Have Your Gay and Eat It, Too: The Sexually Ambivalent Closet

Recently I received a press release about David McConnell’s novel The Silver Hearted, which is coming out from Alyson Books early next year.

Oops, maybe I shouldn’t have said “coming out.”

“Throughout its 30-year history,” says the release, “Alyson Books has been known as a publisher catering strictly to the LGBT community. With the arrival of publishing industry veteran Don Weise as its new Publisher, the company is branching out, publishing works that reflect Weise’s highly-regarded taste and reach a broader audience. At the same time, Alyson firmly retains its roots in gay culture.”

At this point Weise jumps in: “Since coming on as publisher of Alyson last fall, I’ve radically rethought the list, particularly around publishing literary works that stand more on artistic merit than mere gay-themed content alone. Quality before content is the new order.”

Hmmm, okay, nothing wrong with quality before content—in fact, shouldn’t that have been the goal all along? And of course there is something appealing about “branching out” while retaining roots—nice follow-through on the tree analogy. Except that branches are often the most visible part of a tree, while the roots tend to remain buried.

McConnell’s novel takes place, we are told, “on an unidentified coastal landscape that exists outside a defined period in time,” and concerns a “nameless protagonist…who exists outside a defined sexual orientation.” His task is to safely transport a load of silver coins through a city, “assisted by a cast of sexually ambivalent sailors.”

Now, we’ve been told many times that the Kinsey Scale is a sliding one, and that no one is 100% heterosexual or homosexual. And we’re familiar with the tendency of the younger generation to eschew labels like “gay” and “straight.” The problem comes in when you try to define “sexually ambivalent” in a way that doesn’t take you right back to the G-word…or to the closet.

In his blurb on the book Edmund White gushes, “The Silver Hearted is our Hearts of Darkness.” But wait, Ed. “Our” implies a “we,” and who are “we”? The sexually ambivalent? Please, Ed, if you mean this is the gay Hearts of Darkness–and you can hardly mean anything else–then go ahead and say so.

Meanwhile, Peter Cameron’s blurb squeals over the novel’s inclusion of a “soupcon (sic) of Tom of Finland (sailors!).” But there’s nothing sexually ambivalent about Tom’s men—the whole point of their fetishized figures is that they are gloriously, unmistakably gay. And they look like they would sit on you—and not in a good way—if you called them anything else.

Look, I don’t blame Alyson for wanting to sell more books. I just hate to see them acting so disingenuously. And now is hardly the time to exchange the rainbow flag for a standard of dull gray. We face a world where homosexuals are being put to death and jailed abroad, and denied human rights at home. There’s no honor in retreating into a sexually ambivalent closet—especially not if you’re a publisher that claims to have gay roots.