[lit-ideas] Re: Green Carnation
- From: Judy Evans <judithevans001@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 20:20:41 +0100
That reminds me. Alan Hollinghurst won the Booker Prize
>Comment
>Glad to be a gay writer
>Despite the crude headlines over the Man Booker prize, there is such
>a thing as a gay sensibility
>Colin Richardson Monday October 25, 2004 The Guardian
>A (small) revolution has been televised. Last week, the BBC broadcast
>live the announcement by former culture secretary Chris Smith MP of
>the result of the last-minute, close-run deliberations of this year's
>Man Booker prize jury. And the winner was Alan Hollinghurst for his
>novel The Line of Beauty.
>Newspaper reaction was predictable. The
>Sun's no-nonsense headline, Gay Book Wins, typified the general view.
>Across the English-speaking world, the story was the same: for the
>first time in 36 years, the Booker prize had been awarded to a "gay
>novel".
>What this actually meant, however, was not entirely clear. For some,
>Hollinghurst's surprise win seemed to represent a sort of mini sexual
>revolution. Both the Daily Mail and the Scotsman, for instance,
>described The Line of Beauty as a book "about Thatcherism and gay
>sex". The Express went further, with its surreal headline, Booker Won
>by Gay Sex.
>Almost the only people not to frame Hollinghurst's victory in terms
>of the triumph of homosexuality were the Booker judges themselves.
>Chris Smith, who, as well as being the chair of the judging panel was
>the first openly gay man to be elected to the House of Commons, put
>the record straight. "The fact that it was a gay novel did not figure
>at all in the discussions," he said.
>So which is it, then - gay writing or good writing? Or could it
>possibly be both?
>There has long been a tension between those who believe in art with a
>purpose and those who believe only in art for art's sake. Oscar
>Wilde, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, encapsulated this
>epigrammatically: "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral
>book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all."
>Scrolling forward a hundred years, Wilde's words continue to
>reverberate. The impresario Sir Cameron Mackintosh, for example,
>insists that he is not interested in gay theatre, "only good
>theatre".
>Perhaps the most famous exponent of this view is Gore Vidal. He has
>always resisted being categorised as a gay man, let alone a gay
>writer. He considers the idea that an identity can be constructed on
>the basis of an individual's sexual preference to be absurd. He most
>emphatically denies that there is such a thing as a "gay
>sensibility".
>This is an understandable, if frustrating, outlook. To call oneself a
>gay writer or to describe one's writing as gay writing is
>problematic. But not for the reasons that Gore Vidal advances.
>In a loose but significant sense, there is such a thing as a gay
>sensibility. The experience of growing up with an increasing
>awareness that, in a very profound sense, one is different leaves an
>indelible mark.
>You largely have to deal with that sense of otherness on your own, in
>your head, until you start to live out your feelings, when you are
>faced with all sorts of questions: Who do I tell? Where do I meet
>others like me? How do I have sex? How do I behave in public with
>those I love? Such dilemmas colour one's outlook on life.
>It's often said by those who, like Gore Vidal, scorn the notion of
>gay identity, that the only thing that gay people have in common with
>each other is that they fancy people of the same sex as themselves.
>That in itself is enough for me; same-sex desire changes everything.
>At the same time, I understand only too well how annoying it is to be
>dismissed as "just a gay writer". The implication is that I can only
>write about gay sex. But, in my time, I have written about politics,
>crime, religion and much more besides. In my writing, I like to
>think, all human life is there.
>However, as the reaction to Alan Hollinghurst's Booker win shows, the
>world at large still cannot quite grasp that fact. And so the
>temptation for the gay writer is to deny that they are a gay writer
>in the forlorn hope that they will not be written off.
>Which brings me back to my description of Hollinghurst's success as
>some kind of revolution. In his Guardian interview, Hollinghurst
>said: "I only chafe at the 'gay writer' tag if it's thought to be
>what is most or only interesting about what I'm writing. I want it to
>be part of the foundation of the books, which are actually about all
>sorts of other things as well."
>Praise the Lord and pass the biscuits. For all his caveats and
>qualifications, Hollinghurst is happy to be described as a gay
>writer. He writes, he says, "about gay life from a gay perspective
>unapologetically and as naturally as most novels are written from a
>heterosexual position". For that, I for one am truly grateful.
>My copy of Gore Vidal's scandalous third novel, The City and the
>Pillar, first published in 1948, carries prominently on its cover a
>quote from the late Bernard Levin: "The first serious American
>homosexual novel."
>In the end, it is utterly futile trying to resist being tagged a gay
>writer or gay artist - or gay dustman, for that matter. We have to
>accept that that's how the world sees us, and get over it and move
>on.
>· Colin Richardson is a former editor of Gay Times.
Monday, October 25, 2004, 5:59:33 PM, Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx wrote:
Jac> "In order to distinguish us from ordinary blokes,
Jac> we all wear a green carnation",
Jac> Sir Noel Coward
Jac> Incidentally, Read is also a Rupert Brooke fan, founder of the first-ever
Jac> Rupert Brooke Society.
Judy (sig cut in error)
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