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Greg McGoon

Greg McGoon

Greg McGoon

Text JF. Pierets    Photos Courtesy of Greg McGoon

 

Author and theatre performer Greg McGoon challenges the norm of children’s literature. By choosing a transgender princess as main character of the fairytale The Royal Heart and teaching self-acceptance in The Tanglelows, McGoon tries to establish a healthy open-minded relationship between parent and child. A conversation about imagination, gay characters and overcoming obstacles. 

 

You studied psychology and political science. How does one become an author of children’s books with this background? 
There’s a theatre program in my hometown and that’s where I fell in love with both theatre and working with children. This background basically evolved into writing for – and learning to connect with – kids through theatre, an art form not only about acting but something that also strengthens your social skills and your engagement. I think dealing with kids, theatre and art, while keeping the psychology I studied in my mind, naturally developed into writing down stories. It just happened as I was trying to process my own growth and understanding of the people around me. I realized that my words would have a broader reach if I found ways to adapt them to reach out to children.

Your imagination immediately takes off running in your first book, Out Of The Box. A story about the limitless places our creativity can take us to. 
I kind of wrote Out Of The Box for myself, when I was developing a project with children on creative arts. Rather than write some angsty melodrama of my own life, I wanted to rediscover the creativity and imagination that I felt I had lost long ago. I wanted to find some solutions to my own struggles and challenges in a more universal, but also playful way. This book is not only about the simplicity of children playing with a cardboard box. It’s about maintaining and owning your imagination in order to make honest connections with others, even though that can prove challenging. It was my response to the concept of imagination and allowing that magic out of the box once again.

It sounds like your personal pursuit became a tool to help others. 
I did. I thought I’d rather live with the possible pain of expressing my feelings, than live with the pain of denial. My personal life story became so dark and I got so tired of living in that darkness, tired of denying things, that I had to take ownership of myself and of my self worth. Writing these children’s books and trying to work past this fear of speaking about your feelings was very important. Because once you’re an adult, it gets a lot harder to start opening up all of a sudden. But when you’re a child you get into that habit of not only talking about your feelings, but also learning how to do so. There are so many ways to express yourself, but some ways are more healthy and effective than others. If children start recognizing that and start being comfortable, it will help society as a whole.

Your second book, The Royal Heart, is a fairytale. The first fairytale ever with a transgender princess. 
Like many kids I had a childhood fascination for Disney and the exploration of the origin stories. What fascinates me in fairytales is not just the lesson they can teach, but how they’ve been shared over time and what has been changed due to the time that they were written. They are evolving and are adapting to society’s influence in a lot of ways.  Children are connecting and relating to that. When I grew up, all I was seeing and reading were all these beautiful men and women falling in love with each other.  I could connect with the essence of the story, I could connect with the love, but the visibility of it was limiting. Fairytales are magical, grand and beautiful, so why should people be excluded from that?

Why use the transgender theme? 
It just so happened that the idea of a transgender character fitted the essence of what I was trying to convey. Transformation is a common theme in fairytales; Ariel’s goes from fins to legs, the frog becomes a prince, a princess becomes a swan, and so on, and most of those transformations are due to an external force. I never intended the book to be about being transgender, because that’s not something I personally experienced, but it’s about the love for everyone around me. The acceptance of that as being a part of life. If somebody comes to me and says “this is who I truly am”, there’s no part in me that would ever ask “why?” That’s not a question that comes into my mind, I’d rather say “thank you for sharing.” A lot of people are still stuck on the “why?” Why are you a woman, why are you a man, why are you gay? However, there is no “why” to begin with. It’s a reality that needs no explanation. It’s just about love.

 

 

The book can be a message for parents to show their children that this character worked up the courage to express their true self. That no matter what that is, their child can feel that way too.’

Did you intentionally use a medieval setting to make it more timeless? 
Yes, I wanted it to look like it’s been around for many years because transgenderism is not new. And history has a way of denying the voice and the human experience when it is not understood. The book is very minimal, yet I was very careful in choosing the words to take it a little bit further then just about gender. For me it’s also about taking on the responsibility of self and becoming a leader. I want people to look at it and wonder if hundreds of years ago there actually was a prince who could never fully realize himself. We’re talking about a whole spectrum of human life that has always been around. It’s not that all of a sudden people are being born who identify in a different way. It’s just that those voices are finally starting to be heard. We get so caught up with this idea of male-female that we lose sight of just living life. And there are so many ways to live life that I don’t think it has to be dictated how that should be. Let’s just try and live together instead of trying to impede on other people’s lifestyles. We don’t have to hold hands and get along, but we do need not to abuse each other. And that’s what The Royal Heart talks about; it’s about celebrating life.

A true idealist? 
I don’t know how I became such an idealist all of a sudden since my mantra through my mid-twenties was “I’m gonna die alone!” I was this melodramatic person until I finally realized I was only going to die alone if I forced that upon myself. I had to believe that there was more to it, and since I can’t be the only one in the world with those feelings I started sharing my stories and my writing. Because why can’t the LGBT community have those unrealistic, magical, love at first sight, fairytale stories, if everybody else does?

I’ve said you’re working on a book about a gay prince. Are you looking for a fairytale character you can relate to? 
Well, I still want to write this epic adventure I was looking for when I was a kid. Having stories that represent LGBT characters is adding to the positive visibility that hasn’t been around for children. You can only have so much fun looking at blog posts of genderbending Disney characters. We’ve all seen those, and it’s great, but where are our characters? I’m not trying to be groundbreaking or evolutionary, I just want to have a character that happens to love men.

How would you convince a parent to buy an LGBT themed book for their child? 
Having an LGBT character doesn’t necessarily make a book LGBT themed. The Royal Heart is not LGBT themed, nor is the story of the prince I’m developing. The main theme is love. To establish a healthy relationship between parent and child, you have to be open to each other. The book can be a message for parents to show their children that this character worked up the courage to express their true self. That no matter what that is, their child can feel that way too. They can come to them, no matter what they have to say, and that they are going to be ok with it. So it’s an invitation to children to know that if their parents share this story, that they have their full support of their full existence.

You recently released your third children’s book, Traveling the Twisting Troubling Tanglelows’ Trail. What’s it about? 
It’s a rhyming, poetic story that deals with creatures that live inside your mind and tangle everything up, making you feel that you are worthless. In this book I’m saying that life is full of challenges, and that you’re might feel useless, but you have the ability to start untangling that. With this book I hope to introduce some practical applications to an abstract thought. Children need to understand that feeling unhappy is sometimes part of the beauty of life. And while bad things can happen, good things can happen also. The characters are saying that pain exists, but that joy can be found. You’re going to face obstacles, but you’re only going to be able to overcome them once you start to realize that you have the strength to do so.

 

www.gregmcgoon.com

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Amanda Filipacchi

Amanda Filipacchi

Amanda Filipacchi

Text JF. Pierets

 

I was 20 when I read Nude Men and I instantly got hooked on the surreal imagination of this New York based writer. 21 years and 3 novels later there is The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty, and Filipacchi hasn’t lost an inch of her wit and dreamlike tale telling. On the contrary, her latest novel is a genuine work of originality and creativity. Needless to say I was thrilled to talk to her. A conversation about beauty, feminism and our shared fascination in the dictionary method.

 

Your readers are forced to be patient. It’s been 10 years between Love Creeps and your new book The Unfortunate Importance Of Beauty. Why did it take you so long?
It’s indeed a long time, but first of all, I take a long time with all my novels. Much longer than I would like to. Each time, I think it’s going to be faster next time, but then, well, it isn’t. Also, each novel is longer than the last. Not the finished product, but my first drafts, which this time around was almost twice as long as the final version. It’s like writing two novels. And the third thing is that I had some health problems I had to deal with. Life problems that got in the way.

The Unfortunate Importance Of Beauty wasn’t supposed to be a book about beauty?
I noticed a pattern in my life; things I wrote about, things that were completely invented, would sometimes come true. So I thought (but only half-seriously) that I’d better be careful and maybe only write about good things, in case they happen later. Turns out, I didn’t stick to that for long, luckily for the reader. In the beginning I thought it was going to be a book about a group of artistic friends. I intended to give each character a story of equal weight. But as I was creating my characters, there was one detail, one characteristic, I bestowed on my main character just for the fun of it: great beauty. I half-jokingly thought, “You never know, it might rub off on me a little.” Her great beauty was meant to be a small, unimportant detail, and I didn’t expect it to grow into one of the main themes of the novel. But it did. It wasn’t something I planned because in general I’m really not that interested in how people look.

“Maybe if I’m lucky it will rub off”. How important is beauty to you?  
I meant that in a joking way because beauty is not that important to me. At all! And that’s one thing I find a little disturbing about some of the interviews and articles that have been published about me. Due to the fact that my novel is about beauty, that’s naturally the main thing I’m asked about in interviews. And when I read those interviews later, I feel that I come off as being really preoccupied by beauty, when the truth is actually the opposite. If you compare me to anyone you know, really anyone, you will notice that I seem to care less about how I look than almost anyone. I dress like a dork, I never shop for clothes, I wear sweatpants all the time and I haven’t worn make-up in two decades. But some of the readers of the media coverage have sent me e-mails saying things like, “You look fine! You’re quite pretty! So stop worrying about it, ok?!”  It’s very nice of them, but I wish they realized that I probably give less thought to my appearance than they do to theirs. 

Hearing you describe the way you look almost sounds like a statement.
It’s more laziness. I used to wear makeup in my 20’s and I couldn’t understand how a woman could not wear make-up because I thought women looked so much better with it. But then suddenly I had to start wearing glasses. And I thought; what’s the point? Glasses ruin the whole effect anyway. So at that point I stopped wearing makeup and that’s basically it. It wasn’t a statement. It was more like a giving up. And eventually my taste changed and I started thinking women looked better without makeup anyway. Despite not caring much about my own appearance, I am interested in the role beauty plays in our society and in human relationships—the unfortunate importance it has in those areas. But there are also plenty of other topics I’m interested in. In fact, there are topics in this book that I’m more interested in than the beauty aspect. For example the whole creativity topic. Trying to achieve excellence in your art, the feeling that you’re almost reaching something supernatural. I love that idea.

What do you do when you don’t write?
Usually I’m trying to get myself to write. I have trouble with discipline so I’m always trying to think of new ways to trick myself into doing more writing. But if you’re asking about other activities, then I must say that I love to ski, so usually in the winter we go skiing. I like to travel, I love interesting conversations with people. I take long walks every day while listening to audiobooks or just thinking about how to get myself to write more. Sometimes I do my daily walk with a friend and we catch up on each other’s lives. That’s about it.

You are using all different kinds of methods to get yourself to write. Do you start your imagination by putting limits on yourself?
I don’t know if it can be called a limit. It’s rather something that forces you to think in a different direction. When I wrote Love Creeps, I became really addicted to what I call “the dictionary method.” I was using it constantly. For every new twist in the story I got inspiration from random words in the dictionary. I actually became worried and was wondering if I was ever going to be able to write without using this dictionary method. So I decided not to allow myself to use it for my next novel. Just to see how it turned out. For The Unfortunate Importance Of Beauty, I didn’t use it once, and to my relief that was ok. I was less an addict than I thought I was. Even though I think my strong point as a writer is my imagination, I did notice that when I used the dictionary method, it seems to trigger new and sometimes even more unusual ideas. Even when I thought I had come up with every possible option for a certain scene, really gone over every possibility, still when I picked a word randomly out of the dictionary it generated new and interesting ideas I’m convinced I wouldn’t have thought of without that method. 

You also had a method where you were only eating when writing?
Well, I used that method for only about a minute and then I gave it up, so it didn’t work out very well.

Does life influence your writing?
I think it does. When I wrote Love Creeps, I’d gone through some pretty bad relationships and hadn’t been very lucky in love, so I put all of that in the book. Not the specific experiences, because I almost never write anything autobiographical, but all my pessimism about love went into the book.

 

Why not write autobiographically? Is it too personal or are you afraid to jinx your life?
I think I don’t find it interesting enough. My recent New Yorker essay, ‘The Looks You’re Born With and the Looks You’re Given’, is the first really autobiographical thing I have ever written. I must say that I have discovered that it’s so much easier and faster to write nonfiction (or autobiographical fiction) because most of the material is already there and doesn’t need to be invented. But I think I will always prefer to make things up in my fiction because I enjoy inventing, creating something entirely new, from scratch, that did not already exist in some form in my life. I like startling myself by coming up with ideas I find original.

 

 

 

‘There are topics in this book that I’m more interested in than the beauty aspect. For example the whole creativity topic. Trying to achieve excellence in your art, the feeling that you’re almost reaching something supernatural.’

What’s your experience regarding being a woman in literature?
I don’t know if this is true, but I’ve heard it said by someone in the literary world that publishers are far less willing to publish long novels by women than long novels by men. Do you know the organization VIDA: Women in Literary Arts? Every year they count the numbers of men vs. women whose books were reviewed in various publications. The numbers are very depressing. Far more men get reviewed than women, and “the count” helps to bring attention to this unfairness which is based on sexism and subconscious gender-bias. It’s important that men and women get reviewed with equal frequency because when women don’t get reviewed as often or as prominently as men, it creates a whole chain reaction that results in far fewer women than men going down in history and being remembered for achievements that are actually of equal worth to men’s.
I recently read Siri Hustvedt’s novel, The Blazing World, in which she describes the Goldberg Study, which was a real study done in 1968: “Women students evaluated an identical essay more poorly when a female name was attached to it than when a male name was attached.” The same results were found when the study was repeated in 1983. When a female book reviewer compiles and publishes her list of her 10 favorite books of the year, and 9 out of 10 of the books on that list happen to be written by men, I hope she asks herself whether she might not be experiencing some degree of subconscious prejudice against female authors. (And this, of course, applies equally to male reviewers.)
We are all very sexist toward women, even those of us who think we’re not. We can’t help it, because we’ve been conditioned from our earliest days. I consider myself a feminist, and yet I see sexism in myself often. Sexism probably can’t ever be completely eradicated, due to biological factors such as differences in physical strength and temperament, but it can be lessened, starting, for example, with paying attention to what kinds of messages we send out in children’s books. Both men and women are prejudiced against women. And it’s essential that we fight it, not only in others but in ourselves.

So you’re a feminist?
Oh yes!

Have you ever done anything to help the feminist cause?
A little bit. Do you know about the Wikipedia thing I was involved in?

No, I guess I missed that.
In April 2013 I wrote an Op-Ed for The New York Times because I noticed that on Wikipedia, female novelists were being taken out of the category called ‘American Novelists’, and being put in a sub-category called ‘American Women Novelists’. So only the men were being left in the general category. I was really shocked, and felt this was a truly unacceptable situation that should not be tolerated for one second longer. So I decided to write about it even though I knew I’d be putting myself at risk. My Op-Ed, called ‘Wikipedia’s Sexism Toward Female Novelists’, caused a huge uproar. Wikipedia came under a lot of criticism, and not just from the U.S. media, but from media in other countries too. As a result, I experienced what is known as “revenge editing”: hostile Wikipedia editors pounced on the Wikipedia biography about me and started diminishing it and taking information out of it, until they were stopped by Wikipedia administrators. Thankfully, the page was not only restored but then also much improved by non-hostile Wikipedia editors. The most vicious of the attackers didn’t stop at ‘revenge editing’—he also spread horrific lies about me, until he was unmasked in the media and his lies were exposed. The whole experience was incredibly stressful and upsetting. That’s the kind of thing that can happen when you speak up against sexism.
This Wikipedia debacle drew more attention to the fact that female artists and writers have been neglected not only in the art and literary worlds, but also on Wikipedia. On average, the Wikipedia biographies of female artists and writers are less developed than those of their male counterparts, and also, a female artist or writer is less likely to have a Wikipedia biography than is a male artist/writer of equal accomplishment and notability. Several of the articles written about my Op-Ed stated that it increased awareness of the problem of sexism on Wikipedia. People started doing Edit-a-thons, which consist of a lot of women (and men who support them) getting together in various places, sitting with their laptops and editing Wikipedia together, improving the entries on women. One such edit-a-thon happened at The Museum of Modern Art recently. I stopped by to check it out and found it uplifting. Another little thing I do as a feminist is sometimes tweet about VIDA. I try to support and encourage them.

A lot of people are afraid of getting their careers damaged when they speak up.
Even though I believe that most female writers consider themselves feminists, they often feel they have to be careful about speaking up publicly because if they speak up too much, it can turn against them. And they are probably right, sadly. I know many successful female writers who are feminists and they privately rant and rave about the depressing VIDA numbers and other injustices such as the sexism on Wikipedia, and yet they don’t want to speak up or write about it publicly because they don’t want to be seen as complaining. They are afraid of the repercussions on their careers. I am not immune to those fears. I have spoken up a bit, now and then, but I too have my limits. I don’t say as much as I would like to, for fear of the repercussions. And I greatly admire female authors who do speak up more than I have, who do complain, because they are putting themselves and their careers at risk while helping all female authors.

Do you find it important what people think of you?
Yes, I care about what people think of me and of my work. I assume most writers do. I love it when people like my work, but then again, what writer doesn’t? I’m not one of those writers who can say they’ve always written, from their earliest days. I never had an urge to write stories until I was forced to do so at the age of 13.  In school there was a class in which you had to write one short story every week. That’s when I discovered I had this talent, that I was better at this than at anything else I had done in my life—at least based on the reactions of teachers in school and of other adults who read my work. Their reactions gave me such a high, that’s when I decided to become a writer. Before that, starting at the age of eight, I loved reading novels and I greatly admired anyone who could write a whole novel because I thought that must be the most difficult thing in the world. I never thought I could, or would, do it myself, nor did I have any urge to even try. But nevertheless I was very imaginative. I made up a lot of stories for my brother. I just never wrote them down.

What’s your number one reason to write?
To be happy. Many things about it make me happy. When I come up with ideas I really like, I find that very exciting. And part of what makes it exciting is imagining how people will react to them, whether they will like them or not. I don’t write fiction only for myself. And if anyone claims that they are only writing for themselves, I suspect they are probably deluding themselves. So I’m writing to be happy. It gives me a sense of accomplishment and a sense of satisfaction, unmatched by anything else. And it makes me feel appreciated. I like the idea that people will enjoy my work and I always hope that I bring people pleasure.

The Unfortunate Importance Of Beauty is published by W. W. Norton & Company (February 16, 2015).

www.amandafilipacchi.com

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Jonathan Kemp

Jonathan Kemp

Jonathan Kemp

Text JF. Pierets    Photos Rudy Thewis

 

Jonathan Kemp won two awards and was shortlisted twice for his debut London Triptych. Gay bookstore Het Verschil in Antwerp, asked to interview the British author for a live audience due to the Dutch translation of his novel, Olie op doek. A conversation about history, gay writers and a fascination for language and sex. 

 

In London Triptych you tell three stories. There’s the rent boy Jack Rose in the London of the 1890s, of the 1950’s with painter Colin Read and male escort David, living in the London of the 1990s. The three stories explore the subculture and underworld of male prostitution. You seem to know quite a lot about the subject matter? 
I did a lot of research in one way or another, and I was very interested in giving a voice to the voiceless. Male prostitution is a minority within the society of prostitution. Most of the historical focus has always been on female prostitution so they’re like a minority within a minority. As a writer you’re always trying to find a perspective that has not been tackled before and this seemed like a really interesting angle.

London Triptych started out as a short story called ‘Pornocracy’, which told the tale of Jack Rose, one of the boys who testified against Oscar Wilde in 1895. Is Jack historically correct?
Jack starts to work as a telegram boy and then he got involved in prostitution through this man called Alfred Taylor. Taylor really existed and supplied boys to Wilde so there are elements of truth from what I had gathered on research. If it weren’t for the fact that Wilde had been arrested and in prison, it would be even harder to find material on the subject matter. Ironically, given the negative outcome for Wilde, that kind of stamped it in the history books in a way that it wouldn’t have been otherwise. The transcripts of the trial have been very useful. Jack himself is an invention. He’s a mixture of a lot of different boys Wilde played with – he called them Panthers. Their danger appealed to him, their lack of gentility. He was a well-educated, upper middle class man so he liked their roughness, this spontaneity that he didn’t find in his immediate circle.

You seem like a big Wilde fan.
I have loved Oscar Wilde ever since I was a teenager. As I got older and came out myself, I got more interested in gay history. Wilde almost became this figurehead. The idea that he established in many ways, the parameters, the identity that was to go on in the 20th century. The concept that he is almost the prototype of the modern homosexual. He gives it a shape, a voice and a way of being. That was always fascinating to me. I often think the work is overshadowed by his life but I find him an incredible wordsmith. The poetry and ideas in his books have always appealed to me.

Your love of Wilde, the fact that London Triptych is populated by rent boys, models, aristocrats, artists and gangsters,… are you a little nostalgic? 
I must say that Jack became my favorite character, that was my favorite piece to write, What appealed to Wilde in these boys is what appealed to me when I got under Jack’s skin. There must have been many Jacks in London at that time and the more I read about queer history, the more I became interested in trying to represent that minority voice.

The minority voice stays but times are changing. 
Jack could go to prison for what he was doing, but David, the male escort in the 1990s, is free because of the change in the law in 1967. It’s sort of a history of gay liberation and the humanitarian progress during the century.

The book is filled with sex but it remains sexy instead of becoming a dirty story. It’s a thin line between what your write and pornography.
I’m fascinated by the way that language expresses human experience. Pornography is the most straight forward way sex can be represented. It has a very specific aim and that is to turn you on. There’s nothing wrong with that but it felt a bit limiting to me. I’ve always been attracted to writers like Jean Genet, who wrote about sex in a much more poetic way. For me it was essential to the book that sex had to appear but not in a sort of bashful way. The most interesting thing is often ‘what goes where and who does what to whom’, so I wanted to find much more different metaphors and to describe the emotions rather than the mechanics.

When I read the book if felt like all 3 characters were imprisoned. Because of love. Is that so or is it just my imagination? 
As much as sex was an important aspect, love was also. When it became clear to me that this was going to be a novel about prostitution, I wanted to write three love stories. Love coming from the least likely places for example. They are very tragic love stories and I wanted to overturn the cliché of the hard-bitten prostitute who is incapable of love. So love and that trajectory of love is very important.

You ran a theatre company in the 90’s. Why did you switch from that to writing novels?
Writing theater plays was actually a diversion from writing prose. I have always written novels. The first one I wrote was when I was about 17. But I didn’t really pursue it very hard. Every writer gets rejected by publishers but when I got the letters I gave up quite quickly, thinking it was no good. At that time I was living with an actor who wanted to do his own plays so I thought ‘how hard can it be?’ We started of with monologues, it was a one-man show, and after a while I added more characters and got more confident with each play we did. When the company disbanded because there wasn’t enough money in theatre – even less than in books – I went back to writing prose. So London Triptych was the first novel I wrote after the excursion into the theatre.

Your second book is called Twentysix. It’s not a novel nor is it a collection of short stories. I wrote down: ‘Poems about sexual encounters between men. One of every letter of the alphabet’. It’s completely different from London Triptych
It is, but I think it picks up on some of the themes of London Triptych. When I was writing about London and its sexuality, I was trying to gain some originality or poetry in the descriptions. I wrote Twentysix almost immediately after the novel was finished. At first I just wrote down these short episodes, these short encounters. I was exploring language and post structuralism, reading Derrida, Bataille, and wanted to experiment. Midway through the book I considered what to do because I could go on writing about these sexual encounters and publish this huge volume, so I had to put a limit to that. 26 seemed like a slim manageable number.

I read on the net that you once said; ‘I think sometimes being gay has led me to broader horizons than it otherwise would be.’ 
I think straight comes with a script. You are aware of the life trajectory you’re expected to follow. The model you’re expected to conform to. You’re going to get married, have children, a mortgage. I’m not saying that all people do – and I know straight people who forge a different path – but I think that, when you don’t have that script at hand, you create new possibilities. You kind of invent a way of being. And there is a sort of courage that comes from having to live outside that mainstream model. There’s a security in that model that is not available to you.

 

 

There is a sort of courage that comes from having to live outside the mainstream model.’

It’s a different way of being in the world. You have to be more original in the things you are going to be or going to do. Just that slightly greater edge of invention.In London Triptych, David describes playing a game when he was a child, standing on a train track, with all his friends. The game was called ‘chicken’ and was about who could stand there the longest. David always won. This unanticipated courage, that was me. I knew from the beginning that staying where I grew up would kill me. Spiritually.

Being gay is as much about character as having a sexual drive?
Whether moving to London had to do with my sexuality, I don’t know, maybe that was a force of character that made me invent and explore. I do think it had to do with the sexual exploration and with courage, I find it hard to separate the two.

Some gay writers don’t want to be referred to as being ‘a gay writer’. Because they are also a white writer, a male or female writer, an American writer,… Yet you don’t mind being in that category.
I don’t. You can call me a black writer if you want to. I can understand why people are against it but then I think; ‘you are gay and you write, so why not’. I feel that it can work negatively because maybe straight readers wouldn’t go for a gay book. While gay readers will rush to it, but nevertheless will also read lots of straight books. So I understand why that label can feel restricted but I don’t mind. I love to write for gay people. It matters to represent these lives in books. People identify with what they read so why not write for gays. I can imagine that some straight people might find a book like Twentysix quite alien but then again, parts of their lives are alien to me. I’m not trying to write for everyone, I’m trying to write for people who can find something in my work. If a straight reader has an open mind, well go ahead. When I came out, exploring my own sexuality, I discovered there was a whole history of gay men writing. That was great! To know that now, after centuries, you have bookshops filled with gay writers is just fantastic. Its history is very short compared with the history of literature, but to discover people like Genet, Vidal or Capote who were exploring and experimenting was a revelation. By putting a label on it, it allows gay readers to find those books. Because if you are confronted with this huge mountain of literature as a gay man or a gay woman, you are going to want to find the books that speak to you because we are all looking for books that give us alternatives. The alternative to see the world from a different consciousness. So I think if you are looking for gay books and there is a big sign where to look, I don’t mind. I find it very useful. It saves you a lot of time. It’s all about things you want to share.

You are not afraid to exclude readers? 
Those kind of closed minds are not the kind of people you want to speak to anyway. I can’t say that I’m never going to read a book by a straight person because they have nothing to say to me. Then you will be missing out so much of the things I’ve read and enjoyed.

You are working on a third book.
Yes, and it’s almost finished. My first two books are very related because I was fascinated about sex and language. My new novel is something completely different. The main character in All There Is + All There Is Not, is a 65 year old woman who lives on a narrowboat in North West London. One day she’s out shopping and she sees the spitting image of her first husband who died 40 years previously. She thinks she’s going mad. She keeps on seeing him and it turns out that he’s not a ghost, not a figment of her imagination but a gay man with a striking resemblance, like people often do. He becomes a portal to her. And like Alice she’s tumbling through a portal to an entirely different life and culture.

Sounds great! Looking forward already. 

And last but not least. What’s your most flamboyant future dream?
I would love London Triptych to be made into a TV series. A British 3-part TV drama.

And if you were asked to play one of the characters? Who would you choose? 
Oscar, of course.

 

www.myriadeditions.com/jonathankemp
www.birkbeck.academia.edu/jonathankemp

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