Allan Gurganus | March/April 1990

I'm the kind where- I've never met a Saint Sebastian I didn't like. - You getting the code here? So began a would-be witty speech I brought with me. But, as of this afternoon, my fellow travelers, I chucked that one. I see now: the first talk was based on certain assumptions. I assumed that-as a community of writers-we held much in common, most in common. Assuming is notoriously dangerous. We urge our students to Show, Not Tell. We must, I see again, assume nothing about our work's fictional characters, or even about our closest friends; and certainly we should take nothing for granted about this diverse human group, a guild. Maybe conventions inspire our most conventional thinking?

Asked for news of what it's like to be a gay artist in the Academy, I planned saying I felt easy with the artist part, easy enough about the gay stuff, and weird only about being name-called an Academic. I wrote a line that sums up my feeling about most scholarship: "How many footnotes could a footnote footnote if a footnote could note footnotes?" Answer, friends? A whoooole lot of footnotes.

But you already know this part. So it's the queer stuff I'm going for. I should tell you: I hail from two lines of preachers-one out of Edinburgh, one tent-camp evangelical raw as the red clay back waters of Carolina. So-despite my godless proclivities, such die-hard genes still make it hard for me not to see this podium as a pulpit, my smart and gifted Brothers and Sisters in the Blood of the Word. Brothers and Sisters, you have put your lives where I've put mine-on the line and in the word, the words-and today seems another fine occasion to search our souls,' to rededicate ourselves to the mission of our holy job and calling, Brothers and Sisters in the Word, my dears.

I believed that our writerly task meant entering one another-meant crossing the barriers of time, class, gender, race-meant turning ourselves and our egos inside out and handing them over to each other. I believed it meant becoming another person, maybe somebody a bit less fancy than we are by birthright, assuming a soul less lucky and well-schooled, but one embodying some truth we wish to know and therefore write towards. Correct? So we tell our students- till our voices about Voice bore us. It's cliche by now that we are the voices of the voiceless. Don't we learn the dimensions and depths of our own first person pronoun by sending it across statelines and letting it then wing home to us-through monsoon, hunger, and wind-chill factor-bringing back the good bad news of how far from homebase one "I" can fly to return more healthy, more acquainted with what's cruel and random and therefore more singular, more true. The more "us" "I" has in it, the more pivotally and perfectly is it "I."

That said, I'd like to testify about embarrassment, a bit, at even being on this stage. Please don't think it's easy to forego all the first-person voices you've ever become on the page, to cast off a lifetime's disguises you've self-defensively perfected, and to agree to sit up here-overdressed as usual-another token faggot; if you think this is a cinch, then you've assumed too much. I was like you, brought up, my dears-to speak when spoken to; I still long to be well-liked and widely read and to at least seem-for all my faults-a regular guy. In 1989, we're each of us tilting as our unguided culture swerves, leaderless, rudderless, clueless; this late in our particular game and century-I don't consider being on this panel a particularly brilliant career move. I'm here in part because I've lived through an ordeal. It's time to show, not tell. I'11 show you my red leather address book with one quarter to a third of its entries crossed by diagonal pencil lines, names cancelled because these guys, often bright and wonderful, though not necessarily that, are dead-aged 23-46. I plan to copy their addresses and phone numbers-work and home-summer and winter-into the next address book I begin. Sentimental maybe. But that's part of why-I and Us-I'm up here.

Brothers and Sisters in the Word, my friends' absence has left me as a witness. I'm alive today for one reason only: the luck of the draw. In my youth, during the days of my full head of hair and a certain itchy popularity when seen in certain lights, I fucked my way around the world a couple of times and had lovely episodes-with mute housepainters in Portugal, with a Spanish count in L.A. It's weird that I should be left; but I am and can now say, along with Ms. Piaf, "I regret nothing." I regret only the few times everything almost happened but didn't. I regret my cowardice.

So, reeling, mourning a proportion of my dearer ones, it grieves me to see, even at a gathering of word lovers, story lovers, world lovers, our empathy failing each other. When, in her speech here, Grace Paley advises us to enter one another across the DMZ of gender lines, when she requests that we become each other, she is speaking a potent metaphor about responsibility to our characters (fiction and actual, known and guessed); her message turns us outward to a larger artless world. Were this a dry-cleaner's convention, we might expect-that metaphor would need explaining, but here? Not here. That's not why I came here.

I've spent the last seven years writing a book in the voice of a 99-year old woman with a fifth grade education-a woman many times less lucky than I, yet four times smarter, infinitely deeper. Assuming her pronoun every morning has become-along with being drafted during the Vietnam War-the single most politicizing experience of my life. I tell you-from imaginative research-if not actual experience: it's easier to be a gay man in this culture than it is to be a straight woman.

Last night at a dance here, a poet wandered up to me with a friendly air and said she wished that today's panel were a heterosexual one, said she was bored with minorities as urgent subjects and wished today's were a heterosexual panel. This left me to witlessly quip: there has been a heterosexual an el in session for the last 2,000 years and could she spare the queers one hour?

She had said the kind of thing my parents' friends would consider it witty to say-but then my parents' friends are Republicans and my parents' friends aren't writers, much less artists. My parents' friends have this merit and limit-they take responsibility only for themselves and their own clubby bracket; I feel there's too little "Us" in their "I." But then, they live, as we do, in a nation where the real tax-breaks start when you clear 250 thou per annum.

It's a mistake to think our occupation protects us from the self-interested protectionism rampant in our culture, my Brothers and Sisters in the Word. All I'm saying is, we've got to fight it-the "I" without the "Us" in it. First we must battle that in ourselves, then through our work, then via our students-in their lives and work. We've got to keep turning ourselves, like pockets, inside out. We must, my dears, keep entering- through ourselves-the others, each other. We must send ourselves toward the so-called opposite sex, even toward the faggots and dykes who have not been published in The New Yorker. The beauty of our occupation isn't what we know, it's not who we get to leave out, it's certainly not our professional hazard: old Self-Congratulations. It's more how we daily face the page and reinvent the world, a bit more justly than it managed for itself, how we remake it, daily, from zero to the bone, forcing it back to possibility again and in our humblest laboratory: "that foul rag and bone shop of the heart." Mostly I love how we live in days and how we get back up and try and try and try-your life, my, life, our life and lives-all fairly early drafts.

If men love women, they briefly become women. That's the price of visiting privileges. "Girls will be boys and boys will be girls; it's a mixed-up, fucked-up, shook-up world"-to quote the immortal Kinks.

Flaubert is Bovary.
Tolstoi is Anna.
Tennessee Williams is Blanche.
Evan Connell is Mrs. Bridge.

And on and on. Plus there are perks, guys 'n gals, upon entering a woman-in the metaphysical and fullest sense-the guys just mentioned got the only real tenure worth fussing over. Good old genderless Immortality.

I close, Brothers and Sisters, my dears-stating how even that, even calling you "my dears," proves I've never seen a Saint Sebastian I didn't like. I therefore risk arrows or bad words that are, as we know, real sticks and stones that do break bones but also are, we hope, the words that sometimes heal. Yeah, so I am calling you "my dears." The women can maybe handle it, accustomed to hearing that from deskclerks, porters, cabbies, many very well-meaning. Even the big guys, who might like it less, will live through my over-familiarity. Calling you that is a political act because it is an artistic act, it is a moral decision because it is an aesthetic decision. But, hey, you know this stuff already. What really matters is: Let's just keep reading each other. Let's keep trying, in days, with days-with words, by words, through words. Let's keep the "I" in "Us," the "Ours" in "Mine." Let's keep telling and also showing through our lives, showing our students and each other-through the Show of I and the Tell of Us. The others-who read us-they are bored with this type of talk, they are out there waiting, to read Us.

I mention this stuff as an artist, a teacher, a latent academic, and a chickenlivered truthteller who wants most of all to be liked and read-which means, as you well know, fellow sinners-really needing to be liked. I consider it my joyful duty to end right here, and to really mean it while exercising my true duty in calling you, no offense intended, yeah. "My dears"...my dears.

AWP

Allan Gurganus has published fiction in many journals, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's Blueboy, and Christopher Street. His new books are: Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, a novel, and White People, a collection of short stories. He has taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is on the faculty of Sarah Lawrence College.