New views, new voices

SX News
Issue 280
8 June 2006

Copyright
Reproduced with permission

New Views, New Voices

Two emerging authors represent the movement away from 'gay' literature
Report Reginald Domingo

At his recent appearance in Sydney, Edmund White said: "I think many of the younger writers are what we might call 'post gay'. They are quick to identify themselves as gay if anybody cares, but what they're really up to is writing - about people in general. There might be one or two gay characters, but it's not their theme or the world they're exploring necessarily."

This certainly applies to two emerging gay writers featured in Making Tracks, the latest anthology of creative works by students from the writing program at the University of Technology, Sydney.

Sarah-Jane Norman

The nameless narrator in Sarah-Jane Norman's short story, Permafrost, shares many commonalities with her creator. Both are in their twenties. Both were haunted by their memories. Both found their way to an isolated fishing village, north of Japan, where one ventured to explore another world, the other to fill a void left by her lover. And both are lesbian.

But, as Norman assures me, being gay is not what it's all about. "I guess it is a lesbian story," she says. "But it's also about memory, and nostalgia, and the ghost of someone, and what residues people leave on you." And indeed it is. It is a wistful tale that follows the journey of a young, impressionable woman, who trails an older female lover between continents.

Many stories with gay characters are ruled by the fact that they are gay, but here, it is only one aspect that make up their complexity, a bearing that also applies its author.

Norman undertook an undergraduate degree at UTS, majoring in creative writing. Her work has been performed by the PACT Theatre, at the Noise Festival, and on Radio National, and her writing will be featured in upcoming issues of literary journal Meanjin, and Cultural Studies Review.

And while she is gay, she is quick to rebuff the label 'gay writer', and all its associated assumptions. Instead she chooses to write, as all writers should, whatever it is she feels compelled to express, free from any obligations in addressing homosexual themes. "I suppose I don't necessarily try to consciously address any themes as such, but I work from particular angles and particular places and generate ideas from particular origins," she says.

"I just kind of go, 'This is what I'm working with and this is what is fascinating me at the moment,' and I just need to go with that, work with it, see where it takes me and not try and push my writing in a direction it doesn't want to go."

And it's an approach that enables her writing to go beyond her world.

Nigel Bartlett

Nigel Bartlett, laments an associate's predicament: "I got a friend who is black, she's had three books published in England, and she wants to get them published in America. But in America they want her to make more of the black issue, of the race issue. But she doesn't want to do that. While she's a black woman, and her main characters are black, that's not the issue."

The same can be said about Bartlett. Although he may be gay, he hopes it's not the issue by which people, himself included, will define his writing. "I don't want to write a coming out story, I don't really want to write about HIV or AIDS and don't want to write about drugs or sex," he says. "I like to write about characters who are gay but are just living their lives." Like John Kingsgrove, the tormented gay uncle who mourns the loss of his missing nephew, in his short story, Missing Boy.

As with Norman's story, the themes here are not centralised to a person's sexuality, instead they explore the complex relationships and quotidian emotions of one particular gay man. "It about what it's like to lose someone else's child," Bartlett says. "And about feelings of guilt, paranoia, and that in some situations, nothing is black and white."

Writing has dominated much of Bartlett's career. His career in journalism spans many publications, with work appearing in Belle and Inside Out. He is currently a sub-editor for Sunday Magazine, the lifestyle supplement of The Sunday Telegraph.

But his interest has always remained in fiction. "It's a very different feeling," he says. "With magazine writing, there a formula you have to write to - whereas with fiction it's something that just comes out of my head."