About posing or not as a gay writer?

Interviewer:

Most people in your book are gay. But you never use this word; you refer to gay people as faggots or homosexuals, the few times you refer to their sexuality? I find this condescending.

Writer:

A trivial fact: at this time the concept gay was not in use by people in Europe or Australia. As you notice, the people in the book never discuss their gender-roles or sexual preferences. What they were they were, but was not talked about, as little as they talked about having noses.

I: But one is a controversial issue. You are not even willing to choose LGBTQ+ as a category for this book. Why?

W: Absence doesn’t belong there. I read the short introductions to the books labelled as LGBT. They use exactly the same language and the same content as stories in cheap pornographic magazines during my childhood in the fifties. Such is not my book.

I: The content is still largely about LGBT people?

W: Yes, but they do not appear as typical literary LGBT people. When you classify Crime and Punishment or Gone with the Wind as Heterosexual books and when you refer to Mark Twain and Jane Austen as heterosexual writer then maybe LGBT classification will do. Absence is not about homosexuality, it is about love and sex and the lack of both.

I: One may infer from the book that you have a complicated relationship with homosexuality. In one place you let the main character, Simon, refer to his sexual life as a homosexual, and I cite: “Whatever practical adjustment he made with others of his sex, there was no mutual connection with equal gratification for both parties as for a pussy and a dick, only a second-rate attempt which never reached the fulfilling glory of the original act of love.” 

W: Yes, that can be a tough insight to deal with for a young man. And the only way he seemed to deal with this ‘straight fact’ was to get drunk most of the time. But this insight he presents in the latter part of the book.

I: To continue with this theme: the only positive sexual relationship in the book is between a young man and a young woman.

W: The most negative sexual relationship described in the book is also between a young man and the same young woman as you mentioned.

I: What should we infer from this? That it equals out?

W: No. But do not use every single instance to make an inference about a collective or another member of that collective. Evaluate each case by its own special circumstances. And let every individual represent only himself. Let each situation and each person be treated by its own merits, and don’t judge routinely referring to popular concept which are losing their meaning, like misogynist, paedophile or racist, used as invective to silence people with a different view.

About sexuality in the Anglo-Saxon world.

I: The narrative takes place mainly in Mediterranean countries. There you let your characters make critical remarks about Anglo-Saxons and especially about people from the USA, or United States of America, as you spell it out.

W: Yes, because you have a negative, I would say hostile, attitude to sexuality and often even to your own. You pretend bodily functions don’t exist. You don’t even have a toilet, you piss and shit in the bathroom. You treat sexual activities with shame and don’t see fellatio, cunnilingus or anal stimulation as something of the most positive a human being can do to another human being, something one may spend hours to celebrate with zest and abandon. You quickly do away with sex in darkness, and when you’re tired or intoxicated by alcohol or drugs. How often do you spend hours in the full sunlight of a warm day naked with each other for hours? You don’t. You have more important things to do. Perhaps one could argue that there is a little more important to do in life than to give happiness and pleasure to another human being. Instead, you are loaded with a religiously determined hostility, which has created limitless harm to yourselves.

This hostility has created wounds in your emotions that are so deep and so excruciating that you condemn or regard as reckless everything that threatens to make you aware of your wounds and even more make you aware of the harm you do to yourselves and to others. And thus, you punish with hate and destruction anything that makes you become aware of your own buried agony and pain.

I: So why don’t you write an ode to this fantastic human quality? Instead, in this book at every instance when these people find themselves in a sexual situation, things go wrong. They do each other more harm than good?

W: Because they are wounded, each one of them in a different way.

I: What has wounded them?

W: Their mothers, their fathers, without understanding what they did. And why did they wound their children? Because they are wounded children themselves and have not become aware. Too painful to deal with or even recognise. You live your lives in an all-embracing denial.

I: And this is particular in what you call the Anglo-Saxon world?

W: Different cultures tackle sexuality in different ways. Your way is not good. A child born into a culture automatically is affected by the collective mind of that culture.  And your collective mind about sex and body functions is not good for a child. This is one reason why many males abandon heterosexuality. The kind of sexuality your women with power want to impose on your society is not attractive.