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I hope we can work to create a sustainable literary ecosystem that can nurture all of these artists.ĪH: When I first read What Belongs to You, which I was fortunate to review for the New York Times Book Review, I felt both bowled over by its beauty and worried that it would be overlooked because of its frank approach to depicting a gay man’s life. And I’m also grateful for writers who are experimenting with form or engaging with taboo or shocking subject matter in ways that make gaining a large audience unlikely and winning a big prize almost inconceivable. I’m grateful that Hilton Als and Frank Bidart are winning Pulitzer Prizes. I’m grateful that Alexander Chee and Maggie Nelson are finding big audiences.
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I hope we’ve put to rest the idea that queer books necessarily have limited audiences-an assertion that was always a lie. I feel such luck to be a reader and a writer in a moment when Andrea Lawlor, Akwaeke Emezi, Danez Smith, TC Tolbert, T Fleischman, Jordy Rosenberg, Brandon Taylor, among many others, are making exhilarating art, with presses large and small. I refuse to accept them as measures of art’s vitality. I think it’s an incredibly exciting moment in queer literature, and I think sales figures and review attention are never reliable guides to what’s exciting in art. Yanagihara’s book, in the profundity of its exploration of gay male interiority, is proof, for me, of literature’s ability to imagine across difference. The continuing story of AIDS is too big for possessiveness, and the pain of the epidemic cuts across all demographics. Garth Greenwell: I’ll start by saying that I admire both Rebecca Makkai and Hanya Yanagihara, and I think we can-I think we must-both insist on ever greater “own voices” representation in publishing and reject a defensive, territorial posture that would lock us all in the cages of an “identity” conceived along retrogressively essentialist lines.
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At the same time, two of the most recent successful novels from mainstream publishers about gay men, your What Belongs to You and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, were written by gay men. I’ve never read-and I doubt I ever will-a book quite like Cleanness, which feels both bracing for its clarity and frankness yet stunningly operatic in its lyrical poetic voice.Īaron Hamburger: Where exactly do you think are we in the LGBTQ writing world? And where do you think we’re headed? On one hand, two of the most recent successful novels from mainstream publishers about gay men, A Little Lifeby Hanya Yanagihara and The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, were written by cisgender heterosexual women. The book also examines the precarious state of queer Bulgarians and contemporary politics in a country still struggling to deal with the after-effects of decades under totalitarian rule. In Greenwell’s signature elegant, reflective prose, Cleanness is an ode to the erotic experience, both in and out of the novel’s central romantic relationship, between an American English teacher and a Portuguese student living in post-Communist Bulgaria. Garth Greenwell’s second novel Cleanness returns to some of the characters and places visited in his stunning debut novel What Belongs to You, not as a sequel or prequel, but as a revelatory variation on a theme.