Ry Mullen: A Collage, and Queerness

To address this particular issue: queerness, in both the broad and the specific sense: nothing less than a card's on the table confession will do. I am a straight man. I am not queer, or bisexual. Yet the issue is relevant, because queerness in the humanities in this day and age is omnipresent. A straight male writer had better articulate just how he feels about gayness or queerness, and what he makes of the sorts of circumstances around individuals which they engender. So: when I write about queerness, it arises from a lifetime of observation, rather than direct participation in the queer world. An observer has the potentiality to be more objective than a participant, even if he cannot be as real, as felt, as someone who lives (and dances) on the razor's edge of the queer world, with its sense of being angled against the normative. All these issues manifest in Ry Mullen: A Collage, which I wrote at the end of 2019. The character Ry is based on two queer men who happened to be prominent in my life in the mid-Aughts: one African-American, one Caucasian. Both had a sense of in-built charisma around the idea of salesmanship, a social gift; yet both were forced to hide behind a salesman-like facade who they really were. The point of the collage is a definite one: the reader is asked to determine whether the game, as Ry chooses to play it, is really worth it, or if Ry is merely rationalizing that his life as a dealer in the world takes on deeper meaning and substance, as indicated in his more authentic writing. The collage form I was playing with in the late Teens has a resonance, of course, with T.S. Eliot and the Waste Land; only Ry is meant to take the harsh asperity of Eliot and warm it up, make it more personal. Also, to point out that the direct path towards human intimacy is one which the Mod crew often miss. These issues are pertinent, also, in Wittgenstein's Song, from the mid-Aughts, which takes the tack of poetic formality also to attempt a manifestation of intimacy, within queer consciousness. Ultimately, an outsider to the queer world is just that, and must remain so. I do not have the experience or the credentials to speak of the queer world with authority. The position of the straight male writer, however, is determined, if he is any good, by a sense that engagement with the queer world, attempting to make a contribution to it, is more or less mandatory in 2023. That's the sensibility behind what you see here.