Necessary Nonfiction

In an open letter to former Jamaican Prime Minister Bruce Golding—in response to Golding’s recent homophobic remarks—Thomas Glave asks: “If my throat is sliced open in Jamaica because I am a homosexual, or if I am chopped to death with a machete or burned to death in public by a gay-hating group of enraged men and women—[entirely] likely realities that occur and recur on the island all the time—will you send words of comfort to my aged, ailing mother and all my other relatives?”

Glave—who was born in the Bronx to Jamaican parents and grew up between there and Kingston, Jamaica—is an O. Henry Award-winning author and renowned scholar. His haunting new book Among the Bloodpeople: Politics and Flesh (Akashic Books) collects his genre-bending essays on same-sex desire, the literature of the African diaspora and the perilous situation of gay and lesbian people in Jamaica.

That quoted passage (and the awful reality it describes) has a sense of urgency omnipresent in Glave’s writing—an urgency that might point to why, for him, there is no distinction between the personal and the political.

“It wouldn’t make sense to me to say, ‘I’m going to sit down and write something political’—I honestly don’t have any idea what that would mean. Similarly, when I worked as an activist in Jamaica, neither I nor my colleagues ever considered ourselves or spoke of ourselves as ‘activists.’ We were just doing the work that we felt had to be done.”

And it is exactly this dissolution between what constitutes “political” and “personal” literature, along with his rich and lyrical prose, that renders Glave’s work such a powerful force. In “Meditation (On ‘Barebacking’),” one of the book’s most moving essays, he writes candidly about unprotected sex and the flaws of safer-sex rhetoric.

“I worked for years as both a volunteer and paid employee—of GMHC at one point—in AIDS community education and what GMHC called ‘prevention’ of transmission,” Glave tells me. “I remember being particularly struck by the powerful insights delivered in Walt Odets’s superb In the Shadow of the Epidemic, and the clearly vast ocean between what that book had to say and what the ‘official’ educational line of many AIDS education workers was at the time, especially in the 1990s, but also well into this century. Odets hypothesized that much of the ‘refrain from [‘unprotected’] anal sex’ education messages were actually rooted in homophobia, even/especially on the part of gay-identified men…

“And then the term ‘barebacking’ came about, and I was struck by the ‘outlawry’ of that word: for to ride ‘bareback’ anyway is considered…bad form, dangerous, ‘amateur,’ ‘barbarian’ (amongst the British aristocracy of yore), etc. And here we are likening—whether we know it or not—the supposedly, possibly intimate act of [gay] anal sex to the sport of riding an animal—a creature not our species.”

That Glave is unafraid to raise these difficult but important questions—or to confront a national leader about the broader implications of his offhanded homophobia—is what makes him such a rare and vital writer. With Among the Bloodpeople, he has given us a book as beautiful as it is necessary.