A conversation on the Tragic Queer

[breathedout]

James Rawson, writing in The Guardian:

Whether it’s suicide, Aids (a particularly maudlin Ed Harris performance in The Hours employs both), being beaten to death, state execution, getting shot, or getting raped and then shot, LGBT characters are just not allowed the happy endings that their straight counterparts enjoy. My personal favourite comes from A Single Man, in which Colin Firth simply drops dead for no reason. Presumably overwhelmed by sheer homosexuality, his heart can no longer keep beating. Beware, non-heterosexuals: Sudden Gay Death Syndrome can strike anywhere.

Tumblr user @peninsulamamoenam, in response:

Well. I mean, yes, it is AWFUL that it’s nearly impossible to find serious portrayals of queers in popular media who don’t come to tragic ends. Of course it is. But the problem isn’t that there are movies in which gay men kill themselves. The problem is that there isn’t an abundance of other, more positive representations of queer people to round it out, and when people create things of that nature, they’re told it won’t sell. Yes, we need popular queer romantic comedies and road-trip buddy movies and action movies where the girl gets the girl at the end. But we do also need tragedy.

I can’t help but notice that both of the movies cited in the quote are based on books by gay men. I’ve read both, but I read A Single Man much more recently. I haven’t seen the movie, and don’t plan to, but the book is a furious queer protest novel, and also an aging writer’s meditation on death and decay. The entire work is focused on death: it couldn’t end in any other way. I almost hope the movie was terrible, because otherwise the writer of this article is being a dismissive twit.

I feel like an obnoxious pedant even writing this, because we’re clearly on the same side, but I care because those are the kinds of stories that I’m drawn to in my own reading and writing. And I want to explore ideas about death and failure and disappointment without feeling like I’m hurting people like me, you know?

Me, in response to @pen:

Yes, I agree. It is, FOR SURE, extremely problematic that there is not more diversity of representation in terms of queer narratives in the mainstream media. The Tragic Gay Martyr trope has been done to death, no question. But confronting death (and other loss) is pretty much the one universal task that we as humans all have to do, so to say that queer peoples’ narratives shouldn’t address it, is very limiting.

I think there’s a real difference, here, between people like Marijane Meaker or Ann Bannon, those mid-century lesbian pulp novelists whose characters all died or went insane in the end because the obscenity codes at the time prevented their books being published otherwise; and narratives by queer folks that address death and tragedy because death and tragedy are the ghosts haunting those individuals’ souls. The AIDS crisis strikes me as particularly relevant, because for gay men half a generation older than me—hell, even for moderately cosmopolitan straight people half a generation older than me—that epidemic WAS inescapable, and it WAS devastating, and it DID completely alter the landscape of the queer community. My godparents, who are straight, had a year or more where they went to friends’ funerals every single month. So of course queer artists are going to address that, to try to work through the grief and the loss of it. Even largely comic queer novels spanning the late 70s and 80s, like Armistead Maupin’s Tales from the City series, take it on.

The whole issue is difficult from a creator’s perspective, because to be honest the art that I consistently find most interesting doesn’t conform to this notion of the “happy ending” at all. In a lot of cases there’s not even a question, Romeo & Juliet style, of happy versus tragic ending. There’s just messy humans doing messy human stuff: fucking up, and trying their best, hurting themselves and each other, and sometimes, very rarely, achieving moments of genuine connection. If you end a story on a moment of genuine connection it can sort of resemble a “happy ending”—and those are the kinds of hopeful endings that resonate most with me—but make no mistake: it’s a fleeting if a beautiful state. It WILL get fucked up again, and transcended again, and fucked up again, and that will keep happening until we die. I mean that’s what’s so great about humans! Repeated moments of transcendence in the face of limitless capacity for fuckups! And stories that encompass that truth are the kind of queer narrative I’m most interested in reading and writing, because that’s the kind of narrative that reflects my experience of actual human existence.

But there are undoubtedly also queer people who are most interested in writing rom-coms and action flicks with incidentally-queer characters; and novels set in alternate worlds where being queer is accepted without question; and triumph-against-adversity stories where queer characters face down homophobia and win; and…you know, tons more possibilities I’m not thinking of, and those people shouldn’t be shut down by bullshit arguments about there “not being a market” for what they’re doing. I just think the burden rests on the industry and the audiences to support all types of quality queer projects, rather than on individual creators to censor death and tragedy out of their stuff if that’s what they feel called to create.