Racing Turtles

The truth—that queer, sexually truthful literature is seen as pornographic, and is systematically kept out of the hands of most Americans, gay and straight—has been replaced with a false story of a nonexistent integration and a fantasized equality. […] In my own experience, the [mainstream] equation of queer literature with pornography is undeniable. […] Of course, in gay time, “recent” quickly disappears because so many participants are dead, and others have been silenced. It’s hard to have collective memory when so many who were “there” are not “here” to say what happened. Once the recent past is remembered, then the Amazon “glitch” [in which LGBT titles were automatically removed from Amazon’s listings during a porn purge in 2008] becomes all too consistent. So, here is just one example, exhumed from memory.

In 1994, a coalition of feminists and right-wing politicians in Canada passed a tariff code called Butler that was designed to restrict pornographic production. Instead, it was applied in such a way that it allowed officials at Canada customs to systematically detain and destroy gay and lesbian materials at the border. A gay bookstore in Vancouver, Little Sisters, had so much of its product seized that it could no longer operate. As a result, Little Sisters decided to sue the Canadian government. 

My friend John Preston had just died of AIDS. He was the author of some iconic leather and S/M novels, many with literary bent. His novel Mister Benson had been serialized in Drummer magazine, and created a subcultural phenomena. Men would wear T-shirts asking Mister Benson? Or asserting Mister Benson! While he had a less explicit series called Franny, the Queen of Provincetown, John was perhaps best known for his book I Once Had a Master. Since he was newly dead, I was asked by the Little Sisters legal team to come to Vancouver and testify on John’s behalf. And because I was very clear in my opposition to state repression of gay materials, I had no problem agreeing. 

The Canadian courthouse was quite shocking to this New Yorker. No metal detectors, no armed guards at rapt attention in every corner. The building looked like a Marriott hotel, with lovely plants, comfortable seating, and a coffee bar. But do not be fooled, the Canadian government proved to be a vicious animal with a demure exterior. 

Tensions were high in the courtroom the day I arrived. The trial had been going on for weeks and many writers had testified. Patrick Califia, who at the time had presented as female with the name Pat, had been on the witness stand the Friday before and had done so well that the Crown had refused to cross-examine him. Interestingly, “Pat”—who was known as a butch leather dyke—had taken the extreme step of wearing a brown corduroy dress, which impressed me. We were, after all, trying to win. I, and I assume many of the women testifying, had agonized over what to wear on the stand. The only nice dress I owned in 1994 was black velvet—kind of a parody of a dress, and something to be worn to the opera. Anyway, I wore pants. Becky Ross, a Canadian academic, testified before me. She wore a dress, but I think she always wore a dress. Anyway, the Crown had been pretty hard on her, asking her to define “fisting.”

John’s books were being persecuted on five counts. The questions I had to address were: Is it violent? Is it degrading? Is it dehumanizing? Does hit have literary merit? Is it socially redeeming? If I had had my way, I would have argued that even if the books were violent, degrading, et cetera, they still should be available. However, Canadian courts had already ruled on that question, so my only remaining strategy for protecting his books was to “prove” that Butler should not be applied to him. Not that the law was wrong. 

So many years later, this is the conundrum gay writers faced with the Amazon exclusion. Mark Doty, Larry Kramer, and many other principled gay writers noted online and in print that books like Giovanni’s Room and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit were being falsely labeled as pornography. Once again we were forced by a state or corporate apparatus to claim that our literature was different from that dirty stuff, instead of part and parcel with it. But it is the homosexuality that got the books marginalized in the first place. Not their sentence structure.

[…]

The actual testifying did not go that well. Once I got on the witness stand, the Crown claimed that I was not qualified to be an expert on “harm.” I said that as someone who has experienced “harm” for being a lesbian, and especially for being a lesbian writer, I was quite expert on the matter. I argued that “homophobia is a social pathology that causes violence and destroys families.” I said that gay and lesbian books are a mitigating force against homophobia and therefore are socially beneficial and the opposite of “harm.” The Crown claimed that I was not qualified to make this statement because I am not a sociologist. They won, and I was forbidden from addressing that issue in court. 

This was the first indication I had of our judge’s conceptual limits. As we moved along, I came to learn that Milord did not know what  “deconstruction” meant. And later he revealed a puzzlement over the meaning of the word “enema.” Oh no, I thought. If he has never heard of enemas or deconstruction, we are doomed. 

The Crown read out loud a passage from one of John’s books describing nipple torture. It was a bit surreal. Then he asked me if this was “degrading or dehumanizing.” I did my best.

Through the rest of the trial the government repeatedly made clear their view about any gay sex. They had seized a lesbian anthology called Bushfire because it included the line “she held me tightly like a rope,” which they said was “bondage.” They had also seized a book called Stroke, which was about boating.

In the end, after many more years and courts and dollars, Little Sister lost their case. The judge ruled that Canada customs officials had, and still have, the right to decide which materials are not suitable to come into the country. Interestingly, they quickly ratified gay marriage, while continuing to retain the right to insure that no married gay man will ever go looking for Mister Benson. 

Those two days in court made it crystal clear to me that in the minds of many people, homosexuality is inherently pornographic. And there is nothing that has occurred in the subsequent three presidential terms that has created any other kind of context. The best proof is in our contemporary placement and treatment of sexually truthful gay literature. That John Preston was invited to give a keynote address at Outwrite, the now defunct lesbian and gay writer’s conference, was a sign of the prominent and central role of sexually explicit content in gay literature when it was controlled by the community. Now that gay presses and bookstores have been gentrified out of existence, first by chain stores like Barnes and Nobles, which are now being outsold by Amazon.com, gay literature is at the mercy of the mainstream. […] This puts gentrified queer people in a terrible bind: we can dissociate ourselves from the full continuum of queer literature, that is, from queer sexuality, thereby falsely describing our literature as “quality” if its sexual content is acceptable to straights. But that is a kind of implicit agreement that we only become deserving of rights when presenting as somewhere between furtive and monogamous.