What Does It Mean To Write To Survive?

Aug 06, 2024

Some of my recent publications and interviews:

One of my favorite essays, “Star Beings,” is in A Great Gay Book, the collected works of Hello Mr, out in stores now. It is a story set in the 1990s.
The 1990s were with me all through Pride month. T Magazine interviewed me for their story of 30 queer artists, The Year I Turned 30—along with André De Shields, John Rechy, Danez Smith, Catherine Opie, Bill T. Jones, B. D. Wong, Edmund White, Jenna Lyons, Big Freedia—the list goes on and is incredible. I was so impressed with myself until I got to my own entry, the year was 1997. The year’s accomplishments were modest, it was not the most auspicious year of my life. Maybe that was the point. I was living in Brooklyn, working on my first novel and waiting tables, cater-waitering. Much of this is in my first essay collection. I had a series of what I was reluctant to even call affairs, Brooklyn as a vast proto-polycule, telling the men I saw that I was emotionally unavailable. I did this at first because it was true but it seemed to act like a love spell, until soon it seemed irresponsible to say it. In the interview I gave to Michael Snyder I even learned something me about myself—that I had been imitating someone who’d broken up with me, and I saw how it was the last gesture of some powerful misguided loyalty. The headline that came out of that interview did make me laugh. Also? My friend Eric McNatt found these photos of me he took that year as he experimented with a new camera.

And then I went back to the 1980s and 1970s when GQ invited me and a few others—Hannah Gadsby, Jeremy Pope, Carrie Brownstein, Jenna Lyons, Geena Rocero, Perfume Genius, some other brilliant queer people—about the queer art that had shaped us just after I’d rewatched the films Fame and Flashdance, and was reminded just how much it affected me to see a high school student perform a monologue about being gay in 1977, or to see Gene Anthony Ray dance. Of course, I also talked about Maurice and E. M. Forster.
And then it was time to speak of the future. Kiese Laymon and Deesha Philyaw included me as a guest on their amazing new podcast, Reckon True Stories. We spoke of my new novel, money, horror and terror, and what it means to write in order to survive. They did a wonderful reference page of links to what we spoke of which is like a found poem summary there.

Thanks for reading me, it’s an honor.

Alexander Chee

The Querent