Earlier this month, I happened to meet someone at a cocktail party and in the way things often happen these days (i.e., for me), the topic of conversation eventually turned to The Metropolis Case, which is publishing very soon, within days in fact, and a copy of which was already ‘on display,’ floating around the room so to speak (between the bowls of chips and trays of cookies), because 1) I had the advances shipped to my office (due to the near impossibility of receiving packages in Manhattan if you don’t have a doorman), and which I’ve been carting home (often via a party, such as this one I’m trying to describe) one or two at a time, and 2) because I — like 99.97 percent of artists/writers/musicians on the eve of publishing a work — am no doubt guilty of being a bit of a self-promoter; after all, I spent a lot of time working on it and am excited/pleased about how it turned out, and so generally won’t hesitate to show it off to those who express even the slightest interest (or sometimes none at all IDK?), which isn’t to say that I bonk people over the head with it when they’re not looking, but although I don’t have any children (or at least any of the non-feline variety lol) I imagine it’s sort of like the way parents generally don’t hesitate to show off a picture of a newborn. Which in any case is all background to a scene I’m sure you don’t have a hard time imagining, even though I haven’t described it particularly well, i.e., I was at a small and not-unfestive party filled with a mix of people I both knew and didn’t know, we were standing around talking and drinking and I showed the book to someone I was meeting for the first time, and I’m not here to tell you that the person — a younger guy, maybe in his late twenties if I had to guess — said anything particularly outrageous or mean or cruel or unflattering about the book per se; to the contrary, like just about everyone I’ve showed it to, he complimented the cover art and said a few nice things before confessing (or perhaps proclaiming would be a better word for it) that he never reads ‘gay writers.’ Which I found more than a bit suprising given that he displayed certain attributes that are (stereo)typically associated with nonheterosexual males, such as ___ and ___, but which because I try not to assume anything about anyone led me to ask: ‘are u gay?’ to which he responded (somewhat archly, it must be stated) ‘couldn’t you tell?’ to which I just sort of shrugged and offered something along the lines of the above, the point being that unless you’ve seen someone with his or her clothes off engaged in ___ or ___ (i.e., a sexual act) with someone of the same gender (keeping in mind that ‘gender’ itself is not a very solid foundation on which to build anything but for the sake of argument let’s use it in this manner), there’s really never any way to be sure, and trust me the world would be a much better place if more people remembered this truth, although it probably seems perfectly obvious as I’m stating it here. So anyway, the point is, the guy in question professed to being gay but expressed disdain for any books written by gays and/or with gay or nonheterosexual characters, which for a second I was like LOL are u effing kidding me but which it quickly became apparent as I reeled off about 20-40 names that he had never heard of any of them and he wasn’t even BSing me, although he claimed to be more than something of a ‘reader’ and in fact displayed some knowledge of the post-war literary canon (which it’s unfortunately possible to do while maintaining a complete ignorance w/r/t the gays); as he explained, he just didn’t think gay ppl were ‘capable’ of being strong, literary writers or really every climbing out of the LGBT genre ‘niche’ or ‘ghetto’ into which we are so often placed, and — to be fair — sometimes with good reason; obv not every book written by or abt a nonheteresexual should or needs to be a ‘timeless masterpiece.’ Which of course by this point you’re probably rolling your eyes and saying ‘whatever, why are u telling us abt this lil self-h8ing queen?’ which is a valid question to some extent and which is why I took a few days to think about it before writing this post, and to which my response is that I think that to grow up in this society/in this era means that we all ‘internalize’ hatred for gays (much the way we do for ethnic minorities and women and increasingly, the poor and the fat, to list just a few of the more obv categories), and which expresses itself as ‘self-hatred’ if we happen to be members of these same groups. I’m not saying that this is a HUGE revelation or anything, but during this year of ‘it gets better’ (which I don’t mean to disparage in the slightest, it’s a great message 98 percent of the time and let’s hope it actually helps some kid in __ who’s struggling in ways we can all imagine), in addition to curbing or fleeing or disavowing the hatred other people shower upon us, it’s equally important (and possibly even more) to curb the hatred that arises for ourselves ‘from within’ (to use a sort of cheesy expression), often without us even being aware of it, because — as my brief interaction with this character at the party demonstrated — it often pollutes our ability to appreciate beauty or creativity or when you get right down to it the fundamentally good parts of people (or cats) and so many other related things and ideas that could all fall under the rubric of ‘art’ or ‘love’ or even ‘soul’ or maybe just ‘the kind of stuff that makes life worth living,’ and (i.e., the hatred we feel for ourselves) instead manifests as a kind of bitter or dour or sour ignorance or jealousy or just general mean-spiritedness toward others for whom we should probably feel a bit more compassion given that we know what it’s like to be in their/our shoes, and which of course is not really a fun way to live (and I speak from personal experience here) and it should probably go without saying doesn’t really confirm to the idea of the ‘Christmas’ or even ‘holiday’ spirit (whatever you want to call it), and which of course is why I’m writing about this today, on Christmas Eve, with the hope (admittedly naive but there you have it) that in the coming year, we can all do what we can to turn down the dial on both the hatred AND the self-hatred — to the extent the two can be separated, and as I hope I’ve demonstrated to some extent, I’m not sure they can — which is not to say I’m in favor of coddling BS artists or other vindictive h8ers and extremists who would happily send me (and probably you, if you’re reading this) to the gallows, but that we still take some time to try to appreciate ourselves and the traditions and even the mythology from which we arise, because there’s a lot of magic to be found out there (and ‘within’ too, lol), and once you see it, you might just surprise yourself by spreading it out in ways you never imagined yourself possible, because that’s how magic works, and as long as I’m alive I want to believe in this possibility, don’t you?
