CHROMA

Queer Books We Heart

I read this novel as a teenager and discovered in White's beautifully rich prose an articulation of feelings I myself was struggling to understand. Speaking to other gay men and reading about people’s relationship to this book I’ve found that many have experienced the same thing reading this brilliant novel. It’s startling that a story so specific and entwined in it’s particular time and location can touch upon such universal feelings, taking on personal meaning to so many. It also felt brave and honest that the great betrayal at the end of the book doesn’t conform to a facile love story, but hints at impulses inherent to queer identity which have the power to divide us as much as bring us together. - Eric Karl Anderson, author of Enough


I was somewhere between the ages of ten to twelve, just before puberty. I had a fever and for some reason was in my parents' bed (the bed I was conceived in and where I was born.) Pretentious as I was, and have always been, I thought I must read Shakespeare to be truly cultured. The complete words were bound in soft red leather. I started with the long poem Venus and Adonis. When I came to the description, seen from the point of view of Venus, of Adonis' body, something stirred in my soul-- a soul, I hasten to write, in direct contact with my body, so much so that the stirring in my soul stirred by blood,and an erection rose up in my slightly sweaty pajamas. And I recall from this moment of great psychological complexity came a simple sexual impulse that has given me, and gives me, a very great pleasure in my life.



Because when I heard him read poems from this collection on CBC, as part of "Beneath the Buffalo Robe," a documentary/discussion about decolonising Indigenous sexuality, my knees melted like spring thaw. This book is a talisman for me, for its many beauties, but also because it's the frankest, clearest, most delicate and strong, most committed, most alive and most complex literary representation of bisexuality that I've ever read. And in its honest, sexy, lyrical embrace, it freed me to become something more and braver as a lover, a poet and a person.



After reading Borrowed Time at 19, I came out, became a writer, and joined the AIDS movement. This is the book I mean when I talk to young gay men about their inheritance.

OK, “Used to Dream” is not a book, but in thirteen pages, this short story left me raw as a swallow of bleach. The only other piece of short fiction that comes close in impact is Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain,” but Bard’s work here is filthier, scarier, and more lovely. Maybe if we beg Bard at http://www.sixbrickspress.com/ he’ll publish “Used to Dream” online. The story can also be found in Cole’s collection Briefly Told Lives.






“We all dress up as something. The queers just put more thought into it.”

I first discovered this book on-line and have picked it up through two published editions. From the very beginning, it’s filled with raw, naked poetry flirting as prose, limned and fleshed in primal, visceral honesty… It was that honesty about love and Light, of sense of self and purpose, written with an unabashed admiration and respect for life itself, the glories and discomforts, the deeper truths of what it means to be human—not regardless of physicality but because of it and its inherent fluidity—it shocked me, stunned me, grabbed my heart and head and showed me that this was a Writer writing about Life, about real emotion and sex and heart no matter how fictional the story might be.

Here, for the first time ever, I saw faces I recognized, reflections of friends, of self, of community, and the deep deep Truths inherent in being alive and in being queer.

This book moved me, moved me to bravery, to reveal Truth in my own way, to add my voice to the chorus.

A path, a way I’d never seen before, had been opened before me, a way to a world of potential and possibility, filled with characters made of words that could just possibly be flesh, could be me or you, or that person on the corner, hanging about the coffee shop in Buffalo, NY.

I dress up as an artist—and when I wear my writer clothes, it is because of Susan Smith.

In the mid-nineties, I moved from Michigan to Prague and read a lot of Proust. Before leaving home, I’d thought it would be easier to pack one really big book than lots of short ones.

In a few months, I’d made my way through the first three books of Remembrance of Things Past, and my prose style had gone from clipped Hemingway-esque sketches to long, winding reflections that went on for paragraphs and sometimes pages. My pen and mind needed a break.

Fortunately, my roommate lent me a book called The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood, the perfect corrective to Proust’s imperial, longwinded brilliance.

The first thing that struck me about Berlin Stories was the mirror image of its subject matter in relation to my life. While Isherwood was a semi openly gay writer living abroad, teaching English in a Central European country transitioning from freedom to totalitarianism, I was a semi openly gay writer abroad teaching English in a Central European country moving in the reverse political direction.

A couple of years later, as a fully openly gay grad student in New York, I reread Berlin Stories and came to appreciate the virtues of Isherwood’s literary aesthetic. I particularly loved the disjunction between Isherwood’s clear, frank prose and his sparing divulgence of detail. Berlin Stories is told in fragments, with characters who disappear in one story and then pop up in another, or characters who form mysterious and strong emotional bonds, seemingly for no reason. My writing professor explained that these narrative gaps were caused by the constraints on open discussion of homosexuality at the time when Isherwood published his stories in England, in the mid-thirties. However, as a contemporary reader, I enjoyed the stylistic effect of a narrative that pulled readers in by forcing them to do some of the work themselves to create the stories they were reading. As I sat down to write my own stories of ex-pat life, The View from Stalin’s Head, I used Isherwood as a model, drawing a picture of a time and place through carefully selected fragments, which I hoped might tempt readers to play detective and take the time to put together.

In many ways, Isherwood’s narrative gaps are a fitting stylistic response to the lives of queer people, who almost daily have to decide what to reveal about themselves to new friends, co-workers, even strangers. And just like Isherwood’s readers, queer people also examine people for clues to see what’s under the surface, how what’s not being said may be a result of purposeful ambiguity that goes unnoticed by some audiences while speaking loud and clear to others. As queer life goes mainstream, it’s possible the need for this Isherwood strategy of evasion will lessen or even vanish. In which case, much will be gained, but what will be lost?


Audre Lorde's wonderful poetry collection, The Black Unicorn, was a huge influence. It was so exciting to come across a black lesbian, who embraced all of her own complexities, who looked back to the past, and the women of Dahomey to give her confidence, and forward to the future. I'd never heard a voice like Audre's before and she blew me away. Other early books I loved were Patience and Sarah and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. If reading is a kind of a mirror, these books told me I was not alone.

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posted by Eric Anderson @ 6:14 PM