The Death of Donna-May Dean

The first time I discovered Joey Manley, the founder of Free Speech TV and the freespeech.org website, was when I discovered on his website a video of himself giving a speech he had written, titled "Choosing to be Queer." I've linked to that video from my website for years, so hopefully some of you reading this will have watched it before and remember what I'm talking about. Unfortunately I just discovered this evening that my hyperlink to it is now dead, and I have promptly begun the process of writing to everyone remotely connected with it and begging them to repost it. I'm not sure what Joey Manley's own current email address is though, so . . . Joey Manley, if you ever Google your name and find this entry, will you pleeeeease repost your lovely video somewhere on the Internet so I can link to it again?

In the meantime, however, those of you who never saw the video of the speech can still read a transcript of its text, posted by Joey Manley in an ancient Usenet post under the slightly different title "My Queer Life Is Not a Birth Defect."

After I first found that speech so much, I started searching for more of Joey Manley's work. Very soon I found a short story by him, called "Love Will Tear," published in the queer journal Blithe House Quarterly and still available online. This story features fantastic queer by choice content too:

Joey's mother used to tell him about collard greens. When he was a child he would say, "Yuck." His mother said, "I know, I know. But someday your tastes will change." She said that one day she had walked into the kitchen and asked her mother what that was that smelled so good. It turned out to be collard greens, which she had always thought were gross before. From that point on she loved them. The story horrified Joey's romantic sensibility. If something that fundamental could change - if he could be the kind of person who liked collard greens - what else about him might be different someday? What other person might he become? He felt the same way now about his sexuality. Sometimes he saw a woman who appealed to him, or while masturbating he accidentally thought about one. He put these thoughts away, not because he had anything against heterosexuality, but because they made him incomprehensible to himself. He also to this day did not like collards, or any greens for that matter.

So you can imagine how thrilled I was when, only very recently, I suddenly quite randomly stumbled onto a listing on Amazon.com for an entire novel written by . . . Joey Manley! I knew right away it was the same Joey Manley, because it was a queer novel, published in relatively recent years . . . everything fit. I had to have this novel. Rarely have I looked forward to any novel so much. Yet, at the same time, I was also very afraid of being disappointed, because it is not often that I decide to read a novel that no one has recommended to me and whose author I have only ever previously read one very short story by, plus a short speech that was not fiction at all.

But I successfully acquired this novel. It is called The Death of Donna-May Dean. And over the course of the past two days, I read it. And I was not disappointed. I love this novel.

I do not love it primarily for its queer by choice content. My appreciation of its queer by choice content was much outweighed by my appreciation of the novel for simply being impressively well-written. Still, it does indeed have queer by choice content, and in fact I only had to read up to page 7 to find the first instance of it:

I stood at the free-throw line I'd scraped myself, with a sharp rock, across the dirt. I held gravely in both hands before me somebody else's lopsided basketball. Even aloud, I said, "If I make this shot, they're right. And I am a queer the rest of my life."

They were the boys who sat in back of the school bus, cigarette behind one ear each, teeth often bared to show contempt, signs of rot, tobacco stains: rednecks in training who passed in my mind and in my dad's mind for what a boy should be.

I didn't make that shot. But I did try again, and kept on, I made it. I was glad, for the trying again, for the keeping on, for the wanting to be what I already was: the choice.

And I was glad nobody else was there to see.

But that is actually probably the most overt mention of choosing to be queer in the whole novel, with the possible exception of a brief line of dialog on page 87: "Keller says there's no such thing as a straight man," Jimmy said. "Keller says anybody can be straight if you want him to pretend to be."

This novel tells the story of a 16-year-old boy named Jamie who chooses to be queer (at the free-throw line, as described). Of course, he is not at all equally eager to be recognized as queer by other people. In fact, it is very important to him to consider himself to be a different, more elite class of queer than the dozens of male strangers whom he quickly starts having sex with at night in the local park. He typically avoids conversing with his sexual partners at all, but eventually one man at the park, a significantly older man named Keller, tries to start a conversation with Jamie:

Before long I'd established my own territory, a set of benches close enough to the bathroom building and the bushes, also close enough to my car. In case of rednecks, and baseball bats, and I had to get away. That was where I found Keller. I passed him by several times, hoping he'd be gone soon. I just couldn't bring myself to settle some other place. Finally he slid one hand across the seat beside him, an arc that ended with three imperious pats.

"Sorry I didn't have time to clean the living room," he pronounced. "We weren't expecting company."

So I sat, glad to have this chance to reject him and get him out of my way. Because he looked like a faggot. I was proud to be a dicksucker, but why look the part? What he wore: varicose veins, plaid knee-shorts, one cold-cream crescent under each eye, a yellow towel-turban.

"Do you need to piss?" he said. "Well, you look like you do. My name is Keller. You may call me Helen." He held out a mock-reluctant hand, to be kissed. I shook it instead. . . . He patted me on the knee, twice, smartly. "Talk to your mother."

That was when I looked up. I don't know what he must have seen in my face: "I mean," he said, "me."

. . . I said, "I kill faggots."

Not exactly the most auspicious beginning. But Keller doesn't take it seriously, and indeed, Jamie is really not a queerbasher. Maybe a little bit of a wannabe queerbasher, at the beginning, but it doesn't take him long to grow out of that. So this conversation actually marks the beginning of a long and important friendship between Jamie and Keller, and Keller's lover Thomas.

But really I think my very favorite thing about the novel is the portrayal of Jamie's mother. His real mother, that is, not Keller - although Keller is quite interesting too! Shortly after that first meeting with Keller, Jamie's mother tells Jamie that she knows he's queer. She doesn't exactly go about it in the best way, but the rest of the book revolves in large part around her evolution from the semi-well-meaning homophobe she is at the beginning of the story into someone who is, well, very different, and more interesting. Here is the coming-out scene.( Mother and I were always going to the grocery store, together, barefoot . . . )