—Ronald L. Donaghe, Editor IGW
Francis recently completed his second novel, Jagged Angel, which he hopes to publish through Aventine Press sometime in 2004. He hopes to begin writing a new novel later on this summer.
SEXUAL CONTENT: WHEN DOES EXPLICIT BECOME
TOO MUCH?
—©2004 by John Francis
Recently, I had a heated debate with another writer who runs a gay fiction website. He had recently made the decision to exclude running any stories with R- or X-rated content, basically saying that he felt there was a profusion of pornography on the Internet, and he was tired of contributing to it.
I got indignant about this, and argued that to just arbitrarily slam the door on sex scenes in novels was silly and unreasonable. Even worse, I looked upon his attitude as a subtle kind of censorship, since he was now put in the position of having to remove stories that had been on his site for months (if not years).
I feel that the current political atmosphere in America has had a chilling effect on free speech. We’ve got a government that’s obsessed with Janet Jackson baring her breast on the Super Bowl, with Howard Stern doing fart jokes on the radio, and trying to stamp out Gay Marriage to appease religious fundamentalists. I believe these are all BS smokescreen issues, and the government is really ignoring the really important problems we have, like the lousy U.S. economy, rising unemployment, the lack of good education, the need to cure AIDS (and other important diseases), the importance of stem-cell research, and how the U.S. should stop trying to be the policemen of the world, particularly in the Mideast.
Well, a veritiable firestorm erupted from my arguments. I told the website owner that my main problem with his decision was that he needed to do three things:
1) give us the specifics on why he felt that stories with sexual content should not be allowed.
2) tell us how reading stories with sexual content will harm teenagers (particularly when he already has an “18 years or older” warning banner on the first page of his site).
3) give us a specific list as to what can be permitted in stories, vs. what cannot; tell us what the limits are.
But the website owner got very flustered and refused to do any of this. Instead, he insisted that it was his website, and he could do what he wanted with it -- something on which I completely agree. I simply wanted to know why he felt the way he did, but I never got anywhere with my argument.
I was appalled by the attitude of a half-dozen people who agreed with him, many of whom supported the web owner’s position and felt I was trying to attack the guy. I argued and argued that to me, sexual content should be a matter of choice by the writer. For a non-paying website to dictate to an author how their story should be written is absolutely appalling to me. (It’s bad enough when a paying editor forces you to make some changes, but that’s the reality of commercial book and magazine publishing, and I accept that to some degree.)
I pointed out that some of the greatest works of gay fiction ever written, such as Patricia Nell Warren’s brilliant novel The Front Runner, or Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story, had scenes that wouldn’t pass muster with his website’s new rules. Neither novel is pornographic by any stretch of the imagination; the sex scenes are there, but they’re what I would call “R-rated” at best – not in-your-face explicit, but still beyond a PG. Sort of like the difference between an issue of Playboy and one of Hustler. Or, in gay terms, the difference between an episode of Showtime’s Queer as Folk (which I would call a “soft R” in movie terms) and a XXX-rated Falcon video. And that's a big difference.
My argument was, to me, the website owner should worry more about whether the writing is good first, and worry about the sexual content second. If his concerns were about teenagers getting exposed to anything, I think his biggest fear should be about them getting exposed to mediocre writing more than anything else. To me, as long as the characters are well-drawn, the story is compelling, and the quality of the writing is good, then some degree of sexual content hurts no one -- or at least, no sexually-mature teenager. (I am opposed to exposing young children to sexual content, but I also believe that’s a matter for parents to police.)
Anyway, after about a week of beating my head on a brick wall, I finally took the bull by the horns and wrote a response myself for the website owner, and told him he could use it without attribution. I also apologized for upsetting him (which I clearly had), and gave my permission for him to remove all of my critical remarks -- remarks which, by the way, were in the most measured, rational tone possible. Here’s the statement I gave him to use:
“It seems to me that a lot of the gay fiction websites on the web, like Nifty, have stories that are almost totally about sex and not about people. I want the stories on my site to concentrate on story and characters first, along with good writing, and make sex a secondary issue. I'll permit some sexual content in the stories on my website, as long as it isn't gratuitous or extremely graphic. I'll make a judgment on a story-by-story basis, and will try not to have any hard-and-fast rule that tries to cover everything, because so much of it is a matter of personal taste.”
And that was it. He chose not to run it, never did answer my final email (with my apology), but did -- with my permission -- delete all the messages in the debate about sexual content in gay fiction. To date, he hasn’t responded to my argument or my attempts at a reconciliation.
So my question is: am I crazy here? Is sexual content a bad thing? How much sex is too much? To put things in perspective, as I’ve gone back and polished my novels Groovy Kind of Love and Jagged Angel, I’ve actually toned-down some of the sex scenes in later drafts, mainly because I think some were getting into an uncomfortable area. For my own writing, I prefer to make the sex scenes a little vague, and more about the emotions of the participants rather than what their body parts are doing. But that’s strictly my own preference. I think strong sex scenes can work if the writing is good enough -- I’d offer Gordon Merrick’s gay best-sellers as examples where this works well -- but for my own work, there’s too much of a “yeesh” factor when there’s a (ahem) blow-by-blow description of everything going on. To me, it’s the difference between erotica and pornography.
My second controversy: A few months back, I had a (polite) screaming match with a commercial book publisher who read my manuscript for my new novel, Jagged Angel, but then sent it back saying, “it’s not bad, it’s actually well-written, but we can’t publish it because the characters are under 18.” I asked where there was a U.S. law that said that stories with teenagers having sex could not be published, and they responded, there was no law -- it was just their “policy.” Case closed.
A passionate debate followed. I’ll spare you the details except to say that I couldn’t convince the editor that a) teenagers [straight, gay, and otherwise] can and do sometimes have sex, b) books of fiction with teenage characters having sex are legal in North America, and c) booksellers can and do sell books about teenagers having sex. (I can name 10 gay literary classics on this theme… but I digress.) My arguments fell on deaf ears, and now I’m preparing to publish Angel myself through P.O.D.
So my second issue is: why is there a prejudice by publishers against gay fiction with teenage characters? Am I crazy, or is this legal? And does this bias exist, or is it merely a figment of my imagination?
Tell me what you guys think. And please, I’m not just looking for a chorus of people agreeing with me; if I’m off-base, tell me so.
–JohnFrancis2004@yahoo.com
