emerge transformed, in a million years

I wanted to write a little about a short story of mine that was released at AWP this week — it’s featured in Emerge, an anthology of work by this year’s cohort of Lambda Literary Fellows. I couldn’t be there for the release, on account of ‘wrong continent’ as opposed to ‘public health,’ but I hope everyone who made it out there is treating my Lambda family well! I’ve been so fortunate to be in such stellar company.

My contribution to the anthology is called “The Gutter Prophet,” and I submitted it to Emerge because it was so thoroughly born of the experience I had at Lambda; Emerge felt like its most appropriate home.

There she is!!! (Photo by anthology editor Tahirah Alexander Green.)

I read aloud from my book on Wednesday night, the week I spent in LA. We all piled onto two coaches and drove to West Hollywood, where a group of us read at the public library. The reading went well, there’s video evidence if you want it, and after it was over we paraded down the street to a cowboy-flavoured gay bar on Santa Monica Boulevard. I stood outside for a while, chatting to Nicole and still buzzing with adrenaline from the reading-in-public experience, when the strange man approached us to bum a cigarette.

The moment at which I realised he was not inhabiting the same plane of reality as the rest of us was when he mentioned his TV show with Madonna. And then his meetings with Obama. I am limitlessly thankful to Nicole for sticking around with me, in case things got to the point of being dangerously weird.

I don’t recall what he said to me that made me roll my eyes. I didn’t even realise I was doing it until I’d done it — by which time, of course, he had noticed, and taken umbrage. “You see,” he said, and pointed at me. “There’s that negativity. Did you learn your lesson from Harvey Weinstein?” Uneasily, I said yes.

“And did you learn your lesson from Kevin Spacey?” Again: yes.

“And did you learn your lesson from Louis CK?” One more time.

“Then you see my fucking point,” he said, with an emphatic jab of his finger, and he walked off into the night.

I did not stop thinking about that conversation all night. In a sense, it had been on my mind for a long time — since before Weinstein, even. What are we meant to be taking away from hashtag Me Too, the movement, the concept, the experience? What is happening beyond the seemingly-eternal moment of horrified public reaction, and what ought to be happening? I didn’t see his fucking point. I still don’t. Of course this is because he didn’t actually have one, but the sheer gravity of the pronouncement knocked me flat regardless. The next night, sitting around a courtyard table with lifelong friends I’d only known for a week, I started to write it all down.

I read a lot of essays in late 2017. Most of them were unsatisfying. This n+1 piece by Andrea Long Chu was one more in a long line of largely-unhelpful takes, aside from this single perfect paragraph, which has stayed with me since:

The thing is, it’s all of them. It’s every single last one of them. Not just the famous ones. Not just the ones you don’t personally know. […] But let us say, too, that it is a specious compassion that would make us reluctant to admit these things. Whether or not men deserve forgiveness — and if so, which ones — is not the question, much less the answer. In fact, there is no question. The reality is harder. What hurts isn’t when the people we love do unlovable things. What hurts is when, afterward, we still love them. This goes as much for the neon of celebrity identification as it does for the quieter affections: friends, mentors, exes. What this means is that all of us will be caught wriggling on the flypaper of apologism before this thing is over. Lines in the sand blow away eventually.

If the anecdote is the embroidery-hoop overlay, the story is the pillow. (Photo taken at the Otis College of Art and Design.)

What hurts is when, afterward, we still love them. I’m thinking of Mary Gaitskill’s exemplary “This Is Pleasure”; I’m thinking of Sarah Silverman trying to communicate her complicated feelings about old friend and known masturbator Louis CK. In a way, “The Gutter Prophet” has been coalescing for years, awaiting only a catalyst in order to (sorry) emerge.

When I tell this story to friends and family, it’s as a roundabout sort of joke, with Los Angeles itself as the punchline. California, right? I went to the delusion capital of the USA and I brought back a surreal and disturbing late-night encounter, as a cute little souvenir; telling the story to friends after I got back, they joked that people would pay to have that kind of experience in LA. It’s hard to explain why the conversation hit me the way it did, without a particular sort of permission that I’ve learned is only rarely afforded outside of fiction. The process of transforming it into a story allowed me to give it all something like meaning — reality is always so ungenerous with those. It allowed me to articulate the disappointment, the frustration, the merciless double-bind of Still Loving. All the things you can’t laugh off at the end of the anecdote.

I’m thankful to Lambda for giving me the space to work on this story. I hope I have at least piqued your curiosity, such that you will seek out and purchase a copy of Emerge. You can do that at AWP if you’re there, or on Amazon both in the UK and the US. There’s so much talent and heart packed into this anthology; my own work is the least of it. Get after it, and enjoy.