I’ve begun to wonder why writers seem so hung-up on reusing the same tired words in and the same troublesome scenes. Perhaps this is only my trouble: a persistent habit of revising drafts not by using the rough as a vague blueprint from which to rewrite the entire story, but by lopping off a paragraph here, bloating a scene there. Maybe for some people it works, but for me it doesn’t seem to.

In painting, studies (often many, many studies) are often integral creating the finished work. When create a study, it is usually in order to get out all my worst ideas first:  boring composition, anatomically incorrect angles, badly chosen palettes and other rudimentary problems. Studies also help me to establish what is working well, visually, so that I can reproduce it in the final work.

Why is it that this repetitive process seems less frequently used by writers? The late great JG Ballard rewrote his novels using the previous draft not as gospel but as a reference or rough guide. His process strikes me as more useful than what I’ve been doing up until now: trying to tweak large, unwieldy slabs of story, becoming frustrated when nothing quite works, when nothing really fits.

Some of the studies I create toward finished paintings engage viewers on their own; many have at least a few redeeming features (for example, I like the position of the feet in the studies; but, due to sizing and proportion issues, I didn’t paint any feet into the final work). However, they tend to pale in comparison to the final work, because they contain many of the problems that have been resolved by the time I set out to create a polished painting.

I’m going to take a leaf from Ballard’s book (not literally, of course), and try to apply this method to writing as well. I suspect that it may yield good things.

I bet there are a million of you out there talking about this, just like me–so “if you see something, say something.” That is to say, if you’ve been thinking or working along similar lines, don’t hesitate to chime in.

We draw many modern symbols (tropes, perhaps) from folk and fairy tales. Look, for example, at horror films: they’re rife with werewolves, zombies, and vampires, all of which come either from folk tales or from subsequent adaptations that have gained an increasingly large audience over time (for example, Dracula – not the original vampire tale, but probably the best-known). Horror aside, children and adults alike are familiar with the tales of Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, and Cinderella, stories that were initially transmitted through oral retellings, and were eventually recorded by Charles Perrault in the 17th Century and, later and more famously, the Brothers Grimm in the 19th Century. There are novels whose plots have also spread memetically¹, such as the story of Frankenstein, and invented fairy tales like Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid. Many of these stories seem to have a universal quality, as in the case of the story of Little Red Riding Hood, the basic structure of which (girl or children in the woods, grandmother eaten, wolf plays villain) can be found not only in Europe but across the world. (The best example of this is the Chinese tale Lon Po Po².)

Even when the folk and fairy tales that survive and rivet audiences end happily, they usually contain dark elements: Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother are both eaten by a wolf (who is either simply menacing or a frightening rapist³, depending on the version of the tale), Hansel and Gretel are abandoned by their parents, Cinderella is abused by her step-family, Anderson’s little mermaid is mute, perpetually feels she is walking on knives, and commits self-sacrificial suicide at the end of the story, and Doctor Frankenstein’s rejected creation becomes internally as well as externally monstrous and eventually kills the Doctor’s beloveds. The disturbing elements of the stories help them stick, because they describe some of the most painful, scary and inexplicable experiences in human existence: death, abuse, abandonment, betrayal, unrequited love.

Many contemporary versions of these same popular fairy tales have been neutered, ostensibly in order to spare children the very fear that makes the stories memorable. The alteration of fairy tales is the topic of a recent Boston Globe article titled “Fear of Fairy Tales”, which appeared with the tag line: “The glossy, sanitized new versions of fairy tales leave out what matters: the scary parts.” The article’s author, Joanna Weiss, asserts that fairy tales have been heavily revised in order to increase their commercial value, because selling a vague and cheerful “pretty lady” doll is considerably easier than selling a instead a bruised, timid, or soon-to-be devoured one. According to Weiss, this type of marketing appeals to the “lowest common denominator” and hence, sells more easily. However, the tone of and content of the article change when the topic of Weiss’s own daughter arises. Weiss writes that she has told a less frightening version of the Little Red Riding Hood story to her four-year-old daughter, one “in which Granny isn’t eaten by the wolf, but is conveniently out of the house when Red Riding Hood pops in.”

That statement raises a larger question: why do adults change the fairy tales in the first place? Although the commercial appear of the neutered fairy tale is undeniable, it is unrelated to the hesitance of adults to expose their children in any way to In “Fear of Fairy Tales” Weiss briefly sites David Bickham ⁴, a researcher at the Center on Media and Child Health as stating that “kids are already exposed to plenty of violence.” Subsequently, Weiss moves on to write about the Disney Princess brand. However, I remain stuck on the idea that children somehow can’t handle a disturbing fairytale. After all, as Weiss writes that researchers have found that “some of these metaphors [mostly the sex-related ones]…will fly over the youngest kids’ heads.” (Many adults worry that the “youngest kids” are those more deeply and negatively impacted by violent media.) Weiss also paraphrases then quotes Jack Zipes: “he has seen young kids latch onto the classic, dark versions of the tales. Some of the most disadvantaged students, he says, ‘really relate to us, because we’re telling tales that they experience in their homes.’” If children are genuinely able to filter out many of the perturbing metaphors and retain only those aspects of the stories that have parallels in their own lives, then why the panic over the fact that fairy tales sometimes also contain sexual metaphors⁵ and some violence, particularly when the violence mirrors the actual, real-life experience of children.

Adults have their own neutered fairy tale about what childhood is like, as common alterations to the classic fairytales demonstrate. This fantasy about childhood relates not only to what adults think of kids, but also to adults’ deep longings about their own lives and the nature of the world. The Disney Princess line extends not just to children around the world, but also to adults as well. Weiss writes, “To little girls, these fairy tale heroines are pretty ladies, nothing more. And perhaps to adults, too. Disney has introduced a line of Disney Princess costume wedding gowns, designed, [Kathy] Franklin [Disney’s vice president] says, ‘for women who have always dreamed of their wedding as the day they’re a princess.’”

This marketing suggests something bigger about American culture (the root of the Disney Princess brand): that adults have their own specific ideas what childhood should and can be and also whether – or more accurately, how – it can be reclaimed. Both childhood and adulthood are marked by the acquisition of material goods. Sometimes the accumulation of objects accompanies internal maturity (or the lack thereof), but many times it is irrelevant. Nonetheless, society continues to associate maturity primarily with material gain. So it follows that many adults seem to hold the infinite, nonsensical hope that creating an external living environment that looks like a fairy tale will cause the promises of that tale – happiness, safety, a lack of poverty, sickness, even the evasion of old age and death – to come true. It’s one of many reasons for the American obsession with gross wealth (although obviously those who are materially deprived have other and more pressing reasons to value easy access to money and possessions). If you wear Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty” dress the caption beside it must come true: “With a single kiss, Sleeping Beauty’s dream comes true. She finds her prince, falls in love and discovers that she’s already a real princess.” Never mind the desperation, jealousy, and violence present in the original version of the story.

As adults strive to fulfill their childhood fantasies, both literally and vicariously, through media⁶ – fantastical wishes built on fiction, which are never replaced when adulthood turns out to be a disappointment – they also try to bury their fears. Simultaneously, we adults forget that our current fears are just twisted, or inflated versions of the same fears we had as kids, the fears that the scary parts of fairy tales let us know were real and mattered; the fears that fairy tales told us that we were not alone in experiencing and not too pathetic to cope with (even if coping simply meant bravely facing something like the eventual inevitability of death). There were things moving in the dark beyond our eyes, and we knew that. As children fairy tales helped us put names and faces to the scary part of the world, the part adults often refused to own up to because they believed that if they admitted the world was frightening that it would become too terrible, incomprehensible or tragic to manage.

However, the adult version of childhood is not always an attempt to deny the difficulties of actual living or ignore real fears and dangers. There is also often a sweetness to the adult interpretation of the kid’s world that comes from a genuine desire to protect children from the pain that the adults faced while they were growing up. A good example of this sweet, albeit potentially ineffectual care is the practical suburban fairytale presented in “The Wizard of No”, a quirky anti-smoking educational video made in America in the mid 80s. The Wizard of No is a charming and magical oddball who helps the prepubescent protagonist of the film bolster his flagging self-esteem and say no to tobacco. If only self-esteem could be created with a pat on the back and an encouraging word, reified by a parade behind a strange but kindly man in a blue wizard hat! It’s such a lovely, cheerful fantasy, one that acknowledges the realities of peer pressure within a safe bubble of. If anything, “The Wizard of No” illustrates – in vivid colors, with blue capes and silver stars – the sort of world adults wish they could give to children and teenagers. It’s a world free of distracted or abusive parents, where there is no such thing as a lack of school funding or dearth of available jobs, where cruel peers, death and sex simply don’t exist. It’s unbelievably safe, demonstrating the way in which either adults recall childhood as a time of wonder or wish their childhood had been better, gentler. It also seems ineffective, although I wish it weren’t. If only bolstering a child’s self-esteem were as simple as putting on The Wizard of No for 19 minutes. But children know the actual world is different – more frightening and sometimes more wonderful. In the words of Robert Crumb (excerpted from “The R. Crumb Handbook”):

“Adults were hiding something from us. And that’s such a fascinating thing, the adult interpretation of the kid’s world. A world artificially sweetened for kids, full of things kids were supposed to like and want. We sat in front of the television Saturday mornings and looked at kids’ stuff. The shows tell kids that life could be fun and exciting, but the unconscious message was that the adult world is strange, twisted, perverted, threatening, and sinister.”

As a kid I sensed the dangers of the world, often without being able to articulate them. The fairy tales that stuck with me most were not the nice, neutral Disney versions, but the more bizarre and sometimes violent tales – Hansel and Gretel, Anderson’s Snow Queen and Elfin Hill, the underappreciate story of Mr. Fox (a steady favorite from age 10 onward), and Lon Po Po (I didn’t come to appreciate Little Red Riding Hood until I encountered the Charles Perrault and Angela Carter versions of the tale).

The original fairy tales often warn kids and adults alike about the pains and foibles of being human. Adults should heed these lessons. The actual pains of life and adult misinterpretation of the ways in which children perceive such difficulties is far more likely to hurt children than sad or violent themes in fairy tales. In fact, those fairy tales may help children cope when adults are ineffectual or unavailable.

Long live the old stories.

¹ Jack Zipes writes at length about the memetic nature of fairytales in his book “Why Fairy Tales Stick.”

²There is an excellent picture book version of Lon Po Po available written and edited by Ed Young.

³The original Charles Perrault version of Little Red Riding Hood is more or less an extended metaphor for rape.

⁴Bickham’s study, the results of which were published in 2004 in an article called “Is Television Viewing Associated With Social Isolation? Roles of Exposure Time, Viewing Context, and Violent Content”), found that “children who watch violent television programs — especially those who watch such shows alone — spend less time with friends than children who watch a lot of nonviolent programs. Although the federally funded study could not determine a cause-and-effect relationship, researchers suspect one exists.” Bickham’s study itself concludes its abstract, “The more time that children spent viewing violent programs, the less time they spent with their friends. While this study cannot determine the direction of effects for this relationship, a cyclical process between violent media and peer integration best explains the findings. To optimize social development and mental health, children’s access to violent media should be limited.” I find the researcher’s “suspicions” a dubious foundation for assertions about the effect of violence on children. The children who spent less time watching violent television also had richer and more involved home lives; their parents tended to be better engaged and regularly demonstrated love and care.

⁵Admittedly, occasionally folk and fairy tales contain actual sex, as the obscure Peruvian tale of “The Snake’s Lover,” in which a woman is seduced and impregnated by a snake. However, few parents are likely to know of that tale much less read it to their children.

⁶ By “media” I mean films and books – particularly romantic comedies and action films – that insert the values and security of the sanitized fairy tale into a more adult context, e.g. the desire to be a hero or a treasured princess, both living in a world where they are immensely safe and ridiculously happy and successful in their endeavors. Various genres express these fantasies in different ways. As fantasies they aren’t necessarily bad or wrong, but when they take the place of primary adult goals (and they seem to for so many people), they create a culture in which people are divorced from their true needs and the needs of children. Basic pain in life is considered too cruel, and attempts to minimize it become so great that real, pressing problems, personal and social, are often ignored.

Jiang Zhi -- "Objects In My Drawer"

I didn’t know I was interested in Shanghai’s contemporary art scene until I started reading the blog Asian Art Nerd.  The blog offers commentary and showcases Shanghai art (often via the author’s own photos) such as Jiang Zhi’s photographs, which recallsome bizarre combination of dreams, nostalgia, and horror films:

Jiang Zhi -- "Sucker"

Each image makes my skin prickle, as though images of my private nightmares are being put public display. It feels great to see them so clearly in focus, but also frightening, even embarrassing.

On a completely different note I’ve also been enjoying Space Canon, a blog reviewing Science Fiction exclusively. Sounds dull and common place until you actually read the thing. Here’s Space Canon’s recent review of an Arthur C. Clarke novel titled Imperial Earth:

Impetuously, a space-living
Man, still young,
Plots his first and last journey to
Earth, for him, a
Return to his long-forgotten birthplace.
In the ship, he trains for
All those forgotten rituals, including:
Life with gravity.

Everything he finds, including the most anodyne of
Animals, seems mystical, meaningful, alien.
Returning to his home on the moon of
Titan, he is
Humbled.

Here’s what the author has to say about this undertaking to read books from the SF canon:

I would like to become a kind of expert on the subject, and because there are no genuine, bricks-and-mortar institutions where a person can do such a thing. Because I would like to continue striding straight and calm into the future, assured of all possible realities, of how to foil the pitfalls of humanity when faced with sentient clouds, steel planets, and moon pools. And, while the canon of traditional literature forms a majestic, complex image of humanity, the space canon as a culture is as yet lightly-trodden, but full of important, and undoubtedly prescient, ideas.

Happy reading!

Last month I saw a show of Alessandro Busci’s paintings at the Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art. Each of Busci’s paintings featured “train depots, service stations, power plants, and airports”. The enamel palettes used were vivid, usually limited to the brown chemical rainbows over iron panels, thrillingly lurid red paint, near-pure white, and an empty middle gray — now applied thickly, now diluted outward giving the impression of water and light on a runway.

Busci’s paintings speak to the part of industrialization that hard, dehumanizing, and sometimes bloody. In other ways, his paintings act as a paean to the great seductive joys of mass-production. There is a beauty to mass-production — the sense of a sudden rush of material wealth — but also a fear and latent violence, as it always seems in danger of growing into a Goliath, both cruel and easily toppled by its own great girth.

Unfortunately those amazing airport and factory paintings were shown in the wretchedly over-designed Mark Wolfe gallery. The gallery space juxtaposes a slick design aesthetic with raw cement pillars. It’s cold in a way that makes me breathy with claustrophobia. The Mark Wolfe gallery belies Busci’s paintings. While the “raw” space speaks to a similar appreciation of industrial design, the application of that design unwittingly implies a total lack of comprehension of the genealogy of the industrial aesthetic.

For these reasons the entire gallery space put me on edge, which might be considered a feat of architecture and design if the subtext (exotification of raw utilitarian architecture) didn’t distract so much from the artwork displayed.

In that setting Busci’s hauntingly beautiful chemical-and-metal paintings — which, given their color and the spontaneous yet sinuous application of paint seemed an homage to the blunt violence of industry — seem almost like mockeries of themselves. The paintings are inherently effective and powerful; and, unlike the gallery, they are infused with a sense of the history and psychological gravity of utilitarian architecture. However, when juxtaposed with the Mark Wolfe space, the paintings are subsumed and hence trivialized.

Busci’s paintings are wonderful but I would prefer to see them in more fitting space.

When I first learned to paint I was timid. I had to learn to trust what I saw and the ability in my hands. Like most beginning artists I had trouble recording what I actually saw. My frustration wasn’t so much with inaccuracy in my work as a lack of beauty. If sunlight fell a certain way on a table, I became happy if I could capture at least some of the depth and ebullience of the light. I was much less perturbed about things like perspective and where the tables legs lay. Those sorts of things you can practice. But putting down the life of an object or a scene is a process of learning the language of your own vision.

I think writing may be similar. Often when I write I’m discouraged by my inability to tell the truth about the things I know about a scene: sight and smell, the things that occur during speech, underneath it. (For example, the second to last clause didn’t capture what I wanted to say about the thing that occur underneath speech! I had this image of people exchanging small folded notes in a dimly lit room, maybe a black market pub, windowless, and everything is made from exposed wood with ridges raised like angry lines of welts and just as raw to the touch. The exchanged notes are tattered, the people sit across from each other with their whole backs clenched, and their forearms stiff with fury. Their hands move fast and pluck like frightened, hungry birds. Sharp. It smells like wood and sap and that smell I can never explain except that it’s “what cold smells like when you’re outdoors at night in a small town on a street where everyone’s indoors and all the people and radios are at a low volume, and the snow has just fallen and all the smells in the word and tamped down to the ground so the air is clear almost as though the stars flood pure oxygen down to you and the whole sky is clear and the stars shimmer like tears in a dark room and you’re alone and wearing your winter coat but going someplace that is indoors, the light a dim claustrophobic red and yellow, and other people are there but they’ll be drowsy and it’ll smell like the hair and cigarette ashy collected on your thick carpet for several months, and remembering this smell so sharply the air outside is even cleaner, so clean it shakes your body like high pitches in singing.”) My senses know all of these details simultaneously but the translation is so arduous it’s almost painful. Sometimes it doesn’t even make sense. I can’t tell whether it’s making sense to anyone but me.

But I do think it might be like painting or drawing. When I started a curved line took many tiny marks to make, and the whole was unsatisfactory. Sometimes now when my eyes and hand move in tandem the mark is single, swift and right. Most of the time it doesn’t feel that way. Most of the time I’m frustrated with myself. But maybe if I practice the patience of translation and the trust of my senses and tools what I see will become what I record more often.

I hope.

Gregory Orr wrote in his essay This I Believe: The Making of Poems:

“I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions and traumatic events that come with being alive.

“….Because poems are meanings, even the saddest poem I write is proof that I want to survive.

“….Whenever I read a poem that moves me, I know I’m not alone in the world. I feel a connection to the person who wrote it, knowing that he or she has gone through something similar to what I’ve experienced, or felt something like what I have felt. And their poem gives me hope and courage, because I know that they survived, that their life force was strong enough to turn experience into words and shape it into meaning and then bring it toward me to share. The gift of their poem enters deeply into me and helps me live and believe in living.”

The latter part of this succinctly and beautifully makes sense of all the things I was trying to explain in a prior post about JT LeRoy. Art can an act of survival and a (sometimes dark) joy-taking in that urge to press forward, to keep living and trying to thrive.

Here’s one (of many) Gregory Orr poem(s) that I like:

The Project

My plan was to generate light
with no outside source.
To accomplish this, I lived alone
in a burrow under the earth.
Previously I had observed
that in darkness my body
gave off a faint light. Suspecting
that this glow came from the bones,
I scraped the flesh from my right hand.
I’d been underground so long
the meat came off
painlessly, like wet clay.
But when the flesh was gone,
the light was gone too.

Directing attention to these two series on Racialicious, both written by Latoya Peterson:

Debunking Myths about Statutory Rape, Race and Class:

Part One/Part Two/Part Three

This series does a great job challenging the stereotypes that young girls who dress in a ’slutty’ manner deserve to be sexually harassed and abused; that men have an overwhelming ‘biological preference’ for a younger-looking girl; that a majority of statutory rape cases are simply young women ‘tricking’ older men into having sex with them by lying about their age; and that rich and/or white men do not sexually harass younger girls. The articles are well-considered and draw on anecdotal evidence. The comments are quite interesting and deepen the dialog.

Has Class Trumped Race? (an ongoing series):

Part One/Part Two/Part Three

This series explores the meaning of class privilege, successfully macerating a massive subject into moderately-sized portions of text. Once again, the comments enrich the original texts; both Latoya and the commenters take on with nuanced questions such as, “Do you think that the material aspect of privilege is more important or the access aspect of privilege?,” willingly discussing the ways in which entitlement and privilege interact, and commenting on the ways in which class privilege and white privilege (or lack thereof) interact. The posts and comments also seek to answer the eponymous question: “Has class [privilege] trumped race [privilege]?” The answer is complex, debatable, and open-ended.

“You want to read work that reflects yourself, not necessarily literally yourself, but your perspective, your point of view, and the community around you, and if you don’t see it in the work in front of you, as a writer, your job is to write it yourself. You want to put that world on the page.” -Speculative Fiction editor Sheree R. Thomas on NPR, August 13, 2007

I remember reading a message board discussion about the potential of Fantasy and Science Fiction to champion possible worlds in which race is dealt with deftly, interestingly, unusually – the very context of race and race relations is altered. Power dynamics can be shifted (Martha Jones from Doctor Who and Torchwood, anyone?*), sometimes even made void and null (Ursula LeGuin). The point was that Speculative Fiction (Science Ficton, Fantasy, Horror, Magical Realism, etc.) can offer a more flexible context to present and consider race. Unfortunately, a majority of Speculative Fiction offers little more than dulling doses of “Blandy McWhitey White in Blandy McNeighborhood in America or Blandy McMedieval Europe or Blandy McDefaulty Man in any setting anywhere.”**

Speculative Fiction appeals to the imagination and the unconscious – and therein lies its power. It can be used not only for escapist daydreaming, but for social commentary (which, of course, lots of Science Fiction already is), change, even as a visionary medium. Speculative Fiction can be used to address race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, etc., all within unusual or altered contexts.

*Actually, Martha’s treatment by the Doctor was always disappointing, but her treatment by the Doctor Who scriptwriters wasn’t (Martha’s character is great, the Doctor is boring and patronizing). The characters of Torchwood appreciate her far more.
**This is the second time I’ve quoted The Angry Black Woman – an excellent blog on “politics, race, gender, sexuality, anger.”

Everyone reading this blog probably already knows the story: a 15-year-old boy named J.T. LeRoy who has suffered a life of physical and sexual abuse, been neglected and deprived, worked as a prostitute, and been on and off drugs, emerges into intense fame after the publication of his collections of short stories, all popularly considered to be semi-autobiographical. A few years and many friendships with celebrities later, it’s revealed that the 15-year-old boy doesn’t really exist. In fact, he’s the alter-ego of a 40-year-old woman named Laura Albert.

Scandal and mud-slinging ensue. Laura Albert is denounced by The New York Times, not to mention the many authors and movie stars who assisted her ascension to literary fame. Many of those people are angry that they were lied to. They feel betrayed – and understandably so.

But what about Laura’s reading public? I admit, I was once amongst the dewy-eyed fans who packed into overpriced bookstores, wine bars, etcetera to hear minor stars read the reclusive author’s work. I trembled with excitement when I saw an androgynous boy in a blond wig and sunglasses sitting on the stairs (J.T. LeRoy was known for showing up at his own readings “in disguise” and watching). Laura Albert’s Warholian combination of shyness and desire for acknowledgement birthed J.T. LeRoy. I longed to be noticed by LeRoy in a similar withdrawn manner (although I adored him, I never once wrote him a fan letter).

Maybe that’s why I’m not upset by Albert’s ruse – I can understand the feeling of “[being] completely ignored and disregarded and disdained.” That total feeling of invisibility and loneliness wells out of some lack of safety deep inside, like a night when the wind is up and no one is outside, like the concrete slab of clouds in the sky will suck you up and trap you. Sounds crazy, right? I suspect that feeling of an internal vacuum drives a lot of people – not just Laura Albert, but also Hans Christian Anderson and the aforementioned Andy Warhol (to name a couple off the top of my head). I’ve felt that way. But I also fear visibility.

This is the sort of catch-22 that seems to have birthed JT LeRoy.

However, it may be unfair to ask you to be sympathetic to Laura Albert’s cause on those grounds. Laura Albert was and is a mess, I agree. But I also think that whether she’s a mess isn’t really my business (much less in my control), so I’ll reiterate what has been said repeatedly, endlessly, not about Laura Albert but about her writing: the books were marketed as fiction. The books were marketed as fiction. The books were marketed as fiction. Fiction fiction fiction! When asked if they were autobiographical, LeRoy would always insist that they drew on his experiences abstractly. He never suggested that the stories were verbatim, or to be taken literally. The public simply inferred it, and LeRoy/Albert never denied the rumors.

The rumors were never denied because there was some truth to them. Whatever Albert may not be (male, young, living on the street), she has obviously been through some kind of hell – enough so to write short stories that can be acutely joyful and painful to read.

However, these arguments may fail to elicit your sympathy. After all, LeRoy/Albert spent years coyly courting celebrity and soliciting fame.

The books have been attacked because writing of the quality Albert produced is (supposedly) less impressive from someone in their forties than it is from a young street kid. However, sidestepping all debate of literary merit, I’d like to suggest that the books had another value: they were, in some ways, for some people, therapeutic. Not for everyone, certainly. Maybe for some people they were triggering. For others, they seemed silly (I have several friends who would roll their eyes at any mention of LeRoy’s work). However, for some people – especially trauma survivors who had experienced a certain inexplicable type of psychological mangling – the books resonated. They made intrinsic, intuitive sense out of the internal feeling that the wall between sanity and nonsense – or sickness – was broken. To me, and some others I talked to, it felt like someone had written about things we knew – the way trauma twists instinct so that it bends away from self-preservation and toward self-destruction. Albert wasn’t writing down our own experiences – the events of the stories were far worse than anything I ever experienced – but the settings, the descriptions of emotions and tastes and personalities – were pitched with an uncanny perfection.

Other authors – Mary Gaitskill, Dennis Cooper – have written about abuse and lasting trauma with delicacy and a similar dark humor, but no one articulated it quite like J.T. No one was quite so good at writing characters who were both sympathetic and sickening. In Laura Albert’s words, “the characters in JT LeRoy’s books…strive for goodness, even in a world where all their experience contradicts this. I feel that this desire is essential to my story as well. When I would reach a point where I wanted to commit suicide, something gave me hope.”

The stories were and are hopeful. They suggested that even from the dregs of the most awful repeated abuse, a writer could emerge. And they still tell that hopeful story – after all, Laura Albert survived – damaged, maybe, but intact enough to get the story out.

The stories also described, subtly, that abuse could be confused with love, and that children and adolescents could mix up their desire to be loved with their willingness to (in Albert’s words) “serve.” They suggested, that these confusions could be overcome, that in time one could make enough sense of them to write them all down using vivid description. The stories reminded traumatized people that their trauma wasn’t unspeakable and that trauma could escape their bodies if they just gave it vent. Moreover, Albert’s writing showed that even the worst events and people could be seen with wryness and humor, even sympathy.

Or at least, that’s how the stories made me feel.

Yes, LeRoy/Albert’s writing was overwrought, but the experiences described were distressing enough to warrant such a literary style. I no longer feel the intense attachment to J.T. LeRoy/Laura Albert’s books that I once did. However, my feelings didn’t change because of an alteration in the author’s identity. My need for the books lessened because I begin to work through my own trauma. LeRoy/Albert’s books helped me to talk about the trauma I experienced, and get it out. Now I know it’s not unspeakable, and I feel safe much more of the time. I don’t long for the acceptance of ephemeral celebrities as much as I once did (although I admit that I have yet to fully overcome the shameful-seeming Warholian urge). I owe a part of my ability to speak about trauma and to let it subside to Laura Albert’s books. For me, and perhaps for some of the other people who her books imprinted, that means quite a lot more than any public identity hoax.

“For more than ten years I was in a nonmonogamous relationship with a black man committed to nonsexist behavior in almost every aspect of daily life–the major exception being the bedroom. I accepted my partner’s insistence that his sexual desires be met in any circumstance where I had made sexual overtures (kissing, caressing, and so on). Hence ours was not a relationship in which I felt free to initiate sexual play without going forward and engaging in coitus. Often I felt compelled to engage in sexual intercourse when I did not want to.

“In my fantasies, I dreamed of being with a male who would fully respect my body rights, my right to say ‘no,’ my freedom not to proceed in any sexual activity that I did not desire even if I initially felt that I wanted to be sexual. When I left this relationship, I was determined to choose male partners who could respect a woman’s right to say ‘no,’ irrespective of the circumstance.

“Years passed before I found a partner who respected those rights in a feminist manner, with whom I made a mutual covenant that neither of us would ever engage in any sexual act that we did not desire to participate in. I was elated. With this partner I felt free and safe. I felt that I could choose not to have sex without worrying that this choice would alienate or anger my partner. Though most women were impressed that I had found such a partner, they doubted that this could be a chosen commitment to female freedom on any man’s part; they raised suspicious questions. Braggin’ about him to girlfriends and acquaintances, I was often told, ‘Girl, you betta be careful. Dude might be gay.’ I also begin to feel doubts. Nothing about the way this dude behaved was familiar. His was not the usual ‘dick-thing’ masculinity that had aroused feeligns of pleasure and danger in me for most of my erotic life. While I liked his alternative behavior, I felt a loss of control–the kind that we experience when we are no longer acting within the socialized framework of both acceptable and familiar heterosexual behavior. I worried that he did not find me really desirable. Then I asked myself whether aggressive emphasis on his desire, on his need for ‘the pussy’ would have reassured me. It seemed to me, then, that I needed to rethink the nature of female heterosexual eroticism, particularly in relation to black culture.

“Critically interrogating my responses, I confronted the reality that despite all my years of opposing patriarchy, I had no fully questioned or transformed the structure of my desire. By allowing my erotic desire to still be determined to any extent by conventional sexist constructions, I was acting in complicity with patriarchal thinking. Resisting patriarchy ultimately meant that I had to reconstruct myself as a heterosexual, desiring subject in a manner that would make it possible for me to be fully aroused by male behavior that was not phallocentric. In basic terms, I had to learn how to be sexual with a man in a context where his pleasure and his hard-on is decentered and mutual pleasure is centered instead. That meant learning how to enjoy being with a male partner who could be sexual without viewing coitus as the ultimate expression of desire.

“Talking with women of varying ages and ethnicities about this issue, I am more convinced than ever that women who engage in sexual acts with male partners must not only interrogate the nature of the masculinity we desire, we must also actively construct radically new ways to think and feel as desiring subjects. By shaping our eroticism in way that repudiate phallocentrism, we oppose rape culture. Whether this alters sexist male behavior is not the point. A woman who wants to engage in erotic acts with a man without reinscribing sexism will be much more likely to avoid or reject situations in which she might be victimized. By refusing to function within the heterosexist framework that condones male erotic domination of women, females would be actively disempowering patriarchy.

“Without a doubt, our collective, conscious refusal to act in any way that would make us complicit in the perpetuation of rape culture within the sphere of sexual relations would undermine the structure. Concurrently, when heterosexual women are no longer attracted to macho men, the message sent to men would at least be consistent and clear. That would be a major intervention in the overall effort to transform rape culture.” “Seduced By Violence No More,” from Outlaw Culture (bell hooks), pages 131-133 (italics mine)

The above quote not only succinctly articulates widespread cultural contradiction; it also emphasizes possible transformations in individual perception of sexuality. While bell hooks is writing about women and women’s transformation, the overall content, and, in particular, the italicized section, also addresses a male concern that Andrew has told me about many times: the heterosexual concentration on male erection and, more importantly, male ejaculation.

Andrew has spoken many times about how this creates unnecessary male performance anxiety around sex, because oftentimes both male and female attention in so focused on the penis. Both erection and ejaculation are seen as signs of sexual ability.

Culturally, there is a widespread belief that a man who does not do these things is not properly masculine. Simultaneously, the cultural lack of male erection and/or ejaculation threatens women, who have frequently believe that their desirability is predicated upon male erection and ejaculation. The idea that one could “be sexual without viewing coitus as the ultimate expression of desire” is considered culturally ridiculous, even ludicrous. It’s assumed that if one is sexual without viewing penetration as the ultimate expression of desire, that one is sexually defective in some way – unable to perform, or otherwise lacking a proper hormonal balance.

Even as I write this, I feel the need to justify my writing by explaining that “of course I enjoy penetration,” lest anyone mistake me for a lesser or defective (heterosexual) sexual being.

The irony is that anxiety and violence do not inherently contribute to better sex. This is not to say that sex, or sexual acts, must be all white lace, flowers, and sweetness, only that there are many other possibilities, ones that cast aside constrictive and sometimes brutal gender roles.