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PrejudiceOctober 31, 2007 Here's the second (and last) paragraph of my latest "encouraging rejection" letter. (For details, see yesterday's blog.)
Background: This particular press is located in southeastern New England. That's why I queried them -- that, and the fact that a couple of people who've been associated with it over the years are, or at least used to be, politically savvy. I thought that maybe being based in a small town that has a few things in common with Vineyard towns economically and demographically might make them more receptive, or at least more willing to notice this pesky More background: My "depiction of the anti-gay prejudice on Martha's Vineyard" consists of a reference to an actual incident that happened on the Vineyard in 1993. Two men tried to get two kids' books about gay families removed from the Oak Bluffs School library. The attempt was unsuccessful for a variety of reasons, not least the heroic steadfastness of the school librarian and the solid backup she got from the school committee. In retrospect, I think this may have been a turning point in the island's acknowledgment that (a) gay people live on Martha's Vineyard, and (b) the sky won't fall in if you say so out loud. Martha's Vineyard didn't really discover AIDS till the late 1980s. (A few islanders had died of it, but they all died, as they had lived, elsewhere.) The discovery was closely (and hotly) followed by a renewed interest in condoms, specifically the placement of condom dispensers in the regional high school. What was utterly flabbergasting was the community's -- especially the school system's -- facility for discussing AIDS and condoms without acknowledging the existence of homosexuality or the presence of gay men and lesbians on Martha's Vineyard. A drop-in from outer space might have been forgiven for concluding that HIV/AIDS was spread entirely by dirty needles and blood transfusions, and that condoms were just about contraception. There were, need I say, gay men and lesbians on Martha's Vineyard at the time. More than two dozen of us gathered to form the Island Gay & Lesbian Association in 1990, partly in response to the public discussions and some especially nasty letters to the editor. We knew we existed, and they knew we existed, but it's a long way from knowing it to saying it out loud. I was out pretty much from the day I arrived, but I was one of those fringe people who had nothing to lose by being different: I didn't have family here, and I was a writer, for heaven's sake -- writers are supposed to be weird. Everyone knew that Photographer X was a lesbian (at one point I noticed that of the female photographers working on the Vineyard, only one was straight), and Poet Y was gay, and not only was Theater Director Z a lesbian, she was running a popular program for kids and no one thought twice about it. In mid-1985 I landed with both feet in the middle of a place that existed long, long before I showed up. This was new. For the previous 15 years I'd lived more or less in and around communities that were trying to invent themselves, with mixed, often fascinating, occasionally disastrous results. Nearly everyone I knew -- in college, in the antiwar movement, and in the feminist movement/lesbian community -- was within 10 years of my own age and, like me, came from somewhere else. Within a year of my arrival on Martha's Vineyard, my circles of acquaintance ranged from kids in single digits to people in their late 80s. I was beginning, just beginning, to glimpse how many circles and layers exist and interact in this small place, and to understand how individuals manage to pass through those circles and layers and to live in several of them at any one time. I got to know some people who were especially adept at this, and how they managed to accomplish things that outspoken activists couldn't. Discretion and circumspection turned out to be more important values than I'd realized, and "letting it all hang out" -- incessantly calling attention to how different you were from everyone else -- had definite drawbacks. I wrote "Deer Out of Season," which became the backstory for The Mud of the Place, in 1992 or 1993. (It appeared in Irene Zahava's anthology Lavender Mansions: Forty Lesbian and Gay Short Stories, published by Westview Press in 1994.) It wasn't till 1998 or early 1999 that I got down to The Mud of the Place. Considerable composting took place in those intervening years. "Deer Out of Season" is about being gay/lesbian on Martha's Vineyard. The Mud of the Place uses a gay/lesbian lens to explore how Martha's Vineyard works, and by extension how other small, reasonably self-contained communities work. It didn't dawn on me till the first draft was complete that all of the main characters, straight and gay, are single. Which actually provides the best clue to what the novel is "about" -- other than a bunch of people trying to get their work done and do as well by each other as they can. It's about the creative tension between the I and the We: how "I" can I be without endangering the "We," and when do you have to tell the "We" to back off, and is it really the "We" that's holding you back, or maybe your own fear of being left out in the cold? Which comes round to why it's so exasperating to see someone reduce the whole thing to a "depiction of anti-gay prejudice," even if I know damn well they didn't get past chapter 1. The "we have an out lesbian and an out gay man on the Board of Select Persons" thing would be insufferable if it didn't so completely miss the more interesting questions: So did they grow up in town, or did they come from somewhere else? How does the old-timer/newcomer thing work out in your town, and what role does class play in it? How much power or influence was the board of selectmen wield in this town, and how do its members get things done? Who invites the lesbian and gay members to supper, and who accepts their invitations? How do things work out with community organizations -- say, the Catholic church -- that aren't officially gung-ho about homosexuality? That's where the story starts. That's where a whole bunch of interesting stories start.
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