Books have strange histories. There's the outward story of publication and reviews. And then there's hidden history most people don't know about: what was going on in the author's life, what the author left out, what the author put in for devious reasons of their own, and much more. Sometimes a book can even have a twist in its history that's public and private. That's what happened with my first gay novel Winter Eyes.
Published in 1992, it was subtitled "a novel about secrets" and silence reigned throughout the family it describes. The Borowskis are Holocaust survivors and the only way they could find to cope with the nightmares they endured was to wipe away the past—or try to. Immigrating to America, they pretended to be Catholic Poles, and raised their son Stefan in a strange environment of fear and repression.
I wrote Winter Eyes because back in college, I was profoundly inspired by a scene in Virginia Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out. Someone asks a would-be writer kind of books she wants to write and she says, "I want to write a novel about Silence ... about the things for people don't say." A great agenda for me as a gay man who hasn't come out of the closet, no?
While the book was in progress, I was on tour for my collection of gay and Jewish short stories, Dancing on Tisha B'Av, and I kept meeting people who told me that in various ways they had discovered they were Jewish after years of their parents hiding this from them. That experience seemed to confirm my choice of theme for the novel.
When there's a family secret, we can feel its presence even if we don't know what it is and young Stefan in Winter Eyes of course eventually discovers what his parents have been hiding from him.
But then he's been hiding something himself. From an early age, he's been attracted to other boys without knowing what it means or how to even give words to what he's feeling. Over the course of the novel, he explores his sexuality and that path leaves him in unexpected directions. He not only opens up to men, but to one woman. I recall some gay book sellers told me they had customers who were offended by this turn in the novel. Crossing boundaries from gay to straight, however fleetingly, is still a topic that stirs people up--look at the hostility some glbt reviewers have directed to The Kids Are All Right.
The novel had a strange publication. I had written various versions, one of which included a prologue set during WWII, but lost that one during a move and didn't have it backed up, so when the novel went to press it wasn't exactly the book I'd wanted people to read. Years later, I came across the prologue at the back of a cupboard where it shouldn't have been, and so when the book was translated into German, the prologue was included.
Now, with the advent of ebooks, American readers can read the book the way it was supposed to be read. And with something more: a very hot cover. The original cover was way too dreamy-looking, but because the ebook publication was completely under my control, I chose everything.
This is the revolution in publishing that's shaking the foundations in New York. Authors have discovered that they have more power than they realized. We can put our books up on Kindle and Nook or any other platform and avoid middlemen. Gay and lesbian books that have languished or been forgotten can find a whole new audience and that's a gift to all of us dedicated to glbt literature no matter what the genre.
One of my daughters-in-law asked me "How do you know if a book is any good since anyone can write a book and upload it now?" I told her it's the same way as always: you open it up and read. You'll know soon enough, especially when you can download a sample chapter so easily.
The decline of gay and lesbian bookstores has been a blow to people looking for community, but the rise of ebooks is making make LGBT books even more accessible than they were before, and more affordable, too. That's good for all of us and our allies, too.
Lev Raphael is the author of Winter Eyes: A Novel About Secrets, newly available on Kindle & Nook.
