Don't make me a celebrity! Please, make me a celebrity!

It was one of the first things I noticed upon coming to the USA--celebrity culture. Not that the South Africa of my youth lacked magazines devoted to "uncovering" Rock Hudson's skinny-dipping locales and speculating about how he got HIV. Or less gloomily, counting Liz Taylor's diamond necklaces. But the trend was magnified on this side of the Atlantic. What I noticed was the sheer number of prime-time TV shows dedicated to Hollywood, not to mention trashy rags at the checkout counter.

And then there was the cult of personality about Nelson Mandela.

In the "struggle," we just saw Mandela as our "Comrade Leader." The battle to defeat apartheid was collective--the only thing we had on our side was force of numbers. But here, Mandela was seen as a charismatic Beowulf-style hero who'd single-handedly slain an evil monster. I remember Charlene Hunter Gault interviewing him on PBS, and Madiba telling her off several times for assuming democracy in South Africa was "his" victory. This difference seemed to epitomize a culture steeped in adversity, which promotes community, versus a more prosperous, individualized one geared more to mass entertainment.

But whether it's Jesus, Buddha, Prince William, or the Biebs, we seem to need people to exalt above ourselves. Today, South Africa is almost as celebrity-obsessed as North America. When it comes to Lady Gaga or Zac Efron, the amount of money and attention we pour on celebrities is staggering. Did you know that Beyonce made $ 84 million in 2009?

Which brings me to the current focus of this blog--the experience of publishing a first book. My publicist at my press told me the day he met me: "It's only celebrity memoirs that we try to get onto the big radio and TV shows." A friend--also a book publicist--explained, "If you want to sell books, frankly, the goal is to try to make yourself, as much as possible, into a celebrity." Of course, what she was saying was entirely relative. Even the biggest celebrity literary authors, like Dave Eggers, are ultimately small fry. But I think her point was that if I want people to read my words and get my message--if I want an audience for the stories which I worked so hard to produce--I need to be able in some modest way, to play the celebrity game.

Yesterday, WITF--the public broadcasting TV station in Harrisburg, PA--came to our Writers Institute building to interview me about my book and about the Travel Writing in South Africa course. In the big universe of celebrity-hood, it was nothing at all. Tomorrow, at 8 pm, a small news magazine program will broadcast a couple of minutes about me and my students to a central Pennsylvania audience. But still, the camera guy and anchor added a touch a glamor to our bookish surroundings. There were photo lamps; reflective umbrellas. It was fun to talk about teaching and writing, and as is so often the case, I was proud as can be of the Susquehanna University students when they got in front of the camera.

My friends, students, and colleagues didn't lose the chance to tease me about it, though.

"You're a celebrity now!" they said. "A hot shot! Obama will be inviting you to the White House!"

'No," I wanted to reply, echoing my erstwhile President, back in 1994. "I'm just an author!" Half my brain was going, "Shit, yeah! Barack and me, natural buddies." The other half, "Don't you dare call me that dirty c-word!" And of course, it doesn't need to be said that the whole idea was completely ridiculous.

I suppose the ultimate point to these ramblings on the topic of celebrity culture is that I'll take every little thing the world is willing to throw at me, in order to be able to live my dream. That dream is simply to create truth and beauty--emotional, formal, and linguistic --on the page. That's the passion that made me want to be a writer. That's my vocation, what the Italian essayist Natalia Ginsburg called--I'm quoting roughly from memory here--the thing that "burns away everything inessential."

If someone hands me $84 million--thanks so much! I'll buy a nice island and tower off the South African West Coast and use the beautiful solitude to read and write more. I'll donate the surplus to end corrective rape and support the education of young South African writers. Not that I'm holding my breath--but I'm just saying.


If the world hands me nothing at all, I'll write in whatever time I can carve aside.

Either way, writing and love of the people in my life--family, friends, students, colleagues, neighbors--are the two things I care most about.

I don't even think I'm kidding myself on this point. All of this book publicity stuff--successful or unsuccessful--is just a means to an end. All the rest is meaningless.

Miming memories and signing Kindles

It has begun... Readings galore! Two weeks ago, I read at Virginia Tech's creative writing program, at the invitation of Fred D'Aguiar. Then, last week, I read at Susquehanna University, where I work as a professor. Last Saturday I read at the beautiful, excellent Midtown Scholar bookstore in Harrisburg.

Many of the visiting authors we get at SU seem to struggle with performing their poems, essays, and stories. They write exquisite sentences, but struggle to voice them with the same feeling that went into them. I've always thought this had to do with writers being generally shy and introspective individuals, more comfortable alone with words than in front of a crowd.

Perhaps I missed my true vocation as an actor/performer, like my partner, Peterson Toscano? I doubt I have a shy bone in my body. This is probably an essential character trait for someone like me--an exhibitionist, er, I mean, memoirist! For whatever reason, though, I've always intensely enjoyed reading my work.

On stage I forget myself and get into acting out my story. At the SU reading, at one point I knocked on the podium to imitate a friend in the story knocking on my window. At another I mimed hunting through an invisible garbage can for tuna cans. I've always felt a bit self-conscious about how crazy I can get doing a reading. I feel clownish. Somehow serious literature should be more subdued, more dignified, shouldn't it? And I feel a bit like a fake. I won't say I prefer reading my sentences to struggling with them in my solitary study. Yet I do find reading much easier than writing, which is often an intensely pleasurable-painful struggle.

Do I lose points as a writer for laying it on thick from the podium? For not suffering from social anxiety disorder?

Then again, I love listening to audiobooks, and I have to say there's nothing like a skilled reader to bring out the beauty of, say, Eliot's Middlemarch. Also, according to my editor Elizabeth Beier, writers need to learn how to become better performers if they want to sell books through readings. Most authors sell very few books at such events.

The thing that most amused me at the three readings I did this week, though, is how apologetic several people were about me to sign their books. Are you kidding me? You shelled out $16 or more for my book, and you're embarrassed to ask for a signature? To me, being able to sign books is a tremendous privilege.

At the Harrisburg reading, I even signed a Kindle, using a special kind of glo-pen... it was "virtually" as good as signing a hard copy, with the smell of ink and paper and the heft of pages in one's hands.

This blog, a statistical improbability

What a sweetheart he is! Cross-posting Peterson Toscano today, for reasons that will become apparent:

Two are Better than One–Art, Love, & Partnership

April 25, 2011 by p2son

Since finally coming out gay in my early 30′s (after 17 years of self-imposed therapies to de-gay myself) I was never that keen on finding a partner. Sure I dated, and I met some great guys, but first off I knew I had a ton of gunk to work through. One cannot go to war against one’s sexuality and personality the way I did without needing serious recovery. The Ex-Gay Movement with all the faulty oppressive teaching “ministers” and “therapists” served up with a warm loving touch did a number on me. Honestly I never thought I could ever be partner material.

Although “change” was not possible (as the ex-gays vaguely promised) recovery has been. Not that I have everything sorted out. Sadly I believe I will live with some of the negative effects of ex-gay treatment for the rest of my life. But not only does life go on for me, I have been able to reclaim much of my life, my art, my hope, and my sanity. With a handful of thoughtful, faithful, loving friends, I was prepared and content to live single the rest of my life.

In regards to romance and partnership, I hate it when people say things like, “Once you stop looking, that’s when you will find love.” Perhaps anecdotal evidence supports this claim, and unfortunately my own romantic situation plops me into the data pool of those who found love when not looking. Surely most people who find a partner have been looking for said partner. These folks don’t just drop out of the sky.

Glen Retief in Lesotho

Still, my partner did, in a matter of speaking, dropped from the sky. In 2008 I attended the Friends General Conference, an annual gathering of North American Quakers. We met that year on a college campus in Johnston, PA, and I roomed with my conference buddy, Dennis, a 65 year old+ scientist and dancer from Denver. We roomed in a wing of the dorm where many of the LGBTQ folks clustered (you get to request what cluster you prefer when you register.) The dorm rooms were such that two rooms shared a bathroom. When I heard someone on the other side of the two bathroom walls, I thought that we should meet and devise a protocol so that we do not inadvertently barge in on each other.

Just as I cracked open my bathroom door, the stranger in the next room burst in. Tall, gorgeous, and wearing only his underwear, he practically ran into me. I quickly explained, “Um, yeah, so, like, I guess we share a bathroom, so maybe we need to knock or do something before we enter.” Although he was the near naked one, he did not seem flustered one bit. “Yes, I did not realize.” he said with a lilting foreign-accent that sounded a mash-up of British and German. “My name is Glen.”

And that dear friends, is how I met my partner–in the bathroom at a religious conference. Glen, Dennis, and I spent much of the week together going to meals, talks, and Quaker worship. I was a bit harried as I co-led a daily workshop for teens and was scheduled to offer a plenary address to the 1000+ Quakers at the end of the weekend. Glen told me months later that at the time he did not know if Dennis and I were just friends or something more, and he hoped I was available.

I struggled with a sore throat the whole week. I obsessed so much that I would not be able to speak by the time I did my presentation, The Re-Education of George W. Bush, that I paid little attention to Glen. He did catch my attention after one of the plenary addresses when he expressed his strong, thoughtful opinion contrary to my own about something the speaker said. I found this to be extremely alluring. At one point he told me that he was a writer, and inwardly I remarked, “Yeah, right, everyone is a writer these days.”

He saw my play and although he did not say so at the time, he was struck by my ability as an artist–not just another pretty face He then emailed me a chapter of a book he had begun, something about growing up in South Africa which I promised to read when I had some quiet time away from all the wild Quakers with all their many activities. Then we abruptly parted ways. He left a little early because he was concerned for the welfare of his cats, and I hurried back to Hartford to catch a plane to London to speak at the Lambeth Conference.

I meet so many people. I like many of them and stay in touch, but I felt something different about Glen, and found myself thinking of him and speaking about him to friends in the UK. “I met this really nice guy…but I’m sure it is nothing.” Then on a train going up North to visit friends in Wakefield I cracked open the email that held the attachment of Glen’s memoir excerpt. The prose was gorgeous. The story deeply moving. I concluded, “He really is a writer–not just another pretty face.”

And as they say, the rest is history. Of course we took other steps to get to know each other before we literally fell in love while hiking in the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon. We also each found the other to be freakishly compatible. We are both odd ducks in our own ways, and to find another that fits so well, is well, nothing short of miraculous–a statistical improbability. We compliment each other in multiple ways. We enjoy ourselves together immensely and we help each other to become better artists and better people. We intellectually spar, we comfort each other, we cook for each other, look out for each other, we partner in every aspect of our lives–personally, professionally, spiritually, domestically.

Glen Retief and Peterson Toscano

Next month in Washington, DC we will appeared together to present our work. Glen will read from his memoir, The Jack Bank, and I will perform scenes from my plays, I Can See Sarah Palin from my Window and Transfigurations (a play about transgender Bible characters.”

Glen and I often quote a favorite passage from the book of Ecclesiastes, a text used in many wedding ceremonies. It can easily apply to all sorts of couples, but the text appears to be speaking directly about two males (at least in the English translations I have read. I will have to check in on the Hebrew one of these days.)

Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up! Again, if two lie together, they keep warm, but how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him—a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

Ecclesiastes 4:9-12

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Wanna check us out?

Tuesday, April 26, 11:00 AM Radio Interview with Glen about his book. WVIA’s ArtScene with Erica Funke

Wednesday, April 27, 7:30 PM Reading and book signing, The Jack Bank, at Susquehanna University

Saturday, April 30, 7:00 PM Reading and book signing, The Jack Bank, at Midtown Scholar, Harrisburg, PA

Friday, Saturday May 7 and 8 Peterson will perform I Can See Sarah Palin from my Window and Transfigurations in Oslo, Norway.

Wednesday, May 25, 7:00 PM Quaker and Public Witness, a joint presentation by Peterson Toscano & Glen Retief, at the William Penn House, Washington, DC

Thursday, May 26, 700 PM An evening with Glen Retief and Susi Wyss, Atomic Books, Baltimore, MD

Friday, Saturday June 24, 25 Reading by Glen Retief, performance by Peterson Toscano at Wild Goose Festival, Shakori Hills NC

Glen will also read at the Friends General Conference and Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (details to be announced)

A simple pleasure: bartering books for pears

Now, with The Jack Bank at last in bookstores, I just feel, more than anything, happy and grateful. Happy to be sending words, dreams and memories out into the world. Extraordinarily thankful to the people, most of them completely strangers, who are buying my book, reading it, reviewing it, and emailing me about it. It's a privilege, both as an author and human being, to be connecting, even for a moment, so widely and deeply with my fellow temporary passengers on this planet. It's both surreal and moving to have people care enough to pay attention in this ultra-busy life we live nowadays.

No doubt my infatuation with book publication will quickly fade and give way to the hard realities of having to raise a child, metaphorically speaking--to shepherd this literary labor into the world. Books don't keep afloat by themselves. Publicity is a lot of work. But for now I am just touched by the fact that anyone would want to read me at all.

This point was brought vividly home to me last Saturday morning, when Peterson and I went shopping at the Sunbury Farmers Market. One of the things we both love--and sometimes rail against--in our home region is how old-fashioned everything is. The clothes in the downtown stores look they come from the 1970s. The fresh Amish-grown tomatoes at the end of summer are $6 a bushel. Local entertainment includes wooden roller coasters, a drive-in cinema, and a cow-patty bingo fundraiser for the Lewisburg Public Library.

But what struck home Saturday morning is how exotic and unusual book publication is in this country town. We brought along copies to show our market trader friends, and they went beserk. Teaching creative writing at a college, and hanging out with writer types, it's easy to forget how special literature really is. But at the farmers' market, our regular salespeople all wanted copies. They didn't have much cash, so they offered to trade eggs and fruit for books. This is a literary memoir dealing with sexual oppression and liberation in South Africa; it's hardly the most logical reading for rural, religious central PA. But that didn't matter. Like the earliest readers of creative nonfiction, the folks who gobbled up Hazlitt, Shonagun, or Montaigne to get the dirt on their neighbors, these folks wanted to support me and find out about me, because they knew me.

Books--stories, words, gossip--for pears and broccoli! Hardcovers for eggs! Hard to imagine any future book sales that will satisfy me so viscerally.

Having a good place to work

Writer Digest asked me to write down seven things I've learned as an author, for their "Guide to Literary Agents Blog." The piece should be published soon after The Jack Bank hits stores early next week. But I'll give you a sneak preview here of one of the points I made: I talked about the importance of having the most pleasant possible space to work in.

For many years I just wrote wherever there was a spare corner: my university office or high school classroom, or a desk in the corner of the bedroom. I wrote on the dining room table, next to the dirty breakfast dishes. I wrote in Starbucks.

When Peterson and I bought a house together, for the first time I had a study (pictured above). I love working in here. I enjoy the sunlight and the view of the historic town of Sunbury, where we live, and of the green wooded hills. I like being able to turn off the Internet. I love hearing birdsong in the warm months, and the music of the wind chime below. The room is full of my favorite books, artwork, and African cloths. I can't imagine myself ever going back to my old way of doing things.

Some writers do well in artists' colonies or varying their working environs. I think I do well with an ironclad routine: I like to program my own brain so that if it's the morning, I should be sitting down at my desk. And if I'm in my office, I should be working--even the wallpaper and floor rug should be subtle reminders of that fact.

Here's the point I make in my forthcoming article, though: writing takes more concentration than any other activity I can think of. There is no one to cheer the writer on. It's a task that's so easy to avoid. If you're like me and work best in stable, predictable, constant surroundings, then I think it's a good idea to make those surroundings as enjoyable, in themselves, as possible. This may not lead to inspiration in itself (an overrated thing, in my view, but that's another blog post). But if writing is going to be so difficult to do, why not do every little thing we can to make it just a little easier to get started? In my case a comfortable chair. A nice desk. Bamboo blinds, rather than the dusty-stained white plastic ones I had for years. Even though I failed to completely register the fact, I think they imprinted on my brain a mood of gloomy, discouraging dullness.

Foolishness and bravery in Japan

I get lots of my ideas for blog posts from messages shared at the Quaker meeting Peterson and I attend. This Sunday, one Friend shared her despair about human foolishness as evidenced by our building nuclear power plants on geological fault lines.

But my own response has been different. Yes, I will agree she had a point, and media coverage has dealt at length with the corruption of the Japanese nuclear industry. But two counter-arguments: one, this earthquake was the fourth largest in recorded history. A natural catastrophe so freakishly rare, in other words, it boggles the mind. Is it reasonable to conclude that these power plants were a mistake based on such a stunning statistical anomaly? As human beings, what we do expect ourselves to be able to foresee? If we were responsible for preventing every possible catastrophe, however unlikely, we wouldn't be able to do anything in the world at all!

Second, I have to say that his week I've been overwhelmed by the sheer, astounding heroism of the nuclear plant workers. As I write this blog, the effort to control the overheating reactors has had its ups and downs. But I remain optimistic a cataclysmic meltdown will be averted, and if this happens, it will be due to the incredible efforts of the people who've been working on restoring power and dousing these reactors with sea water. They've been putting their own health and bodies on the line for their country's safety.

As a writer and human being, I'm always up for criticizing human stupidity: much of The Jack Bank deals with the innate human capacity for evil. But let's not forget the other side of our natures. My book ends with the recollection of a straight black man who risked his life to keep me safe during an Inkatha attack in Soweto (and he got kidnapped as a result). South African political violence was certainly horrible, but it also led to extraordinary love and heroism.

OK, let's love the dead, but more the living

Today I cross-blog, here as well as at Zack Ford Blogs. Thanks, Zack, for having me as a guest!

We teach our children: speak no ill of the dead. At a funeral, say nice things about the corpse in the coffin. She can’t answer accusations anymore.

If this is true of dead people in general, even more so when the dead person in question is a mere kid, a “laaitie” as we say in my native South Africa. (I immigrated to the United States about sixteen years ago—more about that in a minute). When that child has been bullied and brutalized, we’re tempted to raise them to sainthood. So St. Sebastian, with arrows sticking out of his body, looking to heaven in wounded ecstasy. Also, college boy Tyler Clementi, who got taped making out with a man in his Rutgers dorm room, and then jumped off the George Washington Bridge. Or, closer to my central Pennsylvania home, Brandon Bitner, who got fed up with being gay-bashed at Middleburg High School, and stepped in front of a speeding truck.

As Zack Ford said in his blog three months ago: “We owe [Brandon] that love now, more than ever.” In my home town, people compete for stories of how they are connected to him. My cousin’s husband was the driver of the truck—those kinds of tales. Brandon’s memorial page is understandably full of longing and regret. An acrostic poem states: “An angel you are to us now.”

I don’t mean to spoil the party, but I just can’t do go along with all this anymore. I’ve had enough. It’s certainly not that I hate Brandon, Tyler, Justin Aeburg, Asher Brown, and all of the other depressed queer teenagers who’ve taken their lives over the past year or so. A gay man myself, I value their difference. Is it even necessary to say I strongly condemn their harassment and abuse?

Nor am I blaming these kids for their own deaths in that sadistic US marine sergeant kind of way: “Friggin’ sissy! Toughen up!” They had enough of that crap while alive.

What I am tired of is feeling I’m supposed to fetishize these boys’ victimhood, kiss their broken bones like George of Diocletian’s, adore them ten times the more now they are dead than I would have done if they’d carried on to live happy, fulfilled, grown-up gay lives. More than if they’d survived.

I experienced my own homophobic hell growing up white and gay in apartheid South Africa, an experience I describe in my forthcoming memoir, The Jack Bank. I spent my early years in the Kruger National Park, where a lioness charged my mother and a buffalo killed a housekeeper who crossed a dry river bed in the wrong spot. But what I experienced at age 12, when I was sent away to a whites-only, government boarding school, made these early brushes with danger seem simple.

A seventeen-year-old prefect figured out I was gay when he caught me “looking at him funny” in the shower room. He beat me, sometimes several times a week, on my buttocks with a cricket bat. We called them “jacks,” in South Africa—thrashings—and senior boys were unofficially allowed to administer them to juniors.

He built an electric shock machine with a hand telephone crank and shocked boys’ genitalia. When he suspected another kid of informing on him to his parents, he staged a mock nude hanging in the senior boys’ bathroom. All the time he told us—me in particular—he wanted to beat the “queer” and “sissy” out of us. He said we needed to fight a race war, and this meant we should get some backbone.

One night, just before he got transferred out of the junior dormitory for being too brutal even for apartheid norms, he invented something called the “jack bank,” where we could deposit beatings and they could earn interest. We volunteered for these beatings. We begged him, “Please, sir! More!” When he got transferred out of our passage, the thing that most infuriated us was that we lost our deposits.

We sweltered, for years, in fear and dehumanization, a program designed specifically to prepare us for the role of racist oppressors. At times I felt like Brandon—suicidal. At other times we took out our hurt and anger by beating those younger than us. Some of my most nauseating memories of high school are of pushing younger boys’ heads in a wooden mailbox, beating them as hard as I could with a cricket bat, and then feeling a great deal of power and self-satisfaction when I got them to fear and obey me. Until the self-disgust later drove me to vomit over the toilet.

But I got through these trials, as did hundreds of thousands of other gay white boys under apartheid, not to mention the millions of young black South Africans whose suffering greatly exceeded ours.

The world knows the end of this story. Nelson Mandela, walking free in front of the television cameras. Corporal punishment being banned in South African schools. The adoption of one of the world’s most progressive constitutions, which also bans discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation—a clause I helped lobby for, and celebrated ecstatically when it was passed into law.

I’m trying not to be self-righteous here. Lord knows (metaphorically speaking, on this atheist blog!), I have no reason to be. See a couple of paragraphs above.

But still, part of me is angry at Brandon, Tyler and co. for caving in. For giving the haters what they wanted—a few less gay people in the people. For not keeping going long enough to show the world they could leave adolescence behind and be peaceful and happy queers.

Any depressed gay teenager out there today could look at the reaction to these kids’ deaths and think, “If I want everyone to love me, I should just kill myself!”

But this is wrong. We can survive, hard as it is. We can find joy and peace; can learn to be kind to each other. We can mourn people like Brandon and Tyler, without romanticizing their martyrdom. We can protest bullying. And that way we can, at least at moments, be real angels for our fellow human beings, as opposed to vanished saints.

THAT’s love worth giving, day after day, for as long as it’s needed.

Glen Retief teaches creative nonfiction at Susquehanna University. His memoir, The Jack Bank, appears in April from St. Martin's Press. www.glenretief.com