Queer people’s relationship with literature is often-- if not always-- animated by community. After all, many queers first turned to books because of community, or more precisely, because of its absence. When the childhood groups of school classes, sports, and extracurriculars didn’t or couldn’t accept you, you turned to the library or the bookstore and found books to keep you company. Quickly, us reading queers embraced books and the characters, historical figures, and biographical subjects as our first chosen families. Reading is often a solitary activity (more on that later), so it didn’t require the approval of the teams that didn’t want us, lunch tables that shunned us, or classmates that mocked us. Even before I realized I was queer, I can remember devouring another library copy of an Agatha Christie mystery realizing I was different, but still unaware of what that difference might be. Reading those books served as both a marker for difference, and a space to explore the nature of what that might be, safely, and within the confines of the covers of the next novel. 

But, the relationship between reading and queers is deeper than simply as the backup activity of social rejects. When we read, we encounter new places and ideas, simultaneously envisioning the contours the author provides, while coloring in the details and nuances of our favorite fictional settings. The world building that occurs between the reader’s imagination and the author’s published text often makes literature engaging, but it also makes it powerfully exciting, particularly for readers who are unsatisfied or unrecognized in their own worlds. In the words of literary theorist, J. Hillis Miller, literature can “reveal and create” worlds and allows us, its readers, to witness the spaces that are obscured from us and imagine the future communities we could inhabit if our societies were imbued with a little more change, empathy, or art. When it occurs in the book, it’s not real, per se, but it’s closer to reality than it was before its literary formation. 

Consider the first books that drew you in: you wanted to join it because of they were paradoxically realistic and imagined. Perhaps those worlds were fantasies of imperfect but admirable misfit heroes, or dreamy star-crossed, social-reject lovers, or a sparkling group of effortlessly sophisticated friends, or simply a way of living that fit outside the mold. When we finish such books and leave their settings behind, we are left marveling that such strange worlds could-- or almost could-- exist the whole time without us knowing. I often think one thing that makes great literature so great is the ability to accomplish both: simultaneously revealing what we couldn’t see, and provoking what we didn’t yet dare to imagine. Its easy to recognize this dual impulse in E.M. Forster’s classic queer novel, Maurice. Yes, Forster’s extraordinary little book exposes contemporary critiques of the bigoted, conservative societies of the past that history might gloss over. However, more importantly, he shows how queer men found ways to meet and love each other in that real historical time, and also participates in the hopeful longing of a successful relationship between two people of the same gender could with just a little imagination. He reveals a past to us that we might have missed and creates a present that he certainly longed for.

While Miller’s “reveal and create” equation applies to all readers who yearn for something a little different, scholars have long noted how queer readers have been attuned to these revealed and created worlds, especially when they were buried under the subtext, subtlety and social tricks that queers have long mastered to survive and thrive. We noted the codes and cues of novels, plays, and films, craving the representation such ideas brought, while nudging one another at the ways the straight world wasn’t savvy enough to recognize us in their midst. They also encouraged us to devise new and bolder ways to exist outside of the pages. These revealed and created queer worlds affirmed and animated us. Could any queer reader of Brideshead, say, imagine Sebastian without recognizing their own forbidden crushes and the myriad ways that they were hidden between subtle gesture, careful admissions, and thrilling intimacies. Yet, the excitement and emotional rush also fueled our next crush, and then the next one. 

Eventually some of these notions were theorized in academia, and queer theory has its origins when readers like Eve Sedgwick identified the patterns, epistemologies, and social practices at work in 19th century literature. Queer theory definitely proved that great literature didn’t incidentally mirror queerness; there were often intentional and purposeful themes, that informed and warned readers. Indeed, this academic work codified what queer readers long knew-- that literature was always speaking to us and saving us in ways that were safe and necessary. They were promises and primers of the world to come, and warnings of a society that often despised us. Maybe we didn’t have an academic’s jargon, but when we read queer theory, occasionally, despite ourselves and in spite of the exclusionary impulses of the academy, we recognize what’s there.

And while the relationship between revealed and created queer worlds is important to past and contemporary queers, literature is more than a historical tract or an academic thought exercise; it has an enormous emotional value that is also essential for queer readers. The best reading is ultimately a practice of empathy, the essential ingredient in every relationship, including friendship, romance, and social acceptance. Tracy K. Smith, the former poet laureate, wrote that this community-sustaining power is exactly what makes poetry and literature vital. Great works of poetry, she wrote, “ disorient us from our home base, and they teach us to admit and submit to the feeling of vulnerability, to act upon empathy and curiosity, and to follow along allowing sense to accrue at its own pace and upon its own terms. If you do that enough times with a poem, you might begin to think differently about actual strangers, you might also begin to recognize that there are new possibilities of feeling and awareness available to you.” For queer readers, the practice of empathy has both allowed others to see our humanity, certainly, but also has helped us find commonality with others as we build our chosen families of queers. In works like Reading Backwards by the University of Pennsylvania’s Heather Love, critics have expanded notions of queerness and recognized how many marginalized characters-- those who fall outside society’s norms because of race, class, ethnicity, or sexuality-- can be considered queer for existing and thriving in unapproved ways. Reading can be the first step of understanding the intersectional interests of those who fall outside the status quo- call it patriarchy, the Man, the state-- and allow us not merely to recognize them or learn about them, but to connect emotionally with them on the page and in the streets.  Empathy, then, is also revealed and created, along with new ways of understanding the past or imagining the present.

Perhaps, most importantly, for queer readers, literature reassures hope and possibility for the future of our community. The great queer theorist, Jose Estaban Munoz, wrote eloquently about the utopic possibilities of queer communities that reject the “here and now” for a “then and there,” imagined by art, performance, and literature. Thus, for many of us, what perhaps started as a practice to successfully combat loneliness, unfair societies, and senses of dysfunction, is often implicitly and explicitly tied up to the communities we form, the relationships we desire, the politics we practice, and the futures that we dare to imagine.  

I have to confess, I’m an English teacher, so my ardent and expansive beliefs about the power of reading are inexplicably tied to my professional life. But, my reading is also linked to my growth as a queer individual, who learned the value of queerness from yes, my elders, my community, and my friends, but also the books and art I turned to from a very early age. I’ve shifted how I’ve lived, loved, and taught based on the books I read, not simply because of what they’re about, but because of how I learned to read them-- with care, between the lines, and with a sharp focus on relationality-- as I recognize how this approach helps expand my communities. I wouldn’t be writing this without the literary guidance of the writers, scholars, and poets who inspired and provoked me. “Poetry/isn’t revolution but a way of knowing/it must come,” Adrienne Rich recognized in “Dreamwood.” Similarly, reading itself might not be community, but it’s a way of knowing and making it come. 

If Adrienne Rich is right, literature’s the start, but there’s a next step. And I believe one way of making that community come is by crafting a group of queer readers who can read not merely about queer experience, but in a queer fashion. A queer book club may be a social group, but unlike the wine-swilling clubs of film, that sociality is not incidental but essential to its queerness. A queer book club practices building the very communities that we first thirsted for when we reached for books, that lead us to continue stacking up book on our “to-read” pile. We can share the ways we empathize with characters, that we note subtleties, that we glimpse or foreclose on possible futures offered to us. We can celebrate the ambiguities and the imaginaries in which great literature, particularly great queer literature, dwells. We can build the queer worlds we first saw in novels, and center novels in our world, rather than centering just the worlds of novels in our reading. 

Giovanni’s Room is the perfect space to center that community. As the longest running queer bookstore in the country, Gio’s has long recognized and celebrated the relationship between queer people and books. But, as a community space, it has always used that relationship to do more than simply sell novels by queer literary geniuses (like the namesake Baldwin); it has brought people together in the types of relationships that make those novels so powerful. Hopefully, the book club can not only foster the queer reading that brought many of us to Gio’s for the first time, but it can help continue the mission that has kept Gio’s vibrant for so long. 

These are trying times. Many of the perceived achievements for queer equality appear now to be dangerously temporary. Conservatives are using anger of the culture wars to stoke the hatred of voters and demonize trans kids, drags queens, and gay teachers. As an extremist Supreme Court veers more and more right, marriage equality and other hard-fought rights appear to be tottering on the edge of federal legality. All news seems to be bad news. Community-- and the strength garnered from creating and sustaining new communities-- is more essential than ever for queer people. It is easy to feel isolated and downtrodden. However, history and literature have proven that the only antidote to hopelessness or oppression are the revealed and created communities that have served queer people. Hopefully, our group can continue to do so. 

Danny

August 2021

p.s. if you enjoy reading reflections about queer books and queer community, feel free to follow my substack, “Bits N’ Pieces” here.