Whose art is it anyway?

April 3, 2017

The painting shows a young black man in a coffin, his face a blur of color in the manner of Abstract Expressionist art – and violent death.

The departed, then, is not just someone who has succumbed to the ills that the flesh is heir to. Emmett Till was just 14 years old when he was lynched by two white men for flirting with the wife of one of them. “Open Casket, “ on view at the Whitney Biennial, is Dana Schutz’s 2016 painting of a mutilated Till in the open casket his mother, Mamie Till Bradley, insisted on. The work has drawn protests and condemnation from black artists and writers, who question the right of a white woman to appropriate a searing moment in black history. ...

Your life, my book… or Here’s to you, Ms. Robinson... or Throwing Anna under the train (again)

July 1, 2014

From a provocative piece by Roxana Robinson in The New York Times’ Sunday Review (June 29) on a subject that has haunted me since I became a self-published novelist:

“Fiction writers aren’t in this for the money, since most of us don’t make any,” she writes. “So what are we doing, messing about in other people’s lives?”

What indeed? Robinson’s novel “Sparta” is about a young male Marine – and while most of the vets she’s heard from have been supportive, one reminded her that she’s never been in combat and knows nothing about it. Just as a few readers have asked me, Whatever would possess you to write from a gay man’s viewpoint in “Water Music”?

Robinson has my stock comeback, Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina"...

Are women who write about gay sex ‘fag hags’?

April 14, 2014

At the end of Sassy Ladies Shopping Night Out last Friday at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel in Tarrytown, a vendor approached the table where I was selling my new novel, “Water Music.” She had been by earlier, but our conversation had been cut short by the appearance of customers at her table. Now true to her word, she came back as I was packing up and bought a copy.

She had told me that her son was gay, coming out to her when he was 14, and I could sense all the pain of that reality, not because she rejected him but because no mother likes to see her child rejected by others. She couldn’t quite understand why I – with no such similar narrative – would’ve, could’ve written a novel like "Water Music," whose four gay athletes whose professional rivalries color their personal relationships with one another. I told her that being a man didn’t stop Tolstoy from writing “Anna Karenina.”

“Yes, but at least he knew what it was like to make love to a woman.”

True, but he didn’t know what a woman feels like when she makes love to a man.