This post is part of an ongoing interview with author Mark John Isola about his forthcoming book Inky Flesh, so check back for more questions. Once posted, a link following the current Q&A will allow you to click through to read the next question–or begin reading from the first question: Why the title Inky Flesh? Quotes that are reasonably sized and maintain the context of the discussion are permitted for review, interview, academic, and blogging purposes—a link to the web page quoted will help maintain context.

Here is the current question:

Cal: You referred to yourself as a bad boy—what does that mean? How are you a “bad boy” when it comes to gay fiction?

MJ: Maybe we no longer have such concerns, but this gets at what has been a contentious debate about sex, lust, and beauty in gay fiction and whether we should or should not write about such as gay authors. To Dancer or not to Dancer is the question: meaning whether we should embrace or reject the version of gay life that may be glimpsed from Andrew Holleran’s novel Dancer from the Dance—not to mention Larry Kramer’s Faggots.

The problem is Holleran’s novel seems to produce responses that are more akin to a Rorschach test than an attentive close reading. This reader response becomes part of the problem, if not the problem itself.

I understand the debate, and I respect its thick origins—a minority group’s anxiety regarding representation, the concern over telling community secrets to outsiders, the worry regarding playing into stereotypes, the separatist versus assimilationist political and cultural strategies, the reconsideration of narrative sex in the age of HIV, and perhaps a fair amount of denial, which mirrors the larger culture’s Puritanical preference for real-sex to remain unspoken. However, I find this discussion more reductive than productive at times. Can’t we all just jerk off and get along?

If you’ve spent five minutes reading Inky Flesh or on my web site, you know I think sex is a poignant, productive, and important narrative subject. I would argue it is perhaps more important now given the hyper-romantic and hyper-sexual depictions—all those fantastical faggots—one tends to encounter, particularly of gay men, but of humans generally in mainstream culture.

This is not just a gay male concern. It seems to me lesbians continue to face an even greater problem when it comes to a constant cultural invisibility or strategies of containment. Sadly, this is not so new. This is the problematic “bury the gay” trope, where by the end of the narrative the sexually transgressive character is killed or otherwise locked up or removed from the narrative. Otherwise, just like the fantastical faggot, it’s all luscious lesbians.

There are additional complications surrounding this discussion today. For example, nowadays, same-sex male narratives are not only by, for, or about gay men, and a gay web search is not necessarily an organic gay query anymore. This equals a big difference between today and the days when these debates were more active.

Check back Wednesday for the next question and answer.

This post is part of an ongoing interview with author Mark John Isola about his forthcoming book Inky Flesh, so check back for more questions. Once posted, a link following the current Q&A will allow you to click through to read the next question–or begin reading from the first question: Why the title Inky Flesh? Quotes that are reasonably sized and maintain the context of the discussion are permitted for review, interview, academic, and blogging purposes—a link to the web page quoted will help maintain context.

Here is the next question:

Cal: Of the several authors you mentioned as influences, we are probably least familiar with Paul Reed. I know you have written about him before. Who was Paul Reed?

MJ: Back when the web site glbtq.com was still active, I contacted Dr. Claude Summers to ask if I could submit a bio-essay about Paul Reed. There was nothing on the site about him, and I wanted to remedy that. Glbtq.com was the online companion to The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage, which I think is a book every gay person should own. It is no longer an active web site, but the essay I wrote is still archived somewhere. One can look there for a more detailed look at Reed’s life and work, but I am happy to share some information about him.

Paul Reed was a gay American author, who lived from 1956 to 2002. He wrote the first American novel to directly focalize HIV/AIDS. It is titled Facing It: A Novel of AIDS. He was friends with the poet and journal writer May Sarton. He wrote several interesting journals himself, including one while he was undergoing Compound Q trials, an experimental HIV treatment. I’ve read his journals several times—the image of him sitting in his red chair in his San Francisco apartment always comes to my mind.

Reed was also a prolific erotica writer, and he was a friend of John Preston’s. His sex writing appeared under the pseudonym Max Exander. Of his fiction, his novel Longing is my favorite. His work is out of print, but there are second hand books if you look around.

You can learn more about Reed, and many other gay authors, in The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered. This is a fun book that features authors suggesting other authors. It is a nice gateway to many of the writers I have read over the years, including several of the Violet Quill writers, Melvin Dixon, Mark Merlis, and others.

A similar book to check out is David Leavitt’s Pages Passed from Hand to Hand. This is an anthology that offers excerpts of authors from previous eras writing in a coded way about homosexuality. It contains a great excerpt from Charles Warren Stoddard, whom I wrote about in my dissertation. It also features Willa Cather, Henry James, and others. David Leavitt is another author I have enjoyed, just like every other gay Gen Xer, I suppose. I really liked his novella The Term Paper Artist. I am more of a bad boy when it comes to gay fiction though, so I suppose it makes sense that I like this end of Leavitt’s work.

Back to Paul Reed though, his life and work reflect an intimate experience with the world before, during, and through the multiple evolutions of HIV. This is, of course, not the only thing Reed writes about. Yet, his writing evolved within these three phases of the epidemic.

In a conference paper along the way, I termed these–facing it, living it, and surviving it, for Reed found himself writing against the realities of the epidemic again, again, and again. And, I greatly admire his artful resilience.

Paul Reed left us an amazing journey in words really.

Click through to the next question: What are Bad Boys? Fantastical Faggots?