... having been breathed out

Joel trampled down the tough undergrowth till he came up flat against the house. He was bored, and figured he might as well play Blackmail, a kind of peeping-tom game members of the Secret Nine had fooled around with when there was absolutely nothing else to do. Blackmail was practiced in New Orleans only after sunset, inasmuch as daylight could be fatal for a player, the idea being to approach a strange house and peer invisibly through its windows. On these dangerous evening patrols, Joel had witnessed many peculiar spectacles, like the night he’d watched a young girl waltzing stark naked to victrola music; and again, an old lady drop dead while puffing at a fairyland of candles burning on a birthday cake; and most puzzling of all, two grown men standing in an ugly little room kissing each other.

—Truman Capote, Other Voices Other Rooms

Because my current writing project gestures toward a very specific breed of non-supernatural gothic fiction, and I wanted to refresh myself about how exactly that genre works, I’ve been meandering back through Truman Capote’s 1948 debut novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms. It’s a great read, a classic of the Southern Gothic, and proving very helpful in terms of pinpointing how to evoke an eerie, stagnant atmosphere without any literal ghosts. But what’s really interesting to me is observing my own reactions as compared to the last time I read it.

Specifically, the only other time I read the book was in mid high school (16ish years ago), when I was devouring as much queer lit as I could get my hands on. What I wanted from a queer novel, back then, was direct and obvious representation. I wanted everything spelled out, not just in terms of character identity but in terms of action. In other words, I wanted women kissing/fucking/dating other women, and men kissing/fucking/dating other men, with everything above-board and all the dots connected, and anything other than that did NOT read as queer to me at that time. So I remember being disappointed in this novel (among many, many others), because the closest thing to a romance in the present day happens between a boy and a girl, and there is no (what I thought of at the time as) open acknowledgement of queerness apart from that.

And I think–putting aside the way the above thinking invisibilizes bi and pan people, and is perhaps inherently over-invested in the simple gender binary–I think there is definitely a place for that kind of extremely literal reading I was doing, at fifteen. You shouldn’t have to be a close, skilled reader just to get some queerness in your fiction. There should be obvious queer relationships just like there are obvious het relationships!

However. I do find the juxtaposition fascinating and kind of hilarious, in retrospect, because when I read this novel now, I almost can’t imagine a queerer text.

Seriously: the queerness is just BURSTING from this book like juice from an overripe peach. It’s not only the presence of flamboyant, cross-dressing Randolph; or the fact that the main character Joel is constantly reminded of his own effeminacy by everyone he meets; or the fact that he eventually “falls for” (for some value of the phrase–what takes place does not conform to the expected romantic plotline) the bullying, butch Idabel over her demure and feminine twin. It’s an aesthetic, an interest and an anxiety around gender and sexuality, that permeates every turn. It’s in all the small moments: the introduction of the aristocratic lady cousin with disconcerting hair on her upper lip; or Florabel’s prissy distaste for her tomboyish sister; or the passage above, in which Joel remembers catching a glimpse of two men kissing, and it is more puzzling to him than death.

I mean. To my eyes, now, this novel reads as openly and obviously obsessed with queerness. If it didn’t belong to a gloriously over-the-top genre to begin with, I might even call it overdone. And it’s just so interesting to me that at fifteen, I finished a novel that ends with a brocade-clad bachelor nursing an effeminate young man back to health while heavily implying that he (the bachelor) likes to do himself up in ladies’ old Mardi Gras costumes in the family attic–that I finished this novel and thought “Oh, well, that was disappointingly straight.”