Jay Quinn’s new book, Back Where He Started, charts the emotional re-education of Chris Thayer as he discovers that starting life over at 48 is just as complicated, frustrating, and thrilling as the first time around. After breaking up with his partner of 22 years, he suddenly finds himself the object of a new man's affections: the sexy local handyman who in turn sweeps Chris off his feet.
We spoke to the lovely author to find out more about family, faith, gay marriage, his North Carolina roots and why America is ready for its first ‘grown up’ gay novel, Back Where He Started.
Back Where He Started, on the surface feels familiar, almost traditional. Then you realize you are reading about the breakup of a gay marriage, a gay family.
My earliest notions of this book came about as the nation was hearing its first news of the coming realities of gay marriage, I'd say more than two years ago. I asked myself: if gay marriage becomes a fact, will it follow that half of them will not survive as is the reality for straight marriages?
And it happens at the exact point many heterosexual relationships break down as well. Approaching 50, the kids are starting their own lives, the husband takes up with a younger woman.
The impact of the ‘mid-life crisis’ which many driven career men face. I suppose my own fears came into play as well as I am partnered with a very driven Type-A career man. The great thing about being an author is that you can turn your own anxieties into a controllable world and work them out that way before they can touch you.
Of course Chris is not ‘truly’ the children's parent, Zack is. Chris married into the family when the children were very young and Zack was recently widowed. And yet as Back Where He Started progresses, the children's loyalty remains deeply tied to Chris.
It was my contention that as the kisser of skinned-knees and the confidant of skinned-hearts, Chris would retain the lion's share of the children's loyalty at the demise of their parents' marriage. The family construct in the book was in every way a ‘traditional’ family in that the father is primarily responsible for earning the financial wherewithal to keep the family going and the mother is the one who works in the home, providing the emotional succour for the children.
At one point, the youngest son Schooner tells Chris that his father is "just a chequebook" to him. Zack, the father, is a driven career man who places the responsibility for the rearing of his children on Chris - his gay partner. Zack is mainly concerned with himself and his own ambitions. His family is a reflection of his success in the world's eyes. His children are accessories. For Chris, his children are his own life's work.
It's a messy, sprawling family you have created in this book. Wonderful to read about and spend time with. But unusual for a gay novel. What drove you to make the family such a driving part of this story?
I had some larger points to make about parenting and family. Ever since writers rejected the saccharine portrayals of the great American middle-class of the 1950's, what has sold books is a sort of psychological scab-picking when it comes to portraying ‘family’. I was frankly sick of it.
In gay literature the portrayal of family is even worse. Usually it's discounted altogether as if gay men appeared fully adult in 2Xist briefs in Chelsea or West Hollywood with no past. Or, gay men write of family as if they were so embittered by their early upbringing and environments that they are portrayed as a literal hellhole that one must endure as one would torture.
I am frankly bored by books that treat family as something to be scoffed at, rebelled against and discarded rapidly.
Well, many gay people do have struggles with their families.
For good or ill, family forms us all, gay and straight, and I think genuine and authentic human experience allows for forgiveness, accommodation and continuity within the family context. That is my experience. I do not think I am alone.
The family I created in Back Where He Started is hardly a pristine, Ozzie and Harriet manqué. They are contentious, they harbour hurts and bad memories, they have pet resentments. But they fundamentally love each other.
Their loyalties are protean trines that vary as their emotional needs shift and change. I think they are most real in that sense. But at its heart, the Ronan family is a reflection of the sort of rough-handed affection that Chris, at its centre, has made and nurtured.
The irony of this conversation is that we are talking about a very traditional human story here, and yet it is absolutely groundbreaking. This particular story, a gay family, has never been told. Why?
It is only in the beginning of this century that gay lit has evolved to the point where gay writers are seeing themselves in a return to ‘traditional’ family structures without a sense of abashment for being so mundane and conventional. I think the time for gay authors to create gay characters in such mundane settings as a marriage with grown children has only just come.
At the birth of what we consider to be contemporary gay lit-in the 1970's-the authors were far too preoccupied with breaking down the walls of sexual and social circumspection that had shadowed gay lives up until then. The world of the disco and the efforts to conceive gay lives outside of hetero-normative strictures was too alluring.
In the 80's, gay authors were trying their damnedest to relate the searing realities of HIV/AIDS and its impact on individuals' lives and the evolving gay social structure. In the 90's there emerged a growing group of gay voices who had come of age after Stonewall and were self-absorbed to the point of navel-gazing with their own takes on coming out and making a place in a world that was simultaneously plagued and permissive.
There also have not been a lot of books about gay men past the age of 40!
What I most wanted to do with Back Where He Started was present a story for, by and about grown-ups. I wanted to explore what it meant for a gay man to be middle aged and rolling with the punches-damn the wrinkles or the softening gut, full speed ahead! I don't think gay literature has had room to accommodate a fair notion of aging to the middle part of life.
Middle age has always been when gay people retired from ‘the life’ in the face of a brutally age-ist absorption with youth and beauty. I can think of two of our ‘masters’ who have dealt in meaningful ways with the surrender to middle-age, but those works were elegiac and sad.
As long as we are on the topic of things not usually covered in gay literature, let's talk about faith Religion. Chris is a devout Catholic, but you don't present this in any conflicted way.
I was astounded at how much I made of Chris's on-going relationship with his Catholic faith. Living in a world and culture that seems to have as many problems with traditional expressions of faith as it does with traditional family constructs, I didn't want to make him a pious fool, but rather a reflection of a great many people I know who have not abandoned the faith of their background, but rather have engaged it from remaining in it.
I know of many intellectually athletic people - including myself, I hope - who continue to seek a place in that faith for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with a sort of wilful ignorance, but rather as a kind of elemental part of their nature.
I saw Chris as this kind of man. Neither is he blindly accepting of the Church's many flaws, nor is he radicalized out of his connection to it, but rather he is searching within it. I don't believe this is uncommon for many of my age and life's context.
Why were you astounded?
The only possible answer to that question lies in the final chapter of the book. It was a chapter I wrote in a kind of fever. It came to me as if it was writing itself. Suffice it to say that the final chapter of Back Where He Started is titled ‘Epiphany’ which in its case means more than the actual time of year when it takes place. If I discussed that here, it would be cheating the reader out of discovering personally what is the essential meaning of what I am trying to say about Chris, family, and what it means to be a mother.
And Chris is very much the maternal figure in this family. You portray that very convincingly, but were you concerned that in materializing Chris you would also feminize him?
Not really. From the beginning, I saw Chris as very male albeit slight in build and height. I really saw him as cat-like but fierce, rather more feline than feminine.
Because of Chris's upbringing and background which is quite clear, he is from the start a figure of resourcefulness and resilience. In terms of my leading him to motherhood, this stands him in good stead. There is a void in Chris's background that makes him hungry for a family, as he is genuinely a loving person - and has a need to give love with few expectations of receiving it in return. He becomes a mother that is much more male in practice than in presumption.
Let's talk a little bit about the setting of this novel and its characters. Both are vividly portrayed, the characters are very real, sometimes heroic, sometimes infuriating, endearing and hard-headed, just very, very, real.
(Laughs) I either have a very firm grip on reality or a very tenuous grasp of it that alternates with astonishing frequency. It speaks very much to my process of writing. When I am not writing, I have an almost frightening sense of people who I might see in the grocery store or on the street. I intuit so much of their internal lives that it's exhausting for me. When it comes time to create my characters, I have a rich vein of perception to draw on.
This recall of minutiae comes together as my people. They become hyper-real to me. The day after I sent the finished manuscript of Back Where He Started to my editor, I left on a much needed trip to Maine, where I usually spend some time each summer.
In a journal I kept during my time there, I wrote of how bereft I was without my characters. It was almost as if they had closed the door to their ongoing lives behind them as I wrote the last sentence and shut me out of their lives. I spent my first days in Maine living in a sort of split existence in the ‘there’ of the book and the ‘there’ of where I actually found myself. It was difficult leaving their world behind. I'm a little crazy that way. I miss them still.
You grew up in Eastern North Carolina, went to school at East Carolina in Greenville, obviously spent a lot of time on the coast there, and set most of Back Where He Started
in Emerald Isle which I believe is on the Outer Banks. Was that a homecoming for you?
(Laughs). I have been a beach boy of the Outer Banks since I could toddle. Emerald Isle, which is on Bogue Banks, one of North Carolina's Outer Banks, is the ur-landscape of my imagination.
I grew up in a small town about 90 minutes west of the island and have visited there since I was a small child. For me, that island represents in all its spare landscape of dunes and live oaks, the absolute last edge of my world. At my back is all the richness of my heritage and the despair of my background that propels me there. In front of me is only the open sea and the boundless horizon.
On that island, everything is possible. It was there I learned to surf, where I had my first gay kiss, where I fled to playing hooky and where I intend to die. I own a lot on Bogue Banks, and some day I will build my home there.
The South is certainly a fertile ground for literature, but is often seen as very unfriendly to any non-conforming way of life, particularly gays.
The beaches of North Carolina are a place where old social and religious conventions of a very Red State have always loosened their grip on its residents. There is an air of permissiveness and acceptance there, you won't find anywhere else in the state in that form. When I lived up on the northern Banks, when I was in my twenties; my surfer buddies used to call the beach "the island of misfit toys” like the one in the TV Christmas Special of Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
No matter how weird or broken or fucked up you were, eventually you'd hit the beach, and the beach would take you in and give you a home. It is a very rich place to draw information and inspiration from.
Back Where He Started, by Jay Quinn
Publisher: Alyson Publications
ISBN: 1555838596
Buy Back Where He Started online and delve into the gay life of a Chris Thayer. Buy it online and save some money to put towards Starstruck: A Hollywood Saga.