Who’s Yer Daddy?: Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners

Some Notes, Thoughts, Recollections, Revisions, and Corrections Regarding Becoming, Being, and Remaining a Gay Writer

52 Jus­ tin Chin I. How to Be a Gay ­ Writer 1. Be Gay. 2. Write like a mo­ ther­ fucker. II. How to Be a ­ Writer Who “Just Hap­ pens” to Be Gay, Just Hap­ pens as if One Ac­ ci­ den­ tally Stepped into a Pile of Gay, as if a Lark ­ Pooped Gay on One’s Head 1. Be Gay. 2. Write like a mo­ ther­ fucker. 3. Ex­ plain to all and sun­ dry until their ears bleed how ­ you’re gay but not ­ really gay but gay. Or ad­ a­ mantly re­ fuse to. III. To Read These days, it’s dif­ fi­ cult to im­ a­ gine a time be­ fore the Inter­ net and its easy any­ time ac­ cess to porn. But for me as a wee pup, grow­ ing up in a seem­ ingly ster­ ile place like Sin­ ga­ pore in the early ’80s, where even Some Notes, ­ Thoughts, Rec­ ol­ lec­ tions, Re­ vi­ sions, and Cor­ rec­ tions Re­ gard­ ing Be­ com­ ing, Being, and Re­ main­ ing a Gay ­ Writer A Gay Writer 53 Cosmo was ­ banned, find­ ing a Play­ boy or Play­ girl was ­ nearly im­ pos­ sible. No, what pu­ bes­ cent boys—gay or not—had to set­ tle for were “dirty” nov­ els. Har­ old Rob­ bins and Sid­ ney Shel­ don were kings at that time, Tom ­ Sharpe to a ­ lesser de­ gree. What you’d do was go to a book­ store, find said ­ author’s book on the shelf, and let it fall open to the ­ places where the spine was al­ ready ­ cracked, and voila! the dirty bits. This was, of ­ course, be­ fore the ­ game-changing ad­ vent of the Inter­ na­ tional Male Under­ gear cat­ a­ log. What was the first gay book that I read? I do re­ mem­ ber read­ ing Oscar ­ Wilde’s fairy tales in high ­ school, and I loved how gor­ geous and poig­ nant and ­ tragic and heart­ break­ ing and ­ swoony they were. There­ weren’t ac­ tu­ ally any Acts of Gay in those sto­ ries, so it’s more of a flam­ ing book than a gay one, ­ really. There is an­ other book ­ though, that I found it in the ­ school li­ brary. But for the life of me, I can­ not re­ mem­ ber what it was, even as I’ve tried­ through the years to fig­ ure it out. All I re­ mem­ ber is this: The two male char­ ac­ ters mar­ i­ nate in a haze of ennui, there is an orgy of sorts, some­ one ­ sticks a bot­ tle up his ass, the bot­ tle ­ breaks and the char­ ac­ ter dies, and every­ one swans about being super maud­ lin. It might have been Coc­ teau (though I can’t seem to place it) or some other ­ French ­ writer, or pos­ sibly Ger­ man, def­i­ nitely Eu­ ro­ pean. I do re­ call how the whole thing felt so il­ licit: read­ ing it late at night so no one would walk in on me, feel­ ing that I ­ needed to fin­ ish it and re­ turn it be­ fore . . . I don’t know be­ fore what. As if being found in pos­ ses­ sion of that book would tele­ graph to the world what a big fat homo I was. And I was. IV. It Be­ gins I would not be the ­ writer that I am today if not for the poet Faye Kick­ nos­ way. That is the sim­ ple plain truth. As a fresh­ man at the Uni­ ver­ sity of Hawai‘i at Manoa, I ­ signed up for Intro to Crea­ tive Writ­ ing, pick­ ing the class sec­ tion that ­ suited my sched­ ule best. And in one of those ser­ en­ dip­ i­ tous ­ strokes of life, I ended up in ­ Kicknosway’s class. She was tough—boy, was she ever. I was fight­ ing back tears after our first con­ fer­ ence, when she red­ lined and ­ pointed out all the flaws in the poem I sub­ mit­ ted. But she was also en­ cour­ ag­ ing, and if you did good Justin Chin 54 work, she let you know. Mid­ se­ mes­ ter, she in­ vited me to sit in on her­ upper-division class. ­ There’re...