We've read Sedaris and Burroughs and Kilmer-Purcell. In our Facebook-Linkedin-Grinder-nano-world of open books (or at least books turned to the chapter we choose), the memoir genre has flourished. Ryan Van Meter's newest is a memoir, but in a style that is unique and refreshing.
Van Meter's Chicago roots run deep. He lived here for nearly a decade as both mere denizen of the city and as a graduate student at DePaul University. Although Van Meter has since moved from the Windy City and settled in the Homeland (San Francisco) he was kind enough to allow the Windy City Times an opportunity to speak with him about his life and his work.
If You Knew Then is not a coming out story nor is it a "yup, I'm gay" story. Van Meter uses a subtle knife and style, previously known to essayists like Grace Paley, to tell his story of how he knew but how everyone knew years before him that he was gay. The book is a collection of short stories and essays that come together in a cohesive way to tell Van Meter's own unique experience as a gay Midwestern youth.
In one of the books opening essays, "Lake Effect," Van Meter is confronted with the boredom of spending days on a "houseboat" fishing with his own father and others including the father of a neighborhood acquaintence. In what seems both a humorous and frightening episode Van Meter is reminded by his own father not to be checking out the likes of the other daddy on board.
"Lake Effect" introduces the reader to the concept that our parents frequently feel that their children are gay years before the child does. Van Meter uses this delicacy of language again in "Tightrope." Here Van Meter is confronted with what is actually his first date with another man, though he believes its just two guys going to the circus together. Upon returning home from his date, he is interrogated by his mother and brother and forbade to ever see the other young man again.
"To Bear, to Carry: Notes on 'Faggot'" presents a brief but concise etimology of the that word that carries with it many of our own worst feelings. "I found that although early uses of that word had nothing to do with the gay man, the word carries with it tremendous violence," said Van Meter. "It's as if the word has DNA." The word itself is used to connote something viciously feminine.
Van Meter explores other characteristics of the feminine present in the gay man. He speaks about an instance when he as caught playing dress-up in his aunt's clothing, acting like a good farmer's wife. He also speaks to many gay man's "fear of the ball." "Physically I just could not play softball. But this is also a story about afraid of being different since I was the boy who couldn't do what the other boys were doing" said Van Meter. "Men are not afraid of feminine energy is women but when confronted with that same energy in men the reaction is like that you read about in 'Faggot'. I wanted to question the gender roles and what it meant to break with them."
Some are familiar with a Kaddish, or the lamentation of a grieving spouse for her decease other. Allen Ginsberg has a poem of the same name lamenting his own grief about his mentally ill mother. Van Meter's "Things I Want To Tell You on Our First Date but Won't" is a combination of Van Meter's very personal loss of his first love with the emotional baggage that each of us carries but refuses to admit so. "This wasn't supposed to be a poem," says Van Meter, "but it is lyrical and is written to that hypothetical person on a first date. It lays on the line all those things that you want to share but don't out of fear and other reasons."
"This book is essentially a memoir," said Van Meter, "but I just skipped through those parts of my life that are actually interesting." If You Knew Then is not purposefully humorous. It is not purposefully somber. It is not purposefully dramatic. This book represents to both the writer and reader alike a collection of moments that all gay men of a certain age share. If You Knew Then confronts the reader with the each of our similarities rather than our differences. Whether you are the Adonis bartender or the frumpy guy reading and reviewing books for a gay newspaper, with this work you ultimately realize that the clay used to make us is all the same.
If You Knew Then What I Know Now is currently available in paperback at www.sarabandebooks.org/, from other online book retailers or local bookstores.
