Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Books

Reviews
"Rembrandt's Eyes" by Simon Schama
A new biography charts the troubled painter's rivalry with the worldly, successful Peter Paul Rubens.
By Matthew DeBord
[11/18/99]

Poetry nation?
Thousands of Americans sent poems to the Favorite Poem Project -- but that doesn't necessarily mean poetry is thriving.
By Melanie Rehak
[11/17/99]

Ivory Tower
On closer reading
At the fifth annual conference of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, the old guard looks for the the Young Turks to take up their bookish battle cry.
By Boris Kachka
[11/17/99]

Reviews
"Sleeping With Extra-Terrestrials" by Wendy Kaminer
American boobs will believe practically anything. But is this news?
By Andrew O'Hehir
[11/17/99]

I wrote a novel in three days
A guy, his best pal and a bottle of tequila. It was a recipe for literary greatness.
By Dave Fox
[11/16/99]

Complete archives for Books

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Someone once said all Southern literature is about either admitting or denying one's "whippedness," and the same thing definitely applies to my writing. A member of several oppressed groups (gay, Jewish, female, more below), I have always related strangely to all threatening people and things: violence, hatred, terror, the site of our undoing. The place we were originally hurt, and where we may well be hurt again. Loss. Enemies. What can never be repaired or restored. The dark place. The place that preys on us, years after we've left it behind. I have always wanted to go there.

Am I brave, or just a masochist? I've always wondered.

I once spent a week with the Rev. Fred Phelps, the man who beat all his kids and cheers when gay people die, and I ate Hostess cakes served by his wife. I went to the terrible hog farm where Brandon Teena was raped and I registered in my mind's eye the brutality of what she was put through, kicked over and over in the mud with the smell of pig shit everywhere. I spent three days at a Christian Coalition convention, and I clapped for Beverly LaHaye till my hands hurt while wearing an absurd pink dress so I would know what it felt like to be a woman who was a misogynist. I reported on a man killed by New York state prison guards in a unit where the guards are so violent they alter Beetle Bailey cartoons on their bulletin board so that the punch lines are about beating prisoners. I spent several years going to religious-right meetings so I could understand what made people antigay and punitive, but sometimes ecstatic and kind, too.

At the moment, I'm researching a long article about what motivates cops to humiliate and attack people. I recently wrote about the complicated feelings about sex that I could guess had motivated Matthew Shepard's killers, because I have often had similar feelings, even though I'm no murderer. Once I even wrote a country song narrated by Jeffrey Dahmer.

Someday, I want to write about the loneliness of batterers, and the sad and unfulfillable yearnings of sexual abusers.

Where does this endless catalogue of rogues come from? Why would I ever want to write about their moroseness and difficulties, their pain and their occasional goodness? Why can't I stop talking about them?

I want to tell you why I need to go into that dark cave and talk to the people that I find there. It makes some people nervous. Some people would prefer that I not go in, or that I be a little more blind when I do go in.

Part of the reason that I write about hurtful people is chosen, and part of it is basically unwilled and uncontrollable. It's sort of like being gay. My orientation has been to write about hurtful people -- although I believe that all orientations are fluid and that they often involve choice. In fact, my orientation as a writer may eventually change. But my orientation has also always been to attempt to turn the dross in my life into gold -- and writing is one of the best ways to do that.

It's an odd sort of project, changing fear and violence into gold -- or let's say, into beauty -- by writing about them. In some ways, it's deeply grandiose. In some ways, it is based on the impossible assumption that I can endure anything, encounter anything, go anywhere. Make anything over into something useful and good.

It's not surprising that in my writing and my life, it has sometimes been hard for me to tell the difference between masochism and bravery. Not only do I feel compelled to make bad things good, I feel compelled to do some of the hardest things there are. And, especially in my writing, I make myself do hard things to a degree that occasionally scares me because I can't say for sure if it's completely my choice or just the darkness calling to me, trying to be made right. Something in me continually calls on myself to prove my courage and endurance, to stand up to the hard thing and to watch myself standing up to it.

And I'm compelled to risk angering people -- in my writing, if not in life -- in the same visceral and not-quite willed way. My provocativeness, my ambiguous, masochistic courage, is both the trait of mine I'm fondest of and the relic of one of the worst experiences in my life -- my father's violence. It is a strange gift I get from violence that lets me go to places people who have never been assailed are often unable to go.

Next page | What we all have in common with Matthew Shepard's killers