This summer, a publisher sent me an advance copy of Emil Wilson’s graphic novel The Nightingales. The premise is relatively straightforward: Lou Miller is about to graduate high school in Oregon in 1985 when her father moves his coworker, Jim, into the family home without consulting anyone. Jim is dying of AIDS and was evicted from his apartment when the landlord found out about his diagnosis. What follows, however, is a surreal, lush telling of a family coming undone and a man facing his own mortality. Lou’s mother is furious about the move, but she’s an emotionally repressed Catholic, so her recourse is to have long talks with the Virgin Mary, whom she shares cigarettes with late at night. Lou learns more about Jim through caring for him and his dogs, Henny and Penny, who start a variety show in her bedroom.

I read The Nightingales over a single weekend in July. This summer, it felt like the entire country was choking on nostalgia for the ’80s when the few good stars of that terrible decade of greed and individualism—Dolly Parton and Tim Curry—were suddenly snuffed out. This book is a reminder of all the pettiness and cruelty of that era, but also the art, the love, and the sense of freedom it held. In the novel, Lou is at an age where she can make anything of her life. The Nightingales imagines a girl who sees all the horror and beauty around her and uses it to fashion a better version of herself. 

 

In a room in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1988, eight men sit waiting nervously for a play rehearsal to begin. The play in question is an adaptation of John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes. The director, Havelock, insists it isn’t a gay play per se. “It’s like Lord of the Flies with big people,” he says. “But with man-on-man fucking,” one of the actors, Jordan, immediately responds. This sets the tone for Marlon James’s expansive new novel, The Disappearers. The men acting in the play are all queer. They range in age from just out of high school to middle-aged, and they come from different parts of town, but they all live under the intense strain and paranoia of life in homophobic 1980s Jamaica. We see this play out when their production is met with unspeakable violence. The novel is an exploration of their lives before and after that harrowing rupture. This book is also wickedly funny, at times sexy, and full of longing. It’s a triumph for James, who won the Booker Prize for his 2014 novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings. Like that book, The Disappearers is an epic—over 600 pages long. And like that book, every single one of those pages is earned. Here, James talks with A Closer Read about writing the truth about queerness, community, and joy.

How did you find Edmond Porteous’s voice, the voice that opens this novel? What did you read, listen to, or watch to find its rhythm?

Edmond’s voice was both easy and hard. Easy in the sense that he is my age, or at least close to it, and as someone also born smack in the middle of Gen X, I identify with and understand everything he’s experiencing. Eddy’s voice, much like mine, is Jamaican to a point, heavily influenced by American pop culture, especially pop music. There is a generation outside of America that was also raised on The Muppet Show and MTV, and somewhere between those two peaks came a worldview. But voice is more than just sound. It is point of view and perspective. It’s the product of education, parenting, socialization, and whatever your heroes sound like. Eddy speaks in what Jamaicans would call the “Uptown voice,” meaning posh, educated, rich, worldly. Meaning that you have been to Miami at least twice. It’s also the voice of people who are upper-class-adjacent but not really upper-class, like me. People who sound like we belong even though we look like we don’t.

 

There has been a lot of rhapsodizing in pop culture lately about “community,” specifically odes to queer communities on social media. I was struck by how this book captures community as it exists amongst marginalized people: the desire for connection mixed with shame, antagonism, and self-loathing; the difficulty of making friends with someone who shares your identity when your whole world tells you to hate that identity. First off: What are your thoughts on the romanticization of queer community? Do you find it helpful or useful, or does it open more questions for you? Second, can you talk about how you approached depicting community, specifically friendships between gay men, in this novel?

I’m not sure that much of that romanticization happens within queer communities. When I lived in Minneapolis, I was far more likely to run into racism in the gay community than homophobia in the Black. So, in many ways, queer community was a myth or a privilege not extended to Black and brown people. Romanticization is those interracial couples you always see in beer ads. The first person in America to call me n*gg*r was a gay man, as was the second. The main reason I left Minnesota was that the queer community wasn’t much of a community to me. The first time in my life I ever went to a party where absolutely no one would talk to me was a gay party. And yet one of the reasons I wrote this novel was a fear of having missed out on community. A fear that I never had my gay posse. But then, what is a gay posse, really? Had it not been for this play, none of the men in The Disappearers would have even gotten together. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as circumstances and opportunities bring people together all the time. On paper, Eddy and Jordan should have been best friends. They are almost mirror images of each other, but they never become friends. Havelock and Mark are great friends, but at one point Mark was sorta his pimp. Rainford has no friends. They are a lonely bunch, enough to make you wonder if everybody was just being lonely together. Or if shared queerness, or shared persecution, was ever enough. 

One of the things I loved about the British version of Queer as Folk is that they took that idea of community and ripped it apart with a storyline cut from the American version. In one episode, the gay posse arrives at the club together, but they disperse as soon as they find hookups. One of them overdoses in his bedroom, the hookup flees, and his body sits there rotting for nearly a week. At his funeral, his mother confronts the friends, admitting that she was not much of a mother or ally, but then she throws out a question that none of them can answer: If you were a bunch of straight male friends, would my son have been dead and rotting in his house for days? Bring that up with many gay men now and silence is still the answer.

 

Relatedly, what do you think of “Black joy” discourse? The demand to be relentlessly cheerful, upbeat, not too messy?

Thankfully, true Black joy is not a response to anybody’s demand. White people who expect Black joy are really expecting white safety, a sign that they are not under threat. The angry Black man or woman is, more than anything, a disappointment or a reminder that the American dream is a nightmare for some. Black joy doesn’t need a gaze, which is why sometimes when the white person is gazing, they call the cops. As for real Black joy, Black people are blessed to find joy in so many unexpected ways. To watch Black Panther for the first time was to experience Black joy. Girls double-Dutching on the avenue is Black joy. Al Green’s “Love and Happiness.” Ackee and saltfish. Ballroom. Beyoncé’s Renaissance.

What did you think of A Little Life? Or The Great Believers? I know there’s been a lot of discourse around cis (seemingly) straight women writing about young gay men—whether they have the right to do so, whether they can “get it right.” On the flip side, what I loved about this book were the heavy citations of John Rechy and other queer theorists who dwell on gay male identity in ways that feel expansive, frankly dirtier, and more human. I am curious what you think of that rise in books about gay men—and gay men having sex—that are written by straight women … and the role of the author in all of this.

The last thing I want to do is come across as a hater, particularly for two writers I very much admire. I wonder if the bigger issue is in commercial fiction, meaning queer literature for straight women. Who’s to say if there’s anything wrong with that? I mean, you get your kicks where you get your kicks, but that type of fiction always de-queers the gayness, even when they amp up the sex. Why are none of these boys ever femme? Is this like lesbian pornography for straight men? The dirtiness of gay sex is washed out. Nobody needs to reckon with scatological facts, but also the grit and the realism are washed out as well. What always strikes me as remarkable, not just in the literature but in TV and film, is the miraculously pre-lubed gay ass. These men just jump in bed, ready to get busy. That’s wild, because every gay man I know, including myself, has at least six different versions of lube, and five of them are always the wrong one. You get the suspicion that gay sex for straight people still must allow for the fantasy of straight sex. The boys in Heated Rivalry are all gorgeous, but they are all jocks, and two of them have sex with women. The sex is curiously dickless because the sudden presence of genitals takes it out of fantasy and into actual sex, which is not what the straight viewer bargained for.

 

Edmond Porteous is a beautiful depiction of a tragic mulatto. He would probably delight in using that term. Can you talk about choosing to write from a light-skinned man’s perspective, especially a light-skinned man raised in a majority-Black country with its own very specific understanding of colorism?

 

I wonder about Eddy. He probably would’ve liked the term “tragic mulatto,” but more because he was aware of privilege decades before anybody used the term. But he’s also very aware of what privilege does not get him. It doesn’t get him love; it barely gets him companionship. It doesn’t get him a stable family life. It doesn’t even get him family members he likes. And yet he is also aware that white, or white-passing, skin is the ultimate passport, that there are spaces he can enter without being questioned—for example, a nightclub. He’s aware that even when anger is directed at him, it can only go so far, because nobody would dare touch a white man. That said, I don’t think Eddy ever thought that white skin would give him happiness, mostly because he lives in such an unhappy family. At school, light skin only means that punches are verbal, never physical. But Eddy understands the tricky, perverse racial dynamics of a country that thinks it has no racial dynamics.
 
A beautiful thread throughout the novel is how pop culture, especially music, moves through these characters. But you also depicted something I see very rarely: the pang you can feel when you realize the culture that enacted violence on you has claimed to move on. I am thinking specifically about how, in the first section of this novel, Edmond is so scared to buy a Prince record in public. He also laments that he wasn’t born in the ’70s, when a more flamboyant masculinity would be accepted. And yet, years after the attack, we find another character, Jordan, lamenting how music has moved and changed, how artists now cover the musicians everyone would have shunned as being gay a few years before. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this emotion so thoroughly depicted in fiction. Can you talk a bit about this phenomenon and why you decided to portray it?

It is an interesting phenomenon, isn’t it? Here’s a quick one: being gay and loving hip-hop, especially hardcore hip-hop that wasn’t afraid to be publicly homophobic. Hip-hop has long sorta moved on without ever reckoning with itself, while I’m still struggling over Ice Cube saying “true n*gg*z ain’t gay” way back in 1991. But this question makes me think of Kurt Cobain realizing that the jocks who made his life so awful that he fled to music now listened to his records. I do think the queer perspective on this is a little different, though—although I fully accept Kurt Cobain as queer—in the sense that when harm is done, the person causing the harm moves on, sometimes with shocking ease, while the person harmed remains stuck, trauma now being their permanent present tense. I remember running into the boys who used to torment me at school and being far more hurt that they have forgotten me. Culture moves on, and it’s amazing when it moves in the direction it used to shun, taking cues from the very people it used to harm. Right now in Jamaica, I’m seeing gangsters in skintight jeans who only dance with each other, and I’m old enough to remember when wearing that shit could have gotten you beaten to death. But notice that the person carrying the burden of that memory is me.

In each edition of this newsletter, we ask writers to share a space where they wrote something beautiful. It can be their regular writing spot or an unexpected place of inspiration. This week’s writer is Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, author of the best-selling novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois and, this past year, Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays & Writings.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers: “I used to write in bed, imagining myself as a low-budget Edith Wharton (though I don’t have dogs, as she did). I wrote longhand in Moleskine notebooks, and then I’d move to the desk in my office to type on my laptop. When the pandemic arrived—or rather, descended—I went into lockdown and my routine completely changed. Because I was spending all my time in my house, I didn’t think it was very healthy to keep writing in bed. But when my novel was published, my book tour was virtual, and my office became a curated space. I no longer felt like my office belonged to me. So I started writing on my couch, with my feet propped up on an ottoman. I got rid of one couch and got another, and that’s where I’ve been writing ever since. I wrote my most recent book—a memoir—on this couch, which is very cluttered, filled with several drafts of different sections (that I date so I don’t get confused), my Moleskine notebooks, and books I’m reading (or, if I’m honest, texts I’m just using as emotional support books). Except for my yardman, my housekeeper, and my exterminator, I don’t have people in my house when I’m deep into writing a book, because the clutter on the couch embarrasses me. I’m working on a new book now—fiction again—and this couch is my happy place. Sometimes I have deep conversations with my characters. (I just had a wonderful confab last night.) They don’t seem to mind the clutter, and I’m very grateful for their understanding.”