or straight. This is a gay history you've probably never heard, revealing a hundred year old queer community that in some ways was even stronger and more open than today's.

That world fell apart after World War II, when barriers went up between gay and straight, and terms like "homosexual" and "heterosexual" emerged to pathologize one type of love and legitimize another. What followed were fifty years of closets, secrets, lies, and dangerous manners.

I feel befuddled and old when I hear how many college students today don't see the point in identifying themselves as gay or straight. When I was in my early 20s, fifteen years ago, those labels steered your whole life. Nowadays, we're heading into a new world, where people are realizing that confining your sexuality to a label isn't just necessary, and expecting others to do so is the height of bad manners.

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