“You can’t be serious.”
Twice in my life, academic colleagues and friends have had that reaction when I’ve told them what I was planning to do.
The first time was in the early 1990s, when I decided to teach a course on LGBT politics at the University of California, San Diego, one of the first of its kind.
Eyebrows were raised, gossips gossiped, but I went ahead. The course was popular and always over-subscribed.
The second was when colleagues asked me what I was planning to do when I retired in 2020.
After forty-plus years as a reasonably successful scholar and college professor, I was planning to writing a gay detective series. . .what turned into the Bob and Marcus mysteries. To date two have been published, Shade in 2022 and Fault Line in 2023. A third, Rain, will be published in June, 2024, all by Pisgah Press.
One critic calls the two lead characters, Bob and Marcus, “a gay Nick and Nora”—possibly the nicest compliment I’ve ever gotten.
Most of my professional colleagues think I’m nuts. “Why?” they ask. “Why wouldn’t you just go on writing”—by which they mean academic writing.
It’s a fair question.
One of my motivations has been the desire to chronicle what it has been like to be a gay man over time. The first novel is set in 1985, the height of the AIDS crisis, when Bob and Marcus meet by chance after someone they both know is murdered. The second is set in 1989, after they’ve established themselves as a couple and moved to California (following my own geographic trajectory). The third is set in 1994, and the fourth, now in the planning stages, in 2004.
The gay community went through profound crisis and change over this time period—AIDS, gays in the military, marriage–and I felt fiction would be the best way to capture the nature of gay male subjectivity over this length of time. Fiction can express feelings, longings, regrets, and ambitions in a manner traditional scholarship generally does not.
Another reason I’m doing this is to challenge the rigidity of American academic life. The assumption in American colleges and universities is that every faculty member in every discipline, at every point in their long career, will find “new” knowledge and then produce a steady stream of books and articles sharing that knowledge with the world.
The result is often articles that are read by only a handful of specialists and books that do little more than gather dust. That model of scholarship was imported to America from German research universities in the late nineteenth century, and was based largely on the natural sciences—scientists who worked in labs or collected rock samples or observed animal species.
That type of scholar does indeed make new discoveries.
But in some fields, the task is not discovery but interpretation and criticism, and that is certainly true in the specialty I chose, American political thought and constitutional law. It’s also true for those who study literature and, to some degree, philosophy.
When the task is interpretation and criticism, it’s difficult to say something genuinely new.
That’s why it took me 10 years to write my second scholarly monograph; it took that long to come up with something that seemed original. That need for originality is one of the reasons some scholars, particularly in the humanities and some social sciences, write in esoteric language almost impossible to decipher.
I do believe in scholarship, and I’ve done my fair share, but when I retired I wanted something else—a different kind of creativity. I wanted to use different mental muscles.
And, since my academic specialty included knowledge about politics, the legal system, and police procedures, I thought it would be fun to use that knowledge in a different way.
Above all, I wanted to use my imagination.
As a bookworm for as long as I can remember, I always found that fiction can express profound ideas and moral themes that can sometimes be difficult to find in traditional scholarship.
Take, for example, the topic of sexual longing and adultery. Psychologists and sociologists study it–why people commit adultery, how often, under what conditions, the effect it has on marriages and children and society. All of this is valid and useful.
But can any of those academic studies convey the deeper truths revealed in, say, Anna Karenina, or Madame Bovary, or, in gay fiction, Andrew Holleran’s masterful, gorgeous discussion of gay desire, Dancer from the Dance? Do scholarly analyses of war convey as much, with as much immediacy, as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 or Jayne Anne Phillips’s Machine Dreams? Does a psychological study of alienated youth teach us as much as Catcher in the Rye? Is there any deeper discussion of race than in the novels of Toni Morrison?
Not that I’m Tolstoy or Morrison or any of these other brilliant writers. It’s presumptuous of me to even mention them, perhaps. But there is truth in those novels—a different kind of truth than scholarly truth, to be sure, but profound truth, artfully expressed. And these novels have an impact on the reader that can last a lifetime.
Fiction can also reach an audience that does not keep up with scholarly works—which is to say, almost everyone. Most people don’t read the New England Journal of Medicine or the American Political Science Review.
And, as I’ve discovered to my delight, writing fiction is fun and challenging in new ways, and involves a completely different process than scholarship.
In most scholarship, the real work is what you do before you sit down to write—reviewing the literature, gathering information and data of whatever kind, outlining the argument. The actual write-up is often secondary.
Fiction is different.
Before I started doing it, I read a whole series of how-to books. There are conventions in different genres of fiction, and it was helpful to see some of the masters of mystery spell them out, but overall, the general advice on how to write fiction boils down to one central piece of advice: Get your butt in the chair and keep your hand moving (or your fingers, if you type your first draft).
In other words, just do it. Establish a writing time (for me, mornings), sit down, and write. You may end up throwing away page after page, but sooner or later, if you trust the process, you will come up with a sentence or a paragraph or a chapter that shows you where you need to go.
It works. Images and scenes and plot lines come to you, seemingly out of nowhere, and it feels miraculous, because you are creating something new.
It’s (one of) the best feelings in the world. And it’s the process of writing where the real work happens.
And so I hope I live long enough to help Bob and Marcus grow old together, and I hope they will live on, long after my last scholarly article has sunk into standard academic obscurity.
So I write. Fiction.
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