Sometimes, when you are mad and wild with hunger, you think to yourself, I should kill a God. Musing all the while about all the great thoughts they will one day fashion into a slinky, amusing little number that is by turns serious and unserious, faggy and masc, camp and delightful, full of allusions and alliteration, full of all the shaggy shambolic things stripped out of art by the Emotion Industrial Complex of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop-which, did you know, was a CIA thing? Perhaps they flick ashes from their cigarettes and type a little note to themselves on their phone. The Homosexual Essayist is perhaps drinking something clear or something dark, something vinegary, something like piss, something not at all like piss that they imagine to themselves that they will describe as being like piss. Telling them provocative, mildly homophobic, acidic things about how gay novels with gray book covers have so maimed the public consciousness that we’re all just tender faggots full of feeling. Or holding forth in a bar, gesturing, trying to get a thought or set of thoughts to cohere, trying out arguments for the death of Big Gay Literature on their friends. They type away, sneering and furious, or sad, or horny, or bored, or distracted, or amused, or glad, or perhaps, they aren’t typing at all. Contemporary gay fiction is a place where one can arrive and leave satisfied and by satisfied, I mean, with sufficient cause to be annoyed online and in their little Google docs across media. Gay men are writing this tiresome genre of Oedipal essay in which they decry the status of contemporary gay writing as being too serious or not serious enough, too sad or too happy, too focused on trauma or too irreverent, too ironic or too sincere, too much about sex or not enough, not realistic about apps and hook ups or too realistic about apps and hook-ups. It has appeared in places like Granta, Gawker, The Yale Review, Astra. Then my friend told me that the article about the book had presented it as an alternative to contemporary gay literature, and without it being explained, I knew exactly what kind of essay my friend was talking about.

I was quite happy that my friend was going to read the book, because I was curious what he would make of it though I sensed that there would be things in it that he liked. It had been one of the few books I was able to finish during that time. I’d read the book during a strange and difficult span during the pandemic. I found it funny and smart and enjoyable.

He asked me what I thought, and I said that I had liked the book. He had recently picked it up after reading an article, ostensibly a review, of the book. Grow up.Īt dinner recently, a friend asked me about a book I had blurbed.

A little life read online