Blocks and Blockades

I'm pretty sure your observation is correct, Bill - I bet it is a lot harder to get gay-themed work published. For one thing, this country surely hasn't fully embraced gay themes in life, let alone literature; for another, gay-themed work is probably perceived as a "niche" or even, heaven forfend, a "genre."

I know there are a lot of theories about why the world has become more compartmentalized over the last few decades (many of them centered on marketing), and it always seems sad to me that art and literature, which ought to be the shining beacon against such limitations, happily go along. These days, Jane Austen would be published with a pink cover in the chick lit section and Herman Melville's leviathan would be dripping blood from unwhale-like fangs over in action adventure. I think most editors of literary magazines would claim they were free from such considerations, but still, they have a reasonably firm concept of what "suits" their aesthetic - and I'm guessing that gay-themed work often doesn't. And don't get me wrong, I think the editors of literary magazines are heroes, and ought to be praised to the skies for all they do to keep short fiction and poetry alive - but like all of us, they live in a world with many unseen blockades, and we're all very used to those blockades, no matter how hard we try and see over and around them. Too often, the answer to those blockades is ghettos, and there are many, many ghettos for literature.

But I actually think the answer is to keep doing what you're doing. Your work is by its very nature not suited to compartmentalization, and I think if you keep writing about every aspect of life you know, you're at least helping to bring the blockades down brick by brick. Because the truth is no one, no matter how sheltered, actually lives behind those walls, even if just imaginatively, no matter how hard they try. And what we're trying to get at in our writing is some kind of truth, after all - the one that doesn't recognize those carefully constructed walls.