When I first started to write, I was aware of being queer, but I didn't write about it. Queer poems would probably not have been accepted by the editors I sent them to.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Lots of my writing can be accurately called lesbian, but I myself am queer and date people of all genders.
Of course it is very limiting to be labeled a lesbian or queer writer. We live in a homophobic culture, and even people who aren't hateful per se assume they won't get anything from a queer book.
Many of my poems are not sexual.
Few writers in history have ever been 'politically correct' (a notion that rapidly changes in any case), and there's no reason to imagine that gay writers will ever suit their readers, especially since that readership is splintered into ghettos within ghettos.
A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people.
The poetry you read has been written for you, each of you - black, white, Hispanic, man, woman, gay, straight.
Not every gay person recites poetry or has read Keats. You can get readers through anything if the characters are complicated. You can't dismiss Josey Wales' quite liberal worldview.
I very much like writing about homosexual relations. I don't quite know why. Perhaps it's because I feel there's still so much to be said about them.
I changed my writing style deliberately. My first two novels were written in a very self-consciously literary way. After I embraced gay subject matter, which was then new, I didn't want to stand in its way. I wanted to make the style as transparent as possible so I could get on with it and tell the story, which was inherently interesting.
Gay writers now have both a sense of history and the fables that allows them to dwell in the realms of the ridiculous and at the same time talk seriously about things.
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