Blackbird

by Larry Duplechan

  LD: First off, Blackbird was never meant to be YA fiction. Even if I had been naïve enough to write a book for teenagers that included pot smoking and fellatio, I doubt Michael Denneny [then Duplechan’s senior editor at St. Martin’s Press] was. I wrote Blackbird as a nostalgia piece for people my age, who had been teenagers in the ’70s.

  As you know, every reader brings his or her literary, political and other personal luggage to the work. Comes with the territory. The most influential criticisms of my work, as far as my personal life, were those who accused me of being ashamed of being black, because I liked white men and wrote a recurring, obviously autobiographical character who liked white men. Now, I realize I’m repeating myself here, but I say again that I am not now, nor have I ever been ashamed of being of African descent. However, having my personal sexual preferences thrown in my face by total strangers (in print, mind you) did force me to examine my own behavior. And it did finally occur to me that for me as a black gay man to have no romantic or sexual interest in other black men, might not evidence a healthy sense of my own sexual attractiveness as a black man. And I ended up having to work through some pretty serious personal issues because of that. The most obvious effect on my books is that in Captain Swing, Johnnie has a romantic, almost obsessive interlude with a black man, for the first time in print. What most people fixated on was the fact that the black man was Johnnie’s cousin.

  MM: Although your books were all received very well, they have, one by one, gone out of print. Captain Swing was recently excerpted in the fine anthology Freedom in This Village (edited by E. Lynn Harris, Carroll & Graf), which sort of enshrined you in the canon of gay African American authors of note. I’d like to know how you feel, as a writer, being revisited with this twentieth anniversary edition of Blackbird. And I’d like you to describe how it feels to have your work treated as being historically important. Does the celebration of your work as being both gay and black become restrictive for you?

  LD: As far as the whole going out of print thing, everybody goes out of print. The freakin’ Front Runner went out of print. Patricia Nell Warren ended up self-publishing her stuff, which I was considering doing with Blackbird before you came along. Publishers put out a bunch of books every year and once your little flurry of sales activity is over, you get remaindered and Elvis leaves the building. Nature of the game. So, I never considered it a particular reflection on the quality of my writing that my books went out of print. If I was going to doubt myself, the fact that none of my books sold very many copies would have sealed that.

  The funny thing about Freedom in This Village is that they excerpted Captain Swing without my permission – without my knowledge, actually. I was on Amazon.com one day and happened upon this anthology of twentieth-century black gay literature, and my initial thought was, “Those sons-o-bitches put out this anthology, and I’m not even it.” Then I realized I was in it, and I bought the book, just to see what they’d put in it. And it turned out they’d included a chapter from Captain Swing. And there’s this little cover-our-asses page in the back of the book, basically saying they’d made every effort to find the copyright holders of all the stuff they used. And I was livid. Livid. I mean, if you run a Google on my name, the first hit is going to be my personal website (larry-d.com), which includes my personal email address. So I faxed off a terse little letter to Carroll & Graf (I don’t remember who, probably the president). The next day, I get an email from Don Wiese, a senior editor at Carroll & Graf, very apologetic and offering to do right by me, which of course they did. And, it turns out, Don is a big fan of my books.

  Anyway, that having been resolved, I did finally feel as if maybe I might finally have been, as you say, “enshrined.” Because historically, when the “important” black gay writers have been discussed, my name has usually not come up. Largely, I think, because my books are not serious books. They’re little romantic comedies for the most part, and I get the feeling they’re considered guilty pleasures, even by those who like them. So yes, it is nice not to feel quite so much like Rodney Dangerfield, you know: “I get no respect.”

  As for the “black gay novelist” pigeonhole: I’ve always written exactly what I wanted to write at the time. So no, I’ve never felt restricted by it.

  So how do I feel facing the twentieth anniversary of Blackbird? Old! I feel really, really old.

  MM: Pop culture lives and breathes in the pages of the Johnnie Ray Rousseau novels. While your later books contain references to music and lyrics on almost every other page, Blackbird is saturated with them. In this book there is an additional focus on movies and television. For Johnnie Ray, these references seem to construct his identity, yet in the novel he moves from one stage production to another and neither production goes according to his plans. I’m interested in how you use cultural references as a kind of signature writing style, but also in how you look at different kinds of art – music, film, and theater – as offering different potential sources for your writing. As an accomplished musician who happened to write some great books, what can you say about your creative process? How does it feel to have your written work scrutinized, as opposed to getting on stage and singing?

  LD: I am a pop culture sponge. I grew up in the 1960s and ’70s, listening to AM and then FM radio, and watching entirely too much television, especially sitcoms, variety shows and old movies. There are songs, records that take me to very specific places and times when I hear them, from the opening guitar chords. There are lines from movies that I’ve been using in conversation for so long, I forget where I stole them from. And you’re quite right about Blackbird – there’s scarcely a sentence in it without a pop culture reference. I’d wager you didn’t pick up on half of them – nobody could. Upon re-reading Blackbird, I wonder if I didn’t go overboard, but it is what it is. It’s just the way my mind works. I don’t think I even make a conscious point of it; my brain is just so chock-a-block with movie images and with music that, if I’m writing an essay or a review in my own voice, or narrating a story through Johnnie Ray, that’s what’s going to come out: movie quotes and song lyrics.

  As far as being both a singer and a writer: singing is a much more natural, organic process for me. I am by nature a performer. Even when I was writing, the two things I liked best about it were royalty checks and readings – because a reading is a performance. I started writing books because I was about seven years into pursuing a career as a singer, and not meeting with a lot of success – this was twenty-five years ago, mind you: there were no openly gay pop singers. Elton wasn’t out yet, there was no Rufus Wainwright, no George Michael, no what’s-his-name from the Scissor Sisters. People, management, kept coming to me and saying, “You’re really good, but can you butch it up?” And I was also about seven years into my marriage, and working a forty-hour-a-week job, and singing in clubs every night wasn’t exactly conducive to having a relationship. And the time came when my partner, Greg, said, “You know I’m your biggest fan, but I need for you to be home.” So I stopped singing. But I still had this desire to make art. And I had this B.A. in English. So I wrote. But writing was something I took up because singing wasn’t particularly successful or particularly convenient.

  Writing is not an easy thing for me. It’s a solitary process, and I don’t like being alone. I really like an audience. And compared to singing, especially live singing, a novel takes a year or two years to write, and then maybe an additional year before you get into print, and find out whether it’s a standing ovation or rotten tomatoes or what. Also, as a stage performer, if a song in your set consistently falls flat with the audience, you cut the song. Once a novel is published, it’s not like you can go back and tighten it up. Heaven knows, I wish I could.

  MM: Finally, I’d like to ask you about what you read. Which authors are your literary influences, and which books strike you as being significant or just enjoyable? Do you keep up with current gay fiction? And now, with this new attention to your books, would you consider writing another nove
l?

  LD: Oddly enough, I don’t read much fiction. I have read almost no gay fiction since the early ’90s, when I stopped writing gay fiction. I generally prefer histories and biographies. I read The Da Vinci Code because people I knew at work were reading it. Which sent me off on little studies about the early Christian church, religious iconography in Italian Renaissance art, Grail legends, all sorts of things. The last gay book I read (and I’m not sure you can even call it a gay book) was At Swim Two Boys by Jamie O’Neill. Amazing novel. I love Just Above My Head, by James Baldwin. I re-read it every few years.

  As far as my literary influences: Tom Robbins, especially Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which taught me that I could break all the rules in terms of structure. Write one-word sentences if I want to. Write pages-long cadenzas that do nothing to advance the plot. Blackbird was very much influenced by Boys on the Rock by John Fox. St. Martin’s Press published it while I was writing Blackbird, and it’s a coming-out story about a high school boy as well. The general tone of Blackbird was influenced by that book. And it was because of Boys on the Rock that two characters die in Blackbird. I had sent my first novel, Eight Days a Week, to Michael Denneny and he rejected it, saying that “not very much happens in it.” Well, he’d been the senior editor on Boys on the Rock, and near as I could tell, the only thing that much happened in that book was one of the supporting characters gets killed. So, I decided what Michael Denneny liked in a novel was for somebody to die. So I killed off two supporting characters in Blackbird.

  I’m currently in the midst of a course of study to become a deacon of my church, Metropolitan Community Church in the Valley (which is in North Hollywood). So mostly, I’m reading the Bible, and a good deal of theology: queer, feminist, liberationist. And to take the occasional break from theology, I’ve recently been introduced to quote – graphic novels – unquote. Which is what grown-ups who read comic books call comic books. There’s a series called Transmetropolitan that’s absolutely off the hook: great drawing, and wonderful writing.

  I am pleased to report that I am not only considering writing a new novel – I’m actually writing one. In corresponding with Don Wiese at Carroll & Graf regarding Freedom in This Village, Don let me know that if I was writing anything new, he’d be interested in seeing it. At the same time, I was talking with Arsenal Pulp Press about reprinting Blackbird. All of a sudden, people were talking to me as if I were a writer, so I started writing. The new book in progress is, no big surprise, about Johnnie Ray Rousseau in midlife. Which is all I’m gonna say about it at this point.