By Stephen Beachy

IN 2004 THERE'S no shortage of sexually explicit writing from queer or female perspectives. Writing about sex and identity is so comfortably wedded to fiction that aims at structural innovation – as in the work of Jeanette Winterson or Lawrence Braithwaite or Dodie Bellamy – that it can be difficult to understand how radical the work of certain pioneers seemed in the 1970s and 1980s. It would be easy to believe Kathy Acker invented postmodernism, so ahead of her time was she in making various moves that are now taken for granted. Her use of other writers' texts, her appropriation of pornography, her characters' fluid genders and selves, and her completely fractured narratives, combined with her punk persona, made her a literary poster child for a subversively inclined avant-garde. She broke most every rule and challenged our most basic assumptions about originality, creativity, and the possible functions of writing. This process didn't always make for pleasurable reading but usually unearthed aspects of language that kept her writing interesting, even at its most brutal.

A recent collection, Essential Acker: The Selected Writings of Kathy Acker, compiles samples of her work from her first piece, "Politics," in 1968 to her 1996 novel Pussy, King of the Pirates. Acker had the greatest titles: The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac, Blood and Guts in High School, and who could argue with Don Quixote or Great Expectations? The collection gives us the opportunity to see both consistencies and changes in her approach and in her concerns. Not since Kerouac has an American writer devoted herself so scrupulously to the task of infusing the stuffy category of Literature with a healthy dose of "freedom." Kerouac's experiments with spontaneity were sometimes misinterpreted as offering the lesson that anyone could sit at a typewriter on methamphetamines and make books that deserved to be read; Acker's experiments have sometimes been similarly misread. Winterson writes, in her introduction to the collection, "Acker was one of the most disciplined writers I have met – not only in her habits, but in her defense of form as the necessary buffer against chaos. Those who criticize her writing as a kind of bathetic splurge don't know how to read it."

Acker's work might be instructive for spoken word-influenced writers facing the question of how to keep it interesting to declare: I'm horny I'm angry I'm wacky I'm oppressed. Acker's solution was to make her horniness, anger, wackiness, and oppression collective by dispensing with the self altogether. The "I" of her work became more and more malleable and expansive, incorporating various genders, classes, and personal histories. Her plots and characters constantly morph beyond description; any sentence might follow any other; rabid sexual desire and social critique sit side by side in tortured grammatical constructions. As editor Amy Scholder points out, compiling a greatest-hits collection of such disparate work is no easy task; in support, she quotes Acker as suggesting that you could pick up her books and begin reading anywhere. This isn't entirely true; despite the fragmented nature of her writing, there are cumulative effects in her novels that get lost in the collection. By presenting the excerpts in chronological order, however, the editors create entirely new cumulative effects that are lovely in their own right.

With Acker's difficult work, it's helpful to have access to some of her writings about her intentions and methods. Her 1997 collection of essays, Bodies of Work, makes a nice companion piece to Essential Acker. In "A Few Notes on Two of My Books," Acker paraphrases Poe on what writers should do. "They present the human heart naked so that our world, for a second, explodes into flames," she says. "This human heart is not only the individual heart: the American literary tradition of Thoreau, Emerson, even Miller, presents the individual and communal heart as a unity. Any appearance of the individual heart is a political occurrence."

In 1997 Acker died of breast cancer. For most of the 1990s she lived in San Francisco, in the Haight. I first discovered her work in 1987, and she became one of my literary heroes. In the subdued and degraded world of Reagan's America, the human heart seemed to me to have been shoved through a meat grinder and left bleeding somewhere out of sight, while whoever was visible and talking talked about something else altogether. Acker's voice struck just the right note: she was shrieking. It was a complicated, intelligent, and sometimes melodic shriek, not only of horror but of lust, sadness, and ecstasy. For a second, the world was in flames.

I met Acker in San Francisco in 1992, slightly disappointed that she was only a human being and not a perpetual state of revolution. Her literary persona was so huge, and her writing so extreme, that she often encountered such problems. "People think I'm much harder than I am," she told one interviewer. The other night she came to me in a dream, or, if you prefer a less mystical phrasing: I had a dream about Kathy Acker. She looked more haggard and demonic than she ever did in real life, and she told me she was alive and well and living in Baltimore.

One of Acker's comrades in the world of experimental sex writing was local legend Robert Glück. While she was exploding identity with an obscene vigor, Glück was carefully chipping away at the boundaries between fiction and non-, and between art and life, by casting himself as the central character of his exquisitely wrought fictions. In his new collection, Denny Smith, you'll find "Bob" cast in the utterly plausible role of a gay uncle housing his runaway niece or as the surprised yet precisely observant victim of a relationship breakup in the walled garden café of the de Young Museum. You'll find him less plausibly seduced by a burglar stealing art from the home of a friend or stealing a shovel from the back of a mail carrier's truck. By placing himself within both realist and intimate narratives involving his actual friends and family members and surreal fairy tales truthful in a less literal way, Glück opens up a new world beyond the traditional either/or of literary labels.

For all of Acker's antinarrative stance and despite the unpredictability or apparent shapelessness of her action, there's always something happening in her work, often incest, rape, the transmission of diseases, abortion, piracy, or aimless wandering. What's happening in Glück's work occurs more often at the level of his sentences; the enigmatic sentences of a poet, they can be read and reread. Glück's more sedate characters are constantly perceiving, constantly complicating and doubting their perceptions, constantly negotiating with the perceptions of others. The process of aging, of constantly discovering one's self at a new and untried level of maturity, is of great interest to Glück. In one of Acker's essays she dismisses attempts to critique American social reality in educated, bourgeois terms. "For in its cultural, social and political behavior, the United States resembles a giant baby, perhaps mongoloid, almost uneducated and increasingly uninterested in questioning and education, who not maliciously but unknowingly breaks everything it meets as it crawls around in chaotic paths." Well-measured, rational language, she says, can't even describe, much less critique, this reality. Glück's elegant sentences may seem like the opposite of Acker's anti-elegance, the visible signs or style of "an acceptance of mature rationality." But in the pages of Denny Smith, the opposition soon crumbles, lost within the convoluted moments of Glück's negotiations with maturity and youth. Another either/or doesn't hold, and the deeper spirit in Glück's, as in Acker's, work emerges – a shape-shifting that doesn't necessarily synthesize opposites or even throw them in relief.

Despite that similarity, Acker's sensibility is at root that of a mystic, a believer in the literal magic of writing. If Glück also references "a failure of belief so deep it becomes its own mysticism," his actual practice is a skeptic's analysis that aims at demystifying the functions of myth. Two of his stories explore his myth of the "purple men," whose assholes were painted with dye in a 1978 experiment and who emerged from their sexual encounter stained purple from head to toe. "In its generality (every lovemaking coats us with shit) and its specific hopelessness (intestinal parasites are unavoidable)," Glück writes, "the message has a depth and hatred for the world found in genre literature or religion, antecedent story and crime. The purple men are exciting, like original sin."

Glück recently made a pilgrimage to Marrakech to bask in the presence of Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo. When I first met Acker, we also bonded over our love of Goytisolo's writing, particularly his classic Count Julian. Glück reported to me that Acker said the writer she would have most wanted to be – if she couldn't be herself – was Goytisolo. Goytisolo has defined himself partially through his self-imposed exile and his hostility toward the xenophobia and narrow-mindedness of his homeland. He searched for fluid and innovative ways to unleash his vitriol at Franco's Spain from Paris and Morocco, where he would stand on the shore gnashing his teeth at his despised homeland. In State of Siege, his recently translated 1995 novel, his tone is more subdued, his grammar and punctuation less tortured, as he presents fragmented yet interwoven visions of Sarajevo during its siege in the early 1990s.

Goytisolo employs his usual imagery of catacombs, underground tunnels, fragmentation, the bisexual erotic marketplace, and his usual vocabulary: oneiric, polyglot, shrouds, crypts, ruins. You could be wandering the labyrinth of most any of his novels, with their quests for sensation and adventure, erotic interludes, celebrations of Islamic culture, and incomprehensible graffiti scrawls. In its particulars, State of Siege involves the mysterious disappearance of the body of a visitor to the city, a mystery that quickly turns into a serpentine journey through identities and fragments, revolving around two mysterious collections of poems. The first, titled Astrolabe, is located within the tradition of Islamic mysticism that has provided Goytisolo inspiration in earlier works, such as The Virtues of the Solitary Bird. The second, Sotadic Zone, takes its title from the term Richard Burton used to describe those latitudes in which sodomy was commonly practiced, a zone which, in Burton's own definition, ballooned to encompass most of the known world outside of northern Europe. Sotadic Zone may or may not have been written by an inmate of a North African asylum, J.G., sent away for homosexuality and other political reasons during the Spanish Civil War. J.G., like Glück's "Bob," implies a complicated relationship between our author and the characters he sends on their difficult adventures.

As in Acker's work, Goytisolo's radical disgust and negation become an element of mysticism and magic, an approach toward creating theophanies, illuminations, a belief in the literal magic of writing. In Glück's work the mystification of the excremental is laid bare by analysis; when a Goytisolo character takes a shit on the street, he's an angel or a devil and the shit a cipher with esoteric meanings. In fact, almost everything in this intricate, unsolvable puzzle of a book is a cipher, texts pointing toward other texts, secret machinations revealed only to make apparent deeper mysteries; Goytisolo is like one of his whirling dervishes, or storytellers of the Marrakech medina, taking delight in the open-ended, the unstable, and the obscene and making common cause with all outcasts and minorities in a language that is precise, playful, and fierce.

Like Goytisolo, young Cuban writer Pedro de Jesús constructs intricate and perhaps indecipherable puzzles for his reader. Like Glück, however, he pursues his negations without apparent faith that the negative will be magically transformed into its opposite and with a sense of duty or curiosity to the intelligence that tears truths and identities apart. His sense of play never feels mystical or ecstatic. His language is instead the precise surface that implies a devastating lack of faith. The sometimes chilly Caribbean abstractions of poet Wallace Stevens come to mind, and his line: It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

Although born in 1970, de Jesús could be seen as a pioneer. It has only recently become possible to publish stories loaded with bisexual eroticism in Cuba, such as the elliptical gems of his Frigid Tales. Cuba has a history of ambivalent relationships to its queer literati: José Lezama Lima, Reinaldo Arenas, Severo Sarduy, Virgilio Piñera. De Jesús titled his collection Frigid Tales partially as a reference to Piñera's collection Cold Tales, published in 1956. "To suggest this is what Piñera might have written if he'd been free to express his homosexuality in print," translator Dick Cluster states in his introduction. Piñera was jailed in the 1960s for homosexual activity and died shortly thereafter. (In 1964 Ché Guevara, the 20th century's favorite fetish of butch revolution, on discovering one of Piñera's books on the shelf of the Cuban embassy in Algeria, hurled it against the wall and shouted, "How dare you have in our embassy a book by this foul faggot!" The witness to this outburst was Goytisolo.)

De Jesús makes the shifting selves and self-referential narratives of postmodernism fresh again. He is sometimes a character in his own stories, or a character who resembles him appears. Never does the reader have a feeling of uncomfortable intimacy, however, as in Glück's work, or even sometimes Acker's; his relationship to his own intrusive identity in his fiction is more like Goytisolo's. It is a constant play of masks, identities within identities, a sheer pleasure in the ability of stories and lies to create and conceal identity. His writing is concise and difficult: fiendishly constructed games that are both enigmatic and entertaining.

On the surface these machinations are as cold as the title suggests, involving the passions of those without real passions, the loves of those afraid of love. These characters are more passionate in the lies they tell about their sexual lives than in the actual acts of love. They seduce each other with their stories. What annihilates them is "to figure in a romantic triangle." These deceptions create erotic adventures that resemble math games, but underneath the surface of abstraction a reader can sense a longing that approaches an electric heat, a central identity that maybe loves to seduce us with stories, that maybe loves to figure in romantic triangles, but that like Acker, but more obliquely, barely perceptibly, wants to set the world on fire: a sexual fire that is never quenched.

Explicit sexual writing derives much of its power from prudish sexual mores. Different versions of prudishness have emerged locally and globally – sexually explicit material might be accepted as long as it's divorced from questions of power and social relations, or only if it addresses those issues from a safe and prescripted position. Wilhelm Reich's equation between sexual and political repression is certainly not so clear-cut; happy orgasms won't necessarily make us free, or even antifascist. But without easy answers, it's especially necessary to have writers in our midst who aim at liberation of both sorts – with all of the messy contradictions and unpleasant truths of desire they unearth in the process.

Stephen Beachy is the author of the novels Distortion and The Whistling Song. He lives in San Francisco.

Essential Acker: The Selected Writings of Kathy Acker
By Kathy Acker. Edited by Amy Scholder and Dennis Cooper. Grove Press, 335 pages, $15 (paper).

Bodies of Work
By Kathy Acker. Serpent's Tail, 175 pages, $16 (paper).

Denny Smith
By Robert Glück. Clear Cut Press, 240 pages, $12.95 (paper).

State of Siege
By Juan Goytisolo. City Lights, 155 pages, $13.95 (paper).