WRITING AND CLAIMING A QUEER PLACE IN LITERATURE Marcus James has made it his mission to write in-depth about the queer experience, to tell stories steeped in that without stepping out of the narrative to explain everything to an outside audience of straight people. “I aim to tell stories that anyone can enjoy but to do so through the lens of queerness. Toni Morrison famously said that she writes outside the white man’s gaze, and when she’s writing, she’s writing to black people, free of having to explain anything to white readers about blackness.
gay or straight or bi, etc., and in their worlds—worlds filled with breathing shadows—I get closer to understanding my own journey as a queer person and as a person in general and the experiences that bind us all together. No matter how individual our own personal journeys are. That’s the beauty of writing. That’s the power of literature; all the lives we get to inhabit.” ALL BECAUSE OF ANNE RICE When asked how he decided to become a writer, Marcus had a simple answer. “It was all because of Anne Rice,” he says. He originally wanted to
“I write without the cis-hetero gaze hovering over me. I have a lot of straight-identified readers and characters, and yet I don’t worry if they understand the things I am referencing when it comes to the queer experience,” he says. James also intends to show through his work that queer people can be heroes too. He hopes that every young gay boy who reads his writing, no matter how butch or effeminate, can see that they can be the one who saves the world. “We aren’t weak, and we don’t need to be rescued. Being outsiders is where our strength and resilience lies,” he says. His lead protagonists are always feminine gay boys, as he is one of those himself, and he wants to claim a place for them in horror literature and in life. “Fem gays are the ones who deeply lack role models or positive, strong representation. Usually, we are just the victim, the comedic relief, or the villain, and as of late, we are
become a chef, as he has a deep passion for cooking. Before Food Network existed, he aspired to have a cooking show on PBS and a restaurant or two in Seattle, where he would live in a chic pre-war apartment above Pike Place Market and cook to smooth jazz while enjoying a glass of wine and the sunset. Then, one day in the fourth grade, he bought a copy of Dracula at the Scholastic Book Fair. His teacher noticed his smile from ear to ear, and as she was a fan of Rice, she recommended that Marcus check out Interview with the Vampire. “The title was all I needed. I was at the public library that same day after school, checking it out and taking it home,” he said. He kept re-reading the novel throughout elementary school, and that got him to start writing. “Because what Anne could do, how she could make me hear the clicking
of Claudia’s shoes on the cobblestone and the creaking of a floorboard on its hinge in a decaying New Orleans uptown home, or how she could make me smell the jasmine—I wanted to be able to affect others the same way.” He developed a single-minded ambition to become a published author at that point. This has kept him on track and alive throughout various struggles. He was forced into conversion therapy as a teen, intended to turn him straight. He has also survived crippling heartbreak and an abusive marriage and has been homeless a few times throughout his teens and twenties. “Always, it has been the writing and my career that have kept me resilient. A refusal to be defeated. A refusal to be invisible. Sometimes in life, your dreams/goals/aspirations are all you have to feed you, nourish you, keep you warm, and get you from one day to the next.”
assumed/lumped into being non-binary. Our identity as men is constantly stripped from us. Our entire lives. Straight people take it from us, and some in the LGBT community take it from us. I have a mission and obligation to help do whatever I can to say we are here and we are men, no matter how fem we are, and you are not allowed to erase us,” says James. However, the characters he most enjoys writing are strong, complicated, beautiful, powerful women. “Like most gay men, I worship powerful women, and all the women in my life are fiercely strong and fabulous. Women who bring the wrath of the dark goddesses, the warrior goddesses.” To James, literature is a path toward learning to understand each other and, ultimately, ourselves. “Every person I write about teaches me something about survival,
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