Chapter 8
749 Words
Chapter 8Simon
My mother was crazy excited about meeting Evan. She had me when she was thirty-five; with ninety on her horizon, she’d begun to think I’d never meet The One. A few other boyfriends had met her over the years. All of them were impressed (she started out as a computer for NASA and retired as a lecturer at USC), which pleased me. But even the ones who weren’t white didn’t quite get her experience of growing up in the segregated South. None of them took my experience of that seriously, either. We didn’t move to Los Angeles until I got accepted to UCLA, though, so I had eighteen solid years of post-Confederacy bullshit under my belt. No surprise that all my pre-screenplay books were about young Southern men getting the hell out.
It occurred to me, with some frequency, that I’d done too good a job muting not only my characters’ queerness but also their ethnicity. I didn’t write dialogue in dialect. I wrote the way Mom and her highly educated friends talked. And I didn’t mention skin colors or dump other Big Clues. Now I felt like a d**k (or at best a coward) about that, because the conversation around fiction, maybe especially for the romance genre, is that representation matters.
I could have written my early books explicitly about queer men of color. I could also have never been published. I wasn’t going to revise all those early books to queer or color them up; instead, I’d taken a calculated risk and centered the most recent book on a version of myself. A queer man of color from a high-achieving home (my dad died when I was sixteen, from lung cancer, but he was an attorney with an engineering degree; my brother is a Navy officer), college-educated, articulate, and ambitious.
After writing that screenplay, and having since written books that became, by stages, more openly queer, with more obvious diversity in the characters, I’d begun to get a little more attention from the mainstream media. By which I mean media produced by and for people who watch TV and movies more than they read books. I had become discussable, because now I was writing books that were potentially controversial, because the average reader assumes that all characters are straight and white unless the author makes it very clear that they are not. When you’re clear about your characters not being straight and white, all of a sudden some people think you’re being political. I did a lot of interviews with people who asked about my agenda.
My agenda, for the record, is simply this: to write about people like me and my friends and my boyfriends. There are a lot of us, and we each have a unique story, and our stories can and should be woven into the greater sociocultural tapestry. There are still plenty of books about straight white people.
Wow, soapbox much? I meant to say something about Evan. How much I was looking forward to taking him to meet Mom. How much I was loving having someone to text and drink coffee with and chat to before bed. How much I was loving the excuse, or incentive, to excavate the sixteen years of treasures that had accumulated in my apartment and decide what I needed to take with me if my future lay in Evan’s house, the way I hoped it did.
What, after all, is the real treasure: multiple shelves of books I’ve already read that I could re-acquire as e-books if I truly needed to read them again, or space to have a life with a wonderful HR manager?
Evan’s house wasn’t full of books, despite his current job and the fact that he reads literally all the time. I mean, there’s an e-reader on his kitchen peninsula and another one on his nightstand and yet another in the living room. He reads when the TV is on, while he eats, before bed, behind the counter at the bookstore when there’s nobody else there. He’s the first guy I’ve ever been with who reads as much as I do.
So I knew he wouldn’t mind if I brought a few cartons of books with me, should the day come that I actually moved in with him. His house was uncluttered, though, so he’d definitely flinch at twenty cartons.
“You will be sufficient clutter,” I told my cat Daisy. She blinked at me, unoffended by this allegation.
- Writer
