"Where do you get the audacity to write?"

A question, an answer.

The day before the election I took myself down to New Haven for a class visit at Yale’s Literary Production class and a lunchtime Q&A with my wonderful friend Adam Dalva (

Style it Takes

), newly the fiction editor of The Yale Review. I had an ulterior motive in agreeing to the visit: beyond getting to see Adam: there’s a gay bar in New Haven that is in my new novel and after some thought, I decided to make the trip and visit the bar for research. I was joined by an impromptu party made of the writers Simon Wu and Maureen Sun, and The Yale Review editors Young In Chae and Maggie Millner, who had issued the invitation to begin with, all of whom were perfect company for this.

I drank what I dubbed Old Man Martinis for that night—gin martinis with the vermouth left in and with a lemon and an olive both, served on the rocks—and enjoyed a night of conversation about books and life in a gay video bar in Connecticut. After they left, I waited on an old friend who lives nearby and works in theater—late, that is—and he came at the end and over drinks, we got caught up. I went to bed at a reasonable hour and woke up for the voting to begin, driving back to campus in New Hampshire.

How is this research? Well, there are details to a gay bar you can’t fake and that could get lost on you. Like the video single for Heidi Klum’s cover of “Sunglasses At Night” coming on as a friend tries to tell you about his breakup and it’s the perfect sort of cover, like a machine made to cover up heartbreak in an otherwise quiet bar. It was a Monday night also. As I got ready to leave, the bartender asked me to come back on a busier night. I might. But it was nice to remember the shelter a mostly empty gar bar can offer too.

*

An audience question has stayed with me. It was the first one. “How do you find the audacity,” this young man asked. “To write.” He was smiling as he asked it—it took some just to ask the question, honestly. I loved it. I believe my first answer that day was Well, I am a stunt queen. Which got me some laughter from the audience. And I suppose that’s not so helpful. It’s a way of saying I was born with it. And that may or may not be true. I was as a child someone who loved to be alone in the woods so much the kids nicknamed me Nature Boy. I was also the boy who told a room full of students in the second grade that I had Made In Korea stamped on my buttocks. And that would be a hilarious tattoo, now that I think of it. It was a laugh line, a zap, a way of seizing power. You steal a little from the gods. It’s also partly in the timing and the place. I was in a room of kids in Maine who would tell me often they didn’t know where Korea was or how to say it. But I had been in the town’s gift shops, had turned over the kitsch sold to tourists and puzzled over that exact phrase stamped in all capital letters on a sticker on the bottom of a lighthouse replica of the famous lighthouse in my town. And so as we did the Where Are You From exercise, and I gamely tried to explain Korea yet again, and could see them looking so seemingly happy about not knowing much of anything about this place—“Is it Japan,” someone asked, before I knew enough to get properly mad about that. I remember the way the joke appeared behind my eyes, the way it felt like a friend coming to save me. I remember the laugh from the class and the look of dismayed shock from the teacher, who scolded me and gave me detention, which I enjoyed for the excuse to read. They were laughing at me but at my coordination. Which also proved my point.

They knew that sticker too.

Author, first time in pumps at age 3. I took them from the line of shoes outside my grandparent’s home in Seoul. Photographer: my father.

*

So, a beginning. A little stand up as self defense. But I was also the designated confronter, the person chosen by my siblings to argue for us in front of our mother and father. I am the quiet car sheriff, sometimes, sometimes the guy who tells the drunks on the plane loudly describing their sex lives to each other to quiet down. I was if not the first to get on the tables and dance at the Alpha Delt parties at Wesleyan, I was the second. I loved dancing, still do. I taught myself to dance at home watching Solid Gold and Soul Train. I remember a friend at Wesleyan asking me, on the dance floor in 1986 on night, “Where did you learn to dance like that?”

“Maine?” I said.

“They don’t dance like that in Maine,” she said. “You learned that somewhere else.” And I was too shy to tell her about watching tv and learning dances at home by myself, dreaming of a world where I could climb on a table at a party and watch the room whip to the song on the turntable. Which would have been a story she loved, I think, now that I know better.

An appetite then, for audacity, also helps.

I don’t know why some of us get up and some don’t. I know we have to take turns. I know you have to start and practice. Something I forgot to mention in the letter from Nov. 10 is that back in San Francisco in those early ACT UP days we were always quoting Emma Goldman,“If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution,” typically quoted as we headed out to the clubs after a protest, where a night of dancing brought us back to what it was all for. Was I protesting for the right to sit on a pinball machine in a queer bar and watch men watch me before I got on the stage in a corset, fishnets and latex shorts? Maybe so.

The slogan is apparently apocryphal, a paraphrase, but we were dancing in her honor all the same. The quote, by way of that essay:

At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha [Alexander Berkman, Goldman s lover], a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance… My frivolity would only hurl the Cause. I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, .should demand the denial of life and joy. . . If it meant that, I did not want it.

Where did the audacity come from, where did I get it? I see the lonely boy in front of the tv in his family’s home in Maine. Creating the future I have now as he imitates the dancers on the screen. I don’t want to tell him a thing, either. He knows what he’s doing. He is saving his life and mine.