I’m delighted and excited to share the finalized cover of my forthcoming novel of interracial gay love and the uncanny, Hark — due out on 18th September: you can pre-order it here (UK) and here (US), and there’ll be signed copies available at London’s legendary Gay’s the Word bookshop.

The art — by me — is a composited pair of pen and ink drawings — of the decaying ruins of the (possibly) haunted Tyler plantation house; and of my young lovers, Cleve and Roe, looking on uneasily before venturing inside…

Though my tale is modern — indeed up-to-the-minute, given it kicks off with the take-down of a Confederate statue, and is framed by the spirit of Black Lives Matter — I aimed for a sense of ‘classic literature’ in the cover design — hopefully even ‘beloved book I read when young’. I hope it successfully conveys something of that intent — and that readers of all ages respond to it in that spirit.

John R Gordon is the author of 8 novels, including the Ferro-Grumley Award-winning Drapetomania. He script-edited and wrote for the landmark Black gay TV series Noah’s Arc, and is with Rikki Beadle-Blair co-founder of radical queer imprint Team Angelica Publishing. His new novel, Hark, a haunting tale of gay interracial teen romance that begins the night a Confederate statue is pulled down in a dying Southern town, is out on Sept 18th, and can be pre-ordered here (US) and here (UK). Drapetomania can be bought here (US) and here (UK).

I don’t, by and large, suffer from writer’s block — don’t subscribe to it as a particular psychological malady (in fact I think it’s unhealthy to fetishize it in that way, because to do so can in and of itself generate paralysis). However, when I do get blocked — or perhaps I’d rather say held up — it’s usually because the project is too vague, too embryonic to be born yet, but a deadline has cropped up — either for some funding stream or other, or because someone else involved in the project is suddenly keen to drive it forward. So, as suddenly, one is obliged to produce, and it can feel like there’s nothing to draw on; nothing inside. You said to someone that you’d write some tale about x, and now it comes to it, you have no ideas, or at least nothing that needs to be expressed.

How, then, can you get the egg implanted in the womb-lining, and urge the gestation along in a way that avoids mental miscarriage, dispiriting prolapse, or a morass of birth defects cropping up as you attempt to force the development? What is a fast way to break through so-called writer’s block?

One technique I’ve always found to be helpful is to set aside the computer (or nowadays phone), go somewhere pleasant with a pad and pen (for instance, in this weekend just gone’s oppressively humid blaze, my local Costa coffee, which has aircon as well as boisterous Somali chatter filling the cooled air).

Avoiding internet distraction, and as far as possible without thinking consciously before you begin, (try not to even think, ‘Now I begin’), start to write a literal stream of consciousness. Exclude nothing, even such a thought as ‘I don’t know where to start’. Include questions, images, thoughts and observations, snatches of dialogue, phrases, notes to self, irritations and resentments. Don’t go back or reread; only write forward. Don’t revise, don’t judge; just keep moving. Ignore contradictions: decisions about those can be made afterwards.

Don’t try to write well. Put down voices as they come to you. Their register needn’t be fully achieved. Just keep going until they start to evolve into particularity. Flow without reflection from prose into dialogue and back. Consistency doesn’t matter. The important thing is to be in the moment: to not be looking on as ‘a blocked writer’: you aren’t blocked because you are putting down words. There is no ‘you’ holding things up with judgments or self-doubt. However messy and diffracted your thinking, however many dead ends you venture up — so what? You’re on the journey. If an alley is blind, forge on in a new direction instantly. Don’t cross anything out — don’t waste the time. Put a question mark after anything doubtful. If something seems helpful write ‘yes’ after it or in the margin. Add feelings as prompts — ‘I like this’ or ‘could be good but boring here’ — and move along.

You will meet challenges. For instance, an honest thought — which you should, as above, write straight into your stream of consciousness screed — might be, ‘I don’t care about these characters or this situation one bit’. Again: don’t judge, don’t cry about it. This is a revelation, not a block, because having understood it, the next thought is: what would make me care? Are they the wrong sex, sexuality, age, race or any of a zillion other variants? Are there changes you can make within the context in which you are working (for instance the constraints of a low-budget short film, a current project of mine) that will make you care?

Sometimes, it’s true, the revelation, the ‘unblocking’ will be that you should abandon the project. This, though irritating, will at least draw a line under your suffering and liberate you to put your energies somewhere more productive. However, my usual experience in using this method is that one starts to break through to a story — a situation, a collision of characters and themes — that one does care about. That is writeable.

So don’t stop: keep covering the pages. Almost invariably you’ll find yourself getting somewhere: suddenly generating things you respond to on some level — narratively, maybe; or intellectually, or emotionally. Out of the blue you’ll have a scene — probably a middle scene, but it’s likely to suggest — or logically or emotionally compel — an end or a beginning — something to join onto it, to get you moving backwards or forwards within your story. Keep going until you are written out. Then set the scrawl aside and do something else.

Later on, write up what you put down. I usually do this the next day. Because you will have got somewhere by the end of the process, you’re bound to feel cheerier. Now you can assess the value of earlier thoughts and observations: you’ll be able to see what you can in retrospect slot in; what discard. As you boil it all down, and shift elements around to where you begin to see they should fit in your narrative, you will find yourself moving towards at least an outline — hopefully one populated with the beginnings of characters, situations, psychology and aesthetics that interest you enough to become excited: something from which you can write forward.

John R Gordon is the author of 8 novels, including the Ferro-Grumley Award-winning Drapetomania. He script-edited and wrote for the landmark Black gay TV series Noah’s Arc, and is with Rikki Beadle-Blair co-founder of radical queer imprint Team Angelica Publishing. His new novel, Hark, a haunting tale of gay interracial teen romance that begins the night a Confederate statue is pulled down in a dying Southern town, is out on Sept 18th, and can be pre-ordered here (US) and here (UK). Drapetomania can be bought here (US) and here (UK).

My 2018 novel, Drapetomania, is an antebellum epic that follows two enslaved Black men, Cyrus and Abegnego, who become lovers. After a flood threatens to bankrupt the plantation on which they toil for the benefit of their enslavers, Abednego is sold away. Broken-hearted, Cyrus makes the momentous decision to flee the plantation on which he has spent his entire life, and attempt to seek out his lost lover: his true north star.

One premise behind my writing the novel was to use fiction to restore to life and to cultural memory the sorts of lives that passed unrecorded. For of course no-one wrote a gay/sgl slavery narrative in the C19th — such an endeavor would be almost, if not entirely inconceivable. Following the advice of Toni Morrison, I wrote the book I needed to exist.

While responses to the novel have been overwhelmingly positive, an interesting critique came my way from a (white gay) reader, who found my representation of the lack of guilt and shame Cyrus and Abednego feel over their sexuality and relationship unrealistic. Why, he asked, do they not writhe in the self-loathing that would have been, and has continued to be, planted in gay men by conservative Christian moralizing? Certainly there would be no countervailing liberal or progressive tradition to which they would have any sort of access.

I found the charge interesting: had I, as a gay man, been guilty of sentimentality? Given the years of research I had done in order to render a realistic portrayal of various experiences of chattel slavery and the psychology of its brutality and oppression, had I stumbled here, out of the impulse to allow my characters an implausibly heroic mode?

I reflected, and on consideration decided I had not. In fact, I concluded that my critic was guilty (as it were) of his own particular anachronistic thinking. He took the current Evangelical fixation with homosexuality as the singular locus of moral depravity (much worse than murder, adultery or stealing) and projected that current cultural centrality 170 years backwards into the past. I don’t think contemporary reactionary Christian concerns map onto previous centuries tidily. The feverish religious homophobia of today has gained its focus through LGB people asserting their rights on identitarian grounds analogous to those identities based on race (and so modeled on the Civil Rights and Black Power movements) and gender (feminist movement.) That recategorization removes sexuality from the religious frame altogether — moves it away from sin — and Evangelicals are much exercised trying to claw homosexuality (and its kin) back from the world of human rights based on identity, and into sinfulness. It’s this categorical escape (or refiguring) that drives contemporary religious homophobes mad, and leads to them positioning themselves as victims of a supervening, ‘bullying’ secular discourse.

None of that pertains to the world of America in the 1850s, when Drapetomania is set; a time when by and large ‘homosexuality’ as an identity had not been conceptualized — or certainly not beyond the figure of the performatively effeminate Sodomite (whose ‘freakish’ disordering of gender roles also prefigures later trans discourses). It seems to me unlikely that Cyrus or even the somewhat more worldly Abednego, would have experience of such a person or knowledge of such a concept — and would certainly not see themselves as represented or embodied by it/them.

I think one can also ask, what would have tended to be the focus of the Christian preachers and teachers of the time, in terms of the lessons they sought to impart to the enslaved flock? The historical record is informative. With the exception of active abolitionists, (who could expect to be beaten, tarred and feathered for their efforts), white preachers focused on how slaves should obey their masters, render unto Caesar, set little store by acquiring worldly goods, and endure ‘unimportant’ earthly suffering in anticipation of far more important heavenly rewards. Going forth and multiplying was another tenet, though as an ‘animal’ function it was deemed not to need emphasizing.

What would these white preachers have said to the enslaved about sexual morality? First one might ask, would the enslaved have paid serious attention to anything they said, given the exploitative nature of slavery, and the defenselessness of the enslaved in the face of sexual predation and violence. Any sermonizing on sexual morality would surely have been viewed most ironically, and not be seen as having any moral weight.

Moreover, in such a context, without a trigger or catalyst — that is, an event publicly noticed — why would a white preacher bring up the sins of Onan or Sodom? The pseudo-scientific race discourse of the times gave rise to the notion that ‘Negroes’, being closer to the brutes of the fields, were ignorant of the possibility of sexual ‘deviance’, it being a product of perfumed decadence. Why chance planting such decadent ideas in pliant minds, however limited those minds were assumed to be? Better to say nothing. Better to urge marriage, however little it would count for; to urge reproduction.

What, then, might enslaved preachers preach among their fellows? This, of course, is much less recorded. However, we can reflect on its likely focus. Here a guide is surely sorrow songs and spirituals, imprecating the Lord to ‘let my people go’, drown Pharaoh’s army, and liberate the Children of Israel from slavery. Talk of a Promised Land that for white preachers was located conveniently in the hereafter, was a way for Black preachers to model liberation for other Black folks, share notions of a better life, and even outright rebellion: the North might be at least a version of that promise.

Given the vicious (and vastly predominantly heterosexual) sexual oppressions of slavery, pious talk of sexual morality amongst the enslaved must have dwelt in an ambiguous, uneasy realm, and in the slave narratives, and the sermons at times mixed in with them, we see talk of loving friendship and support between man and woman, husband and wife, championed as key virtues. Within this matrix, it seems to me inconceivable that homosexuality — in particular the tale of Sodom and the strictures found in Leviticus — could be in any way a focal point of sermonizing. It could only conceivably become so as a consequence of homosexual relations occurring in some measure publicly, within the immediate environment.

Indeed, it’s at that point in the novel — when the intensity of the friendship between Cyrus and Abednego becomes noticed by the other hands — that Samuel, the slave preacher with whom Cyrus shares a cabin, hints at the issue. However, he references the tale of David and Jonathon, rather than that of the Cities of the Plain. To his question, is Cyrus and Abednego’s relationship like that of David and Jonathon, Cyrus simply replies yes, and is sufficiently imposing (and indeed well liked enough) to foreclose further comment.

I felt that was realistic. Samuel is confronted by two people he has known all his life, and so the Bible tale he goes to is one about two individuals, rather than the tale of Sodom, with its fairly unrelatable power dynamics — stranded wanderers; a lynch mob of locals — its peculiar aspects (handsome angels as houseguests), and queasy foundations (‘Rape my daughters instead,’ Lot offers) that could hardly have sat well with an enslaved man who has witnessed such sexual violence against women at first hand.

Cyrus and Abednego, then, in somewhat differing ways (Cyrus being at heart a pre-Christian animist, and Abednego anticipating the modern secular man to whom religious doctrine is marginal), both inhabit the tale of David and Jonathon’s loving friendship, and find no reason to connect their experience with the tale of Sodom. I think here love is key. It is love that reveals their desiring natures to both each other and themselves, as opposed to experiencing a desire to perform certain sexual acts with someone of the same sex, and seeking out someone who responds to that desire — though the more worldly Abednego is more aware of a desiring identity as a possibility, prefiguring modern conceptions of self, than is Cyrus, the novel’s primary protagonist. Cyrus’ sense of identity formation is brought into sharp focus later, through his encounter with the white coachman, James Rose.

And so I think my interpretation stands. But it was deeply interesting to be given a reason to reflect upon it at length.

John R Gordon is the author of 8 novels, including the Ferro-Grumley Award-winning Drapetomania. He script-edited and wrote for the landmark Black gay TV series Noah’s Arc, and is with Rikki Beadle-Blair co-founder of radical queer imprint Team Angelica Publishing. His new novel, Hark, a haunting tale of gay interracial teen romance that begins the night a Confederate statue is pulled down in a dying Southern town, is out on Sept 18th, and can be pre-ordered here (US) and here (UK). Drapetomania can be bought here (US) and here (UK).

Tender is the Night — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Valley of the Dolls — Jacqueline Suzanne

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter — Carson McCullers

Blind Man with a Pistol — Chester Himes

The Farthest Shore — Ursula Le Guin

Ballad of the Sad Café — Carson McCullers

Clock Without Hands — Carson McCullers

No Orchids for Miss Blandish — James Hadley Chase (a book Raymond Chandler despised, made into a film British censors called ‘a sewer of filth’)

Confessions of a Mask — Yukio Mishima

From Russia with Love — Ian Fleming (all his titles are strong, I think: Doctor No intrigues; I also very much like The Man With The Golden Gun.)

Of my own novels, I think my most memorable titles are Faggamuffin and Drapetomania.

John R Gordon is the author of seven novels, most recently the Ferro-Grumley Award-winning Drapetomania. Buy Drapetomania here (UK) and here (US).

There were many challenges to writing an epic love story between two enslaved black men set in America just before the Civil War; in attempting to realize a tale that would explore same-sex love in ways rewarding to the modern reader, yet feel authentic and true to the mindsets of the period.

Given that (homo)sexuality as an identity is a psychological construct that was only brought into being in the late nineteenth century, I had to consider how Cyrus and Abednego, my protagonists, would conceive themselves as desiring and loving human beings, and explore the extent to which they might understand that locus of desire, that seemingly singular experience, as an essence, as the core of some nascent identity that might connect them with similarly desiring others.

This seemed to me conceivable, given that race too is a construction but is in many respects experienced as an essence, and in Drapetomania comes to the fore in a sequence where runaway Cyrus is obliged to seek the help of white coach-driver James Rose to escape slave-catchers. Is there a possibility of communal feeling between them? — and more pragmatically, is trust possible on Cyrus’ side?

In terms of psychohistory, I was also interested in orienting understandings of same-sex love between black men around — in exploring mindsets both before and after — the Christianity imposed on the enslaved by their enslavers.

While Christianity could be and oftentimes was repurposed by the enslaved to model possibilities for liberation — perhaps above all as Israelites resisting pharaonic captivity — it never liberated unconventional sexual self-expression: if anything, the reverse. In Drapetomania, Cyrus in his thinking harks back to a pre-Christian African animist world-view that is capable of incorporating same-sex love as shamanic, even prophetic — and at the least as something for which there could be a social space — while the more ‘sophisticated’ house-servant Abednego embodies the modern, proto-urban secular man, who views faith-derived personal strictures as quaintly irrelevant to a life well-lived.

Also, both men deploy the Bible tale of the love between David and Jonathon as a shield and a justification in debates with a fellow slave preacher who seeks to make trouble for them.

My view of pre-Christian West African cultures was informed by reading various academic works: Neville Hoad’s African Intimacies; Roscoe & Murray’s Boy-Wives and Female Husbands, Marc Epprecht’s Hungochani and others. Of course levels of acceptance and possibility varied greatly between societies and across time, but what was clear was that there had been same-gender-loving Africans who had lived and loved, had social acceptance and performed understood social roles, and that this had been attacked by Christian missionaries, colonists and slavers as ‘immoral’.

I was particularly intrigued by the concept that sex between men could be ‘powerful magic’, and incorporated a trace memory of this understanding in the climax of my novel, where the love between Cyrus and Abednego is understood by the other rebels as a good augur for their uprising against white tyranny.

Researching same-sex intimacy in pre-Civil War America was challenging. Legal bans on black people acquiring literacy; poverty of time and resources; reluctance to archive illegal activities — all meant that black people recorded little, and naturally would resist recording what was taboo about their own personal conduct — as indeed would white people, in the main. As a recent exhibition on LGBT history at the Tate Britain showed, very little was set down by ordinary or working people in the first place in terms of same-sex love; and what was recorded even by the privileged would often be destroyed by reputation-shielding families, or simply get lost over time. So: little is there.

The one academic book on the subject, The Delectable Negro, by gay African-American scholar Vincent Woodard (revised on his decease by Dwight McBride et al), shows the lack of primary texts — a handful of court-cases; some very tangential mentions in published slave narratives. I came across conspiracy theory websites promoting the idea of the routine mass rape of male slaves (‘buck breaking’) that offered no evidence whatsoever, and then argued that this lack of evidence was a sort of proof of events ‘too shocking to speak of’ — basically attempts to justify black homophobia as different from other homophobias, and deserving of especial exemption from censure due to a greater rootedness in (racialized) victimhood.

This is not to deny that, inevitably, every sort of abuse of the enslaved of either sex by the slavers will undoubtedly have happened somewhere at some point. However, even abolitionist texts keen to highlight every white Southern slavery-supported vice (routine rape of women; selling own children into slavery; voyeuristic degradation of women and men in slave auctions; depriving the enslaved of respected marital status; occasional records of predation by white women upon black men) lack even a hint of decrying ‘unnatural vice’ as an abolitionist tactic. (By contrast: the abolitionist British MP J. S. Buckingham wrote of ‘unnatural’ transvestite revelers at a ball in his 1833 Journeys in the Southern Slave States, one of my research touchstones, demonstrating that the topic was — obliquely — mentionable.)

What is of course lost in all this is love, and I wanted to write about love and its liberating possibilities. Casting an eye over the world and its history, it’s evident that there have been same-sex lovers across the millennia, in all and every culture, and so I sought to write a Narrative that must surely have been true, but could never have been written at the time, and show same-sex love as aligned with the revolutionary and liberatory. Cyrus and Abednego are ultimately liberated as lovers by enjoining the battle for Black freedom that is the novel’s climax, from which to turn away would be a defeat, as, as the work progressed, I found myself unable to see their love — their personal flight to freedom — as a triumph if they willingly left others in chains.

For myself, there was a liberation in writing about deep and intimate love between two men who by the novel’s end I think — hope — embody a notion of joyous love in liberatory struggle to free all those who are oppressed.

Drapetomania by John R Gordon is available in good independent bookstores, and globally on Amazon — USA here; UK here. It is the winner of the 2019 Ferro-Grumley Award for best LGBTQ fiction, and was shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award for best gay novel.

Who — or what — first inspired you to write? (prose fiction, that is.) Any childhood or school favourites, or books secretly discovered along the way?

For as long as I can remember, I have had a spiritual longing and loved stories. Whenever we visited my mother’s family in Leicester — which we did quite regularly — I was fascinated by the Hinduism I saw there. I would constantly ask one of my aunts to explain things to me and she would tell me stories. Why does Ganesh have an elephant head? Krishna and Radha were lovers but not married? How can Ravan be the devotee of Shiva and at the same time a villain? Life in all its complexity is explored in the Hindu stories — as in other mythologies. One of the first things I wrote was a very short holy book. I wrote something about the importance of non-violence, being kind to all living beings; I don’t remember the rest.

In Leicester, my mother, her siblings and my grandmother would sit up till late at night, drinking chai, reminiscing, talking about ancestors, family, and their childhoods in Kenya and, in my grandmother’s case, India. They were all storytellers, and for them, as members of the diaspora, I think the stories and storytelling somehow became a home..

Pappa also played an important role in introducing me to literature. Every night before bedtime at home in Norway, my little brother and I would sit in our pyjamas at the kitchen table, drink our milk and have a sandwich or something, and Pappa would read out loud to us. Mio, My Son by Astrid Lindgren is one of the books I remember. The important thing, more than the actual stories, what lingers, is Pappa taking the time to do this, and the sense of us sitting there together in the darkening evening.

From an early age, I also loved reading books by myself, being free to explore a whole universe on my own. At some point, I got editions of the Hindu epics, including Ramayana, as well as Gandhi’s autobiography, from members of my mother’s family. And I sought out other books with links to India. I travelled to India and other places through reading — and writing — as often as I could.

How do you begin a story? What sort of inspiration makes you decide to set something down?

When I travel, I often get inspired; perhaps the movement, the change of scenery, does something with the mind and soul, introduces something or frees something. I wrote the first drafts of several of the stories in Lord of the Senses while staying in Bombay, a city I regularly return to.

I think it’s also about making myself available: When I go to Bombay, I often have few plans except to be with friends (and sometimes lovers), wander around and observe people and life, drink coffee, read and write. When I am aware of what is going on in me and around me, there is always something interesting happening.

Also, emotional life events, such as falling in love or heartbreak, often make me want to write; to somehow understand the process through creating a story, as well as turning it into more than my own personal pain or pleasure, a story that can be appreciated by more people, something particular and universal. For example, I wrote the first version of ‘A Safe Harbour’ soon after a very painful breakup.

Do you have a set routine, a preferred setting in which to write, a typical number of rewrites?

When I first start writing, I often tell my inner critic that he can rest in another room for a while. That way I can write freely, without too many ideas of how a story should be and what others will think. At a later stage, I invite my inner critic back in, ask for and appreciate his contribution. I also share a draft with, and ask for feedback from, one or two reader-writer friends, who understand and appreciate what I want to say and how I want to say it, and whose own writing I really respect. A good editor is also crucial in the process.

Sometimes I am inspired, and writing is easy and fun, and I can suddenly start writing in the middle of the night. At other times, it’s more difficult. I have a regular meditation practice and that helps, I think. I tell myself that I need to just show up in front of the Mac, much like I show up on the meditation pillow, for a certain time, regardless of how I feel. Writing is like life in general: in the end it is all important, the ups and downs all part of the process. And from a spiritual and therapeutic point of view, the most important thing is how I respond to those ups and downs. I don’t need to inflate my ego when it is going well or beat myself up when it feels difficult. I want to be aware and kind to myself regardless.

I can write almost anywhere so long as I am alone and undisturbed by other people. My family has a holiday home in Andalucía. There is a gym nearby. There is chocolate and good food easily available. There is wild nature, and mountains to run in. Just outside the house is an orange tree. There is a view of the ocean and sky. I did the last bit of work on Lord of the Senses there. When I did my morning meditation on the final day, I thanked the orange tree, the ocean, the sky, the gym, the people there, the food, the books I had read, and the innumerable factors that had contributed to the writing and creation of this book. All these write, not ‘I’ alone.

Who would you say you are writing for, as your primary audience? I like that your work is not overly accommodating of non-Indian readers (while giving them enough contextualizing information to keep up.)

I guess the primary audience is people like me, LGBTQ folks with some link to India. I wrote several of the stories during (and as part of) the mobilisation for LGBTQ rights in India and many were published in Indian LGBTQ magazines such as Gaylaxy and Pink Pages. There has been a paucity of Indian LGBTQ literature. It is important to find some recognition in a story, I think, to have your identity and experience somehow validated. This has been important to me. Indian LGBTQ literature speaks to me in a very special way. And I wanted to contribute to this growing body of literature. We create a community, a sense of who we are and can be, through storytelling.

At the same time, I also hope that others who are not LGBTQ folks with a link to India will read and appreciate the stories. We all have the ability to empathise and expand ourselves through stories. And we are all human, after all; not that different, though the particularities of our longing, loving and heartbreak differ somewhat. I have read lots of books by white and/or straight people, with white and/or straight narrators and characters, and I have not found it difficult. All good literature deals with the complexity of life and can be enriching to everyone.

I don’t want to be overly accommodating of straight, white readers, though. Partly out of respect for the primary audience — LBGTQ folks with an Indian link, or more broadly queers of colour. White and/or straight people are often enough the focus in literature. It is also partly an aesthetic, stylistic consideration: When the narrator and protagonist in my story is Indian, it breaks with the whole illusion if common Indian words such as ‘Dalit’ and ‘Nanima’ are explained. I think there is enough information in all the stories for readers to understand everything without much knowledge of India, but it may take a tiny bit of patience and effort from straight, white people.

Much of your work feels autobiographical; do you see a division between writing that draws directly on your experience and writing that explores very different lives and settings, or are they very much part of the same creative act/process?

As soon as I recount or tell a story about an experience I have had, I am at a distance from the actual experience. Some things are included, some are not. What I remember and how I tell the story will depend on my current state of mind, the audience and overall setting. It is already a creative act, and fiction to some degree. In the stories that draw on my own actual life experiences, I also take the liberty to consciously change certain details and use my imagination.

However, I do feel there is a difference between writing that draws on my own experience and writing that explores a rather different kind of life. The latter requires more, or a different kind of, imagination and empathy, I guess. And I feel somewhat cautious when doing this, knowing that I cannot really and fully know how it is to be a Dalit or a woman, for example — or even someone who is born and bred in India, which I am not. Still, I do take a chance and write stories with such characters. Often I then seek feedback from someone who does identify with one of those groups. I think I can write about many things, but I do want to be aware of, and constantly explore, my own position and how it may influence my writing.

Many of the themes of this collection — modernity and tradition; the at times rather different values of Europe and India; the different outlooks of the generations on issues like caste, faith and sexuality — are usually shown in Indian and Diasporic literature as being inevitably in conflict with each other. Yet you tend to find an at times unexpected potential for co-existence between them. Was that something you set out to show — an optimistic, ideological vision, or is it one more simply rooted in your own life experience and observations?

I think it is both an ideological vision as well as something that is rooted in my own life experiences and observations. I believe there are various parallel traditions or tendencies within a culture and society. And this is not a linear development, always moving from oppression towards liberation, but rather tendencies that co-exist in the past and in the present.

In India there has been an oppressive tradition or tendency (‘conservative’ would not be precise), that is casteist, heterosexist. But there has also been a very inclusive and emancipatory one that has celebrated diversity and challenged oppressive practices such as casteism and heterosexism. The title story shows this clearly: The poet saint Meera, who lived 500 years ago, defied norms on sexuality and gender, leaving her husband, mixing with people belonging to different castes and religions and backgrounds, without shame. Today her songs about love are sung all over India. Another story, ‘Fucking Delhi’, shows that there has also been a very inclusive and loving tradition within Indian Islam — in parallel with a more oppressive one. This is the kind of tradition and tendency, inclusive and loving, that I want to contribute to.

In many of your tales there’s a harmony between the sensual/sexual and the spiritual that can be surprising to a Western reader used to Christian body-spirit duality/oppositionality. Given your predominantly Norwegian upbringing, was the harmony that you express — that your narrators literally embody — hard-won, even defiant; or was it more something that emerged naturally as you grew into yourself?

My spirituality permeates everything, including my sexuality and my writing. I grew up with a very inclusive Hinduism. Even in less inclusive versions, you would have to look long and hard to find anything in Hinduism that condemns homosexuality or queer lives more generally. In fact, there are stories that celebrate the diversity and fluidity of genders and sexuality. There are stories and traditions that celebrate the body and the sensual and include everything as holy. In one story, Vishnu turns himself into the female Mohini and arouses Shiva, they play sexually till they are satisfied, and then Mohini again becomes Vishnu and Shiva returns to his meditation. Awareness, compassion and playfulness are some of my guiding spiritual values. Cock, asshole and anal sex are — or can be — just as holy as everything else in this wonderful world and life.

Of course, I did have some shame around my sexuality while growing up — and still have — but this has more to do with growing up in a still largely heterosexist world. Furthermore, Norway used to be a Christian society, often quite puritanical. Even though it is now quite secular, shame does not disappear that easily. I think many people in Norway who identify as secular still struggle with shame related to their body and sexuality on some level.

You seem a confident citizen of the world, at ease in Oslo, Berlin, Delhi and elsewhere. As someone of dual heritage mostly raised in the West, did you have a journey to make to achieve that confidence? (In an early story there are hints of shame around your — or rather your narrator’s — mother’s Hinduism — her shame; his interest — and later he repudiates his Western name [and she asserts her spirituality]. Yet the narrators of the ‘adult’ stories seem fully self-possessed as gay Indian, or Indian-Norwegian, men.)

‘Growing Up Queer’ is a story that is closely based on my own childhood. It still has elements of fiction, though. For example, my own mother is more cosmopolitan and comfortable with that than the mother in the story, I think. My mother was born in Kenya while it was still a British colony. Her parents, my grandparents, were from India. She studied in the UK. Then she lived in Norway for a long time. Now she lives in Spain. She loves reading Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and the other great Russians. She loves listening to Leonard Cohen. She proudly declares that we are citizens of the world. She has certainly contributed to my cosmopolitanism.

At the same time, she feels rootless, that she doesn’t belong anywhere, and is sad about that. She didn’t want us to feel that way, my little brother and I. She wanted us to feel accepted and at home in Norway. But, when I was growing up, Norway was a society that was very white, homogenous and rather ignorant of other cultures. My mother was for example told that she should only speak Norwegian with us, otherwise we wouldn’t learn the language properly. And so she did what she thought was best for us, adapting to, and adopting, Norwegian culture to a large extent.

Still, as a brown boy, I was never fully accepted as Norwegian. And partly as a reaction to racism and othering, I started to distance myself from Norway and sometimes even demonise white Norwegians. I was increasingly drawn to the Indian part of our heritage — which I came into contact with during visits to my mother’s family in Leicester. (Later, when I have visited and lived in India, I have not been fully accepted as Indian either, of course.)

Today, many of my wounds from racism and othering have healed somewhat. I don’t need to distance myself and demonise others so much. I have matured somewhat. Oslo has also matured, I think. There is greater diversity and understanding. I am not othered so much. Today, I have a strong connection to India and can feel at ease in many cities around the world, but I would say that Oslo is my primary home. In a way, I have come full circle: I live in the same street in Oslo where I lived as a baby, only minutes away from the hospital where I was born and my parents worked, only minutes away from the beautiful graveyard where my mother used to take me for walks, the old, massive trees still there, just a little bit older. I appreciate being cosmopolitan and moving freely, but I also appreciate growing roots in some very specific places.

Many of your stories are very sexually candid and unashamed in representing homosexual sex, which I liked a lot — sometimes non-Western LGBTQ writing can seem rather fearful of a level of explicitness Western gay writers take for granted. You clearly enjoy writing sexually candid tales — one of the pieces in the collection was published in earlier version in the Erotic Review. Did you have to overcome a degree of self-consciousness to expose so fully your desiring — and acting — self? (Put another way: did you worry how your family would react?) — not of course that to write of something is necessarily to have done it!

I think ‘A Safe Harbour’, an early version of which was published by Erotic Review, was one of my first really sexually explicit stories. It has definitely been a process for me. I have had — and still have — some shame related to gay sex. Sex is after all a main reason why we were — and still are — considered sinful, criminal, sick or just dirty. Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, introduced by the Victorian-Christian British, criminalised ‘carnal intercourse against the order of nature’. This is a good reason to include gay sex in some detail in literature and elsewhere; let’s celebrate it, be excited by it!

More than it being a political-literary project, however, I like to write about erotic encounters because it is a way to explore interesting psycho-social, existential and spiritual themes: our desires, our prejudices, what we find attracting or repulsing, our insecurities, our sensitivity to rejection, our longing to be liked and loved, our longing to transcend our small selves and merge with someone or something else.

My mother and other family members have read some of the stories but not all, not the most sexually explicit ones, and I don’t really need them to do that. I don’t think I would want to read an erotic story that my mother wrote, if she ever did. Or maybe I would, actually. Anyway, the stories are out and everyone can read them if they want. I don’t want to be governed by a shame that is damaging to our liberation and growth.

Do you have any concerns about how Indian readers may respond, both to the sexual explicitness, and also to the intertwining of the sensual and the divine?

I am not very concerned. As I have said, there is an inclusive tendency and tradition in Indian culture and spirituality and that is the one I want to strengthen and participate in. Those who oppose that may be insulted when they see or read the book, but I can live with that. However, there is always a certain risk in India that a book may be banned because it is considered insulting to a particular group. Satanic Verses is one such book. I want my book to be widely available, of course, but I also don’t want to change something I find no fault with. It is a difficult balance. We did actually change the title from one that more clearly made connections between a Hindu god and being queer. Apart from that there has been no self-censorship, I think.

You work as a psychotherapist and have published on that subject (The Empty Chair, 2018). All your narrators observe people closely, but not, I think, in service of any analytic schema. How, if at all, do you feel your psychotherapeutic practice informs your fiction writing?

The stories in The Empty Chair are based on cases from my therapy practice. Both in form and substance they are in line with gestalt therapy: they are based on sense impressions, bodily sensations, feelings and thoughts that I became aware of when meeting different clients. And they are written as dialogues. An aware, dialogic approach is both a method and a goal of gestalt therapy.

Other stories that I have written, including those in Lord of the Senses, are not as directly influenced by gestalt therapy, but I do think the therapeutic approach influences me generally in life and in writing. I am glad to hear you say that the narrators observe people closely; that has to do with my training in awareness, I believe. Awareness helps me pick up more in a situation than others might do, that I may later use in a story. Often I also feel that the writing itself is, at its best, a whole-body-mind-process, using all my senses, not just thinking.

Gestalt therapy, with the emphasis on awareness and dialogue, fits well with my spirituality. My highest intention is loving awareness towards everything in me — all kinds of thoughts and emotions and sensations — and around me. This has consequences for both how I write and what I write.

Lord of the Senses is being published on the anniversary of decriminalization of gay sex in India (September 6th.) There’s very little representation of gay men’s lives in India — R. Raj Rao’s The Boyfriend was published 16 years ago, in a very different landscape — & I feel like your writing is representing this newly-liberated moment in India, with its world of Grindr hook-ups, gay hotels, flirtations, fearlessness and lack of inhibitions. Yet some of the pieces were surely written in that strange moment where liberation seemed to have come, & was then homophobically reversed, before being reversed again. What was it like living through (albeit at a remove) — and writing in — that horribly uncertain period?

I was very angry and sad. However, while the Koushal verdict was a setback in terms of law strictly speaking, it may have led to an even stronger mobilisation in response, and had various unintended positive effects. The movement organised a Global Day of Rage with slogans such as ‘No Going Back’. And the outrage extended far beyond the Indian LGBTQ community. Almost all major Indian newspapers decried the decision. Even the government petitioned the court to review its judgment. And in some ways, there was no going back: society had already changed a lot. I spent some time in India during this period, and there were still LGBTQ Prides and parties, Grindr hook-ups, gay hotels, and everything you find today.

As in so many other countries, India’s homophobic laws were put in place by British imperialists, but held onto after independence by Hindu ruling elites; and then, paradoxically, the gay rights movement is in many ways a Western concept, albeit one that Indian activists have been able to adapt to their struggles. Do you have a sense of what led to positive change, particularly in what seems a fervently religious moment?

I am also a lawyer and socio-legal researcher and some of my research has been on the queer struggle in India. In my research I have identified several factors that can help explain the positive change. Law is one factor: the Indian Constitution is very progressive, emphasising non-discrimination and equality. And the Indian Supreme Court has historically played an important role in social transformation; but the backgrounds of the judges matter, of course — something that became very clear with the negative Koushal verdict.

Social change is another important factor: Since the filing of the petition in the early 2000s, the movement made sure to mobilise in the wider social arena as well, thereby influencing society directly and the judges indirectly. There have been Prides, LGBTQ magazines have been established, and activists have engaged with the media more generally. There has been a lot of media attention, mostly positive. Increasingly, there are books and films and TV-series that feature LGBTQ characters in a positive manner.

A third important factor is tradition and religion: In addition to a rights framing, the Indian LGBTQ activists have also engaged with the morality and tradition framing that is often dominated by opponents of LGBTQ rights. LGBTQ Indians have highlighted the inclusive tradition or tendency that has existed throughout Indian history, one that has celebrated LGBTQ loves and lives. And they have argued that criminalisation was British and imperialist. Since it is difficult to find anything in Hinduism that condemns homosexuality and queer lives, the BJP has come out in different voices on the issue, with some ministers supporting LGBTQ rights. And so, despite the Hindu Right currently dominating Indian politics, the LGBTQ rights movement has been largely successful.

Early on, LGBTQ Indians allied with various other movements, including the women’s movement, and have emphasised intersectionality and the connections between various struggles. One of the signs during a Pride I attended said, ‘I like my men beefy’, alluding to the increasingly heated controversy around beef, which especially impacts Muslims and Dalits. LGBTQ Indians have multiple identities — some are gay and Muslim, others lesbian and Dalit, etc. — so it makes sense to have an intersectional approach. The LGBTQ mobilisation has also been part of a wider mobilisation for the right to love, whether it is same-sex love or love across castes and communities. However, while solidarity with other marginalised or oppressed groups may be strategic, in today’s India it may also have a high cost. An important question for many LGBTQ Indians now and for the future, a question that may contribute to defining both our individual and collective identity, is the following: Shall we focus narrowly on promoting LGBTQ rights, perhaps even entering into an alliance with the Hindu Right in power, or shall we show solidarity and allyship with other, increasingly marginalised and oppressed categories of people? Needless to say, I want the latter. The way I see it, being queer involves a radical loving and questioning of norms and divisions. This is reflected in the stories in Lord of the Senses, stories that deal with love across castes and religions and ethnicities as well as same-sex love.

Do share with us some of your favourite authors/inspirations (musicians, say, or film-makers) with us — those who inspired you to write, or who you enjoy listening to while writing — or indeed who challenged you in any way.

When I am working on a story, I like to go fully into that story. That influences what I read and listen to. Working on the title story, I really dived into Meera’s love for Krishna. There are many translations and renditions of her poetry; one that I enjoyed reading while writing was that by Robert Bly (Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems). A song I listened to, and danced to, was ‘Rang Barse Bheege Chunarwali’ from the film Silsila. Reading and listening to her poetry, dancing, looking at an idol of Krishna that I put up next to my Mac, it sometimes felt like I embodied or channelled Meera.

More generally, while working on Lord of the Senses, I read a lot of short stories. Saadat Hasan Manto is one of my favourite short story writers, and I believe he was as much in love with Bombay as I am. Another excellent Indian short story writer is R. K. Narayan. I also read stories by LGBTQ writers, especially LGBTQ writers with a link to India. The Boyfriend by Raj Rao is a classic, which I re-read. Other Indian LGBTQ books that I read and really appreciated include Sandip Roy’s Don’t Let Him Know, Vasudhendra’s Mohanaswamy, and Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s My Father’s Garden. Someone in the diaspora that I have really appreciated reading is Rahul Mehta (Quarantine: Stories).

Are there any in particular LGBTQ authors who inspired you?

I remember enjoying A Suitable Boy by my namesake Vikram Seth when I first read it. As a young teenager struggling with my outsider identity in Norway, I enjoyed being in the Indian universe of the book. At the time, I didn’t know that he was also queer — nor did I myself identify as queer. Perhaps there were also queer hints or subtle things in the book that resonated with that part of me. Stories really can help one feel at home in the world, I think, and that is quite something.

Another book that I read and appreciated early on in life is Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin. How amazing is that, a Black, queer man writing about same-sex love in 1956! And writing so well!

I should also mention Osman Diriye’s Fairytales For Lost Children here. I was so enthusiastic when I read these stories; well-written stories by a queer Somali, sometimes quite sexually explicit, stories from Somalia and Kenya and the UK! I had never read anything like that before. I had to look up the publisher. And that was the start of my relationship with Team Angelica, a team I am so much in love with now.

And, finally, there are the Indian LGBTQ writers I already mentioned above: Raj Rao, Sandip Roy, Vasudhendra, Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, and Rahul Mehta.

What’s your favourite city to visit? To live in?

First is Bombay. Istanbul and New York are other cities that I like. I like cities by the sea. Despite being inland, I also like Berlin. They are all cities where there is much queerness, and a vegetarian can eat well.

Oslo is my favourite city to live in. It is just the right size and has a great location. I can walk or bike from my flat to most places I want to go to. After 30 minutes on bike, I am in the forest by the fjord and can bathe in salt sea water. After a 30 minutes’ tram ride I am up in the forested hills. Most importantly it feels like home, with the language and culture I grew up with. And, thankfully, it has become a very diverse city. I can love and hate Oslo and Oslo people in a very intimate way, like you can love and hate only family.

And lastly, are you working on anything now?

I am currently working on a book about meditation.

A shorter version of this interview was published in Gaylaxy magazine.

Lord of the Senses is published by Team Angelica, and can be bought here (UK) here (India) and here (US). More info at www.teamangelica.com @WeRTeamAngelica

It’s strange when your own life-span is long enough that it becomes part of ‘history’, to be analyzed and assessed in literature, biography and — as here — in academic writing; for the AIDS pandemic to become a discrete historical event, broadly closed (in the West, at least) by the advent of effective antiretrovirals — a moment in which (as movingly recounted at the conclusion of David France’s How To Survive a Plague) hospice patients arose from what had been their death-beds and began to plan a return to work, but a moment that came just too late for many of those discussed here — legendary black gay artists like Essex Hemphill, Marlon Riggs and Rotimi Fani-Kayode. They, and many others, lived and created in a time when for all they knew effective treatment might never be achieved, and with the burning urgency of the consciously mortal.

Darius Bost is engaged with reclaiming these lives from the sanctification bestowed by premature death and the ‘fixing’ of memorialization, emphasizing instead how a sense of possibility remained present to those living through (though often dying in) those infernal times — using the unpublished diaries of the novelist and academic Melvin Dixon as a way into experiencing an often quotidian procession of haphazard life-events unshaped by teleology — thoughts and feelings set down when the future appears not yet incised in stone. I think he succeeds. As I read Evidence of Being I was brought back vividly to the excitement, as well as the nightmarishness of those times.

It’s not that I was a part of any of those scenes, or lives — though I did get Essex Hemphill to sign a chapbook of his I’d bought at Gay’s the Word, at a reading he did in London, England, in the late ’80s, which he inscribed with what I was later to learn was his trademark: ‘Take care of your blessings’. Later by chance I came to somewhat know a lover of his, (they were photographed together by Rotimi Fani-Kayode, who mentored a friend of mine, the extremely talented Robert Taylor, and photographed other pals: Philip McPherson; Guy-Mark Foster, now a tenured professor of English Literature); and I came to know some people involved with the Other Countries movement/moment who survived: Guy-Mark Foster; Allen Luther Wright — it’s more that those artists embodied an incredibly exciting black gay cultural renaissance — a fascinating new future, full of possibilities.

Yes, AIDS was a lowering and all-too-viscerally real horror looming over (above all) gay men, and indeed especially black gay men, at that time, yet in the face of that horror these remarkable artists made remarkable art. Seeing Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied at the London LGBT Film Festival (as it was then); reading Joseph Beam’s landmark black gay men’s anthology In The Life and its sequel, Brother 2 Brother, and Hemphill’s and Assotto Saint’s poems; listening to Blackberri’s LP — you knew this was something transcending what came before, less a re-naissance than a brand-new birth that went wholly beyond its acknowledged precursor, the very-gay-but-mostly-closeted/‘discreet’ Harlem Renaissance. And too it was in thrilling dialogue with remarkable Black British/British-based artists — Isaac Julien, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Ajamu X — in a diasporic cross-fertilisation that was intoxicating to witness.

I remember the legendary black gay film- and theatre-maker Rikki Beadle-Blair and I wondering when the UK equivalent of In The Life would appear. It was a long time coming, and many convulsions passed through the publishing scene in the meantime, but in 2015 we brought out our own landmark anthology, Black & Gay in the UK, with the imprint we founded, Team Angelica Publishing, following it up in 2018 with a sister anthology, Sista!, with UK Black Pride co-founder Phyll Opoku-Gyimah as lead editor, and which is currently shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award.

Evidence of Being brought me back to the catalyzing excitement of that period when so many black gay men were, almost abruptly as it seemed, confidently coming to voice. Without downplaying the tragedy of so many lives so painfully curtailed, and within a framework of academic discourse, Bost reminds the reader of much that was — and remains — hopeful, defiant and inspiring.

Perhaps for reasons of copyright, Bost quotes only partially even from works that are impossible (or at least extremely difficult) to obtain. I hope this book will encourage someone (perhaps Bost himself) to consider putting together a compendium of such uncollected and hard-to-access texts, usefully contextualized, for publication.

Evidence of Being is published by University of Chicago Press, is 188pp, and has an rrp of $27.50. Buy it here.

John R Gordon is the author of seven novels, including the 2019 Ferro-Grumley Award-winning Drapetomania. Buy it here.

History is written by the poacher, not the lion, and therefore many of the lions’ tales are lost. The further back into history you reach, the more this is the case.

In Britain, February is LGBTQ+ History Month, which by chance is also Black History Month in the USA, and to me this is a powerful synergy. Black people of the Diaspora, whatever their sexuality, have somehow to leap the abyss opened by the unspeakably violent rupture of slavery. And gay folks of whatever race must construct an affirming history, or set of histories, around what has been travestied, suppressed and erased. Such losses cannot be repaired by research alone.

Where facts are lost, or at the least unreachable, art steps in.

I set out to write a historical tale, an epic set in the American South in slavery times, in which a gay — same-gender-loving — black man was the protagonist, heroically stealing himself away and attempting to rescue his lover, another enslaved man; and trying to free others along the way.

What triggered me was coming across a sepia photograph of two African-American men in civil war uniforms gazing into each others’ eyes — one of those ambiguous images the truth of which is lost to time.

Part of my purpose was to repair in a modest way a breach in possible knowledge. No slave narrative intended for public consumption could have focused on (or even so much as mentioned) SGL romance; nor is it likely any such record would have been put down privately at a time when so few could write with sufficient fluency, or, if it had been written — at considerable risk to its author — survived to the present day.

So I hoped to tell what could not have been told at the time with such skill as I possessed.

There is currently much wrangling over identity, and the virtue of, or problems with, asserting an identity, or intersection of identities. Whatever one’s take on all that, it is certainly the case that, in the West, despite many gains in rights, gay men of all races are corrosively bereft of self-love — as evidenced by elevated rates of suicide, self-harm, mental illness, and the many who are sucked into the heartless, bludgeoning and soul-evacuating whirlpool of chemsex.

I would contend that this is in part an ironic byproduct of social progress. While analogies between race and sexuality tend understandably to be fraught, the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1957 is instructive. While a huge step forward in legal and social terms, the legal ending of segregation also ended the tight-knit sense of community that oppression had fostered, and, as black citizens exerted their newfound right to shop where they chose, many black businesses failed as a direct result of this new freedom.

We now see gay characters all over TV, from soaps to Brooklyn Nine Nine to RuPaul’s Drag Race. This is progress, and encouraging. However, it means gay men feel less need to investigate their identities as gay men: consequently a depth of spirit, and indeed intellect, is lost. And disavowal of identity — absolute individualism — does not help us — something made clear the instant one looks further afield, to Chechnya, say, or Nigeria.

I see being gay — being same-gender-loving — as a serious identity worthy of as deep and intense a level of exploration, of focused attention, as the endlessly-dug-into heterosexual one. I believe that to approach our sexualities in such a spirit is healing and empowering. And so I write as I do.

Drapetomania, or, the Narrative of Cyrus Tyler and Abednego Tyler, lovers by John R Gordon is available at selected indie bookshops and on Amazon. It was recently selected for inclusion on the Rainbow List by the American Library Association.

As a gay man who is aware that ‘being gay’ as an identity is a fairly recent idea, I’ve always been fascinated by the ways in which same-sex-loving people would have understood themselves in the past — particularly before Freud, Jung and Havelock Ellis came along, projecting their own complexes and neuroses onto those of us who prefer their own sex sexually and romantically.

Coming upon a photograph from the 1860s of two black soldiers in US Civil War uniforms — two young men gazing into each others’ eyes, who seem to be rather more than fond friends — set me wondering: if they were lovers, how did they understand that love, and their own identities in relation to it? While there wasn’t — couldn’t have been — a gay identity to step into, on the other hand, since same-sex sex was outlaw they must at the least have had an externally-constructed notion of it, and themselves, in relation to the larger society.

This thought was the genesis of my epic historical novel, Drapetomania, or the Narrative of Cyrus Tyler and Abednego Tyler, lovers, in which a house slave and a field hand fall in love, and when one is sold away, the other flees bondage to attempt his rescue. It took me ten years and reading thousands of pages of research to complete, and it does, I hope, what I think historical fiction should do: use imagination to fill gaps in the historical record — gaps that are, inevitably, particularly gaping when it comes to accounts of same-sex love, because of both external censorship and self-censorship.

Some people resist the idea that there could be a gay essence that is in some way claimable across time, sexual identity being, after all, a social construct. Yet our lives are full of constructs that function as — are lived as — essences. Race, for instance is self-evidently a construct, contrived by white colonials/imperialists to justify slavery and exploitation — yet the blues (for instance) evoke real shared experience — some essential quality of being — of blackness — beyond an external system of classification imposed by others. ‘Woman’ too is a construct but is not without essence, and I think the same is true of sexuality — there are essential connections between all same gender loving people that are not merely the product of being herded into the same pen by the heteropatriarchal majority.

For me the challenge of writing Drapetomania was to embed such reflections in mid-C19th thought processes: what was conceivable to enslaved African Americans? I knew the Bible would loom large in their minds, as a frame and a tool both of oppression and of liberation — on the one hand the destruction of Sodom; on the other the love between David and Jonathon — and Cyrus’ and Abednego’s affair is discussed in precisely those terms by a fellow slave who is a preacher.

I also wanted to harken back to pre-Christian West African belief systems, some of which allowed — validated — expressions of homosexuality. In Drapetomania, though he is generations away from his African forebears, field-hand Cyrus is emotionally closer to these belief systems, less drawn into the white Christian world than his house servant lover Abednego, and he draws power from this psychological proximity.

Fascinatingly, even today there remains in some African cultures a notion that men having sex with each other is ‘powerful magic’ — and so, precisely because they are understood to be lovers, in Drapetomania Cyrus and Abednego are affirmed as sources of good luck — as prophesying success — by their fellow slaves as they rise up and attempt to liberate themselves at the novel’s climax.

As far as same-sex love in slavery times goes, the historical record offers us little to go on — Dwight McBride’s The Delectable Negro: consumption and homoeroticism within US slave culture is one of very few works on the subject, and he has to dig deep into exceedingly scanty evidence. No ex-slave would have authored a narrative focused on same-sex love, and if they did no one would have published it, and so far no private account has come to light, nor is likely to.

We live in a time where, despite surging prejudice all around us, we are often told that lgbtq+ narratives are unnecessary and self-indulgent. I strongly feel the opposite: in a time where many gay men are being sucked into a vortex of lovelessness and loneliness so extreme that it leads to both a death of the spirit and literal suicide, we all the more desperately need narratives that assert connections across time and place, class and race, and demonstrate that same-sex love and desire can be subjects of serious literary endeavour, and are as worthy of being placed centre-stage, and as deep, as the much-mined, often frankly mined-out topic of heterosexual love and desire.

John R Gordon is an award-winning novelist, playwright and screenwriter. He worked on the groundbreaking TV series Noah’s Arc for which he was nominated for a NAACP Image Award. Drapetomania, or the Narrative of Cyrus Tyler and Abednego Tyler, lovers, his seventh novel, an epic tale of same-sex love in slavery times is out now from Team Angelica Publishing and available here and here.

When young and first becoming conscious in the world I was inspired, even transformed, by African-American writers and activists. At that time — the late ’70s — their works were mostly out of print, and had to be hunted out in secondhand bookshops, battered paperbacks with browning, brittle leaves and cracked spines, sometimes priced in pre-decimal pounds, shillings and pence: here a black-gloved fist; there a trashy ‘let’s make this novel look like porn’ photo-realist cover. I read — absorbed; devoured — James Baldwin, Chester Himes and Richard Wright, grandchildren of those who had been born slaves (how recent it all is!); Baraka, Bullins and the Black Arts revolutionary playwrights; political radicals like Malcolm X, Huey Newton, George Jackson and Angela Davis; deep thinkers like Audre Lorde and bell hooks. My first great political and social awakening came through these radical African-American geniuses, all of them so vividly aware of the presence of the past in the present, and they still fundamentally inform how I see and understand the world. In recent years this has been reinforced by the endless shooting (and framing up) of African-American citizens by the police and the rise of Black Lives Matter, a queer-led movement that in that way harkens back to the activism of Baldwin and Bayard Rustin. Seeing Baldwin quoted, and his quotes as applicable to the now as they were when first written, made me feel there was value in exploring the deeper past, in attempting to complete a slavery-days, US-based novel about same gender black love that I had been working on for — then — seven-plus years.

Drapetomania, or the Narrative of Cyrus Tyler and Abednego Tyler, lovers— which is an ultimately hopeful novel of black empowerment and resistance — is my love-letter to those writers, thinkers and fighters, almost all of whom have now transitioned to the realm of the ancestors; my attempt to pay a little back to those who so inspired me when, as a lost gay teen from the vanilla suburbs, I was looking for ways to understand, deal with and surmount an opaque and hostile environment without being consumed by despair.

Drapetomania is out on May 17th, and is available for pre-order here (US) and here (UK).