Teaching LGBTQ+ Literature During the Pandemic

I’m fully vaccinated and giddily savoring post-pandemic firsts. Dinner with friends—not on Zoom but in their home! And in restaurants! Hugging friends! Carpooling with friends! Partying with friends—not on Zoom but around a fire pit! Driving west across Iowa to see my mom and brothers. Hugging them! Strolling the Iowa City ped mall with my husband Ben and browsing at Prairie Lights Books!  Hugging the books! (No, I didn’t really hug them. But I wanted to!)

It’s summer, the clematis and day lilies are blooming, and I’m out of the classroom until August. Well, I haven’t been in an actual classroom since March 2020, but I have been teaching online and now I’m not.

Now I have the time and emotional energy to write!

Since it’s Pride month, I’m going to reflect on my LGBTQ+ Literature course and what I learned from teaching it during the pandemic. These reflections will better enable my future students to examine the emotional complexity of LGBTQ+ Lit. And I hope these reflections will help me—and maybe you—navigate the present moment.

If you’re like me, you’re edging away from the trauma of the pandemic through the euphoria of post-vaccination firsts towards some sort of psychological new normal. A space shaped by both trauma and joy. A Midway point.

Background

The next time I teach LGBTQ+ Lit, I’ll emphasize the coexistence of (queer) trauma and (queer) joy.

Why? Let’s start with some background on my Fall 2020 course. It was my second time teaching LGBTQ+ Lit, but my first time teaching any literature course during a pandemic. It was also my first time teaching an asynchronous online course.

I taught many of the same books this second time around, but along with a thematic emphasis on coming of age, coming out, and aging, I chose to add an emphasis on trauma and healing. I figured (rightly) that many of my students would be traumatized not only by the pandemic, but also by racial injustice and the derecho.

(The derecho was a land hurricane that devastated our campus and its city of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Fortunately, no one was killed, but the tree canopy was ravaged, damaging lots of cars and homes in the process. Many Cedar Rapidians and other area folks were without power and water for weeks, internet and Wi-Fi for still longer. The start of Mount Mercy’s semester was delayed two weeks.)

I also figured (again rightly) that students would be interested in exploring parallels between the AIDS crisis and COVID.

So we wouldn’t be completely depressed, I added some texts on queer joy. In fact, I book-ended the course with such texts. I started with five poems—“Yes” by Muriel Rukeyser, “I Know Someone” and “On the Beach” by Mary Oliver, “I Do” by Sjohanna McCray, and “On Trans” by Miller Oberman—and I ended with Andrew Sean Greer’s comic novel, Less.

But I did not anticipate how relentlessly students would focus on trauma. Even though I offered lots of choices for discussion and essay topics, at least two-thirds of the students usually chose to examine trauma.

This emphasis on trauma led one of my most engaged students (an out bi man who married his boyfriend during the semester) to tell me that the next time I teach the course I should add some happier texts—texts that focus on community or drag or ecstasy or rapture—so that students don’t come to associate queerness with trauma. He acknowledged that even though nearly all the texts we studied contain moments of queer joy, sadness dominates. I’m taking his suggestions seriously because I was already disturbed by how intensely some students were drawn to the trauma in the texts—and because he made his argument twice, once in his final essay and once in a small Zoom group.

Zooming

This Zoom group was the best part of the course for me—and for the five or six students who regularly chose to participate. Once a week, I gave my 20 students the choice of discussing the texts via discussion boards or via Zoom. Of the five or six students who regularly Zoomed, nearly all were nursing majors, and one was a double major in English and psychology. (LGBTQ+ Lit is a Core course, not a majors course). The nursing students already knew each other, and they quickly took the other student into their fold. Our conversations were lively, authentic, and insightful. The students often related the texts to their majors and work lives–and sometimes to other other parts of their lives. I looked forward to these discussions, and the students (who had good grades and did not need to brown-nose) told me they did too.

Yet for me these Zoom discussions brought up highly mixed feelings—thus relating to the subject of this post, the combination of (queer) joy and (queer) trauma. These sessions brought me joy because I knew I was offering the students something valuable: not just an opportunity to learn about the LGBTQ+ community and its literature, but also the rare opportunity (during COVID) to experience their own small (physically safe, yet live) discussion group. Their own community.

Where does trauma come in? Well, for me, it wasn’t trauma, but grief. I missed the familiar joy and privilege of discussing texts with students face-to-face. I missed taking that activity for granted. I missed even “ordinary”—sometimes annoying—moments with students: the rustle at the end of class as they shove their books and papers in their backpacks, grab their bottles of Mountain Dew, and reseal their plastic bags filled with Trail Mix or Fruit Loops. At the end of a Zoom class, some students say or wave good-bye, and then one vanishes into the darkness of the screen, then another and another, then all of them. Poof. Gone. Those quick disappearances always made me melancholy, but sadder still sometimes was seeing—really seeing—the students. Dark circles under their eyes on the very first day of class. Putting on a brave face for their second quarantine. Coughing and sneezing, wrapped in blankets, waiting for the results of a COVID test.

If I had the Fall 2020 class to do over again, would I share these mixed feelings with the Zoom group? Probably not. Then why write about it? Because I needed to. And because it illustrates my belief that nearly every event and every story can prompt mixed feelings.

I will explicitly share this belief with my students the next time I teach LGBTQ+ Lit, and although I may add a “happier text,” I’ll certainly make several other changes that will help students access the mixed feelings that most literary texts can prompt.

Changes

First of all, I’ll expand on the goals/questions near the start of the syllabus.

• What is LGBTQ+ literature? What counts as queer literature? How has it been defined?
• What are some of the key characteristics, topics, themes of LGBTQ+ literature? How have writers represented queer identities, bodies, love, sex, families, communities, time, success, and activism?
• How does queer literature vary according to the historical and cultural context in which it is written? How do other aspects of identity (such as race, gender, and age) influence depictions of queerness in literature?
• Who are some important LGBTQ+ writers? Why are they important?
• Why study LGBTQ+ literature?

(Big thanks to poet Jennifer Perrine! I adapted many of these questions from one of her syllabi. If you like, you can see my full 2020 syllabus with the boring policy bits removed.)

To the 2020 questions, I’ll add this cluster:

• What is (queer) trauma? (Queer) joy? How are they depicted in literary texts? What is their relationship?

In mini lectures or during discussion, I’ll share the following beliefs and facts with my students:

• Literature worthy of study usually includes a wide variety of emotions, if not ranging from trauma to joy, then from sorrow or pain to peace or hope.
• There are many reasons why it might be difficult for readers to notice and consider the joy or other positive emotions in (queer) texts.
  • The human brain is hardwired to notice and remember negative events, so we are compelled to examine trauma. We often have to work to discern and recall joy.
  • This tendency is all the stronger if our society experiences collective trauma, if we ourselves have experienced personal trauma, if the academic subjects we study emphasize trauma, and if our leisure reading or viewing or listening consistently includes trauma.
  • The news focuses on conflict, trouble, and trauma—and often so do queer organizations when they fund-raise—so it’s easy to mistakenly associate queerness with pain and trauma.
• Queer trauma is not caused by queerness but by homophobia and transphobia (and racism, sexism, misogyny, and various other types of prejudice).

Of course, I’ll invite students to test out these ideas for themselves, to find examples or counter examples in our texts and in their own reading experiences. I’ll also tweak my first essay assignment and the headings in our reading schedule to de-emphasize trauma, and I’ll focus many of our discussions, especially our early ones on the texts’ emotional complexity.

Richard Blanco

Take, for example, Richard Blanco’s “Queer Theory: According to My Grandmother,” which I teach early in the semester with his inaugural poem, “One Today,” and with joyful Whitman poems like “I Sing the Body Electric.” (Whitman’s catalogs clearly influence Blanco’s). Along with the audience members in the video below, I find much of Blanco’s “Queer Theory” to be funny. In his grandmother’s voice, he catalogs all the things she forbids him to do so that he can grow up to be the kind of (straight) man she wants him to be.

Initially, most of my traditional-age students respond with righteous indignation because the grandmother is trying to make young Ricky into someone he is not. They identify strongly with Ricky, saying that it’s wrong for parents to force so many gender rules on kids. They’re right, of course, but their emphasis on Ricky’s childhood suffering causes them to miss the the poem’s satire and celebration.

I encourage a lot of close reading in order for students to see that most of the grandmother’s rules are over-the-top and nonsensical:

Put away your crayons, your Play Doh, your Legos.
Where are your Hot Wheels,
your laser gun and handcuffs,
the knives I gave you?

(Sedentary activities are off-limits, even gender neutral ones. Far better for a small child to play with knives. And handcuffs? Am I the only reader who thinks bondage?)

I urge still more close reading and ask the students to consider what Blanco was like as a child. Eventually, they begin to realize that as Blanco lists his grandmother’s rules, he also honors all the things he loved as a child:

Never dance alone in your room:
Donna Summer, Barry Manilow, the Captain
and Tenille, Bette Midler, and all musicals—
forbidden.
Posters of kittens, Stars Wars, or the Eiffel Tower—
forbidden.

Next time I teach this poem, I’ll ask students to reflect on how their age (or experience) might impact their interpretation. Would someone Blanco’s age or older find it easier to see the humor? Someone who no longer cares (much) about pleasing parent-figures? Someone (of any age) who no longer cares about meeting gender norms? Someone out? Someone otherwise able to be themselves?

If I can successfully help students consider these questions, it will serve several purposes.

• First, it will increase their self-confidence and curiosity as readers. The next time their interpretation differs from mine or a classmate’s, they will not deem themselves (or others) “stupid,” but instead consider why the interpretations differed. What in their own experience and the text gave rise to their interpretation? Why might another reader have focused on a different part of the text and arrived at a different reading?
• Second, this subtle mini-intro to reader response theory will set students up to be more nuanced consumers of texts.
• Third, it may make it easier for them to recognize that even in the saddest of texts—especially in the saddest of texts?—there is hope in the fact that the writer was able to create it. Hope in the possibility that the text may transform and inspire readers.

(Queer) Childhood & Coming of Age

At the very least, students will be better equipped to recognize the emotional complexity in our next readings: texts that feature childhood and coming of age.

This unit starts with poems by Ocean Vuong, Paul Tran, Tommy Pico, Beth Brant, Eduardo Martinez-Leyva, Monica Hand, Nikki Giovanni, Derrick Austin, and Saeed Jones. These poems, from the anthology Queer Poets of Color, vary widely in topic and tone.

In the past, I’ve simply asked which poems the students most want to discuss, and then I offer some info about the poet, we do a close reading, and discuss what the poem suggests about childhood and coming of age. I also introduce the concept of intersectionality.

Next time, I’ll also ask students to be prepared to discuss these questions: Which poem is most clearly joyful? Which poem most clearly explores trauma? Which poem contains the biggest mix of emotions? As the students argue their cases, they’ll see that most of the poems contain at least some mix.

Then they’ll be primed to examine the emotional complexity in the full-length texts we’ll study next—texts that each feature some combination of queer trauma and queer joy.

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home

First up: the most frequently taught text in the LGBTQ+ canon, Alison’s Bechdel’s graphic memoir, Fun Home. Of all the texts in the course, this one contains the sharpest contrast between queer trauma and queer joy, and it’s the one that most explicitly grapples with their coexistence. The text’s most obvious trauma, the suicide of Alison’s closeted father, Bruce, occurs around the same time as its most obvious joy, Alison’s first lesbian relationship. This horrible coincidence shapes the text as Bechdel seeks to understand herself, her father, and the vast chasm between her father’s closeted despair and her own ability to live out and proud.

This chasm obviously causes Bechdel a lot of pain, and most readers’ hearts ache for both Alison and her father. Yet there is also hope in their differing trajectories, in the fact that Bechdel is able to lead a more open and authentic life.

To ensure that students don’t miss this hope, I’ll more clearly emphasize the fact when Bechdel published Fun Home she was already a famous author of the syndicated comic Dykes to Watch Out For. In other words, she was not simply out to her lover, friends, and family. She was a lesbian celebrity who brought others a lot of hope, fun, and laughter.

These facts will, I hope, encourage students to engage more with the humor in Fun Home and to see Alison as more than a victim of trauma—and Bruce as more than a bad father (and more than a victim himself, a victim of his homophobic time).

To further help students see the text’s emotional complexity, I’ll highlight young Alison’s capacity for joy. The first time I taught the course, I showed students a video of the song “Ring of Keys” from the award-winning musical based on Fun Home. The song captures the transformative moment when child Alison first sees an older butch lesbian (and is one of the best songs ever!). Next time, I’ll also share “I’m Changing My Major to Joan,” which Alison sings after first having sex with Joan.

I’ll also work harder to highlight Bruce’s complexity. Yes, there are abundant examples of him behaving horribly as a husband and father. For instance, Bruce shames Alison when he notices her watching the butch. But this sad moment also subtly celebrates Bechdel’s resilience and defiance. After all, she turns out to be a pretty butch adult herself. The moment also highlights her huge capacity for empathy. Even though Bruce hurt Alison when she was a child, the adult Bechdel suggests that much of his bad behavior stemmed from his own struggles with gender and sexuality.

Students readily see that both Bruce and Alison struggled with homophobia, but next time I’ll ask them to identify less painful similarities. I’ll ask them to examine moments when Bruce impacts her positively, including the text’s opening and closing sequences.

Because Fun Home is so allusive, and because I teach it relatively early in the semester, I also use it to introduce some queer history and culture, including Oscar Wilde. Next time, I’ll highlight the fact that Bechdel emphasizes this queer icon as a blend of queer joy and trauma. His artistic success, his exuberant love of sex and beauty, his witty epigrams, his over-the-top proclamations, his snarky defiance even at his own trial. Then his public humiliation, imprisonment, and exile—his “martyrology” as Bechdel calls it. But ultimately? His enduring influence and fame.

To supplement Bechdel’s depiction of Wilde, I may include excerpts from Moises Kaufman’s Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (a text I teach in another course, Law and Literature). Maybe I’ll even invite my students to watch The Importance of Being Earnest and serve them cucumber sandwiches.

Thomas Page McBee’s Man Alive

Like Fun Home, Thomas Page McBee’s memoir, Man Alive, grapples with trauma, and it retrospectively depicts both childhood and young adulthood. It alternates between scenes when McBee is ten and when he is 29, a trans man in the midst of his gender transition.

One of the reasons I chose to teach Man Alive, besides its stunning prose, is that it challenges mainstream media depictions of trans people, depictions that focus on trans women and on physical transitions. Although McBee makes it clear that his physical transition is important and liberating, he also demonstrates that it is not the most important thing about him, maybe not even the most important part of his transition.

What is important to McBee? “Focusing on being a person who wasn’t defined by trauma.”

This goal is an ambitious one for him: when he’s ten, he is sexually abused by a family member, and when he’s 29, he and his girlfriend are mugged at gunpoint. But as McBee portrays himself healing from these traumas, he offers so much insight and hope.

The next time I teach his text, I’ll ask students how McBee’s goal—not being defined by trauma—might apply not just to individuals, but also to oppressed groups. For instance, does it seem like the LGBTQ+ community bases too much of its identity on trauma and oppression? What are other sources of the community’s identity? How does it tap these sources, focus on them–especially in the midst of oppression and trauma?

McBee’s narrative suggests many answers, and I’ll cite one to give you a feel for his beautiful prose and to show how he combines trauma with empowerment. He and his girlfriend are driving through Nebraska, wondering why Brandon Teena, a murdered trans man, didn’t go live in a city. McBee writes:

I could see him under the biggest sky in the country, weakly counting stars. He was brave because he understood what I was just coming to understand: it’s not about nobody else ever harming you.

It’s about going on, despite it all, knowing that there’s part of you that cannot be harmed.

No wonder my students love Man Alive! It offers all readers—trans and cis—so many sustaining insights.

Danez Smith’s [INSERT] BOY

Our next text, [INSERT] BOY by Danez Smith, concludes our coming of age unit and starts a unit on poetry. Smith—a Black, Queer, Poz writer and performer—opens their collection not with a focus on sexuality but on racism. The poem, “The Black Boy and the Bullet,” clearly critiques the racism and fatal violence directed against black male bodies. This poem contains no hint of joy or hope, and it was especially painful to read in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

Yet Smith follows this poem with “Alternative Names for Black Boys,” a list poem that does blend pain and hope. Some of the “names” are heart-wrenching (“guilty until proven dead” and “monster until proven ghost”), but others are beautiful and empowering (“first son of soil” and “brilliant shadow colored coral”). Others still are ambiguous (“coal awaiting spark and wind.”)

Students had no trouble identifying and discussing such emotional complexity in the rest of Smith’s collection, much of which does focus on sexuality.

The next time I teach [INSERT] BOY, I hope to enable my students to reflect on the relationship between the parts of the collection that critique and the parts that celebrate. I’ll show my students Smith’s performance of the book’s final poem, “On Grace.” It celebrates Smith’s own desire and sexuality—and the beauty of black bodies. But the poem also calls out the hate that makes Smith’s defiant celebration necessary.

Sonnets

As I discuss the rest of the reading schedule, I’ll shift part of my focus to whether there are emotionally painful texts that I should replace with happier ones. Feedback and suggestions welcome!

After Smith, we read sonnets by Shakespeare, Marilyn Hacker, Candace Williams, and Jericho Brown. Shakespeare’s sonnets obviously run the emotional gamut. The excerpts from Hacker mostly convey the queer joy of lesbian sex. Williams critiques the sonnet form by ending every line of “Black Sonnet”  with the phrase “I’m still black.” Brown’s title poem from his Pulitzer Prize winning collection, Tradition, mourns the police murder of black men.

Brown’s poem is stylistically different from Smith’s depiction of the same topic. This difference is interesting to discuss. But am I offering too many texts on a traumatic subject? 

If I deleted “Tradition”—or all the sonnets—I’d lose the delightful fact that a queer African American man just won the Pulitzer.

I’d also lose the opportunity to share my belief that Shakespeare, the world’s most influential writer, was what we would call bi or, at the very least, bi-friendly. Bisexual Bill’s literary success fills me with queer pride and joy, as does the fact that so many literary game-changers are queer. But perhaps this is a joy that only other English majors or nerds can share—and not a good reason for teaching the sonnet in a Core course?

Poems About Pulse

During that same session, we also study poems by Richard Blanco, Andrea Gibson, and Jameson Fitzpatrick about the Orlando Pulse massacre. This is a heavy topic– especially for traditional age students who have grown up with mass shootings. Again, have I already offered too many texts about racist violence and trauma? (Or maybe just too many texts on one day? I do that sometimes.)

Blanco’s and Fitzpatrick’s poems offer some hope along with the trauma. And I’d really hate to cut Fitzpatrick’s “Poem for Pulse” because it beautifully portrays the LGBTQ+ community as so much more than victims of trauma. Consider Fitzpatrick’s final lines:

Love can’t block a bullet
but neither can it be shot down,
and love is, for the most part, what makes us—
in Orlando and in Brooklyn and in Kabul.
We will be everywhere, always;
There’s nowhere else for us, or you, to go.
Anywhere you run in this world, love will be there to greet you.
Around any corner, there might be two men. Kissing.

I’m certainly not going to cut the next two class sessions, which allow students to focus on poems they find interesting in Queer Poets of Color. The anthology offers so much diversity—not simply in terms of the authors’ identities, but also in tone, subject, and form.

Feminism

Next up are two sessions devoted to feminism. The first session features poems by Second Wave lesbian feminists Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde. I’m loathe to cut this unit because both writers shaped my own journey as a feminist and queer woman.  And because the course has thus far has featured a lot of males. But I should probably add some Third Wave feminist texts or some feminist texts that are funny. Suggestions?

Lorde’s poem “Power” appears in Queer Poets of Color, and it’s interesting to compare to Rich’s poem of the same name. Lorde’s “Power” is partly about a ten-year-old Black boy shot by a cop who “stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood / and a voice said ‘Die you little motherfucker’ and / there are tapes to prove it.” When I tell the students that the poem was published in 1978, some of them are horrified to learn that police have been murdering black boys since “way back then.” This is important knowledge, but it’s also enraging and depressing.

Again, maybe the course has already offered enough rage and sorrow on the topic of racist police violence. Maybe I should instead teach one of Lorde’s poems on motherhood and/or her essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.”

As for Rich, I’m committed to teaching “Diving Into the Wreck.” It can be interpreted so many ways, and the following line describes what we all do when studying the history and literature of marginalized people: “I came to see the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail.”  

But if I don’t teach Lorde’s “Power,” I’ll also delete Rich’s, along with two other fairly sad Rich poems, “To a Poet” and “Hunger.” Then I could devote more time to some of the “Twenty-One Love Poems” in Dream of a Common Language, one of the many texts Alison reads as she comes out in Bechdel’s Fun Home.

The second day on feminism includes Virginia Woolf and Aphra Behn. This day also serves to prepare students for Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, The Hours—a text that I may cut even though I love it. Woolf, of course, is not simply a character in Cunningham’s novel, but important in her own right: an innovative modernist and an early mother of women’s literary history (“All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn…for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.”)

I teach excerpts from the opening of Woolf’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway, to show students her stream of consciousness and to prepare them for Cunningham’s use of Woolf’s novel in his own.

I have several reasons for teaching short excerpts from Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Woolf depicts the difficulties facing writers, especially women writers, and she shows her strong desire to see love between women represented in literature. Woolf writes, “’Chloe liked Olivia,’ I read. And then it struck me how immense a change was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature.” There is also Woolf’s tribute to Aphra Behn. This Restoration writer has nothing to do with Cunningham’s novel, but I love teaching a few of her queer poems (indeed written “way back then”), and I love letting students know that this queer woman was the mother of the English novel. And a spy!

Was Behn what we’d call bi? Was Woolf? Woolf’s character Clarissa Dalloway? Cunningham’s Clarissa? It’s hard to say, and Robyn Ochs’ short essay “Finding Bisexuality in Fiction” helps explain why, so I assign it along with Woolf and Behn. Students engage deeply with Ochs’ take on bi-erasure, so even if I cut Woolf and/or Behn, I’ll find other texts to pair with Ochs’ essay.

Literary Responses to AIDS

The next two-session unit, “Literary Responses to AIDS” also serves as preparation for The Hours and for the course’s final text, Andrew Sean Greer’s comic novel, Less.  Both novels are themselves responses to the AIDS crisis, The Hours more obviously so.

Maybe all literature written after the crisis in some way responds to it, but certainly no LGBTQ+ course could be complete without some attention to it. In the U.S. at least, the AIDS crisis is the clearest example of queer trauma.

I aim to cover a range of genres and a combination of early and current texts, starting with Susan Sontag’s classic story “The Way We Live Now” (1986) and “No Day But Today,” Finale B  from RENT (1996), winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Drama and the Tony Award for Best Musical. Next there is poetry, starting with an excerpt from Walter Holland’s Journal of the Plague Years (1992). The excerpt pays tribute to Sontag’s story and alludes to the quilt.

• 

• 

Then we return to Danez Smith, author of [INSERT] BOY, and read some poems from his National Book Award winning collection, Don’t Call Us Dead (2017). In this performance of “every day is a funeral & a miracle,” Smith juxtaposes the threat of AIDS with the threat of police violence against black men (“my blood is in cahoots with the law”).

On the same day, we read the essay “why I write” (2007) by Reginald Shepherd, one of the poets Saeed Jones mentions in an excerpt from his award-winning memoir, How We Fight For Our Lives  (2019). The unit ends with Alexander Chee’s 2020 NYT article, “In This Pandemic, Personal Echoes of the AIDS Crisis.”

I also provide a timeline from AIDS.gov and a brief lecture on the history and impact of the crisis. I include images of the quilt and other visual art like Keith Haring’s. I bring up the good that the LGBTQ+ community created out of the crisis—increased solidarity, visibility, and activism (National Coming Out Day and the influential protest strategies of ACT UP). And I make it clear that the large death toll was caused by homophobia.

This year, as some of my students worked with COVID patients and all my students were living through a pandemic, they reacted with tremendous shock and rage when they learned that the AIDS epidemic was four years old before Reagan mentioned it publicly. “Four years!” my Zoom group kept saying, first whispering and then growing louder. “What if that had happened with COVID?!” “Four years! How many people died because of that?” “How could the president say nothing for four whole years?”  

Michael Cunningham’s The Hours

When we moved to The Hours, this fury strengthened the empathy that students felt for Cunningham’s character, Richard, a writer suffering from AIDS-related dementia. And both times I’ve taught the course, students have been engaged with the novel’s three main characters: Virginia Woolf (writing Mrs. Dalloway), Laura Brown (an unhappy 1950s housewife reading Mrs. Dalloway), and Clarissa Vaughn (a happily married lesbian in the 1990s, nicknamed Mrs. Dalloway by Richard). The students are proud of themselves for reading an intertextual structurally difficult text, and even though most of them are the age of Clarissa’s daughter, they connect with 52-year-old Clarissa and her questions about time, aging, love, success, and happiness. They also find it interesting when such themes are treated comically in Andrew Sean Greer’s more male-centered novel, Less.

Why, then, am I considering cutting The Hours? The sadness. It opens with the actual letter that Woolf left for her husband, Leonard, before she died by suicide. The movie, featuring Nicole Kidman as Virginia, also opens with the letter and the suicide. The letter itself, the opening of Cunningham’s novel, and the opening of the film are all beautiful. But gutting. So gutting.

I won’t spoil Cunningham’s novel for people who haven’t read it, but it also contains two other suicidal characters. Given the suicide of Bruce in Bechdel’s Fun Home, maybe that is too much suicide for one course? Especially given that Woolf’s and Bruce’s actually happened?

And maybe one “middle-aged” text is enough for twenty-something students?

Decisions, decisions…

Andrew Sean Greer’s Less

I know that I want to continue ending the course with Less. The main character, Arthur Less, is a nearly 50-year-old gay author who is feeling like a failure. His major claim to literary fame is that in his youth he was the lover of a much older Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Robert Brownburn. Arthur’s major sorrow is that he has just lost the love of his life, a much younger high school English teacher, Freddy Pelu. Instead of attending Freddy’s wedding, Arthur decides to accept every single speaking/teaching invitation he has recently received and travel the world.

The novel’s ending is my favorite of all time—not simply happy, but also thought-provoking, clever, and funny. More important, Less explicitly explores two themes I want to emphasize in the course—the coexistence of (queer) trauma and joy—and the purpose of queer literature.

What makes a good (queer) writer? That topic is handled lightheartedly via Arthur’s interactions with the writer Finley Dwyer, who accuses Arthur of being a “bad gay.” At a party in France Dwyer tells Less, “It is our duty to show something beautiful from our world. The gay world. But in your books you make your characters suffer without reward. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were a Republican.”

The rest of their exchange is hilarious, but the topic is serious. Do marginalized writers need to follow more rigid rules than mainstream ones? For instance, is a gay writer, unlike a straight writer, obligated to limit the amount of sorrow his characters experience? Is a gay writer obligated to inspire his gay readers? To create happy endings?

The novel Less offers no easy or clear answers to these questions, but it does seem to support a claim made by Freddy’s father: life is half tragedy and half comedy. Greer himself has said that Less is about “the saddest things I can think of and the most difficult things in my life,” but he also says that it’s “about joy.”

One of the novel’s “saddest things” is the intergenerational trauma of AIDS, which serves as a painful backdrop to Greer’s picaresque plot and comic tone. The following passage is a perfect example of Greer’s vast emotional register. He pulls no punches about the trauma caused by AIDS, but he surrounds it with a comic treatment of Arthur’ angst about his own aging.

Arthur Less is the first homosexual ever to grow old. That is, at least, how he feels at times like these. Here, in this tub, he should be twenty-five or thirty, a beautiful young man naked in a bathtub. Enjoying the pleasures of life. How dreadful if someone came upon naked Less today: pink to his middle, gray to his scalp, like those old double erasers for pencil and ink. He has never seen another gay man age past fifty, none except Robert. He met them all at forty or so but never saw them make it much beyond; they died of AIDS, that generation. Less’s generation often feels like the first to explore the land beyond fifty. How are they meant to do it? Do you stay a boy forever, and dye your hair and diet to stay lean and wear tight shirts and jeans and go out dancing until you drop dead at eighty? Or do you do the opposite—do you forswear all that, and let your hair go gray, and wear elegant sweaters that cover your belly, and smile on past pleasures that will never come again? Do you marry and adopt a child? In a couple, do you each take a lover, like matching nightstands by the bed, so that sex will not vanish entirely? Or do you let sex vanish entirely, as heterosexuals do?

Unlike Arthur with his lack of role models, Greer had a mentor in Cunningham. And that may be another reason to keep Cunningham’s novel the next time I teach the course. Yet, yet, yet… it would also be nice to teach a novel that is not simply woman-centered, but actually authored by a woman. I’d also like to add some fiction by writers of color.

What do you think? Should I keep The Hours? Should I replace it and some of the other heavier texts with happier ones? I want recommendations, but they need to do more than please Finley Dwyer. Yes, we need happy endings and inspiration, but we also need hard truths, companionship in sorrow, and emotional complexity. Complexity, period.