Her question: “Carnal Sacraments could be marketed as a queer book, or as Science Fiction (SF). The cover makes it pretty clear that the publishers intend to market it as a queer book; there's hardly any hint that the contents are very much in the speculative realm. What are your thoughts on that? Do you have any plans to reach out to a more general SF reading audience? Do you think queer SF is its own subcategory, or are books that are both destined to be called one or the other? How do you draw from the queer tradition and from the SF tradition?"

I was a little lost about this “queer tradition” of books reference, considering that up to 1960 the U.S. Post Office could stop any book espousing homosexuality in the mails on the basis of “obscenity.” So if it was queer, you couldn’t mail it; ergo, was the “queer tradition” to be stopped at the P.O.?

But I answered:

“Carnal Sacraments is a literary novel, not an SF novel. What drives it is basic human impulse and conflict, not the hardware and software that drives, too often, SF. The 'marketing' of the book was to get people interested in it, which a hot cover does. I don’t think of myself as an SF author, but a storyteller who uses some science fiction elements—mostly because I like the richness of them: the idea of imagining inaccessible places and times, a concept which goes back to The Arabian Nights.”

I knew I was in bad shape with Ms. Fox from the very onset of that interview, but had no inkling that her 550-word review would spend 20% of its ink “reviewing” the cover.

“The cover of this paperback,” she begins, “is mostly occupied by a photograph of a buff, shirtless man staring coolly at the camera as he eases down his unzipped jeans. Next to his head are the words “a historical novel of the future.” The juxtaposition of gay lust and science fiction is not an entirely comfortable one, which neatly sets the tone for the story. Mr. Shirtless is presumably meant to represent Jeffrey Cooper, an American septuagenarian living in a near-future Germany. As long as he retains his ability to package and sell just about any thing, the network of conglomerates known as ‘the system’ finds him useful enough to provide him with anti-aging treatments. Driven to the brink of breakdown by job stress, Jeffrey struggles to hide his anxiety from his colleagues and system-mandated therapist; he knows any sign of weakness will see him culled from the herd.”

How she got the idea that the cover model, “Mr. Shirtless,” is Jeffrey Cooper is anyone’s guess. There are other male characters in the book the cover model might have represented, or he might have simply been put there to entice people to buy the book (an idea I’m sure has never happened before in publishing). It didn’t take me very long to see that Ms. Fox was simply prejudiced against the book by the cover; she did not like it and it offended her idea of the kind of moral “purity” good Science Fiction books should have. In other words, getting her to review my book was like having a woman from the Women’s Christian Temperance Union review a guide to bartending.

This brought to mind what has perhaps become one of the most celebrated examples in publishing of a book both epitomized and overshadowed by its cover: the notorious Bantam mass-market paperback edition of James Purdy’s Eustace Chisholm and the Works, from 1968—it’s almost impossible to find this book on the Web now but it must be out there. Bantam got a young gorgeous Italian ragazzo with, in some opinions, the world’s most beautiful ass, to pose exposing all of his rear end in profile-view to the camera. The book sold half a million copies, and put Purdy’s name on the popular map. As far as anyone could see, the model “represented” no one in the book, but just made a lot of people very happy, and did alert the “normal” bookbuyer that he/she was in a for a hot time in the Old Town tonight, just from the cover of the book.

In her wrap-up (of Carnal), Fox goes on to say:

“Jeffrey’s story is emphatically a gay narrative and also emphatically science fiction of the Huxley and Orwell school. As on the cover, the two look for ways to coexist, but they don't always find them.”

Again she judges the book by its cover, and she ends up hacking the book to pieces in a way that’s so clumsy it’s hard for me to quote it here (please go to the Lambda Literary Foundation to find the review). The real shock of this story was that I had never a book so harshly judged, so reviewed by its cover. I always thought reviewers were sophisticated enough to know (certainly book buyers are) that the basic role of a cover is 1) to entice people to buy the book, and 2), of course, get past the various censors who will stop the book if the cover is too suggestive (the Post Office; customs agents in certain parts of Canada, Iran, or Saudi Arabia; book buyers at Walmart). But I never had the cover reviewed, and felt very bad about that until I learned of David Leavitt’s recent review in the New York Times Sunday Book Section of John Rechy’s memoir About My Life and the Kept Woman.

In his review of the book, Leavitt doesn’t just review the cover of the Rechy’s book, but reviews Rechy’s “cover” as well: the photos of himself that Rechy has placed on his website, that show him as a hunky, well-muscled young man and hustler. Leavitt stays fixated on the “beefcake” aspect of these earlier, and often famous shots of Rechy, and says he associates these kind of photos [with] “different kinds of websites,” i.e. porn. Leavitt laments that there is not one “typical author photo” on the site, again, a desire to maintain that squeaky-clean, Gap-khaki image so beloved now by younger queer men and the older late-bloomer generation (Leavitt’s) who love them.

“Leaning in classic muscle queen posture against an invisible wall,” he complains. It’s the very opposite of a typical author photo.” Later he goes into a diatribe against Rechy that reminded me of Fox’s barbs about Mr. Shirtless on my book cover: “Literary ineptitude is as much a part of Rechy’s persona as the oiled chest and the jeans unbuttoned to the top.”

Perhaps Rose Fox and David Leavitt are one person, railing against the enticements of those unzipped jeans, those shirtless models and authors, those reasons why the unwashed masses still buy books thought too worthless by the Fox y Leavitts.

(Leavitt also jumped, too early, on the grave of Oscar Wilde Bookstore in New York, when the tiny venerable old bookstore was about to go under, and Leavitt said in another NY Times piece that he was sick of having his books stuck in queer bookstores, instead of the mainstream where they deserved to be; Oscar Wilde got a reprieve. It’s still open, and probably still sells David Leavitt books to the “beefcake” types who shop there.)

All of this has made me wonder, now that we live in an age when almost every image is available and can be instantly zipped back and forth through time and space, what do covers and author photos actually mean? Do they mean this book is meant to entice and seduce us, or brands us as being “queer,” and therefore, without any qualities of depth or meaning? (As in Rose Fox’s strange dichotomy between queer books and Science Fiction books—as if one group of qualities and ideas can’t possibly bleed on to another.) And when people are “caught” having undesirable images in their possession, such as “porn” on their hard drives, does it mean the images themselves are evidence of “unspeakable acts,” or is it that the images simply speak for what they are: enticements for us to think on our own?

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Perry Brass’s newest book Carnal Sacraments, A Historical Novel of the Future has just been named a finalist in gay and lesbian fiction for ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Award. He can be reached through www.perrybrass.com. His website does not take PayPal payments.

In the Writer's World appears the last Thursday of every month. More about Perry Brass