Everything I Have Is Blue:
A Conversation with Wendell Ricketts
by Susan Raffo
In this age of Will & Grace
and gentrification, the "dream market" and gay investment advisors,
you don't hear much about working-class queers. In fact, some would even
consider the idea a contradiction in terms. But the contributors to Everything
I Have Is Blue: Short Fiction by Working-Class Men About
More-or-Less Gay Life would beg to differ. The first collection of short
stories by working-class queer, gay, and bisexual men, Everything I Have Is
Blue is a rich and long-overdue contribution both to the burgeoning field
of working-class studies and to LGBTIQ fiction.
Susan Raffo: Okay, Wendell, you do a
phenomenal job of answering this question in the Afterword to Blue, but I still have to ask here: Why pull together gay men,
working class and fiction into an anthology? What gave you the idea?
Wendell Ricketts: There wasn't some "Aha!" moment, which I guess
would be more dramatic. Actually, it was a long, slow burn. I was in a
fiction-writing program, and I was increasingly unhappy both with what I was
reading in class and with the way that writing and literature were being
presented as this precious, gem-like thing that was removed from real life. If
you've ever been in one of these programs, you know there are basically two
camps: The people who think that questioning how characters are represented in
literature or questioning authors' biases and intentions and so forth is some
kind of crime against art, and then the people who think that writing is just
one more product of our social conditions and as such is fair game for all
kinds of criticism. Obviously, that's a huge oversimplification, but that's the
gist of it. It's the difference between people who think you should read Heart
of Darkness for the sublime story and not notice the racism, and those who
think that issues of white supremacy and colonialism are crucial to figuring
out what the book is actually about.
Anyway, all of this was going on in my head in 1998, 1999, and we didn't yet
have Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, but we did have Will & Grace
and, of course, I had been to the last couple of Marches on Washington and was
appropriately appalled. In the Afterword to Blue I call them
"mobile shopping malls," because that's about what they were. And I
had been watching for several years as this great, rowdy, passionate, angry,
beautiful grassroots AIDS activist movement that I'd witnessed in
So there was that, and then I came across Queerly Classed, which was
extremely important to me in thinking that there was room for the topic of
class to be addressed in a popular, nonacademic way for queer audiences, and I
was also reading Dorothy Allison's books, which were getting big play then, and
I had become very interested in Walt Whitman and the way he romanticized the
"working man" as almost a kind of metaphor for America itself, and
that somehow led me to Liberace, who is an amazing example of a queer man whose
adult presentation was so inflected by his roots in working-class Wisconsin,
and then I kept finding these tantalizing glimpses of useful thinking even in
the academic literature, like John Champagne's "Seven Speculations on
Queers and Class," which was in the Journal of Homosexuality and
was one of the smartest things I'd read on the subject.
So all of this was just kind of roiling around in my mind, and I just set off
on a hunt for fiction by working-class queer men. I mean, I knew it had to
exist. If work by all these working-class lesbian writers existed--Judy Grahn
and Audre Lorde and Amber Hollibaugh and Minnie Bruce Pratt, and if some very
essential roots of the modern "liberation" movement could be traced
back to the traditional left--I'm thinking of people like Harry Hay--then
working-class queer men had to be writing fiction, too. Plus I knew
working-class queer men, although none of them were writers. The first living
author I found--and I don't even remember how anymore--was John Gilgun, who
immediately sent me copies of all his books. And there it was. And I kind of
just went from there.
SR: Back in the early 1990s, when I was
putting together the anthology Queerly
Classed, I had a very hard time finding gay men willing to be in the book. I
told you already that I had two different gay men--one a fairly well-known
activist and one a fairly well-known author--tell me that if the specifics of
their background were made public, they would become eroticized as
"working class" in ways that would be harmful to the work they were doing.
In a sense, they would be delegitimized as men who wanted to be understood as
thinkers and creators. Familiar territory for a woman, not always so honestly
articulated by gay men. Other submissions I received by gay men from a variety
of class backgrounds were dependant on class stereotypes--upper class man takes
young street stud to the opera where his eyes are opened to the glories of high
culture which also, by the last page, translate to the glories of gay sex. I
had a hard time finding honest complicated representations of being gay and
working class. How did you find these guys? And what did you expect when you
were looking for them versus what actually happened? Did you get what you
imagined would pop in through your assorted mailboxes?
WR: I guess my gut feeling is that if Elvis Presley could manage both to stay
true to his working-class roots and to be taken seriously in his craft and
profession, then so could the two guys you mention. I mean, there's something
about that response that strikes me not necessarily as false but as not the
whole story. But what it does speak to is the closet, to use that term, that
working-class queer men are in within the so-called "gay community,"
and on that level I understand it very well.
But to answer your question about how I found writers. Basically, I used every
free or nearly free resource I could find, which mostly meant the internet, to
distribute the call for stories. I sent hundreds and hundreds of messages to
Yahoo groups, to listservs, to queer newsgroups, to working-class newsgroups. I
sent printed flyers to queer bookstores and reading groups and Bear networks
and queer academics. I contacted every queer author whose email address I could
find on the 'net. I sent the call to magazines and newspapers and online
writers' sites. I spent hours and hours searching for queer and gay-identified
authors and groups online and harvesting email addresses. Basically, I spammed
the internet and made such a nuisance of myself that I actually started getting
complaints about why I was sending my call around so damn much.
In the end, I got about 150 stories over the course of five years or so. I knew
most of them were wrong from the very first page. They were
"erotica," which I knew I wasn't going to use, or they contained some
terrible cliché about working-class life, or the quality of the writing
wasn't up to the standard I was trying to uphold. I thought, for better or
worse, that I wanted the writing to be absolutely top notch, so there'd be no
discussion about applying some "kinder" standard to the book because
it was, after all, only working-class writing.
But even more often, the problem was that the stories contained some stylized
version of a working-class character seen from the point of a character who wasn't
working class. In the finished book, there are at least two stories where I
think the working-class "gaze" invites scrutiny, but I like both of
the stories, and I feel satisfied that they raise questions that are
interesting enough that they deserved to be included. In the end, the main
criterion was my instinct: I didn't interrogate people much about whether or
how they were working class. I got to a point where I felt I could tell what I
needed to know by reading the work.
SR: How come only gay men? Why not
bisexual or trans men or women?
WR: Well, some of the writers in the book do identify as bisexual and no one
should make the assumption that a transgendered or intersexed author is not
included. Others, like me, call themselves "queer" and reject
"gay." But it is obviously true that there are no writers in the
anthology who live or identify as women.
The real answer has a long version and a short version. The short version is:
That isn't the book I was putting together. But I realize that sounds flippant
or dismissive, which is not how I feel. So let's move to the long answer.
Through the 1990s, I was watching this major shift take place in the gay male
cultural Zeitgeist, to use a really klunky phrase. And what I saw was gay men
succumbing to enormous pressures to normalize and assimilate and be tamed. And
those pressures were specifically the pressures of the marketplace--the
incitement to consume according to specific patterns as though that were
equivalent to wider social acceptance for gay people, to view the accumulation
of wealth and property as evidence of the defeat of homophobia, and to embrace
some very middle-class standards of taste and sophistication. You saw
the emergence of these gay male "lifestyle" magazines that
were marked by two significant features: the conspicuous presence of major
mainstream advertising and the conspicuous absence of politics. Not a
coincidence! And these anthologies of gay male short stories kept coming out,
and virtually all of them…well, D. Travers Scott put it so kindly in his
blurb for Blue: "Finally! A gay story collection 100% free from
scenes of Jeremy and
And all of that was accompanied by a huge swing toward the center in terms of
the issues that gay rights organizations were willing to take on, this idea
that we had to "focus our efforts," which meant ignoring issues of
economic justice and race and everything else. And then I just saw the
neighborhoods change--the Castro got more and more yuppie and exclusive, and
that zip code now has the second-highest per capita income of any neighborhood
in
And then the other issue was that it seemed to me, if you wanted to find a
working-class lesbian perspective or working-class dyke writers, that it wasn't
that hard to do. A recognition of working-class writers has been important in
lesbian publishing, both fiction and nonfiction, for a long time. I'm
remembering in particular one book I came across years ago, the Lesbian
Fiction anthology that Elly Bulkin edited (Persephone Press, 1981), which I
later went back to because it was what I hoped Everything I Have Is Blue
might be able to be. I mean, Lesbian Fiction is very nearly an anthology
of working-class lesbian writing, though it isn't presented that way. But there
are some amazing stories in that anthology, including Judy Grahn's "Boys
at the Rodeo" which pretty brilliantly anticipates the excitement about
queer gender studies of more than a decade later.
So, having said all of that, what it came down to for me was that I saw a need
for a space where queer men could talk to and with other queer men about class,
and specifically a space for working-class queer men to begin a conversation
among ourselves. An economic and class analysis has always been part of lesbian
feminism because understanding the economic status of women is central to an
analysis of sexism. That linkage is obviously not the same for men, but we need
to start figuring these issues out. Especially in a context in which queer men
increasingly wind up pitted against other queer men in what feels to me an awful
lot like class warfare.
SR: And of course, you didn't even
start putting together the anthology until you had a publisher already on
contract, right?
WR: Let the record reflect that I'm laughing hysterically. I was so naïve about
the way publishing worked and especially about the changes that were taking
place in the queer publishing market by the end of the 1990s. This book was
born as a wild idea that came to me one sleepless night during graduate school
as I sat in my little apartment in
SR: When I was putting together Queerly Classed, I very purposefully chose to solicit essays
and poetry and to leave out fiction. At the time, I felt fiction allow an
authentic enough tone. I'm a changed woman, Wendell. As the years go by, I look
at Queerly Classed and am constantly noticing what isn't there. A couple
of years ago, the absence of fiction started to bother me. Maybe it's because
we're living in such strangely mythical/literal political times, maybe it's
because I have a child now and live a more story-telling life, and maybe I just
don't feel the same need to prove my life by using "fact-based"
narratives for conveyance. Spend some time talking about fiction--what does
fiction do differently from nonfiction and poetry? And why, for you, not
nonfiction?
WR: Well, the existence of Queerly Classed was an important impetus for Blue,
and I still go back to refer to it, so I'm not sure it's missing as much as you
might think! But I guess the simplest answer is that I was interested in
fiction because I'm a fiction writer and because I believe in the power and the
usefulness of fiction. You've put it much more thoughtfully than I would have
come up with when you mention the "mythical/literal political
realities" in which we live. Along those same lines, I felt that fiction
was capable of capturing something elusive that nonfiction couldn't. I find
that the act of writing something into a fiction often ennobles it and gives it
gravitas, and I like that about fiction. But from the get-go I got snarky
letters because I wasn't using "life writing" or memoir and because I
was privileging a "bourgeois" literary form, the short story. But my
experience was that my childhood and youth were full of stories--literally
fictions, because I found out as an adult that some of them simply weren't
true. But those stories weren't told to hide some ugly secret but rather to
give our lives a kind of continuity that they didn't necessarily have, to tell
about things that turned out better than they usually did, or to warn us about
the dangers that life held, or to pass on information about certain kinds of
survival skills or cleverness or pragmatism that I think of as working-class
values. I'm thinking specifically of the stories that my Uncle Charlie used to
tell about being in
One thing I really want to challenge with this book is the notion that
"literature" and "working class" can't be uttered in the
same sentence, that working-class people don't read or that literature is some
bourgeois category. It's bullshit. Write something that includes our realities
and we read. And who owns literature anyway that the working class isn't
allowed through the gates? Even within working-class studies there's often a
lot of care to say "working-class writing" or "working-class
texts" instead of literature, and I say to hell with it. We have a
literature, and we have every right to call it that.
SR: Now, on to the book itself. There
were a lot of themes I noticed across the stories. For example, none of the
stories seem to be set in an urban gay community, the characters don't work for
the local AIDS project, no one is on the Pride committee or has a first date at
the International Queer Film Festival. Was this intended or are those the
stories that came to you? What does this say about how working classness can or
can't exist within the context of urban gay life?
WR: I think that is literally THE question. At a purely linguistic level,
"gay" is a word that to me contains the impulses of normalization and
assimilation, and I reject that as a plan for my life, particularly to the
extent that such assimilation seems to imply some sort of mindless
collaboration with capitalism and with the identical power structures that have
been screwing us for years. I can't believe people forget that all those
friendly, helpful pharmaceutical companies didn't want to research new HIV/AIDS
treatments or provide affordable AIDS drugs at first and had to be more-or-less
bludgeoned into it. That was capitalism. That was profit motive and corporate
indifference. But now we love corporations because they buy ads in Out
and sponsor forums and pay for booths at pride celebrations. We rarely
questioned--and we certainly didn't change--the underlying power structures
that made it necessary to fight them in the first place. They were the Borg and
we have been assimilated.
In the case of Blue, I had an interview recently with one of those
"stylish new lifestyle magazines" that gay boys seem to love, and the
reporter said at the end, "Well, I just don't understand how these are gay
stories. I mean, the people in them aren't really gay, are they?" And it
was a beautiful question because you could spend hours unpacking the
assumptions and premises it contained. If you're a "gay community"
type gay man who is accustomed to seeing homosexuality depicted and
"performed" in a particular way in what you read, or if you are a
class-privileged person who is used to seeing yourself and your realities
reflected in writing, you will probably experience being displaced by the
stories in Blue. You will find yourself in a world in which what is commonly
erased is, instead, brought to the foreground.
When I came out in 1977 I thought that the whole point of "gay
liberation" was that we could do anything we wanted and live anywhere we
wanted. But nearly thirty years later, there's that question again: "But
these aren't really gay stories, are they?" Because we don't see ourselves
as free to go anywhere and be anything. We see ourselves in limited ways, and
people who don't organize their entire lives around their homosexuality are
exotic and different and, obviously, not "really" gay.
I talk about that at some length in the Afterword--that notion that we must run
away to the place where gay is, turning our back on our roots and our natal
cultures in order to "become" gay. I did it and, frankly, I wish I
hadn't. But in fact, that's a major--if not THE major--theme in queer
coming-out literature of the last couple of decades. The Diaspora, the flight
to the Land of the Gays. I told you that I'm finishing up the translation of an
Italian gay novel, Generations of Love, which I love because it's
precisely the opposite of that: It's about a small-town boy who grows up, comes
out, finds a lover, and tells his family that he's gay--and he stays right
where he is in his community and his culture the whole time, and he never once
thinks of leaving.
It's vital to understand that, in most parts of the world, LGBTQ people do stay
where they are, and poor and working-class LGBTQ people tend to stay where they
are even in this country, and that's not a sign of internalized oppression or
self-hate or closetedness or anything else. It's a sign of being normal. We act
like homosexuality takes place in six or eight cities in
But I have to admit that it remains an open and painful question for me. I
don't know whether working classness can co-exist in the same space as urban
"gay community," at least in the way that's currently being
construed. I used to be convinced they could, but I'm not so sure anymore. I
think that the working-class perspective and voice is in constant danger of being
driven out and coopted. Of course, there's the wider question of the way urban
centers often get too trendy and yuppified for working-class people to stay
there anyway, which is certainly what's happened in
SR: So, let's talk about sex. Most
"representations" or working-class gay men are found in gay
pornography. The line between gay fiction and gay porn is often a fuzzy one. I
love the upfront sexuality of gay culture and have often measured myself and my
dyke/queer community against the places where gay men can put sex, desire and
queerness right there in the open. It smells home-familiar to me, growing up in
an inner city neighborhood where sex was a far more public language (for both
glorious and fucked-up reasons) than it seems to be in most white middle-class
worlds. I admit it, my own assumptions about anything created by gay men made
me expect more sex. And there IS sex, but it's not necessarily the main musical
note in this book. Can you talk some about sex and representing sex within the
context of Blue?
WR: This is tremendously complicated for me, and I'll just be very blunt about
it. As far as I'm concerned, the biggest secret about gay men's lives at the
dawn of the new millennium is how sexually dysfunctional we are, how colonized
and tiny our erotic imaginations have become. We're super-saturated with
sexualized images, with erotica and pornography, with nudity--almost all of it
of a distressingly identical type--used to sell us absolutely everything. I
wonder sometimes if any of us can still get off if we aren't either looking at
porn or doing it with a partner who looks like he could be in porn or
fantasizing about porn. We've completely forgotten there's any such thing as
aging with anything remotely like dignity, and in some ways we're more like the
queens in Boys in the Band, with their terror of not being young and
beautiful, than even they were. We've made the stereotype of the frivolous,
self-absorbed, youth-obsessed, hypersexual queer come true. We've insisted on
hammering everyone over the head with our sexual "freedom" and put
our fingers in our ears, to mention just one of the places, and refused to hear
a word about sexual responsibilities. And I am NOT talking about HIV. I'm quite
specifically not talking about that, because the notion of
"responsibility" in that context has become so freighted and ugly
that I want to stay as far away from it as possible.
But I am talking about a responsibility to treat each other like
multi-dimensional human beings, to use and enjoy our sexuality as much as we
want and in all the ways that we want--but not to treat other men like they're
worthless if they're not some fantasy out of Freshmen or Honcho
or like pieces of Kleenex even if they are. And much more important than that
actually is not to succumb to the immense pressure we're under to evaluate our
own worth according to those terms. I think it's become a pretty desperate
struggle to keep from doing that.
From my point of view as a middle-aged fag who has been at this gay thing since
I was seventeen, gay men's "openness" about sexuality has been as
much a boon to us as a curse. You know, it's like that old saying, "You
can never get enough of what you don't really want."
But that DOESN'T mean I don't know exactly what you mean about the beauty and
freedom and even the RELIEF of finding the "upfront sexuality" of gay
male urban life. That's what I came to
So with all of that as prologue, I can tell you that I specifically excluded
"erotica" from Blue because, to be honest, I'm sick of
erotica. I think the glut of erotica is hurting us. I know it's hurting
publishing opportunities, but I think it's also hurting our psyches as men, and
it's hurting an entire generation of fiction writers, who seem content to learn
nothing more of their craft than how to write about people who never find their
way out of the bedroom. I mean, imagine a genre of literature in which the only
thing the people in the books do is eat, or fantasize about eating, or talk
about eating, or wish they could eat more, or visit expensive restaurants in
search of better things to eat. We'd think THAT was boring.
I've already told you this story, I think: Alyson Publications was one of the
first publishers to reject Blue, telling me they couldn't work with
working-class fiction. And then, a few months ago, as Blue was going
into final production, I had one of those experiences that seem too fictional
for reality. An email arrives with a call for submissions from Alyson--for
their new forthcoming anthology, Working Stiff: True Blue-Collar Gay Porn.
I mean, the irony is either delicious or debilitating, depending upon how you
look at it. So there it is: they can't work with serious working-class queer
fiction, but they can work with "blue-collar porn."
But if you look at what's considered erotic for gay male audiences--on the web,
for instance, if you go on a little search for some of that hot male-on-male
action you've heard so much about--what you find is that the fetish category of
"working man" or "blue collar" is second only to
"straight boy" in its popularity. Apparently, this is where gay men's
erotic minds are at, which to me says at lot about our conflicted relationship
with masculinity, but that's a whole other topic.
For the record, by the way, I'm not opposed to porn or erotica or even to
"hot male-on-male action." I wish there were more male-on-male action
that I found hot. What I'm in favor of is proportion and balance. And that's
the rub, so to speak, when it comes to working-class queer men and sexuality.
The inability to be seen with a wider lens--which is, in effect, what
working-class people experience all the time, not just queer men and not just
in the arena of sexuality.
Tim Anderson, one of the authors in Blue, and I have been talking
recently about trucker and rancher friends of his who feel like they're
constantly being forced to star nonconsensually in somebody else's porn movie
and can't even come off three days on the road, filthy and exhausted, and take
a leak in peace at a public rest room without somebody following them in and
cruising them. It does seem sometimes like gay men can't quite wrap their minds
around the notion of "working class queer man" unless that person
falls into the category of fetish object, trade, slumming, or "a little
rough on the side," as the Brits might put it.
I mean, look. Class can be racy and race can be racy--or class and racial
differences can be--and there's no point denying that. At a certain level it's
healthy for us to recognize that our erotic desires are untamed. At another
level, it's equally healthy for us to acknowledge that our sexual choices don't
exist in a vacuum, that our erotic imaginations are nurtured on whatever we
feed them.
SR: I love your Afterword--it's smart
and funny and right on. I also like that it happens after the stories--I have
to first move through the stories asking my own questions "what makes this
working class or gay?" before coming to your articulation of context. As I
told you on the phone, it's almost impossible to call something "working
class" without having a neon sign pointing to every moment in which
polyester, grease under the fingernails, a way of smoking cigarettes, calling
your mother "Ma," and a particular flavor of bar fight crops up on
the pages. And, those are authentic moments that exist within many of our
lives. You managed to walk that line between stereotype and authenticity
incredibly well--your editing, the writers, both? Can you talk more about this
issue of representation?
WR: Well, let me put it this way: There are a lot of things I'm not very good
at, but false modesty aside, I'm not a bad editor. At the same time, the
writers who wound up in Blue are good writers, and they were willing to
work with an editor if he seemed like he could be trusted and had only the best
representation of their work in mind. One of my pet peeves is that most of the
people who put anthologies together and are called "editors" are not,
in fact, editors. They are compilers or collectors or something else. The
authors and I worked, sometimes for months, on each of these stories, and went
back and forth, and I asked for things and they would either say no or they
would try them and see if they worked, and then we'd work some more. There
were, frankly, people who got angry and dropped out of the project because they
couldn't stand to be edited, which is the sign of either a very inexperienced
writer or a very jaded one. But I think what happened in that process, with the
writers who hung in, is that we discovered some kind of common vision. But
having said that, I don't remember a single conversation with anyone about
"representation." I didn't really have anything I wanted to prove
about presenting working-class writers or working-class characters in any
particular light. I wanted them to be authentic, which I guess begs the
question, but that's what I cared about.
One of the things I find so interesting about fiction are the techniques you
learn to use--with increasing skill, one hopes--in order to identify who and
what your characters are. If you write an Asian character, for example, and if
you care that your readers knows that the character is Asian, you have choices
for how you create that reality for the reader. You might do it through
something as simple as the character's name or through showing some snippet of
family history, or you can put her or him in a environment that the
"average" reader is able to read as "Asian," and you can
deploy those techniques either carefully or stereotypically. In this
post-Judith Butler world we live in, we've gotten sort of used to the idea of
"performed" identities, but what the writer has to do essentially is
to "perform" the race or ethnicity or class or sexual orientation or
whatever it is of the character for the benefit of the reader--that's if the
writer cares for it to be known, I mean.
At that level, we're not even talking about representation yet, just identification.
If you look at Rigoberto González's story in Blue, for example,
he's so artful in the way he identifies his main character, Andrés, as
gay that you might very easily miss it. At that point in the story,
Andrés' boss tells him that some of the women he works with complained
that he looked at them funny, and Andrés thinks to himself, "None
of the men had complained, though it was true that he sometimes looked at them
in a way someone might call funny." And that's all you get about
Andrés' sexual orientation for the entire story. That's skillful.
But at the risk of making a gross oversimplification, I think the issue of
representation is somewhat resolved when the writer simply knows what he or she
is talking about. If that's there--and it's almost a kind of intuition you feel
as you read--then you're willing to have that writer tell you almost anything.
I mean, the working-class characters in this book are not all such nice
fellows. The guy in Keith Banner's story is a complete alcoholic and a
psychological mess. Dean Durber's protagonist beats up his boyfriend. Rick
Feely's commits suicide. Royston Tester's is about to do a stint in juvenile
jail. James Barr's main character is a piss-elegant prig, though he does get
his epiphany at the end.
So I guess that's my answer--it's not anything that I did, it's that the
writers knew what they were talking about. I think that's what you're
responding to. I will be surprised if anyone actually says to me that they
didn't think working-class characters were represented well in this book. I may
eat these words, but I don't think so. The characters are presented with that
gorgeous "ring of truth" that you so hope for as a fiction writer,
and I think working-class people, who know bullshit when we hear it, are going
to love that.
SR: When you think about what you
imagined for the book versus what you ended up with, where are the gaps, the
stories you wanted but didn't find, the perspectives you know about but
couldn't get on the page?
WR: There were a couple of things I couldn't find, actually. I was looking for
a good story about sexual objectification, since we've been talking about sex.
I wanted a story in which the working-class character understands and can find
and deploy his own power in being sexual objectified by a class-privileged
character. Patrick Califia has a great story on that topic in Melting Point,
by the way. It's called "Unsafe Sex," and it deals with a bourgeois
gay man who goes "slumming" for sex and finds this a big, black
leather daddy whom he thinks will uncomplainingly service the particular sexual
fetish this character feels in the mood for that night, but then it doesn't
turn out that way. And there's a nice juxtaposition between that and the
middle-class life he has at home with his safe but boring lover. In fact, the
"unsafe" sex in the story isn't about condoms or not; it's about what
middle-class gay men have given up in exchange for their Victorians in Noe
Valley and their art collections and their partnership-track jobs at the law
firm.
So that was one thing. I was also hoping I'd find a story or two from the UK,
since I think the way that sexuality and class play out among queer men there
is even more fraught and blatant than it is here, and of course, there's that
great British tradition of the upper-class man with a working-class male lover:
Edward Carpenter and George Merrill; John Addington Symonds and his Italian
lover, Angelo Fusato; Oscar Wilde and his boys; J. R. Ackerly and his; E. M.
Forster and Bob Buckingham. It's interesting to me that, in all those couples,
the voice that comes down to us is always that of the class-privileged partner.
I thought maybe I could get the other side of that.
I was especially excited about the contributions by Royston Tester, Dean
Durber, and Ryan Kamstra, all of whom live in the extended "empire,"
but I could never seal the deal with a writer who actually lived in the
And finally, I would have liked to have seen a greater exploration than there
currently is in Blue of intersections of class and race/ethnicity. There
were a couple of writers whose names you'd probably recognize whom I literally
begged for a story, but I couldn't get them to submit anything, and the work I
did get had a self-consciousness about its subject matter that I found
distracting.
I dunno. I think one of the things we've heard too much of already is how hard
it is to be gay and X, whatever X may be. About how you never feel at home
anywhere and what a burden it is to have to cross borders and code-switch. And
it is, and I get it. But it's a story without much variety, and I'm not very
interested in hearing it retold. By now, there has to be something more
interesting to say about the different worlds we walk in, or about the act of
walking itself, but it seems very hard to write about.
SR: You told me that you have a web
project linked to the release of Blue--that
you're actually using this book's publication as an opportunity to find and
make visible even more "short fiction by working-class men about
more-or-less gay life." From your description of the project, it almost
felt like you're charting that place where oral history and imagination come
together to document a gathering of lives. Can you tell me about that?
WR: Well, from my point of view, the best thing about the web project is that
it means that the published version of Blue isn't the end of Blue,
which is important in terms of your question about all the things I didn't
manage to get into the book. The online project is called "Still Blue," and it's housed on the Everything I Have Is Blue
website. I think there are tons of stories out there waiting for a context
and a place to be seen. I haven't done much yet to publicize Still Blue, but
when I do I'm hoping that intuition turns out to be right! I'm very encouraged
by what Tim Anderson has done on his website,
where he has an amazing collection of nonfiction pieces from rural and
working-class folks around the country. He has very generously offered to work
with me so that we can share writing back and forth between his site and the Blue
site. And several of the other contributors to Blue are connected with
groups of writers in their cities, and that should be another way to bring new
writing to Still Blue.
I'll tell you, from a perfectly selfish standpoint, that the best part of this
project has been finding this group of working-class queer writers literally
around the globe. It's what I dreamed of, and I'm not ready to give that up.
SR: Okay, Wendell, go ahead, give me
your elevator speech on class in
WR: Blue had its public "birth," in a sense, in 1999 at the
Center for Working Class Studies Conference in
But speaking generally, and bearing in mind the great gratitude I feel for
people like Renny Christopher at Cal State in Camarillo who have been
supportive from the very beginning, the official reception from people in
working-class studies as academics or students or organizers and activists has
not, frankly, been everything I'd hoped it would be. Working-class studies
anthologies and working-class literature anthologies continue to be published
that are silent on the lives and realities of working-class queers, and not one
of the people who has put together one of those anthologies over the last five or
six years, several of whom I've met personally at conferences, has ever asked
me if I had any ideas for them or could refer them to working-class queer texts
they could consider. Not one.
When I approached working-class publishers about considering Blue,
meanwhile, they said they didn't know how to market queer material, which I
read as being partly sincere and partly pretextual. Or they flat out told me
that they just didn't believe in fairies--at least not working-class ones. Let
me give you three examples of the responses I've gotten.
The first one, which gets some sort of award for tortured prose, came from the
editor of a university press series that is dedicated to working-class topics:
"What your collection reveals most strongly in terms of the series is that
a volume exploring the relationship between class and gay fiction is needed.
However, the fictions in your manuscript are less about class and gay life than
fictions by members of a particular (albeit ill-defined) social/economic class.
Any similar volume would need to be clear as to whether it wishes us to
consider gay males as a class in themselves and/or the social/economic/cultural
position of gay males as the class issue."
The second one I quote in my Afterword, and it came from a professor in Ohio
who received the call for stories when I forwarded it to the Working Class
Academics listserv in 2002:
"Excuse for saying so but isn't gay and working-class kind of a
contradiction in terms?"
And the last one is from an editor at yet another publishing house which prides
itself on doing social conscious, progressive books:
"The idea is intriguing--and it's true that I can't think of blue-collar
gay writers as readily as I can think of blue-collar straight and lesbian
writers--but, in the end, I'm not convinced of the validity of such a category.
I believe that class is a major issue in American society, and have wanted to
address this through an anthology the way diversity has been addressed. But it
proves to be illusive and fraught with contradiction."
At a certain level, I understand all of that--especially the part about
"fraught with contradiction." But if you can deal with the
contradictions inherent in considering race and class or gender and class, you
can deal with sexuality and class.
So I think Blue will struggle a little to find acceptance in
working-class studies, but perhaps no more so than it's going to struggle to
find acceptance in traditional LGBTQ studies. Queer Studies, as it currently
stands, has absolutely nothing useful to say about class. And working-class
studies has virtually nothing to say about queers. So I think this is a great
opportunity for everyone to come together and nail down a great big golden
spike. Preferably right in the middle of the order form on the Suspect Thoughts
Press website store.
But here's the "elevator speech": I'm very well aware, from the
perspective of traditional class analysis, that we cannot argue that LGBTQ
people disproportionately experience economic discrimination or hardship because
they are LGBTQ, but I don't think there's any question that we do find
ourselves in positions of less authority, liberty, and mobility because
capitalism is the lynchpin not just of sexism and racism but also of
heterosexual privilege. God knows I'm not the first one to think of that.
People like Jeffrey Weeks, John D'Emilio, and Estelle Freedman have laid all of
that out very clearly and very convincingly. The control of sexuality and the
commodification of sex serve class privilege, to put it very very simply.
Okay, so what if we agree that you cannot make exactly the same analysis about
queerness and class that you can about gender and race and class? I mean, the
"feminization of poverty" is not just some slogan; it's a
statistical, demonstrable reality. Similarly, it's easy to show--so easy, in
fact, that I wonder why more people don't grasp it--that America's class
structure holds people of color apart from opportunities and resources that
allow full access to the so-called "American dream" or to the things
that make that dream achievable.
But just because sexual orientation isn't precisely analogous to gender or
race, that doesn't mean there's nothing left to talk about! In fact, there are
two fronts where there's quite a lot to say--or at least, I seem to have a lot
to say. The first has to do with the realities of LGBTQ people in working-class
life and culture. To me, that encompasses how issues of sexuality and control
of sexual expression are viewed within working-class studies and especially
whether those issues are respected within working-class, labor, community, and
union organizing.
Second, there's the question of how the so-called LGBTQ community deals with
class and economic access and disparity within its own, so to speak, borders.
To that I would add the need to find new ways to think about how we, meaning
gay and queer men and especially young queer men, uncritically and
wholeheartedly embrace and endorse these images of ourselves as
"classy," sophisticated, cultured, and elegant, as epicures and
fashion plates and jet setters. To synonymize sexuality with the signs and
symbols of affluence and with bourgeois and upper-class entitlements strikes
me, to say the least, as problematic.
You asked earlier whether working classness and "gay community" can
occupy the same space, and here's what it all comes down to for me. "Gay
identity," among other things, strikes me as a hugely self-serving and
isolated way to make your way through the world. I don't think it's fair to be
mad at middle-class gay white men just because they're white and middle-class
and male. But I do think it's fair to criticize those who refuse to see beyond
themselves, who won't acknowledge that having rights confers responsibilities,
or who define the group they "belong" to so narrowly that it becomes
acceptable to disregard anybody who isn't inside of it.
I remember seeing an interesting documentary a few years back, Flag Wars,
which is about what happened when white gay homebuyers started moving into and gentrifying
black working-class neighborhoods in
Here in
I'm certainly not the first to argue that being able to claim gayness as your
whole identity or even as your main identity--you know, to say, "Being gay
is the most important thing about me"--is an expression of privilege. But
even if you are that poor, beleaguered middle-class white guy who seems to be
bashed by everybody, the question of your identity ought to be complicated by
questions of commonality, allegiance, solidarity, loyalty, affinity.
So from my point of view, what a working-class perspective brings to queer life
is a kind of humanity, a kind of other-concern that I find lacking. I
understand--believe me, I understand--how, if you're interested in anything
beyond "gay rights," you get accused of being "PC." That
always tickles me, because, yeah, when it comes to dealing with my fellow human
beings, I would very much like to be correct. What kind of sociopath wouldn't?
But I think many of us could give examples of the ways that "gay
loyalty" is put into conflict with other loyalties simply because gay male
identity is constructed in such a way that it can only permit one subjectivity.
And my thing is: Knock that shit off.
I remember when I first moved to
SR: Did your own thoughts on what makes
something "working class" change at all during this process?
WR: Only in the sense that I feel more uncertain than I ever did about what it
means! All of the people whose work I think is really seminal in this
area--Paul Lauter, Janet Zandy, and Michael Zweig, to name just
three--emphasize the need to maintain a kind of looseness in our definitions
and in our thinking about the working class. From the standpoint of strict
economic analysis, that's partly due to the huge changes that have taken place
in the
At a more earthy level, it speaks to just the difficulty of talking about
class, about the way the realities still don't match our language. You probably
saw that very interesting series the New York Times did during the late
Spring of 2005 on social class in
I guess the other thing I learned is simply not to answer the question when
someone asked me "What makes you working class?" or "What makes
these stories working class?" Amazingly, people did ask that--lots of
people. No one asked me if I or the other authors were "really" men
or whether we were "really" gay, but over and over they questioned
whether we were really working class. The danger of answering the question is
that anyone who asks it already has a definition of social class in mind, and
you either will or won't fit that definition. You know, like the guy who wrote
that it wasn't really working-class fiction, it was "fictions by members
of a particular (albeit ill-defined) social/economic class." And you kind
of have a brain freeze because you realize that no matter what words you use,
someone will think you don't have it right.
And, in fact, you don't have to. Working-class people don't have to define
ourselves to the satisfaction of class-privileged people--or to the
satisfaction of each other, for that matter. If you say you're working class,
I'm ready to believe you. I mean, it's what I said earlier. For me the larger
issue is your consciousness, your awareness, your analysis, and your
allegiance, not how many years your family spent on welfare or something like
that.
But if anything, my definition of what is working class grew broader. Particularly
in terms of literature--what makes a text working class. I cribbed shamelessly
from Zandy and Lauter when I wrote the study guide for Blue, and rather
than give a clear definition I suggest a series of elements that a reader can
look for. I think it's a much more useful way to look at writing and a much
more useful way to look at class.
Susan Raffo is a writer and activist
living in Minneapolis. She is the editor of the anthology Queerly Classed:
Gay Men and Lesbians Write about Class and co-editor (with Victoria A.
Brownworth) of the anthology Restricted Access: Lesbians on Disability.
Wendell Ricketts is a writer, editor,
and translator currently living in the ruins of San Francisco. He has worked as
a cocktail waiter, a teacher, a house painter, a telephone solicitor, and a
Kelly Girl, among many other day jobs. His fiction, poetry, essays, and
journalism have appeared in such publications as The Advocate, Out, Spin,
James White Review, Salt Hill, Mississippi Review, Harrington Gay Men's Fiction
Quarterly, and the anthologies Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Gay
and Lesbian Literary Heritage, and Silent No More: Voices of Courage in
American Schools. He was born on Wake Island, an atoll that is slowly
sinking into the Pacific Ocean, and raised in small towns on O‘ahu,
Hawai‘i.