Queer souls
From Gogol to Prufrock, a young writer finds victims of a common passion

By Masha Gutkin

We cannot foretell how our words will echo.

Fyodor Tiutchev (19th-century poet)

AS I WRITE , a woman sits not far from me in this café, her brow furrowed over Rubyfruit Jungle (Rita Mae Brown's lesbian coming-of-age novel). I feel a thin, invisible thread stretch between us. It's less the book that I remember than the experience of reading it, lying on an air mattress beside the bed of a friend with whom my friendship was ambiguously achy. I read her copy, and perhaps my recall of the book is so much less than total because every inch of its margins was inked with her painstaking notes, through which I tried to glimpse her.

An entry in my queer genealogy spun as much from the moment a reading took place as from the reading itself. It's not a unique story. For instance:

I curled next to Ryan and fixed my gaze on her throat. Coincidence clapped us firmly under her hot wing.

"I'm reading this book –"

"Sexing the Cherry?"

"How did you know – ?"

"I am too."

We passed the cigarette back and forth for a while without speaking. Fleshy tugging transubstantiated into smoky lungfuls. I savored proximity and the nasty Pall Mall.

From Amanda Davidson's novella-in-progress about coming out, tentatively titled Ryan

For those of us who didn't have a concrete sense of our queer selves in our "youth" (puberty, I guess I mean), there comes that moment when we try to suss out when and what happened to make us – or make us see ourselves. Wanting to pinpoint some crux for my queerness, which, in my mind, unspectacularly coalesced out of a thick mist of sexuality, I turned to my journals, in search of revelation. There wasn't much there to enlighten me. The closest clue came from a line (from when I was about 19) that begins, "I'm really wondering whether I shouldn't have an affair with a girl/woman, because lately I have been having some very sexual kissing dreams where satisfaction involves another woman." Such pragmatism. Donning my queer-colored glasses, I rummaged further afield and came across a poem I wrote a few years before that journal entry:

I watched her strong body

in the salt-water and

wanted to take her into

my mouth and my arms

to press fingers into the

firm flesh under cold water.

Under setting sun.

There was my queer self, waving recognition to me with one hand, and, with the other, holding a glinting thread that wove back in a flash, through a lifetime of greedy reading to fifth grade and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Jerry, my English teacher that year, had huge tufts of ear and nose hair that I couldn't tear my eyes from, except when I was looking at my hands under the long folding tables of the classroom, where I intently practiced contorting my digits into the obscene gesture known as "the middle finger." But the "Love Song" gripped me, and it still hasn't let go. A kind of squeezing and bursting took place in me when I read it that my body still remembers. At age 10, I felt I was the balding, deflated Prufrock, wandering the coastline, hearing mermaids' calls and wondering, doubting, whether I would ever dare taste that proverbial peach. Over the years, I memorized that poem and held it inside me like a heartbeat of words.

My sense that poems were my first queer texts is, first of all, intuitive. How did I read them queer? I asked myself after that glinting thread flashed back to Prufrock in my mind's eye. But I don't want an answer made of a "straight" line of causes and effects – in part because the visceral for me in the "Love Song" was its desire not to experience anything as partial. Perhaps, I venture, the poem pierced me with a sense of the openness, the crisis, of desire – the experience of desire not being about a particular object.

This holds, too, for Frank O'Hara's "A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island." Long before I had any inkling that he (or I) was queer, the sun's dictate in this poem magnetized me: "And / always embrace things, people earth / sky stars, as I do, freely and with / the appropriate sense of space. That / is your inclination, known in the heavens /and you should follow it to hell, if / necessary, which I doubt." Sure, it could be said I saw these lines as permission for my sexuality. But what's more interesting is their invitation to depart from the narrative of a normalized desire, to not draw lines.

I spoke to friends about what they read as queer in their youth. Turns out Sweet Valley High is very queer. And so are In the Night Kitchen, Anne of Green Gables, Forever, The Female Eunuch, Huckleberry Finn, The Awakening, The Cat Ate My Jumpsuit, and Flowers in the Attic, among others. (Book burners: Throw in the towel, 'cause nothing's safe.) There's a school of literary criticism that claims as "queer" any narrative that doesn't conform to what its genre dictates. Go a step further, and what's queer is what we read as queer. What's queer about these books? Transgression, same-sex bonding, living outside the prescribed narrative, getting to be the gaze – and sometimes all of these at once.

In my middle adolescence, I checked out shopping-bagsful of romance novels from the public library. From this voracious and escapist reading, I learned the word egress (as in "Laurinda, creamy bosom heaving inside her tight bodice, made her elegant egress from the elm tree and shook her curly head at Lord Ravenclaw in defiance.") At some point, though, I developed what I term an "allergy" to romance novels. Just cracking one open would incur a splitting headache. This allergy was sort of a relief because it broke my embarrassing addiction. Whence that weird insatiability? I'm rife with speculation, but something resonated when a friend described her "unhealthy sexual urges for the women of the French aristocracy," embodied in a childhood hunger for the novels of Dumas, especially Queen Margot. "You know how sometimes you keep reading just because you have a crush on a female character?" she asked dreamily. I remembered my first taste of that, when an older neighbor lent me her worn paperback of Georgette Heyer's 1932 gothic novel, Devil's Cub. The headstrong heroine so smote me with her witty resistance to villainous playboy Dominic Vidal that I kept returning to the genre, hoping to rediscover that first rush. Getting to be the gaze.

Romance novels were a guilty pleasure; I hid that trash from my parents' discerning gazes. To the chagrin of my literary Russian family, as a kid I didn't like 19th-century Russian novels, or much of Russian literature in general. I dreaded its sadness and preoccupation with redemption. Gogol was one of the few of the classic Russian prose writers I could bring myself to read, maybe because, besides being just plain funny, his stories were ambiguous and surreal and (looking back) distinctly uncomfortable with heterosexual constructs.

The following is a soliloquy from Gogol's 1833 play The Marriage: A Completely Unlikely Occurrence in Two Acts. The protagonist, Podkolesin, awaits the arrival of his bride:

Indeed, what was I until now? Did I understand the meaning of life? I didn't, I didn't understand anything.... Only now you see how foolish are those who don't get married; and yet, if you really look – so many people exist in such blindness. If I were sovereign somewhere, I would decree that everyone marry, absolutely everyone.... Really, if you think about it: a few minutes – and you'll already be married. Suddenly you'll taste bliss, just like the kind that's only in fairy tales, the kind that you can't even express, that you can't even find words to express.... (After some silence) And even now it's impossible to back out: another minute 'til the wedding wreath.... Is it really impossible to leave?... But here's an open window; what if – through the window? No, I can't. It's uncivil, and, besides, high off the ground. (He walks up to the window.) Well, it's not that high.... Should I try it, after all? (He stands up in the window, and, having said "God Bless," jumps down into the street....)"

Go, Podkolesin. Whether or not, as rumor has it, Gogol was attracted to men, his writing is queer. What's queerer than jumping out a window – that is, finding a means of escape – when the prescribed narrative structure is closing down upon you?

I wonder if, now that the genre of gay teen fiction is burgeoning, we queers will no longer have to write our own literary genealogies? Will "girl meets girl" or "boy meets boy" be enough? Will it mean an end to the construction of queer genealogies from private and idiosyncratic reading habits and that shared experience? If the genealogy becomes present to itself while it's being made, where will the queerness shift to?

For many queers, what attracted (and attracts) us in our reading was/is a sense of transgression of visible and invisible bounds of gender, narrative, class, race. Queerness isn't an element so easily isolated from the rest of life's blood. The other day, in Dog Eared Books, I saw a little note taped up on the "Queer Lit" shelf. It read: "The line between queer and nonqueer lit has blurred ..." Yes.

It may be an old saw, but structure matters – not just content. When I started doing more of the kind of reading I'll broadly term "queer experimental," the pleasures of narrative and poetry intersected; Camille Roy, Mary Gaitskill, and Dodie Bellamy (in particular, her Real: The Letters of Mina Harker and Sam D'Allessandro). It's not easy to pin down the commonalities to be claimed among their writings: Bellamy and Roy ask questions in their stories about what the stories are doing. They pull back from the action of the story to perform a different kind of thinking, while remaining committed to the characters and what else makes a story go. Gaitskill doesn't pull back in that way, but she does transmit an experience of self that is so moment-to-moment that it also subverts a predicted/predictable line of narrative structure. This sort of writing shows us how identity is supple; experience is open-ended.

I do, though, also owe my share of gratitude to the narrative and self-reflective satisfactions that came from reading overtly gay personal narratives – bildungsroman types such as Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Michelle Tea's Valencia. It's queer, though, that the narrative that crystallized the most for me was outside me, "misidentified": The book I credit for my headiest experience of gayness is Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming-Pool Library. For exciting days after I read it, I had the pleasure of channeling the persona of a ridiculously pretty London boy perpetually cruising in a world of sexual prospects. Sigh. Prufrock's peach shimmered in my mind's eye.

Masha Gutkin is a poet and Bay Guardian food columnist. She lives in San Francisco.