LIBERTIE redux

A birthday again for Libertie

Today is LIBERTIE’s publication day in the UK! Serpent’s Tail press has created a truly beautiful edition of the book. If you’re in the UK or have friends who are, consider sending them a copy.

I studied abroad for a semester in London—a semester that happened to coincide with the US invasion of Iraq and the quickening slide into global dystopia that we currently inhabit. I did not, of course, know that was happening at the time. I went to do an internship program, where I worked for a museum. I had hoped to work for the Victoria and Albert museum—the spring I was in London, they had an absolutely stunning exhibition on the history of modernism which, shockingly, acknowledged Black influence on the movement—or so I understood it to be, in the beautiful Josephine Baker-inspired t-shirt they sold in the museum store (I was then, still am, a dilettante, so that was enough evidence for me).

It sounds laughable to say this in 2021, but in 2003, to have a major art museum acknowledge the cultural conversations between Black and non Black artists, especially on a movement that was capital I Important like modernism, seemed so futuristic and daring. I wanted to work there, or the newly opened Museum of Fashion, which was hosting an exhibition on the art and design of Grand Theft Auto (again, this was 2003). Instead, I was assigned to Dulwich Picture Gallery, a 30 minute train ride out of London.

Dulwich Picture Gallery would never host an exhibition on a video game. It was a very tiny, very traditional art museum—so traditional that it was the original art museum in the UK--a rich person had converted a property he had into a public gallery, to show off his collection, hundreds of years before I even got there. In my imagination, I had thought I would be darting around the grubby, teeming streets I’d read about the year before in White Teeth. In reality, I took a very lonely train ride to the gallery, then walked along a gravel path, my only fellow commuters being the birds and the trees, to get to the stove villa set in a gleaming green lawn. In time, I grew to like that it felt like a kind of fairy tale, but there was still, two blocks over, a Pizza Express that staff was always sneaking off to for clandestine meetings. I had hoped to go to dazzling art world parties and packed clubs but the one out of office, late night assignment I was given was to lead a group of school children in an art appreciation class in the city, which required putting on a curling white wig a Georgian nobleman would wear and standing very still while they laughed at, and attempted to paint, me.

A thing that I loved about London, though, was the books. It had never occurred to me that another English speaking country might have access to completely different books than we did in the US. I bought books everywhere, all the time, always slightly aware that they would be a pain in the ass to get home, but I couldn’t resist them. I bought a bunch of Bangladeshi comic books because the art was so stunning. I found a bunch of editions of Alan Moore that were more extensive than the ones in the US—I scared myself shitless reading the extended version of From Hell, in our university flat one Tuesday, when all my roommates were out. I bought this absolutely wonderful novel called Lust: or No HarmDone, that at that time did not have a US release, from the novelist Geoff Ryman.

Lust is another kind of fairy tale—a man gains the power, I can’t remember how, to have sex in real time, in real life, with whoever he fancies, living or dead. He figures it out when he starts vividly imagining a man he saw at the gym and suddenly that man is in front of him, ready and willing. I loved that novel and remember it to this day, not least because it understood that if you could have the power to have sex with anyone from anywhere, why would you limit yourself to a specific gender, race, or your so-called “type”?

So, the main character, ostensibly a cis, gay white man attracted to other cis men, first has sex with all the crushes of his childhood—Tarzan, and Cary Grant and Harrison Ford. Then he remembers how much he loves the sound of Billie Holiday’s voice and so he conjures her up for a date. He remembers how hard a life she had had and so before he does so, he makes his apartment beautiful for her. She appears, from the past, a little sad and tied but game, and mostly they talk and slowly flirt and are romantic before they fuck. He conjures Charlie Chaplin, Attilla the Hun, a Viking, Jessica Rabbit. He wants to see if Cleopatra was truly the most beautiful woman in the world and so he conjures her as well but who appears is a 14 year old, skinny, anxious, stinky (the novel has a lot of fun with imagining what people from the past’s body odor must have been) wreck and he ends up drawing her a bath and letting her sleep, disgusted with himself and what the world has done to this child’s name.

Lust probably influenced my writing more than I would admit—mostly in its complete commitment to a slightly ludicrous premise and its expansive take towards human bodies and sexuality. I see echoes of it in Libertie, in everything I write. I think about how books travel across oceans, or don’t, how they end up by chance in other countries. It makes me so excited to imagine some impressionable, slightly bored 20 year old potentially picking up Libertie in the UK and falling into its pages.

Anyways, more soon. Apologies this newsletter has fallen off as of late. But, things are quieting down in my life and I hope to return to you again more regularly.

And thank you to those who keep reading and sharing this newsletter. And thank you to those who have bought LIBERTIE!