As a counter-argument to my particular stance, I enjoyed reading through the diversity of voices and places in Edge of the World: An Anthology of Queer Travel Writing, an important new book which was beautifully edited by my friend Alden Jones. Alden and I taught together when I worked at Emerson College, where we also co-taught an Honors Seminar in the early aughts. Alden is an awesome and celebrated travel writer herself, one whose unique perspective on the world has altered and opened how I approach such things myself. At the close of her insightful introduction, Alden posits that the essays in the book are “meant to raise questions around the centering of one’s own culture” and to “undermine the idea of cultural centrality.” The fifteen essayists gathered here all do a consummate collective job of that as they criss-cross our country and the globe, while also exploring and blurring the various boundaries of their own sexual identities.
Andrew Ellis Evans’ “My Cohort,” which opens the anthology, is well-placed and remained my favorite piece after I’d finished reading the rest of the book. It’s wide-ranging, a kind of heartfelt survey of the many places the author has traveled with his Zimbabwean zoologist boyfriend Brian, whom one woman along the way refers to as Andrew’s “cohort,” being unsure what else to call him. One truth about queer lives abroad, still today, is that others aren’t quite sure how to regard us. Even in a city like London, my being alone at the theatre with my rainbow bracelets and my “Queer & Goth” button pinned to my scarf can draw some unusual, curious stares. The majority of the world surrounding us daily remains straight, unfortunately, and ongoingly uncertain of how to fit us into its picture. I could list the places where Andrew and Brian traveled together, but the more important aspect is the reality of their love in the world, and their trajectory through those places side-by-side through time: “I have loved a man all over the world. I have woken up next to him on all seven continents. He is my constant. He is my opposite pole. My dive buddy in dark seas. The man who holds my hand when the plane bumps too hard. The man who followed me across the ocean, around the world, across a lifetime.”
From there the book spelunks from Edmund White’s semi-historical overview of the remote queer artists’ enclave of Key West, to lesbian family dramas in Senegal and Cambodia, to Garrard Conley’s post-gay conversion therapy Peace Corps service tutoring a masculine hottie in Ukraine, to a search for queer utopia in contemporary Berlin in trans Jewish writer Calvin Gimpelevich’s “Future Past,” which finds the author by its end revelling at the Hello Daddy party: “I am in a dark room pressed with bodies, and we are dancing, dancing.” It’s one of many moments in the book where the oneness of individual identity gets blended into the people surrounding you, the same way the map of the world gets swirled together by the moving travelogue of an anthology such as this.
Closer to home, sometimes that effect occurs on a smaller scale. Sara Orozco’s “Lessons in Digging and Replanting,” for example, finds its author in a harrowing scenario of getting arrested and sentenced for drug possession, only to be assigned to do 200 hours of community service via hardcore landscaping (planting ferns!) at the Billy Graham Center in Asheville, North Carolina, where her evangelical host David proclaims to his queer mentee, “I believe that we are both children of God, Sara. That is enough. It has to be.” Religion darts in and out of these essays pretty much continuously, which annoys me to be honest (as a truth about the world, not about the essays themselves), but it’s sure a fucking statement on why queer people still struggle to gain traction in cultures around the planet, given what a stranglehold religion has on most of them. But I can read the book and then go right back to ignoring religion almost entirely.
The truth for me, my own truth, is that I don’t even really want to “visit” places at all. I want to drift through them and tunnel into them at once, by tunneling into my own mind while I’m drifting through them. As externalized as these essays present the world and the authors’ intimate relationships all around it, they also make a clear case for how much the internalized world matters for each of us. What we contemplate privately within the confines of our own public solitude is just as significant, ultimately, as the physical, worldly spaces that surround us at any given moment.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment