While assembling material for a collection of my
nonfiction writing, I was searching through my old computer disks for an essay
that I was certain I had written in October 1998 in the days following the
beating of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student at the University of Wyoming
who was beaten, tortured, tied to a fence and left to die near Laramie, Wyoming.
I had participated in the October 19, 1998 rally against hate crimes and the
impromptu demonstration down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and I was sure that I
had written about the experience.
What I stumbled across, instead, was the manuscript of a
novel I had begun in the aftermath of Matthew Shepard’s death. Writing the book
had been both a rewarding and painful experience, but I had chosen to forget
about my novel because of the personal disappointment I had attached to it.
Like many gay Americans I was moved by the tragic fate of
Matthew Shepard, and in the days following the crime I struggled to pull
together portraits of the victim and the assailants from the emerging news. One
reason why I decided to write A Gathering Storm, a novel about a hate
crime against a gay man, was because I felt what was missing from the news were
the details and stories of the individuals involved—the crime was analyzed and
politicized but oddly not humanized. We did not know who these young men were,
what they were thinking, what were they doing, why had they been where they
were when things went wrong. We only had their generic representations in the
media. The national focus on the issue of hate crimes seemed to overwhelm the
personal stories.
I finished writing the A Gathering Storm in early
2001 and I submitted the manuscript to my editor at the publishing company that
had published my first novel and had an option of first refusal on my next one.
My contract called for a six-week response, but because I was an unagented
writer the manuscript languished at the publishing company, never generating
any attention or a formal rejection until my editor casually informed me that
he was leaving the press to begin another career.
In spite of this I secured the services of a literary
agent to represent the novel, who shopped the manuscript around without much
success, and, in my estimation, without much enthusiasm on his part, so I began
shopping it around myself to additional publishers and editors. After I found a
British publisher who was interested in the novel, the agent declined to act on
my behalf, and interest faded away when the British publisher—who saw A
Gathering Storm as a commercial thriller and not a literary novel—was
concerned that I did not have another thriller ready to go as a follow-up.
By then Matthew Shepard had been the subject of too many
movies, plays, books, and dramatizations. One editor at a mainstream house
declined the manuscript stating “the Shepard murder was discussed and
dramatized and debated in the media so much that this novel may have a hard
time finding an audience.” A Gathering Storm was both too similar and
too different. My novel was fiction that read like fact. I had consciously
changed many details, including moving the location to a college town in the
South. During the aftermath of the Shepard murder, the town of Laramie,
Wyoming, where the beating and murder occurred, fell under tremendous scrutiny.
News reports and other works based on this crime focused sharply on the town.
It was my intent to step aside from this location and show that this type of
crime could happen anywhere. In choosing to locate this story in the South, I
was also able to draw from many of my own experiences and memories and to write
it as a story I felt I could tell.
During the course of writing the novel I had also rewritten
many details about the Shepard crime and the characters involved with it,
weaving in details from other hate crimes against gay men. More importantly,
however, I was peering inside the emotional lives of the characters who were
living inside my mind, not just presenting the facts. Fiction can oftentimes
carry more emotional weight than a news story or a nonfiction account and it
was my intent with this work to present a more human face to this tragedy than
what was emerging through other works, both in terms of understanding the deep
suffering of the victims as well as looking into the psychological motivations
and backgrounds of those behind the crimes.
And I had made a conscious decision to write this novel in
a different style from the long, complex sentence structure I had favored in my
first novel, Where the Rainbow Ends. A Gathering Storm is a
deconstruction of a crime and this time my prose was purposely short and
choppy, like a screenplay. I wanted the visuals to rise immediately off the
page and to do so I had, in fact, studied many screenplays and true crime
narrative accounts and the way they presented both dialogue and action. And
since I was deconstructing the crime, I also wanted to deconstruct the
narrative structure of the novel, presenting it as linear, circular, and fragmented.
Sometime in 2003 I formally severed ties with the literary
agent and abandoned the manuscript to pursue other projects. I never expected
the novel to be published and had been so upset by the experience of both writing
the book and not finding a publisher for it that I had stored all the notes and
drafts of the novel into a box and hid the box at the bottom of a closet in my
apartment, out of sight and incapable of wounding me any further. But there it
was, A Gathering Storm, always at the top of a list of my completed work
that I keep on a bulletin board above the desk where I write, ignored and
overlooked until I saw it there again while I was looking for my Shepard
essay. Even as I copied the manuscript files of the novel from the floppy disk
to my laptop to archive it, I did not anticipate publishing the work because I
felt it was surely outdated, even though other authors had revisited the
Matthew Shepard crime and had published recent books about it.
What I discovered when I sat down to reread A Gathering
Storm was a densely absorbing work full of purpose, a novel that I cannot
believe I walked away from and I cannot believe I did not find a publisher for.
My faith in it had been shattered by the kind but continued rejection of it.
One editor who turned down the manuscript remarked on its “enormous integrity”
and found it “refreshing to read a manuscript that is informed by such
passion.” Another called it “a shocking yet timely story that truly gets to the
heart of gay hate in America.” Still, no
one offered to publish it.
I see now
that this novel is a bridge to other themes in my later writings, particularly
the gay-themed ghost stories that I would publish later in the decade. But I
also see it indicative of the evolution of the gay novel during the first
decade of the twenty-first century—how it fell victim to mainstream publishers
only wanting commercial blockbusters and how smaller publishers decided to
mimic this desire—and how during these years gay authors such as myself,
because of our gay themes and narratives and characters and the choices of our
fictions—had to find other publishers and other ways and outlets to continue to
be published and to find readers. I began Chelsea Station Editions to publish work
that was overlooked and ignored by other publishers, worthy gay-themed
literature that needed to find its way into print, and I am grateful for the
advances in technology, economics, and business and trade practices that have
allowed me to do so. I have never been a writer who has chased financial or
critical success, only a place to publish what I have wanted to write and what
I felt needed to be written and shared. I never expected to be a publisher or a
bookseller. But I am extremely proud to say that I have created the perfect
home for A Gathering Storm.
* * *
"A captivating, highly detailed, and impressively impartial, almost journalist, profile of a Southern college town shaken by the after-effects of a hate crime when a male student is beaten and left for dead for no reason other than his sexual orientation. The power prose effectively conveys why it was written, as well as the inherent need for it to be read. Despite—or perhaps because of—the unpleasant circumstances and outcome that shape this novel, A Gathering Storm is enraging, engrossing and impossible to put down."—Christopher Verleger, Edge
