THE GAY WRITER

...They have been relegated to a literary back-burner regardless of the quality of their work...

...Like a number, of writers I know, I've been working for quite a while—but that "gay writer" stamp I took on voluntarily has come between you and me...

...M Leslie Powell is a writer in Long Beach, California...

...The articles were not, as you might suppose, on gay topics—one of them, as it happens, merely contained a passing reference to an individual who shared my life and who was a woman...

...Indeed, teaching the basic principles of the craft one is trying to master often helps in a most fundamental way...

...As a prospective guest on a television talk show last summer, I was summed up in the program guide by the blurb, "Lesbian Schoolteacher...

...Given no outlet in the wider market, writers restrict themselves to the less lucrative gay magazines or to writing only gay material...

...Gay writers must often choose today between writing exclusively heterosexual material while concealing their own sexuality, or being restricted to "trendy" gay topics...

...Good writing must transcend boundaries, including the sexual...

...The writer was thirty-seven, I believe, before he found a publisher willing to take a chance on his first book...

...I wonder...

...I know of women who have gone to Europe to write, surrounded by a salon of adoring admirers and expatriates...

...The label becomes self-reinforcing...

...This will hurt you with the publishers...

...For every gay article that must be done there are other projects that must be put aside, half-finished...

...But there is nothing to match Esquire, Harper's, or New York magazines...

...It's a bleak vista if one is at all serious about the vocation of writing...

...I've worked too long with unemployed blacks and Asian refugees to have much tolerance for injustice of any kind...

...For the most part, however, these women were wealthy...

...To live up to such advance billing one would have to do something obscene on-camera, like an ill-trained bear...

...To me it means I can practice my profession full time for one more month—a profession made remarkably difficult by the censorship of gay authors which continues unabated even now...

...And where do openly gay writers take that growing body of unpublished work they have amassed...

...You may imagine the interviewer's chagrin as he reads through the material...

...I found the designation sadly amusing...

...Thanks to them, there has been a welcome surge of gay work: novels, poetry collections, historical appraisals of previously ignored figures, studies of little-known facets of gay life, such as my own essays on closeted lesbians...

...No heterosexual writer is required to work within such shackles and to accept such psychological infringement...

...One thing is certain, however: The author in question was a homosexual and a rather vigorous one at that, given his time and circumstances...

...See the gay person eat with a fork," as one gay journalist has accurately put it...

...Certainly this overdue appearance of gay work is worthwhile...

...it has certainly robbed me pf an invaluable experience—that of writing for all readers without regard for their sexuality...

...Yes, there are a couple of gay magazines that publish urbane, sophisticated writing and a few other gay outlets as well: some newspapers and struggling regional magazines, a few publishers willing to look at the work of gay writers without much enthusiasm...

...Academics, political essayists, humorists—whatever their respective specialty, they have been labeled as "gay writers" and passed over...

...We may come to realize in a saner time that it has been a profound loss for both of us...

...It is a sad comment on our lingering provincialism when my file contains a bundle of terse rejection notes which say, in effect, "We do not accept homosexual material...

...No mention was made, of course, of some equally important facts: that I am a much-published poet and committed environmentalist, that I have written articles on wilderness and survival and backpacking, on education and job-training legislation, on post-secondary schooling...

...Our work is immediately suspect, as if we had first to justify our sexual difference before being allowed to display our credentials as writers...

...The letter bearing this message lies in front of me on the desk, a thoughtful response from a well-known eastern writer to some material I had sent her...

...No, I was simply to be fed to a ravenous television audience as a "Lesbian Schoolteacher," a grotesque right out of a Diane Arbus photograph...

...Even the recognition of gay writers often, takes the form of a sideshow, as a recent experience of my own can demonstrate...

...Much as women journalists in the past were restricted to doing society-page news—or to no job at all—gay writers are only called upon when a gay book is to be reviewed or a gay parade to be covered...

...And it may well be that none of those things that were to hinder his career weighed as heavily as this singular fact...

...Many fine writers of my acquaintance have suffered from just this sort of heterosexual bias...

...There are editing jobs outside of academe, and gay writers may find themselves applying, carrying along a portfolio of their articles...

...Her candid advice was well taken, although it did not express anything I did not already know...

...I want to share my particular insights, such as they may be, with all readers, not just those who are gay or female...

...I was probably expected to...

...In what school district, on what campus should a gay writer bother to apply...

...Does a biographical detail imply that I could not write insightfully about other-than-gay issues...

...They are ghettoized in the worst sense of the term...

...A writer's open homosexuality is still the surest way not to have one's work taken seriously...

...It has deprived you of reading someone who, I believe, is quite good...

...Does an acknowledgment of homosexuality give an editor the right to pass over competent journalism...

...Are we all that intolerant of one another...

...I make no pretense about my sex drive and do not shrink from a head-on confrontation with some spouter of lies...

...The reviewer had meant, I suppose, that the author's success had not come easily to him, that he had had to bide his time, learning his craft in isolation while waiting for that public exposure and acceptance so essential to writers...

...The unexpected sale of an article and the extra two hundred or three hundred dollars is a real trophy—another few weeks before we must go back in the closet to work as a public relations assistant...

...Whatever the merits of this increasing body of gay material, if the writers are coerced into covering this sort of subject matter and nothing else, it is a hollow triumph...

...I suppose I am that...

...So I will write articles on "gay liberation" even though, in a sense, they take me away from my other writing...

...Not the least of these is the opportunity to compete equally in the literary marketplace...

...We all know about the handful of men and women whose preference has not seemed to hold them back...

...Many men and women do just that—and do it well...

...Maybe they have been fortunate enough to have been published in The Los Angeles Times or The New York Times— articles which got them some exposure if not sudden wealth...

...They would have made it in any field, in any time...

...There have been successful gay writers, to be sure...

...The rest of the article proved to be dull and pedantic, but that one phrase stayed in my head for weeks...

...In our day, persecution has metamorphosed in publishing quarters to a bland condescension, but it is no less lethal for that...

...Money had smoothed the way for them, as it does not for the writers I know who can not turn to their parents' bank account to see them through the publication of that first book...

...Maybe those things which beset us all obstructed his life and art: lack of money, someone to support, a steady output that went ignored by the public, an unpopular stance on some now-forgotten issue...

...Are we really in such a state that a writer's credibility goes down the drain if it is inadvertently learned that he or she is gay or bisexual...

...It has become a truism that gay persons are denied some experiences...

...And at thirty-five, I worry about time...

...And make no mistake about it: There is a continuous stigma for those of us who are open about our sexuality...

...Perhaps this slow-to-ripen author was an unwilling late bloomer—we'll never know...

...Activist gay...

...Aspiring writers often work concurrently as teachers, since the two experiences seem to enrich and inform each other...

...But this is what editors term "homosexual material...

...Often this means being relegated to the dreadful triviality of columns on the current fad at the local disco...

...this will hurt you with the publishers' We market our material as best we can...

...But it is not enough...

...Gay writers are frequently cut off from the means to their objectives...

...But some of these pieces touch upon a gay point, or otherwise identify the writer as gay...