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Everything I Have Is Blue:
Short Fiction by Working-Class Men
About More-or-Less Gay Life
edited by
Wendell Ricketts
Praise for Everything I Have Is Blue
"Finding alternative voices that prove how much diversity truly exists in our same-sex oriented 'community' is problematic to begin with because so many men and women, our sisters and brothers, do not relate to what has be-come the accepted view of the 'gay community.'
"One of the authors in this collection is Tim Anderson, who will be writing an ongoing column for SNN from an alternative perspective. Read Tim's first 'Out! In the Middle of Nowhere' entry in this issue to get a feeling for his viewpoints, and those of the other writers presented in this fairly new and interesting genre.
"Nothing like many of the novels and short stories I usually review, these accounts are somewhat rough, sometimes grim, but a feast worth devouring. This literature has the power to pull us out of the cocoons, where we live in partly resistant agreement, conforming to the conventional image of the GLBT 'lifestyle.'
"Many of us realize this illusion is an insignificant part of who we really are. If you are questioning, challenge yourself with some of these narratives born of a divergent queer sensibility.
"Ricketts' contribution at the very end, 'Passing Notes,' offers the following: 'what better project, one that involves both interior decorating and power tools, for a collaboration between the myth of the modern homosexual and the archetype of the working class. Not matter and antimatter, but iron and carbon. I can't think of anything queerer than that.' I agree. This intrepid group of stories kindles a deeper reflection about who we really are."
—Christopher Lawrence,
Stonewall News Northwest
"Edited by author and translator Wendell Ricketts, the subversively inclusive Everything I Have is Blue: Short Fiction by Working-Class Men about More or Less Gay Life gives voice to an often-ignored segment of queer society while at the same time offering astute commentary about GLBT culture in general (Jim Grimsley's "Food Chain"). The characters in these stories are not the type of men typically depicted in the glossier, overly sexualized genre of "mainstream" gay writing, but rather the boy next door who just so happens to like other guys.
"Many of the works selected in Everything I Have is Blue present an outsider's view of straight society ("The Bottom of the Cloud" by James Barr and John Gilgun's "Cream"), and for some the issue homosexuality is found only in the margins of the story ("My Blue Midnights" by Rane Arroyo, Rigoberto González' "Men Without Bliss"). Relationships between gay men--and the perception of such--provide rich source material for the collection, perhaps best illustrated in "My Special Friend" by Christopher Lord and Wendell Ricketts' "Raspberry Pie," two of the anthology's most memorable entries.
"A valuable depiction of an underrepresented subculture, Everything I Have is Blue: Short Fiction by Working-Class Men about More or Less Gay Life by Wendell Ricketts is now available from Suspect Thoughts Press."
—Shawn Revell,
EXP Magazine
"San Francisco writer and editor Wendell Ricketts had a mission. He saw a hole in the fabric of gay publishing and decided it had to be filled. Everything I Have Is Blue collects 18 stories by 18 gay and bi men from working-class backgrounds. In an intro, Ricketts reports that he had 57 rejections from publishers. It seems fitting that the aptly named Suspect Thoughts Press finally became the book's home.
"The first out of the gate is a knockout. C Bard Cole teaches English in Tuscaloosa, but his tale of New York City homeboys proves his familiarity with urban jive. Frankie and Raj are razzing each other on the stoop over a touchy issue. It seems Frankie is hanging with a boy whose reputation is a blot on the 'hood. David is a little too pretty and arty to be a real brother. He works in Manhattan at a graphic design shop and gets off the F train with the laptop and leather portfolio to prove it. Raj is pressuring Frankie to come to his senses. "They say you down wit' dat faggot, man.... They sayin' you gay together." Frankie fends off the charge with sarcasm.
"Then we get inside David's apartment -- and Cole rises beautifully to the large implications. David and Frankie's near-indefinable relationship makes for funny, sexy, touching and sometimes ominous storytelling. Gay man and straight man are in undeclared love, and it's wonderful to watch. The dialogue communicates a labyrinth of cross-purposes, tenderness and denial that many a lesser writer would describe with clunky narration.
"Marcel Devon's story offers a Texas ma and pa just far enough from outright parody to be horribly convincing. Scotty is home from university with his bewildered boyfriend in tow. Ma is a Jesus freak nutbar terrorized by a 300-pound Pa whose sole pastimes are TV football, beer, kicking the dog and fingering the contents of his very deep navel. The dog abuse is a substitute for deeper fears: "You know, we oughta get rid of that faggot mutt." As Scotty and Terry pull off each other's pants later in his room, the spectre of Pa's rage looms large. The story bounces between funny and ghastly. We learn in Ricketts' end notes that Devon writes from solitary confinement. He's been in a Texas prison for the last 13 of his 28 years.
"Ricketts includes a story of his own, a disturbing tale of a man aroused by bloodshed, and his ex-lover who still can't fathom why he loves films full of death and mangled flesh. "I want to see those things because they look like how I feel inside. Cut up, howling, disintegrated." Ricketts explores violent fantasies and how they play out on the field of love, but offers us nothing about this scary guy's background. How did he get so twisted?
"One of two Canadians here, Toronto writer Ryan Kamstra grew up blue in Thunder Bay. His entry is convincing enough, but seems to have no point beyond its description of a druggy, gender-bendy night in streets and clubs, followed by an inconclusive erotic tease in a condo. The story feels like a cursory demonstration of talent without the redrafts that would give it focus.
"An accomplished piece from prolific queer author Jim Grimsley is a reworked passage from Boulevard, his fifth novel, in which a small-town kid discovers gay life in New Orleans. Other highlights: Alfredo Ronci, a librarian in Rome, gives us an ominous love triangle that spurs one party to consider murder, while Christopher Lord offers a redemptive family Christmas at mom and pop's ("first house past the trailer court") in rural Oregon.
"No review can do proper justice to 18 authors. That said, there are more than a handful of writers here who apparently remain unconvinced that good writing is mostly rewriting. A rambling, 30-page number from James Barr, first published in 1951, feels both unfocussed and a retro mismatch with the rest of the book, its narrator editorializing on nature versus nurture and underscoring his distaste for "effeminate idiosyncrasies." Mostly though, Ricketts' choices display a smorgasbord of arresting voices and sensual pleasures."
—Jim Bartley,
Xtra
Full review available here.
"Blue collar men who love men
"The subtitle of this book is Short Fiction by Working-Class Men About More or Less Gay Life. That pretty much tells you you're not going to find the characters in these stories on gay cruises, in lavish resorts or A-list parties. Never mind the stories for a minute. It's interesting that most of the contributors are well published. Some gay writers aspire to a sort of pretence of affluence and high culture. In most cases, the culture is real but acquired. The wealth is in talent, and the 18 writers here have it. There's even a famous name, James Barr (1922-1995), author of the 1950 gay novel Quatrefoil. His long story here is from a 1951 collection and has as many twists and turns as a novel. The contemporary contributors are a diverse bunch. C. Bard Cole is a writer who is all-ear--seldom form and never resolution--but his talent makes his characters real, as in his story of love between a straight homeboy and a conflicted gay guy. Jim Grimsley is brilliant on the deep fear of poverty in a working class gay runaway trying to hold down a low-end job in New Orleans. John Gilgun has a comic edge to his character's stress in trying to survive-and break away from-his 1950s rough, Boston working class environment. The tough-love advice of his hard-bitten mother is hilarious and all too true. A couple of the newer, younger writers, Marcel Devon from Texas and Rick Laurent Feely from southern California, have jolting stories that reflect their hard lives to this point. In fact, all the contributors deserve credit for strong and entertaining work, including editor Rickett's story and thoughtful afterward."
—Mandate
"When gays are more often depicted in the media as upwardly mobile Will Trumans, it's easy to overlook working-class queers. This collection of short fiction from a truck driver, a Texas prisoner, a poet, an activist, a street mime, and others tells of love, loss, hope, revenge, and redemption"
—Out
"As John Lennon sang, 'A working-class queer-o is something to be.' Or something like that. Eighteen short stories by the salt-of-the-earth gays and bisexuals. And what a variety: a librarian, a trucker, a Texas prisoner—there's even a story by a street mime. Who knew gay mimes had so much to say?"
—Miguel Molinero,
Instinct
"I've never met Wendell Ricketts, but I have long admired his writing, and the tremendous power of his own writing in many genres he now brings to an editorial project which must have seemed daunting at the start, but which winds up, in his able hands, a terrifically rewarding anthology. It's not your typical book of working class porn, where middle class designers drool over the mechanics perched under their Mercedes. Nor is it precisely a book of agitprop urging the proletariat to armed revolution by any means necessary. James Barr's long story, "The Bottom of the Cloud," which must have been written a good fifty years ago, has everything but period charm, thank God. It might have been written today, and only some of its circumlocutions tag it as the product of an era in which Henry James was widely read, even by John Fante types whose labor is of the dust. Barr's story (from his collection Derricks) is amazing on a sentence by sentence level, even if you don't know what exactly is happening to our hero, Robin, and his anguished pilgrimage through the gray areas of "Central City." Barr was able to rewrite John Bunyan for our own time, and out of a fiery, almost blindsided gay sensibility. Torment, bruises, bondage and pain abound, and he takes you there. Keith Banner's story "How to Get from This to This" shares some of Barr's bleakness of vision. Two gay brothers, Danny and Lucas, argue it out from either side of a tavern that might itself be mistaken for a class marker, and from either side of alcoholism itself. Lucas is pulling himself up by the bootstraps, edging himself into a higher class status, while Danny, at age 33 (Christ's age) is sinking deeper into a nickel and dime pit. "I see my apartment the way it truly is, a mouse-bit bag of bread, Old Crow bottles, old textbooks I never sold back to the bookstore. The magical couch with no cushions." He doesn't have much self-esteem, as we say here in California. But maybe that lack keeps us honest. Not all of the stories are as hard hitting as these, but in general there's a rock-solid thrust to them that feels good.
"Ricketts has taken this material and made some hard sense out of it, in a long, engaging Afterword that serves as a sort of Apologia pro Vita Sua. Are there working class people in gay literature? Or is working class "contra gay"? Ricketts' thesis is a tough one, but he asserts that his own best experiences of bonding with men have occurred not in gay contexts, or even in the context of gay sexuality, but while working shoulder to shoulder in prisons and union hiring halls with other working class guys, even murderers. You may meet some dangerous scum there, but at least they're honest about it, unlike the coiffured and manicured men about whom, and by whom, so much of gay writing is being written. The working class gay man receives nothing but confusion and shame when he attempts to enter the bourgey world of "gay community."
"He may say this, and he may believe this, but paradoxically enough, the stories he has collected here tweak his own definitions of what they portend. Fiction is volatile, like nitro. It doesn't do exactly what you think it will do, and it works different on everyone who comes in contact with it. "Only connect," E M Forster wrote, and the great thing about Ricketts' book is the attention he bears down, with his great brain and heart, onto proving and disproving that way dated dictum."
—Kevin Killian,
author of Shy
"This book gives us what no contemporary TV program, movie, or magazine has even come close to—the tender, angry, funny emotional innards of the embattled daily life of working-class gay men. These could be the stories of the guys on the corner in my neighborhood—or yours!"
—Minnie Bruce Pratt,
author of S/He
"A very large percentage of gay literature produced in the United States is written by middle-class white men for middle-class white readers. There is a homogeneity to gay writing that reflects how, in our supposedly classless, multicultural society, issues of class and color are seldom worthy subject matter. If gays are ‘The Other’ in our predominantly heterosexist society, blue collar people and racial minorities (often one and the same) are ‘The Others’ within the gay community—a margin within the margin. The edgy, surprising stories in Everything I Have Is Blue are a tonic: they make an important contribution in terms of bringing to our attention characters and themes we seldom see explored in gay contemporary fiction."
—Jaime Manrique,
editor of Besame Mucho: New Gay Latino Fiction
"Finally! A gay story collection 100% free from scenes of Jeremy and Chad having tiffs by the Fire Island hot tub. Gay fiction needs books like Wendell Ricketts’ Everything I Have is Blue—and it needs them bad. Strapped to myths of upward mobility and disposable income, gay men are desperately short on books addressing working-class experiences. Thankfully this book steps up to the plate, serving up fiesty, sharp stories that stretch and challenge stagnant notions of class, masculinity, and gay identity."
—D. Traver Scott,
author of One of These Things Is Not Like the Other
release: June 2005
gay fiction/queer studies
softcover, 5.5X8.5
256 pages, $16.95
0-9746388-9-7
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