Reading and writing

I just finished Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. I had been avoiding the book, because I heard him speak last year at Muse & the Marketplace about autobiographical novels and he spent too much time talking about archiving your emails in case you need them for research.

But the book was amazing. And actually articulated for me what autobiographical fiction can do that memoir can’t. Which is to say things you don’t know how to talk about from you own life. Also what plot can do to make the underlying issues legible.

There were two essays about ACT UP San Francisco in the late 80s, and they so viscerally put me back in that time and place. I am 6 years younger than Chee, so when he was 22 and just out of college, I was 16 and not out to anyone yet. But the ACT-UP look that he describes: leather jackets, floppy hair with the front dyed pink or blue or green, colorful scarves, earrings, combat boots. I had totally forgotten that that was a coherent and recognizable style, but it absolutely was. And it was one that I imprinted on. I had one friend, from the Pacific Center queer youth group, who actually dressed like that. But mostly those guys were so much older than me, all I could do was look on in awe. How did I forget about that style? It made such a deep impression on me but I didn’t have the distance to understand it as a distinct thing.

And so it hit me that the reason I was having problems articulating what Michael looked like when I first met him, and what seemed so attractive about him, was that he had that ACT UP/ Queer Nation look, even though he was my age. I went back and looked at the 30 second video clip I have of him from an SFNet documentary, and he has a black inverted triangle on his leather jacket. And I am wracking my brain to remember what it meant to him. I think mental illness? Disability? I had totally forgotten about it.

And so now I have a way of articulating what he looked like, to translate the message of his fashion choices for readers (for myself?)

I am working on rewriting the first page of my manuscript for a workshop next month, and I put in the Queer Nation reference. But when I was talking to one of the women in my workshopping group, she was like, You’re confusing the reader by bringing up Queer Nation because he’s not queer. I was taken aback that somehow all the times I talk about him being bi, and the incredibly destructive crush he had in his straight best friend are not making an impression on readers.

I think it is only with 20 years distance that I have been able to see the ways that stigma (around disability, mental illness, drug use, and queerness) played a role in the tragedy of Michael’s death.

But because there is no scene of Michael kissing a man, it doesn’t seem to matter how many times I say he was bi.