Intimate Contact: Garth Greenwell on Book Bans and Writing About Sex

Acclaimed novelist Garth Greenwell joins co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to talk about book banning, writing about sex, and the different (and often coded) reasons people talk about limits to reading. A former high school teacher, Greenwell discusses the ideological roots of book bans targeting Black and LGBTQIA+ writers and describes how books like Giovanni’s Room gave him hope and inspiration as an isolated queer teenager in the South. Finally, he talks about the need for generosity and patience in this debate and why we should all be willing to have hard conversations about what is, and is not, appropriate reading material for students.

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Check out video excerpts from our interviews at LitHub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This podcast is produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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Selected readings:

Garth Greenwell

Kink, edited with R.O. Kwon • Cleanness • What Belongs to You

Others

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison • All Boys Aren’t Blue by George Matthew Johnson • Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan • In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado • ‘Banning My Book Won’t Protect Your Child,’ by Carmen Maria Machado, The New York Times • Carmen Maria Machado • Edinburgh by Alexander Chee • Another Country by James Baldwin • Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin • Just Above My Head by James Baldwin • Anonymous Sex edited by Hillary Jordan and Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan • Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters • Skinned Alive by Edmund White • Edmund White and Emily Temple on Literary Feuds, Social Media, and Our Appetite for Drama Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 2, Episode 4 • O. Kwon and Paul Harding Talk God and Faith in American Fiction Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 2, Episode 9 • A Streetcar Named Desire Elia Kazan • Judy Blume: ‘I thought, this is America: we don’t ban books. But then we did,’ The Guardian • Brontez Purnell • Ocean Vuong • “Why book banning is back,” Vox • “A Texas lawmaker is targeting 850 books that he says could make students feel uneasy,,” NPR • Cleanness | Work in Progress: Garth Greenwell & Mitzi Angel on Writing About Sex

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From the episode: 

Whitney Terrell: I agree completely with what you’re saying, and I wanted to just go back a little bit to the book that broke your class. You’re talking about [Alexander Chee’s novel Edinburgh]. I taught Another Country, which is a James Baldwin novel with Rufus Scott as this very complicated Black main character. And it was a mixed, you know, it was not a white-only class. So I had a lot of Black students and they were like, ehhh, we don’t like this guy, you know? And I thought, OK… Because that book would have not seemed out of place when I was in college. I don’t think people would have objected to it in the same way, and I thought that was interesting. I’m learning from that, you know?

Garth Greenwell: Yeah. And I think it’s right that those conversations change. I mean, look, I absolutely will still teach Another Country. I still teach Giovanni’s Room, which again, like for me, was the book that saved my life. You know, teaching it in the queer aesthetics course at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I put front and center the fact that I do think that the book has a homophobic logic at its heart, and one of the things that is deeply moving if you read Baldwin’s novels just first to last, is one of the things you see him doing is climbing out of a pit of homophobia, so that in Giovanni’s Room, queerness is only ever a shut door.

And then by Just Above My Head, he can imagine these full, rich, affective, long-standing relationships between them. And that’s very moving. But still, this is another way in which I think our conversations about what it means for literature to be affirming are too simple and get things wrong. And also another way in which generalizations kind of don’t work, that books mean different things to different people. So when I taught Giovanni’s Room and very much talked about homophobia in it, at the end of the unit or at the end of the couple of classes where we had read it, I had a student, a wonderful student from Nigeria who said, you know, I am a queer man from Nigeria, and this book does not help me—I’m from a place where homosexuality is criminalized, and this isn’t the kind of story that is going to help me live my life.

And it was so interesting to me because I said to him, Well, I also am from a place where homosexuality was criminalized. When I was 14 and read that book homosexuality was illegal in Kentucky and those laws were enforced. And somehow, for me, that book—in which homosexuality is only ever a closed door—opens every door. But that doesn’t mean it does that for everyone. And that’s OK, too.

WT: In addition to being a teacher, you’re also well known and rightly praised as an author who writes explicitly about sex and what intimate contact reveals about our humanity and how it’s a crucial part of our humanity. You’ve also edited a volume of fiction with R.O. Kwon titled Kink that gives other writers a forum for this subject. So I’m assuming you find there are important truths a writer can tell by writing about this. Do the writers you published in Kink talk about what drew them to write about sex, and particularly sex that our friendly neighborhood book banners might define as “out of the mainstream” or “inappropriate”? Had they had difficulties in finding places to publish that kind of fiction?

GG: That’s an interesting question, and I wouldn’t want to speak for any of them. Considering the particular stories that we published, they were almost all solicited, so they were written for the volume. So we sort of created a space for them. You know, it is certainly the case that in my own sexually explicit work—so there are two very sexually explicit chapters in Cleanness. One of them was published at The Paris Review. Actually, I think the first story I had ever published. But it had been rejected by other places like The New Yorker and the other story, “The Little Saint,” which, interestingly, they’re both stories that have to do with BDSM sexual encounters, “Gospodar” is one in which the narrator is the submissive in the encounter, and the companion chapter, “The Little Saint,” is a scene in which the narrator is the dominant.

I wonder if that might be a reason that it was—I think that’s maybe the strongest chapter in the book—we could not find the publisher for it. And you know, my editor at The New Yorker, where three of the chapters were published, and someone who I loved working with, was very frank with me about just, you know, this is simply too explicit for us to publish. And again, I think that’s fine. I think it’s fine for a magazine to say we will publish this amount of explicitness, and two of the other chapters that had appeared there also had explicit moments that I think she had said were as explicit as The New Yorker had ever been.

But at a certain point, they had to say, this is just too much for us, and that’s analogous in some ways to community conversations that I think can be healthy. It doesn’t make me angry that The New Yorker wouldn’t publish that piece. It also, to me, doesn’t say anything about the value of the piece itself. R.O. and I, in conceiving of the book, we certainly did want to create a space for collecting together work, some of which I think probably would have a difficult time in the world. It’s interesting to me—I haven’t read this, but there’s just this new book that’s come out in the last couple of weeks called Anonymous Sex. Have you guys heard about this?

V.V. Ganeshananthan: I was just thinking about this!

GG: Wonderful writers are in it, and I haven’t read the work so I’ve no opinion about the concrete work in the book, but the conceit of the book is that they’re all writing about sex and they’re doing it anonymously. So their names are on the cover, but not on the individual story. I have to say, that seems very odd to me. I just don’t quite understand what that’s about. Because I do think there is a space in the world for this kind of material. Again, maybe it’s not going to be The New Yorker, but, Kink—I mean, there was definitely a place in the world for Kink. Simon & Schuster was willing to publish it, and it was a national bestseller.

So I think we shouldn’t pretend that these spaces don’t exist, because then that can also be a kind of discouragement. And I feel very strongly that queer writers have often been told, if you write sexually explicit stories, they won’t be published. I mean, I hope in a world that can accommodate Ocean Vuong and Brontez Purnell and Alex Chee and Carmen Maria Machado and so many great, great queer writers—I mean, Detransition, Baby, which has extraordinary sex writing in it—you know, I hope that it’s harder to tell queer writers that story, that your work won’t be published if you write about these things candidly and explicitly.

VVG: I wonder, you mentioned Anonymous Sex, which I was also thinking about as you spoke, and I was thinking about the ways in which writers from marginalized backgrounds are often read autobiographically, in very simplistic ways. And I was thinking about the ways in which having that work untethered from their names might have spared them that even as it presents other challenges.

GG: Well, that’s really interesting! I like that idea. That lets me think about it in a slightly different way. Because to me, it suggests that there’s something shameful—Edmund White is in that book and Edmund White writes explicitly about sex under his own name as well as anybody. Talk about books that I read when I was 14, 15 that were not age-appropriate, but absolutely exactly what I needed. Edmund White’s collection Skinned Alive was absolutely one of those books for me. So, you know, I had been thinking about this…. I like what you say. Yes, that it sort of releases one from that horrifying presumption of autobiography, which you are quite right to say we often face.

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Transcribed by Trint. Condensed and edited by V.V. Ganeshananthan, Carter Groves, Brooke Spalding-Ford, Shannon Moran, Maria Starns, and Kayla Wiltfong. Photo of Garth Greenwell by Oriette D’Angelo.