The one time I had an opportunity to meet Martin Amis, I ended up taking heroin instead. I’m not especially proud of this fact, it was a kind of accident, but also perhaps a lucky swerve from the more difficult experience of having to have dinner with Mr. Amis himself. It was the very late nineties and I was teaching undergraduate courses in creative writing and literature at the University of East Anglia. The university was, and still is, famous for having nurtured the talents of a generation of British writers—think Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro—and the department regularly hosted dinners for the writers who came down from London to give talks and public lectures.

I was working, largely, in a world of men, most of whom were privileged white men. Although there were some female academics in the department, the main tutors in the writing department at that time were men, the writers who came to speak were mostly male, and the grand fromage of the whole department had developed something of a bad reputation with the ladies. It was the poisoned duckpond of the late twentieth century. And yet, it was the water in which I was swimming, and it’s hard to atomize the water while you’re trying to stay afloat.

I was nervous about the dinner with Amis. What could I say to the self-styled bad boy of English letters, with whom so many of my male contemporaries were enamored? I was ambivalent about his lugubrious prose, and his caricatures of women and the working classes, and although I approved of his scathing critiques of capitalism, I was much less convinced by his worldview, and all the stories about his teeth and his sexual conquests. There was something cynical and self-serving about his work, and he depicted a world in which women were largely sexualized adjuncts to the male ego, or mysterious cyphers never to be fully understood. His work, and the cultural response to it, seemed to embody Simone de Beauvoir’s observation that “representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth.” Read More

Like many other queer writers and activists of his generation, Lou Sullivan lived a painfully short life: he died in 1991, at the age of thirty-nine, from complications related to AIDS. But he left behind a wealth of material, thirty years of diaries chronicling, in joyous detail, his emerging sense of self, his relationships, and his daily triumphs. As arguably the first publicly gay trans man to medically transition, Sullivan found himself walking a path few had previously trodden. Without models for how to live, he found his own way, refusing to compromise his identity, working tirelessly to help others, and all the while keeping careful note of his day-to-day. Sullivan never realized his dream of publishing his diaries, but We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, 1961–1991, published last month by Nightboat Books, finally brings Sullivan’s writing to a wider audience. An excerpt appears below.

Image from the Louis Graydon Sullivan papers, courtesy of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society.

Yesterday T + I rode our bikes through GG Park, he was leading me through hidden path + trails. Found a secluded spot + laid in the grass. Told me he wished he could introduce me to his family + be open with them about us, but he knew he never could, that he has always strived to be what they expected him to be, especially his ma. He said he felt that way even if I were a normal man + we were together, so I don’t feel too bad.

Then he asks me if I have any problems with our relationship + I said yes: I wish he’d turn off the iron by the switch instead of just pulling out the cord (telling him in that way how content I am). He pressed me further + then said I never tell him how I feel about him! I couldn’t believe it, and so tried my best to express to him how much he means to me. Read More