The Writer as Outsider

Michael Taylor posted a great comment to my remarks about David Stacton:

I am a heterosexual who is interested in Queer Theory. It seems to me, as a student of creative writing that my particular bent is social and anthropological. I'm simply trying to understand what your view is on homosexuality. Why reference the murder? I don't mean to sound trite, Stacton is a great writer in my opinion and I respect your expert opinion and obvious respect for the author. It is difficult to communicate good fiction with so poor data on sexuality, our customs, culture, and other social ways. In a very real way, queerness is very misused and misrepresented in writing by heterosexual writers like me.

I thought quite a bit before mentioning the possibility of a specifically homosexual murder as the cause of Stacton's death, and I didn't offer it as a titillating bit of gossip. Stacton's sexuality probably helped make him a fine writer by making him an outsider.

Until a few months ago, I had no clue about Stacton's sexuality. I knew almost nothing about him except for a biographical item in a reference book on American authors, and that had told me almost nothing. Since his death I've sometimes mentioned him to other writers, but they were as ignorant of Stacton's life as I was. Even in his days of fame, he was almost as mysterious as B. Traven, the author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and many other powerful novels.

The man who's planning to publish some of Stacton's novels was kind enough to send me some materials I'd never seen, and that's where I learned not just that he was gay, but flamboyantly so—flying in drag to a job as a teacher of creative writing, for which he dressed soberly in jacket and tie, then flying home in a cowboy outfit. And this was in the 1950s and 60s, when such behaviour could get you beaten up or even killed.

Exactly nothing of this is evident in his novels. He has gay characters, but their gayness is just part of what they are, like the straight characters. Unlike many American male writers of his generation, he does show some entertaining insights into the way women think: I still recall his throwaway line, "Wives consider their husbands' friends the unshaven underworld." Try finding that kind of observation in Norman Mailer!

So Stacton's gayness, and how it might have led to his untimely death, interest me for just one reason: Gayness made him an outsider, and being an outsider made him a writer.

You don't have to be gay to be a good writer. You just have to consider yourself as not quite belonging to your society. In Stacton's generation, born in the 1920s, it helped to be Jewish or black or communist or just some kind of crank...combine two or three of these qualities, and you couldn't lose.

Here in Canada, our outsider-writers are often Asians, blacks, women, gays, aboriginals...and it also helps just to be Canadian, living next door to the huge dysfunctional family whose parties keep us awake all night. The Americans define themselves as insiders, so that automatically makes us outsiders. (Most Americans, of course, don't consider themselves insiders at all, which is why so many good writers are Americans.)

And this is why being an outsider is so good for you if you want to be a writer: Outsiders don't take much for granted. They walk down the street as if they expected to be pointed out, denounced, and then beaten unconscious. They look more carefully at the people around them. They notice the habits, the rituals, the tone of voice of the insiders. They see what works and what doesn't, and they learn about what goes on in everyone's head.

In The Great Gatsby, the outsider Nick Carraway watches the outsider Jay Gatz try to become an insider by winning back the ultra-insider Daisy Buchanan. If Nick had been part of the Buchanans' class, he wouldn't have noticed anything worth mentioning about the failed love affair. He'd probably have gone on and on about Tom Buchanan's polo ponies.

The basic plot of all fiction, meanwhile, is of someone who is an outsider trying to gain (or regain) insider status. The outsider has been kicked out of Eden, and now has to struggle in the desert to find a new home. So if you're not an outsider, you're not going to know how your characters feel, why it hurts to be an outsider, and what they'll do to become an insider—even if it kills them.

David Stacton's gift was to show us that even an Egyptian Pharaoh, or a Republican presidential candidate, could be an outsider. If we recognize what a gift he offered us, we will be better writers.