This is by way of a jump-start to my contrapuntal stories about a man in a post-covid landscape where un/sur-reality has become the new reality( we know/experience that bit!); but where the old/”old” reality becomes the new un/sur-reality….by some peculiar tortured twist…
Here is an idea: the subject, for homework, for the weekly monday Creative Writing course is: how we read ourselves into our lives-sometimes- by way of fiction/”fiction”; obviously being a thrusting-my-sexual-orientation-identity-down-your-throat {GAY} type entity(person), I thought of this:
The role of LGBT fiction in the identity-formation of a gay man
and many similar posts/pix -on this blog- re my gay male/queer/lgbt archive, and my lgbt (mainly gay male author/content) reading.
You/I wouldn’t you/I?:P! That is my need for selfhood being reflected back(as opposed to written out, exterminated, {margialised at best})
Then I thought/think, extrapolate, extrapolate, extrapolate…….
Dystopian/apocalyptic novels (of plagues and other catastrophes) of yore-days (pre this particular plague); INCLUDING(yes) narratives of the AIDS years.{ many straight people get very annoyed when you make this comparison; what’s that about?…. HIV as sexually transmitted via gay sex?[yep}; add in drug-users and African people; it sort of brings all the homophobia and racism to the surface, a la Brexit……anyway, that is for another post/time…but ” the thing is, Steve, Covid-19 affects us all”, it unites, it is universal(ist); wow……..}
So, here are some fairly random AIDS narratives:
- the darkest book I have ever read:”Billy’s Brother”(Kenneth Martin, GMP,1989); read it and be freaked.
- “In Memory of Angel Clare” (Bram,GMP, 1989)
- “A Matter of Life and Sex”(Oscar Moore, Penguin, 191). A lost classic.
I was on the fringes of the horrific ravages of AIDS in the mid/late 80s and upto the nineties, when most people with it died(there were no retro-virals…..lest we forget); I knew(STILL know people with treated-HIV); but MANY gay men lost ALL their friends, their lovers, their partners: in the fell-swoop of a few years).
SO, this is not the first apocalypse (plus the many plagues and 1917 Spanish flu); but, unlike AIDS, and like those earlier “It affects everyone”{sic} plagues, it affects everyone….[perhaps people in non-minorities will now support-more-people in minorites/disadvantaged… I am cynical but we cannot but hope…..]
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Where was I?
Writing and reading your/my way into writing a story/”story” ….well, there WAS a (often hidden, sub-textualised) lineage of gay male narrative; what is the ancestry of covid narratives(excluding generalised plague/catastrophe narratives)? Rien…
It is a very clunky analogy- I am now finding, as I write- because it’s STILL HAPPENING!!
Many people are-worthily and usefully- writing their COVID narratives, processing-or an attempt thereat- what is going on(or not; cf. HM “government” in UK); but can you have a back-look at the present/the unresolved/the continuing (till God knows when{except God is in not in the house; he never was})whilst it is all still rolling itself in endless folds and layers?……….Yes and no
Scientists extrapolate into a putative future(they may get it wrong or right); but only hindsight will tell………so we cannot tell…yet.
All we have are scary narratives like:
Mary Shelley:”The Last Man”{don’t read currently, unless TOTAL apocalypse -through reverse psychology- gives you a complex form of solace)
Add any “fiction” re Plague years: Samuel Johnson inter alia
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Can I bring all these threads together?{remember, “Threads”, the post-nuclear-war drama at the time of the Afghanistan war, early 80s?}
Am I trying to fit a square plug in a round wotsit……?
Possibly…… there is NO joyful,radiant counterpoint of a coming-out-as-gay-after -all the-years-of angst narrative that is possible here{obviously}; “[Somewhere over] the rainbow has, like the eponymous, beautiful song, become a symbol of hope {our lgbtq symbol, but let us ALL have it:}. But the imagined “over the rainbow” bit which is emphasised: the rainbow ain’t here yet………
The CW task was “What made/motivated you to read more {gay male, in my case} narratives after the first one?”,as a prelude, I surmise, to writing one’s/my OWN gay male story (not a universalist one; not primarily, anyway; I allow people to extrapolate it to their own alienation and minoritisation); and as a “Birth of Reader(Writer) device of “mining” your own life experience. This is right up my street:)(Thanks, tutor/facilitator:).
At last, i have (some sort/degree of ) link/weave to the divagatory threads: it is A GAY MAN(“he/him”, but also me/I) amidst the COVID landscape, and , particuarly, the hoped-for POST Covid (or amidst the waves of repeated infections…)world; writing and reading him/my-self into it…..
So, finally for today/this week, here is a possible/definite first sentence:
“He {I?}writes parallel, first and third person narratives in two columns?; {a bit naff?worth a try}
The dweller walked into the city centre, the first time I{sic!}perambulated, desultor-
For 6 months Ily
some cafes were open; officially the lockdown
was ended
(fully),
but
denizens were warily sitting at four feet
(an improvement on 6,
in the old days);
few believed the “government”; but isolation had
driven them
to come out (and come out as gay, in some cases)
Oh, bog it, I am-creatively-abandoning the formalistic/poetry concrete dual, parallel lay-out….let’s go sequential (soz,but you will have to imagine the counterpoint, whilst actually seeing block chords>>>:P)
Anyway, out of time/out of joint{neighbours loudly drilling…____it COULD only be THOSE (bad) neighbours……
see u next time, for more parallelly serial tales of he/the dweller/I in post-Covid (un)reality………..
towardsutopia 