"Come on Wil, let's gay!"

-Xander Harris. Probably the funniest line of season 7 of BtVS. (Though the Whedon concept of using "gay" as a verb comes up in season 6 where Buffy says "She's gay, but we don't gay." referring to her and Willow.)

I'm not sure exactly when ass fucking creeped into every aspect of my life, but I'm pretty sure it was Pickle's fault.

It's starting to get sorta weird, reading-wise that is, (no worries, I'm not going into my usual guide to anal sex), as I read all this slash and then the books I've been enjoying most lately have been written by gay male authors.

They are all quite different books, but there's a similarity...let's explore what it is might be to "gay" in writing! I'm going to make some pretty huge generalizations as I'm only really commenting on 4 gay male authors, so obviously my saying that the qualities common to these four are those that are found in all gay male writing is just dumb, but perhaps it's worth taking a look at. And I keep re-writing this damn blog because what I want to say just isn't coming out.

Brutal honesty, melodramatic comedy these things jump out at me. And these things seem to mix to create a certain talent for portraying the moments in life that somehow manage to be the funniest and saddest at the same time.

In the beginning of this book that will be coming out in February called I am Not Myself These Days (by Josh Kilmer-Purcell, an autobiography), Josh is a drag queen whose claim to fame is having his breasts be these plastic see-through balloons filled with water and live goldfish swimming around in them. He spends his nights drinking himself into oblivion (not because he's a drag queen, but because of other issues) and trying to pick up men. There is such funny dialogue, but you continually get the sense of how sad this man is, sitting there making jokes in return for someone buying him drinks and taking him home for a night. And even that is sort of amusing as you see it as the condition of human loneliness, and you smile because it's true I guess.

Another quality of the writing is that the brutal honesty about life and who the characters are makes it so that when beautiful moments occur, they seem all that much more beautiful. Their honesty about the ugliness makes their honesty about the beauty more poignant as well as more real.

David Sedaris (and if you haven't read him yet, at least Me Talk Pretty One Day, shame on you!) is very adept at this type of writing as well. He has a new holiday book out, Holidays on Ice, that actually had me laughing my head off about a baby being killed in a washing machine (but obviously I saw some sadness in this moment too). The first story is one where he describes his own experiences as an elf at Macy's when he first moved to New York. The lady in charge of costumes has to do some training and he writes:

"She held up a calendar and said, "Ladies, you know what this is. Use it. I have scraped enough blood out from the crotches of elf knickers to last me the rest of my life. And don't tell me, " I don't wear underpants, I'm a dancer." You're not a dancer. If you were a real dancer you wouldn't be here. You're an elf and you're going to wear panties like an elf."

Funny speech, but his whole description of the training and the other elves and the people with their children wanting to see the white santa or the black santa, you're just constantly stuck between wanting to laugh at the human condition and wanting to cry for it. But now and again, someone acts in a way that is truly beautiful and you really get the significance of someone being beautiful, even just for few seconds, in a world such as ours.

The other author I wanted to mention is David Rakoff, who wrote Don't Get too Comfortable which is an examination of the luxury of the leisure class (that means us and him) in North America. The luxury of complaining that we don't have fulfilling jobs, the luxury of complaining that we can't find the perfect pair of jeans - he points out the general hipocrisy of our culture and he rips us a new one for it. It's lovely. It's non-fic by the way and very funny.

I just starting reading Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty (won the Booker last year) so I'll let you know how that goes, but so far my patterns for gay male authors are applying nicely. They also seem to apply to Oscar Wilde...I might be onto something here.

But what is it that I appreciate about this? I guess it's the honesty and the willingness to really portray the flawed human character with love, humour, anger, sincerity, and hopefulness.