Postscripts

It was not what I wanted to hear. Mark Merlis, who reimagined the Trojan War in his often sardonic and moving An Arrow's Flight (1998), said a few things about love last weekend at the dramatically titled Behind Our Masks Literary Festival in Philadelphia. The annual festival is the nation's major conference for gay and lesbian writers. When Merlis declared that "love, in fact, is not intrinsically interesting," he was part of a panel titled "Love, Oh Careless Love" that addressed an intriguing fact of gay fiction: It's almost always about love. But "enduring relationships are an inaction, not an action," Merlis said, "and who wants to read about inertia?" Most of the conference went like that: authors and editors and publishers taking the thornier aspects of gay writing head-on. Is "gay literature" a crutch for mediocre writing? Should gay writers trying to get published seek out gay presses before mainstream ones? How have life-prolonging AIDS treatments changed the narrative of the AIDS story? Is anyone still writing the AIDS story? (See Edmund White's The Married Man, published this summer.) More importantly, who said funny gay things? During a panel about humor writing, Michael Thomas Ford (Alec Baldwin Doesn't Love Me) said that when he went to a Borders in Philadelphia to read from one of his books (another of which is titled That's Mr. Faggot to You), a representative of the Christian Library Association was scheduled to give a reading the same night and said to the Borders people, "I think it might be nice if we removed ourselves from that sassy gay man." During the same panel, comedian Bob Smith (Openly Bob) requested that columnist Kelli Dunham "give us some Mother Teresa dirt" after she talked about being kicked out of Mother Teresa's order, the Missionaries of Charity, for "insufficient docility." (She didn't divulge.) Two hundred and fifty people attended the festival, according to director Paul Willis; a writing conference with that relatively small number of participants -- that includes everyone, audience and speakers -- seems like a dicey proposition. It can easily devolve into nothing more than a clubby get-together or anemic support group, but the discussion stayed at a vibrant intensity throughout the weekend. Getting ahead, making people know who you are -- a routine facet of conferences like this -- took on a blessedly milder face; gay people do all that differently. Self-promotion isn't a sin if you're gay, but being obvious about it is grounds for dismissal. At a party for festival attendees thrown by the Philadelphia chapter of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, there were probably lots of people trying to "network," but they fooled me, whoever they were. "We have a heap of plotlines that opera would be lucky to have," Andrew Holleran (Dancer From the Dance, In September, the Light Changes) observed at one point during the weekend; if you listened closely enough, they were making themselves heard... Marion Winik has just turned in her new book, Rules for the Unruly, to Simon & Schuster and it's slated for publication in May 2001. Rules for the Unruly is -- and these are Marion's words -- "an advice book for young freaks and dreamers, maniac brainiacs, and lesbian vegetarians."... BookPeople is throwing a party in honor of the Texas Book Festival on Thursday, Nov. 9, from 7-10pm; the Gourds will be playing and Whole Foods will be providing food with beer coming from the Saint Arnold Brewing Company. Free!... For the roster of authors attending the Jewish Community Association of Austin's Book Fair, Nov. 5-19, see www.jfaustin.org.