LITERARY STALKER – A ‘GAY NOVEL’ BY A STRAIGHT AUTHOR BY ROGER KEEN

At the Hay Festival last year, prominent gay novelist Alan Hollinghurst declared that the gay novel has had its day. He said that in earlier decades it possessed urgency and novelty, but now it is ‘…dissolving back into everything else and we are living increasingly in a culture where sexuality is not so strongly defined.’₁ Broadly speaking, Hollinghurst feels that as homosexuality is now so familiar and generally accepted, the ‘gay novel’ no longer has an edge.
 
Yet the recent story of Matt Cain and The Madonna of Bolton (published in 2018), shows there is some vibrancy left in the phenomenon of the ‘gay novel’. A tale of a northern gay lad growing up in the 1980s and worshipping the singer Madonna, Cain’s novel was widely rejected by publishers for being ‘too gay’, ‘a little niche’ and also for not having the highbrow literary credentials of Hollinghurst’s work.₂ But through a crowdfunding campaign and the support of backers such as David Walliams, Mark Gatiss and Lisa Jewell, it was published and proved popular with a large audience.
 
Nonetheless Hollinghurst does have a point. In an age where gay love stories and their tribulations are featured universally in screen dramas and soaps such as Coronation Street, what can the ‘gay novel’ do to be transgressive again? It has become a well-trodden path with familiar tropes, and so has the status of a genre one can dabble in, such as horror or science fiction. Which is the precise point where I personally interfaced with its world. For reasons of plot expediency, I set out, as a straight man, to manufacture – to the best of my ability – a ‘gay novel’.
 
Many years ago I was attending a bookshop talk and signing given by a ‘famous writer’ – Iain Banks actually – and I had this perverse idea, as you do, concerning a crazed psycho leaping up onto the stage and gunning down the writer, saying something like: ‘Put that in one your books!’ I thought that if someone were to feel so inclined, there was nothing to stop him – no guards, security or anything, because it’s not expected, not considered a risk. So this became the germ of the idea for Literary Stalker, and in the note-taking stage, one of the key tasks that emerged was to give the ‘stalker’ a believable motivation for attempting to murder the ‘famous writer’.
 
The project languished on the back burner, but more recently when I had other ideas to inject new life, I returned to this issue, and I thought: Why not make the stalker gay? If I did so, then he could not only be unhinged, with a Misery-style hero-worship fixation, he could also be ‘in love’ with the famous writer! Then when the stalker is amorously rejected and also plagiarised and exploited by the writer as ‘literary canon fodder’, his obsessive bitterness would be supercharged to extreme levels and make revenge murder plausible.₃
 
That said, I had doubts I could make it work on a technical level. As the novel is written in the first person, I would have to convincingly create a gay narrator when I’m not gay myself, which at first seemed daunting. But I found I got into it and also I enjoyed the ‘not me’ part – like an actor playing a role far removed from his own personhood – which gave me freedom to really push the boundaries because I wasn’t revealing anything personal about myself. And regarding information on gay life – returning to Alan Hollinghurst’s point – there is so much of it around now, from TV soaps and dramas to personal, intimate stories, biographies, confessions and, of course, ‘gay novels’.
 
Here I had a particular card up my sleeve in the fact that one of my most favourite writers, William Burroughs, was gay. Burroughs has certainly always featured unrestrained, sometimes allegedly pornographic gay content in his work, though despite this one wouldn’t really call his most celebrated novels – Naked Lunch, Soft Machine, Junkie, Cities of the Red Night – ‘gay novels’, as the gayness is incidental, matter-of-fact. Though indeed several of those titles are fine examples of gay themes occurring within experimental and genre mash-up fiction.
 
Really for a novel to qualify as a ‘gay novel’, those gay aspects need to be focussed upon as an existential condition, a central subject. And in this respect, Burroughs did write one proper ‘gay novel’, his second – Queer – which is a kind of semi-autobiographical follow up to Junkie. It tells the story of recovering addict Bill Lee, now living in Mexico City, and his hopeless obsessive pursuit of a handsome younger man called Allerton, who is basically straight. Coming from the 1950s, the narrative is classically self-lacerating as regards gayness, and the storyline also has similarities to Literary Stalker, as they both deal with unwanted pursuit and unreciprocated gay attention. So this novel gave me something of a framework and a transgressive character mindset to work within.
 
And more generally, having read everything by Burroughs and most of the stuff written about him, I’ve tuned into his way of looking at things by osmosis. That has helped with the most important aspect of any first-person narrated work of fiction: getting the voice right. Also, taken from biographies of Burroughs, there is a pivotal line in Literary Stalker – concerning oral sex – that is adapted from a line actually spoken by Allen Ginsberg to Burroughs when their affair wasn’t going well…But I won’t go into detail, save to say that my research into these matters, vicarious though it is, extends widely.
 
And another ‘gay novel’ which greatly helped me was From Blue To Black, by Joel Lane, which I bought in 2000 when it first came out and greatly enjoyed. Now Joel is one of those writers who is not generally well known, but within the British horror community he is highly revered as an excellent practitioner of the art. I knew him slightly, but I wasn’t a close friend. Unfortunately he died in 2013 at the age of fifty, so his career was cut short. But he’s still celebrated for his uniquely edgy, sometimes surreal take on horror.
 
So when I came to write Literary Stalker, I reread From Blue To Black and was reminded of its excellence. It is a departure from Joel’s usual short stories in that it’s a naturalistic narrative set within the indie music scene of the 1990s. And it is an explicitly ‘gay novel’, with detailed scenes of the emotional and physical side of gay life and a first-person narrator. What was particularly useful was not only the content – the window onto intimate gay life – but also the treatment and tone, and indeed the language. How do you talk about the feelings and the sexuality and make it real rather than ersatz? Joel certainly showed me the way.
 
So, aided by these sources, I built my gay literary stalker – Nick Chatterton – a thirty-eight-year-old obsessed writer with borderline and narcissistic personality disorders who dresses in black and looks like Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones. The narrative of Literary Stalker is primarily horror-crime driven, with metafictional and black comedy elements, and it’s very much immersed in movie pop culture, heavily using movie pastiche in a nudge-wink way. But in putting it together, the ‘gay novel’ dimension – the strand about hopeless unrequited love turning bitter and homicidal – became at least as important if not more important than all those other aspects. Certainly from the feedback and reviews I’ve received so far, the experiment appears to have worked!
 
1.  https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/gay-novel-is-dead-says-booker-winner
 
2.  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/oct/06/novel-rejected-gay-crowdfunding-support-the-madonna-of-bolton-by-matt-cain
 
3.  https://musingsofthemadartist.wordpress.com/2017/10/01/literary-stalker-a-novel-by-roger-keen/