Point of View- "Gay Geography"

 Point of View- Gay Geography

My editor advises me that the reader needs more information about the narrator, her intentions, and what drives her into the company of gay men. I cringe. To me, it is painfully obvious why Eliza doesn’t like straight men. I am Eliza.

I resent his suggestion that I dig deeper into my subconscious to better articulate why I feel safer in a gay environment than a straight one. For me, this is a therapeutic issue, not a character development problem. Although he tells me the writing is beautiful, he wants more information. Why do I always feel that people ask of me more than I am willing or able to give? Whatever setting, dialogue, scene, character development, or narrative arc, so obvious to me, as the writer, is unclear to the reader.

Know your audience. In my first novella, “Gay Geography”, my audience is the large tent of LGBTQ readers and straight readers who are intimately familiar with gay life. Perhaps they have a sibling, a parent, a child who is queer. Perhaps they are queer and have not made peace with it, or are simply too young or too repressed to know who they are in the world, whether that be straight or gay. In the end, the only thing that matters is that my audience is familiar with and respectful of gay life, because that is the world I grew up in, that is where I feel most myself, and therefore, most at home.

Still, I have paid for his critique, and I need to at least appear willing to consider his suggestions, when what I really feel is irritation. He is a gay man; he of all people should understand why a fag hag is an integral member of any gay family and deserves her place at the table. I resent defending my right to sit down at the kitchen table in Rehoboth Beach, surrounded by my five gay roommates. I earned my place at that table, and I belong there. Why do I have to delve into Eliza, the narrator’s motivation to eat at that table?

I go through the pretense of being open- minded to his editorial critique. He suggests I change the POV from third person to first person singular, the standard pronoun of all memoirs. I explain that the manuscript was originally memoir, but to protect my family’s privacy, I have spent an entire year manually changing and double-checking every pronoun and fictionalizing the story. So, that suggestion is a rule out. Then he compliments me on the writing and how poetic it is. I explain that I am a published poet. Then he dares to suggest I rewrite it as a prose poem- a form of poetry I dislike. So that, too, is a rule out. His last suggestion I take begrudgingly, and I write a two-page single- spaced explanation of why Eliza loves her gay family and avoids straight men whenever possible. To be responsive to his advice, I painstakingly take that 2-page synopsis and change just those two pages from third person singular to I. And when I re-read that explanation, shifted to the pronoun I, then and only then, do I remember to cry.