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. Rather, he imagined what it was like to be an upper-class woman – one who knew her place in her straitlaced world and was seemingly content with it – who is suddenly, rapturously and disastrously derailed by an adulterous love.
The key word in that sentence is “imagined.” Imagination may be breath to a novelist but it is in short supply in the Internet Age, which craves reality. “Is it a true story?” people ask, rather optimistically when I go into my sales pitch. When I remind them it’s a novel, they’re almost disappointed. As with TV and the movies and radio before TV, the Internet has created an illusion of intimacy and authenticity. People tweet and Instagram and post selfies on Facebook as if these were experiential. But the very act of capturing an event removes you from actually experiencing it. If you’re photographing the Van Gogh at The Met, you’re not looking at the Van Gogh at The Met. You’re seeing it through a lens but not the lens of the mind.
The result is a loss of imagination – though not for all. “Cool” was how a young woman named Danielle responded to my sales pitch and without further ado plunked down her money and asked me to autograph her copy. When I told her that two of the characters – swimmer Daniel Reiner-Kahn and his mother, Dr. Daniella Reiner – shared names similar to hers, she brightened even more, grasping that nothing in life is accidental. Again, the imagination at work.
Chereese Jervis-Hill – the compassionate president of Events to Remember, organizer of Sassy Ladies – told me she didn’t see my characters in terms of gay or straight but rather as people in relationships. That, however, goes beyond imagination, which I classify as an intellectual gift, to empathy, which I see as an emotional one.
Back to the vendor who opened this post. She was convinced that I must have some connection to gay people. I explained that in my former life as an arts reporter, I had met many gay people and had reported on AIDS and the arts community’s response to it from the days of “And the Band Played On,” Randy Shilts’ early chronicle of AIDS in America. I covered it all – Day Without Art on World AIDS’ Day (Dec. 1) and Dancing for Life, among other benefits. And when AIDS became a chronic illness, like certain forms of cancer, and the media lost its sense of urgency in covering it, I wrote one of my best columns – an elegy to AIDS and a moment in my life that I sensed was passing that I called “And the Band Moved On.”
I had been on the front lines of a movement whose face was often female – Princess Diana, Elizabeth Taylor, Mother Teresa, Dr. Matilde Krim. It certainly wasn’t male, not in the days of the Reagan Administration.
“So you are a fag hag,” this woman said to me.
I was kind of taken aback, and not just because I considered that a pejorative term. “Fag hag” implies a particular fascination with gay men. While I certainly have some close gay friends – including one I lost recently, former theater critic Jacques le Sourd – I wouldn’t say they were the impetus for “Water Music.”
I was and am fascinated by power – which men have and, I believe, want to keep and which some women want. Some would say women already have it.
“In my field (the medical profession), women are the powerful ones,” another Sassy Lady told me, rather smugly I thought.
Well, good for her. Women dominate the colleges and most professional schools. Yet for all that they still – 50 years after Gloria Steinem – earn only 77 cents on every dollar a man earns.
But I’m not even talking economics. I’m talking emotional currency. I have seen the brutality that men can visit on women. I wanted to write a story about power, jealousy, dominance, submission (and yes, hot male sex). There are plenty of stories in which women are on the losing ends of those equations – or where they pull the strings obliquely. (“Fifty Shades,” everyone?)
I wanted to write a story in which the feminine may still be trampled by the masculine but women at least were out of the direct line of fire.
And if that makes me an f-word – as in feminist – well then so be it.