Working Class Queer Fiction – from A Queer Mobile

A Queer Mobile
Tom Sidebottom’s and John Schwartzkopf’s family blog
12 February 2006

Working class queer fiction

I’ve loved reading through Everything I Have Is Blue, a collection of short fiction by working class queers. Wendell Ricketts, the collection’s editor, closes the book with a strong essay, ‘Passing Notes in Class: Some Thoughts on Writing and Culture in the Ga(y)ted Community.’ He opens the essay with this:

I have a confession to make. As much as I reject the notion of collective identities, as much as I despise the Stepford Fag mass hallucinations of gay “community” rhetoric, and as much as I long to be the fierce and independent warrior of spirit that the label “queer” conjures, the genesis of this book was a much more fragile concept, We.

I hung on the phrase Stepford Fag. I’m not from a working class background but that phrase reminded me of times I’ve spoken with queers, mostly in the SF Bay Area, who just can’t wrap their minds around the idea that a queer wouldn’t want to live in an urban gay ghetto. I don’t, and I never have. And Stepford Fag pretty much sums up my feeling about it. I don’t have any reason to define myself by the community I live in. I’m weird enough that some parts of me never quite fit into any predefined group. I’ve long since given up the notion of lopping off parts of my anatomy on someone’s Procrustean Bed just so I’d fit in.

There was a strange incident when I was a teenager that this essay brought to mind. I was raised as a professor’s kid, but with some unusual things going on. My father would rather have been a farmer, I think, rather than a professor. Not that he wasn’t good as professoring; he was a full professor at the University of Illinois in the College of Engineering the year I was born. He wrote god-knows-how-many graduate-level textbooks. But I still rather think he’d prefer to have been on the land. Grandma (Mom’s mother) lived with us; she about raised me. She’d tell me stories of growing up poor in southern Indiana. We weren’t fancy.

When I was a teen I had the good fortune to be a lab tech during the summers at a local hospital. I was chummy with several of the full-time techs, especially Sally, a do-gooder wife of a graduate student. Off and on I talked with Madeline, one of the medical transcriptionists, a woman in her late forties who usually had dictation headphones plugged in her ears.

I came in one morning and Sally stopped me. She said she’d been talking with Madeline about her son. He was in the same class that I was in at Urbana High School, and Sally asked her to talk to him about whether he knew me. Madeline told Sally that morning that her son told her that he and I weren’t in any of the same classes and he didn’t think I’d be interested in talking with him. “I’m not the sort of guy he’d be interested in talking to” were his words or pretty close. And now Sally wanted to know why I thought I was too good to hang out with him. I had no idea what to say. I’d never even met the guy.

That was my introduction to class-based behavior. I’d been running around in homogeneously grouped classes with my other professor kid friends; the University was the largest employer in town, and we were everywhere. But we weren’t everybody.

I never did meet Madeline’s son, and I’m sorry I didn’t. Ricketts’s essay focuses a lot on class struggles, and that concept still bothers me. I’d like to think that folks can still talk. Maybe that’s the purpose of his book: to put out narratives from a very different starting point. What’s strange is that a lot of the stories remind me so much of my own family. We weren’t fancy then, and I’m still not, and I like being easy to talk to. Talking and knowing are  just a matter of getting past the veneer.