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Hey
everyone,
I'm
writing this on the day the California Supreme Court announced
its decision to uphold Proposition 8, the controversial legislation
to amend the state constitution to define marriage as being
exclusively between one male and one female. Many of us here
at the HBC are saddened by this decision, not just because
of the injustice and fear-mongering it perpetuates but because
the decision directly effects some of our own. Kyle was tempted
to use this space to write what he called "a long-winded diatribe
about James Madison's 'tyranny of the majority,' " and I was
very willing to agree, but we decided that, as literature
site, this was not the best use of our space.
 It
seems strangely appropriate, then, that this issue of the
HBC includes an article by Matt Merendo explaining why gay
and lesbian literature still needs its own section in bookstores
the way mystery and African American fiction do. As the Prop
8 verdict reminds us, we as a society are not as far along
as we'd like to believe in the move towards social equality.
For those gay and lesbian readers who need to find solace
in knowing they are not alone—or those who need to be
reminded of how far LGBT rights have come over the years—a
prominent section devoted to the issues is a great comfort
and perhaps a means for encouragement to continue the fight
for equal rights.
For me,
Matt's article is less a means of comfort and more a reminder
of why I read: I read because I want to understand myself
and others. I read because I am fascinated by the human condition,
and effective writing of all genres explores what we as human
beings are capable of doing, what we're capable of being.
Every time I pick up a book, I learn through someone else's
perspective what it's like to be human. As a straight American
born Chinese woman, I don't know what it was like to be gay
or a black man straddling two different continents, but I
can get an idea from reading James Baldwin's novel Giovanni's
Room or his short story "This Morning, This Evening,
so Soon."
This
idea isn't exclusively reserved for highbrow literature, either.
As Kyle points out in his review
of Clive Barker's Books of Blood, Barker sets himself
from other writers of his genre because he writes with what
Kyle calls an "anthropological eye": a way of rooting his
story in the humanness of the situation—in the part in
all of us finds relatable.
I think
that what compels many of us at the HBC to write—and
specifically to write personal essays on this website—comes
from that same desire to contemplate the human condition,
especially when it is our own. We think, we dwell, we obsess,
and we study the events that we see and experience. Somewhere
in that mix, we write all of those thoughts down. Whether
the writing is fiction or nonfiction matters only a little;
the point is that we're thinking about the world and we've
found that we can't let those thoughts go undocumented, unprocessed,
or only partially understood. It is as memoirist Patricia
Hampl said: "I don't write about what I know, but in order
to find out what I know."
 With
that in mind, I hope you all check out one of my favorite
HBC personal essays: this month's Influence
of Anxiety
column, in which Dorothy Parka steps aside so that Marie
Mundaca can discuss her unique connection to the work of David
Foster Wallace. As the one-time associate production manager
for Little, Brown and Company, Marie did more than read Wallace's
books: she chose the fonts and set the text, making them tangible
for the rest of us. I like to think that if Wallace was the
god of his stories, Marie was his bolt of lightning—the
chisel that etched his Ten Commandments.
These
past nine months or so, fans and friends have been lamenting
Wallace's death almost to the point of ridiculousness, so
Marie wasn't even sure she wanted to contribute to our suffering
by writing yet another article about him. But I have to tell
you folks, reading about those little connections she had
with Wallace through their shared work on his book kills me.
What she describes in her essay is not so much about losing
her favorite author as it is about losing a small part of
her life when a significant person in it passed on. Who among
us can't relate to that? Who among us haven't read of this
in a variety of different forms: in verse (Mary Jo Bang's
Elegy), in fiction (Amy Hempel's "In the Cemetery Where
Al Jolson Is Buried"), in memoir (well, just about everybody).
Yet we never grow tired of reading it because it's as real
and ubiquitous as oxygen but as dirty and complex as air.
I well
realize that the pursuit of civil rights for gay and lesbians
is not as universal as the untimely death of a friend, but
I doubt they are as disparate as one might think. For those
of you in need of consolation, I hope you all find what you're
looking for when you pick up your next book—or even better,
while you scroll through this site. For those of you who do
not feel the disappointment that I, Kyle, and most of us at
the HBC feel about the ruling on Proposition 8, I hope you'll
be open enough to read a few books that may help you empathize
and understand our side.
Here's
to better understanding one another.
Yennie
(June,
2009)
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