Garrard Conley and SJ Sindu on the Mainstreaming of Queer Identity

In this episode of the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast, fiction writers Garrard Conley and SJ Sindu discuss writing about queer identity with hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell. In part one, Conley talks about having his book Boy Erased adapted for film, and writing about the evangelical community. In the show’s second half, Sindu talks about writing about the closet, and how the publishing industry imagines readers will react to stories about queer people of color.

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Readings for the episode

Boy Erased by Garrard Conley · Marriage of a Thousand Lies by SJ Sindu · Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai · The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily M. Danforth · The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall · Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeannette Winterson

PART ONE

“It’s still a big deal for a lot of people just to say who they are.”
Garrard Conley on writing about gay conversion therapy and his parents

V.V. Ganeshananthan: We had Dhonielle Clayton on and Ayesha Pande on several episodes ago and we were talking about racism in publishing and the way that people can research point of views that are not their own, and just listening to you talk about Joel Edgerton I’m reminded of that process, and also listening to you talk about who the audience for this movie is I’m curious to hear you talk about the role that this kind of representation plays—does it change minds?

We have a lot of conversations about storytelling and the effect that it has on audiences, and I keep thinking about the people in Arkansas, where you’re from, or Tennessee, where the facility that you referred to, the Love in Action facility, actually is—do you think they’re reading the book? Are they going to see the movie? Does this actually move them in that way?

Garrard Conley: Well, one of the things that Joel said to me that I thought was really astute is, he said—well, you know, any time anyone writes, or talks about, or depicts Christians in film, they’re gonna watch it. Whether or not they sneak it, or they talk about it amongst themselves, they’re gonna want to see how they’re being portrayed, and I think what a lot of Christians—or Fundamentalists, especially, are going to find is that we aren’t trying to turn them into villains, but we are holding them accountable for what they did. And I think that that’s exactly what the church needs right now, it needs to have a conversation about—here’s how we evolve, here’s how we become more inclusive, and here’s what we did in the past, not just paper over it, and pretend like it didn’t happen.

One of the things that Joel very carefully did, which I didn’t necessarily do in my own memoir, is he made sure that it could at least be seen by these people, and that they could get a message, a tolerance, in sort of the language that they could understand. Because if we made fun of them, if we poked fun at them once again, which is what conversion therapy has always been portrayed as, in film, pretty much always—there are a few exceptions—I felt like we wouldn’t have this great tool to use in places like the South and these really small towns. And I mean, it’s a bit of a compromise, honestly. I—I would love to make a gloriously queer film one day. I don’t think that this movie is gloriously queer. I think that it’s a depiction of something that happened to a queer person that stripped away their identity, and it’s a depiction of parents who’ve done something absolutely terrible, but they need to ask forgiveness for, and that doesn’t, you know, the movie doesn’t necessarily have that kind of, you know, celebration that I often see in queer film.

VVG: You mention the language—are you thinking of any phrases, or anything in particular in the film that you want to mention?

GC: Yeah, I think there are a lot of lines in the film, even in the trailer, if you see it, where Nicole Kidman’s character, playing my mother, says—I love God, and I love my son, and, you know, nothing’s going to change that—and there’s also a really big moment—I don’t want to give too much away, but there’s a big moment with my character, played by Lucas, where he stands up to some people, and he affirms his identity, and in a movie where you’ve seen someone pretty much systematically stripped of who they are, it’s astounding to hear someone come out on their own terms, because the context makes you realize it’s still a big deal for a lot of people just to say who they are.

VVG: Yeah.

Whitney Terrell: You know, the interesting thing for me, when reading your book, which I loved, is that I have so many students, teaching here in the Midwest, who have had, who are wrestling with, in their writing, the legacy of an Evangelical Christian upbringing, you know? And we’re talking about the mainstreaming—the idea of queer content appealing to the mainstream, you know, but I thought, look, here’s a mainstream that doesn’t get addressed very much, in quote-un-quote mainstream movies, right? And, the, the difficulties of growing up in an Evangelical household, and what that’s like.

It’s extremely difficult to write about, whether you’re queer or not, you know, and yet—as a queer individual in that community, you’re driven out of it in a way that maybe one of my straight students wouldn’t have been, and you end up producing a book about how you encountered, and dealt with, Evangelical Christianity, but the result is—is a thing that any student, any kid, any person who’s grown up in that environment, would be interested in reading, I would think.

GC: Yeah, I mean, first of all, I think that there are a lot of really great queer communities in the South, and in these small towns that do pop up, and they become wonderful because everyone’s sort of fighting against the same thing, so there is that, but we are, you know, often, we can’t go back to our hometowns, and many people can’t go back to their parents, but I think—one of the things that I was consistently told, while trying to sell my book was that it was a gay book, and it’s not going to sell.

I mean, we’ve proven that wrong consistently for the past couple of years, and we’ve shown that people of color’s stories matter for a lot of people, and these stories that used to be considered universal are no longer being considered universal. And I think that, you know, executives and producers have extremely limited minds when it comes to what people want to see. First of all, I think the mainstream is breaking up. I think we’re going to have a lot of different stories, an abundance of stories that a lot of people want to see, and you can see that in the new generation, like, everyone is, you know, talking about the spectrum, and people are talking about identity, and using new terms that are wonderful, and increase our understanding of what it is to be a human. So I just see all of that breaking up, and we’ve got to, kind of continue to chip away at it because—I mean, look at, look at a story like A Little Life, which sold so many copies, and yes, the LGBTQ community loved it, but so did so many other people, other types of readers, and I just, I think we just want good stories, and we want new stories, and we haven’t seen good, new stories, you know?

PART TWO

“There’s this assumption that people only read stories that reflect their own experiences, which is absolutely absurd.” SJ Sindu on flipping the literary script

Whitney Terrell: I really enjoyed the book [Marriage of a Thousand Lies], and the tensions that you create—as is clear in the scene that you just read—between Nisha and Lucky, and between Lucky and Kris, are so—first of all, structurally it’s really interesting, I mean it’s a great conceit, this idea of: they sort of create their own arranged marriage, right? And as Sugi mentioned and as you talk about in that passage—you talk about the closet, and how vast it can be—did you think about the history of writing about the closet when you began this book? And what does it mean to write about the closet in 2018?

SJ Sindu: [laughter] Oh man, I had no idea when I started this book, back in the infancy of the Obama years, that it would come out at a time like this. I never imagined this scenario. And when I was writing it—

WT: When you say a time like this, what do you mean by that?

SJS: I mean, in the time of the Trump Administration, and—

WT: Oh, ok.

SJS: When I was writing it, I got all kinds of feedback from agents and editors who said that they didn’t believe anyone would be in the closet in 2012, when the novel is set. A lot of these people I think were living in their little New York City bubbles, but those bubbles have burst now. Having this book come out on the heels of the Trump election means that the closet is again a harsh reality in the American imagination, even though in reality it never went away.

WT: That’s interesting, because I was thinking, like, here in Kansas City—we talked a little about this earlier in the show—but, for instance, there was a very famous weatherman in Kansas City, and everyone who knew him knew that he was gay, and he only recently came out, like, I don’t know, eight, six months ago, on Facebook, and then it was great, and nothing changed, and he was fine, but it’s interesting to me that he chose now as a time to come out, after all those years. I mean, he’d been on the air for as long as I can remember.

SJS: That makes sense, you know. Now is when it matters. Now is when it matters to really take a stand, and I feel similarly. Before this book, before this election, I didn’t—my friends and family knew that I was queer, but it wasn’t as public an identity for me. But I’m glad that this book came out at a time when I could come out publicly and say—because when the powers that be are completely trying to put everyone back in the closet, this is when it matters.

WT: Right.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: So, you were mentioning your difficulties or your path to getting the book published, and the way that people would assume certain things about what the closet was, and for who. And a lot of the crucial stories that first gained prominence featured white men and their stories . . . What were the challenges of publishing content about queer women of color?

SJS: I think that the publishing world right now loves it when you’re marginalized in one way [laughter]. Like, you’re a person of color, you’re a woman, you’re queer. But when you’re marginalized in multiple ways that are intersectional, they suddenly don’t know what to do with you. I had an editor say that he wished the book was either gay or South Asian, but since it’s both he couldn’t publish it because he didn’t know who would read it. There’s this assumption that people only read stories that reflect their own experiences, which is absolutely absurd. Queer women of color have been reading about white hetero men and white gay men all our lives, and it’s time, I think, that this script got flipped. But the publishing world is slow to change.

VVG: Yeah, I mean I think back on—we did an episode about racism and publishing, and I can hear some echoes in what you’re saying of what Ayesha Pande and Dhonielle Clayton were saying in that episode. And the other thing is that there’s also this sort of funny erasure of what actually is a very long and rich tradition of queer writing. And I think actually, for me, some of the most influential Sri Lankan writers have been queer writers. I think of Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy, which came out way back in 1994, or Mary Anne Mohanraj’s Bodies in Motion, or Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, or YaliniDream, or other folks, and I wonder, as a queer writer, what kind of queer-themed content you had to read when you were younger, and how it influenced you and how you found community, given what may have been available to you, were you to have known about that tradition, or perhaps not?

SJS: Right. Well, when I was coming out and sort of being forged as a writer, it was at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, so it was a completely white space. I didn’t know any other South Asians who were queer, except one person on campus, and I didn’t know any other South Asians who were writers. So, I was in a completely white literary space, and I took this gay and lesbian literature class with Dr. Amelia Montes, at UNL. And we read Funny Boy . . . and it changed my life. I was a computer science major before this, but after this class and after taking some creative writing classes—encountering this story, this novel, convinced me that there was a place for my stories out there in the world, that I could actually make a difference in someone else’s life.

Transcribed by Damian Johansson and Stephen Paur