Ick!

So plowing through the collected works of Michael Nava, I've come upon Finale, Short Stories of Mystery and Suspense, edited and introduced by him, thinking this would be very heaven (as in, "Heaven is lying all day on a sofa reading endless French novels"). Then, reading the list of contributing authors, I note with disquiet and disgust that two of them, Katherine V. Forrest and Ivy Burrowes, are authoresses (ick!); and when I read Nava's introduction, I find with creeping horror that he says things like: "I do not fault gay and lesbian writers who choose to write about the experience of being gay." As if that single word could apply to the absolutely dissimilar experiences (and natures) of (gay) men and (lesbian) women--whatever heterosexual bigots, women, pussy-men and pansies may stupidly presume about their similarity . In the next paragraph, teasingly (I suppose, but double ick!), Nava says, "You need all kinds of ingredients to make a mystery work and the mystery writer must cast her nets far and wide into her experience to populate her story [my italics, of course]. This kind of imagining forces us to think beyond ourselves and our immediate circumstances" Then: "The two stories in this collection that best illustrate my point are Katherine Forrest's 'Jessie' and Richard Hall's 'Death writes a Story.' In both the issue of homosexuality is so subtle as to appear absent and yet, try to imagine them if homosexuality did not figure in them at all. I am particularly proud, by the way to include both these writers. Katherine Forrest's Kate Delafield novels, popular among women, deserve a wider following among men. Both Katherine and Kate are first-rate...."

I fucking doubt it.

Ick! is a personal thing. Your ick! is not necessarily mine. One can say, however, that one of the things most resented, by women about men, is the fairly unanimous reaction of men to shopping, clit flicks, clit lit, unnecessary disclosures of feelings of jealousy, inadequacy, and "vulnerability," details of personal hygiene: Ick! Being a virgo as well as a man, having a real innate, karmic revulsion against vulgarity, cruelty, uncleanliness, emotional exhibitionism, the list of things that I can't bear to think or hear about is--so my friends tell me--longer than most: Surgical procedures of any sort, including hypodermic injections; all atonal music except my own; all farts, poops, mucus other than my own; just about everything written by women who aren't Frenchwomen; anything at all suggestive, much less explicitly revelatory, of the menstruating, chlamydia-prone physical nature of women; all disclosures whatsoever of the creepy negative emotional natures of women--and especially, and in spades, the affective nature and physical practises of lesbians. It's my ick! and I indulge it with studied abhorrence. As a general thing, if I see that something about men--especially gay men--has been written by a woman, I shield my eyes, making the crossed-fingers Vampires Begone! sign and--not just don't read it--pretend I haven't seen it. If an anthology of purportedly gay literature contains anything written by a lesbian, I shudder, sigh, and put it back on the shelf. And, of course, I do the same with anthologies of ghost stories and mysteries. It's not so much that I want women, their emotional and physical natures, to be kept in their place, as that I don't want them anywhere near me.

And so, as with Ethan Mordden and twelve-tone music, my latest, most passionate enthusiasm, Michael Nava has utterly ambushed, utterly sandbagged me, with his vile and nasty equivalence of gay and lesbian "experience," his nauseating, treasonous intrusion of icky lesbian sensibility (even, O Horror Unspeakable, of lesbian eroticism--Who knew, really, that there was such a thing as lesbian eroticism, until I googled Forrest's Curious Wine and read the reviews?) where I had hoped and believed never to encounter it.

So what am I going to do? Forrest's lesbo fantasy is the second story in the anthology. I'm halfway through the first, very good story by a male writer, and I'm dreading what lies next more and more, every time I turn a page....Shall I have even to read the unheard-of Ivy Burrowes' cooty-ridden lucubration?

God fucking damn it to hell....