As the visiting author at Mountainview MFA’s 2020 Winter Residency, Garth Greenwell, the acclaimed author of What Belongs to You (2016) and Cleanness (2020), sat for an interview with author and program director Ben Nugent to discuss his new book and the craft of writing.

During this discussion, Greenwell launched into an impassioned and spontaneous lecture on the necessity of writing gay sex in fiction and the importance of doing so in great detail and urged writers to embrace eroticism and beauty in regard to the queer body, as Greenwell does in his writing.

The following is an excerpt from this discussion, specifically revolving around sex and the relationship depicted in “The Frog King,” a chapter from Cleanness. The following has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Ben Nugent: Returning to [this penultimate section in “The Frog King”], I think it’s interesting in a number of ways. It begins with a desire to make [the character] R. laugh. It continues throughout this act that doesn’t fall neatly into a category — sex, tickling, kissing. Then at the very end of the story, we get the Christmas ritual. The burning of the frog, the raisins, the band. This is a kind of prelude, you might say, to that fiery end. It doesn’t feel planned. One of the reasons it is intriguing to think of it in context with [Cleanness’] 41-page paragraph is that it feels like a kind of submission to form rather than planning. In the 41-page paragraph, memory forces feeling on you. In this, it’s “this is what my desire is prompting me to do.”

Garth Greenwell: That’s a beautiful thing to say. I think that’s true. I’m trying to remember writing that section. I have really vivid memories of writing this story. I can see the table at The High Ground Cafe in Iowa City where I wrote much of it. I remember writing this section and I remember hesitating when I realized what this section was going to be. I was writing this on these separate pieces of paper, I feel very limited in what I can bear. I remember feeling, as I was writing, this space open up and being like “if you do this, you have to do it. You have to fill this space.” And feeling a kind of dread about that.

The writing of the section — I don’t know if this is true, it just occurred to me, but it feels true — that the narrator, as he meditates on this act of kissing, this is also a meditation on my act of writing it. There’s another line — a little bit of a live wire, something that says you’re on the right track, a little spark — where he says “I felt a weird, wide patience.” Which is kind of an homage to Adrienne Rich. She has that incredible line “a wild patience has taken me this far.” Wide patience, wild patience. You know, when you’ve spent your life memorizing poems, these things happen.

That was what I felt in the writing. It’s the moment when the narrator commits himself to this weird act, which he could break at any moment. He could give R. a blowjob, he could do whatever, he could break at any moment. And he decides, “I’m going to do this weird thing that I don’t understand.” And that’s what I was doing. That’s the moment where he commits and that was the moment when I committed to writing it. I said, “O.K., I’m going to really try to enact this weird, ritualized thing, and then it became very important to to name the body. The first time he says “I love you” — that was a discovery to me, and I thought “O.K., that’s what’s happening.” And then to name the parts of the body. This is how my brain works, I think “I’m going to say this thing and then this branching of thoughts happens and now I have to follow 15 different courses.”

Thinking about writing sex explicitly, there are so many reasons why I think it’s really important. I’ve been talking about it a lot because Cleanness has a lot of sex in it. What Belongs to You doesn’t. People talked about it like it did. People were like, “this is so brave, how are you so brave to write these sex scenes.” And I was like, “what have you been reading?”

Look, progress, well I think its progress, in terms of explicitness, is not a single direction. You read things from the early 1970s — how many of you have read Gordon Merrick? The Lord Won’t Mind trilogy? — Holy bejeezus. First of all, they are really good books. They sold millions of copies. This thing that people have told gay writers — that if you write books centered on queer lives, you won’t find an audience — has always been a lie. He sold millions of copies with the most explicit gay sex. You can get this on your Kindle. I really recommend it, it’s so hot. You could buy this in the drugstore as a mass-market paperback. But mainstream publishing forgot that.

In 2016, my little book, with three pages of explicit sex in it, was somehow seen as brave and breaking boundaries, and I was like “y’all need to read Samuel Delany, because that’s some real boundary-breaking stuff.” When I wrote Cleanness — I mean it’s not really true that it’s written in a kind of defiance because “Gospodar,” one of the book’s most explicit chapters, was written before What Belongs to You was published — I was like, “alright, if you guys think that was sex, I’ll give you some sex.” I’m going to earn what people said about What Belongs to You.

So I’ve been talking about sex a lot, and there are lots of reasons why I think it can be an important thing to write about sex and why, in literature and in the technology of literature and with literary mechanics. It’s really important at this moment in our culture, when we are submerged in images of sexual bodies, but I think there’s a real dearth of embodied-ness and representations of embodied-ness, of bodies that have consciousness. And literature does that, it’s the best thing we have for understanding the machinations of another person’s consciousness.

Also I think it’s really important to write gay sex. Because we live in a period when queer people have won certain very limited rights of citizenship that I could never have imagined, even ten years ago. Queer people can marry, [non-transgender] queer people can serve in the military openly. Now, you can get married on the weekend and go to your job on Monday and legally be fired for being gay in the majority of U.S. states. So this idea that queer people have equality is utter bullshit. But marriage equality, which I thought I didn’t care about — I think everyone should be able to live how they want, and gay people should be able to enter into any kind of contract they want — but I didn’t think I had feelings about it, because I’m not going to get married. If I get married (my partner doesn’t need me to get American citizenship), it’ll be if I need to flee to Europe. We’ll get married if I need Spanish citizenship.

But I didn’t think I had feelings. I lived in Bulgaria when the Supreme Court decision came and this wonderful Bulgarian friend — we were at a writer’s retreat, it was kind of like this but Bulgarian — and I walked down the stairs and he had a glass of wine. He said “chestito,” which is Bulgarian for congratulations and I said “what did I do?” He said, “The Supreme Court decision just came and gay marriage is legal.” I burst into tears. I had no idea I felt that way, it’s really important.

It came at a cost. That cost was the way that the marriage equality was won was through an advertising campaign, and queer lives and queer bodies were packaged in a very particular way. I remember the horror I felt at one of the Human Rights Campaign rallies in front of the Supreme Court when they told trans activists they couldn’t speak because they didn’t want them on TV, when they told undocumented queer activists they couldn’t speak because they didn’t want them on TV.

America came to embrace gay marriage because there was an extraordinary effort made to make America forget that gay people — and especially gay men — have sex. You think of something like [the television show] Modern Family. I think that show is incredibly powerful in people embracing queer parents and see queer couples in a loving relationship centered on the raising of a child, but it’s also impossible to imagine those two men having sex. That is not an accident. Even in our age of marriage equality, America despises the queer body, it despises the queer sexual body and when you start talking about men having anal sex, people suddenly feel a lot less comfortable with their gay friends.

It feels to me so important to write the queer sexual body because when you make something into art, you make a claim about it. You make a claim that it has value. You make a claim that it is capable of accommodating beauty and revelation. That is something I felt intensely writing this scene about these two men, both of whom have been taught that their bodies are to be despised. We don’t get it in “The Frog King,” but in the title chapter story of the book, R. tells the story of his past. He tells the narrator of something he’s never told anyone before. It’s a story that is really common — this is something else that really pisses me off.

How many of you have read A Little Life by Hanya Yanaghara? I think that book is extraordinary. It is brutal, it is devastating, it is transformative. If you like it or you hate it, it is a landmark book in your reading life, you will never forget it. It is a story in which we are made to experience, with this character, who is queer, experiences of brutal sexual abuse as a child. Daniel Mendelsohn, who is a very smart critic who despises this book, wrote a very late review. It was very weird, like months after the book came out. He wrote a very long, very angry review in the New York Review of Books.

There were two big articles early on that championed this book. One of them was by me in The Atlantic and another from a critic in the New York Yorker. The first two paragraphs in Mendelsohn’s review are attacking us. That’s how angry he was, he had to attack the champions of the book. The review ends by claiming that people love this book so much because America is full of narcissistic, whiny millennials. I was like, “it’s not enough to hate this book, you have to hate everyone who liked this book.”

Now Daniel Mendelsohn is very smart and he’s also been very kind to What Belongs to You and I respect him as a critic. But he was wrong and he was triggered and he was triggered in a way that was not about the book. One of the things he said was, “this is so disgusting, this is just another example of the old cliche that people are gay because they were abused as children.”

That is a typical narrative of being gay and yes, for a long time there was rhetoric that what made you gay was being abused as a child and that is a dangerous narrative that needs to be pushed back against. It is also true that the best statistics we have suggest that queer kids are three times more likely to be abused. That doesn’t mean that makes them gay, it means that predators are really good at picking vulnerable kids and queer kids are vulnerable. So the idea that this story is out of bounds because it upsets the sort of attachment we have to normalcy and health of queerness is fucked up.

R. tells a story about having been abused as a child and his own fear. R. is closeted and the narrator is trying to scold him. This is annoying for the narrator and he tells him to come out, that he’s not even Bulgarian, he’s Portuguese and from a modern country that has gay marriage. The narrator tells him that he thinks his friends and family will love him enough to accept him, and R. says, “stop. How dare you? How dare you think you understand what I feel.” He tells this story about being abused. Then he says something that many queer people feel and that we should be able to talk about. He says, “what if that is why I’m gay? If I march in the Pride Parade, isn’t that saying that it’s okay?”

That’s a real problem. That’s something that people really have to deal with and we should be able to talk about it. So R. has his own baggage and he has been taught to hate himself and to hate his body. The narrator has been taught that. Every queer person in America has been taught that. I hope that is less true every year and that queer kids now have access to many different narratives that teach them other lessons. But in that scene, I wanted to write this as beautifully as I could. When I write sex, sometimes I write it brutally, sometimes I write it in an ugly way, but I also very often write it in a way that makes it beautiful and lays claim to all of the the lyricism that English is capable of, all of our tools for making something beautiful.

I want to lavish these bodies with that. I want to pour this beauty over those bodies as a way to say “these bodies can be cherished and these bodies accommodate and produce a value that is infinite like all human value.” When I felt myself fall into that place, that weird, wide patience, that was what I fell into. You have to feel in the writing what you feel in the body. You have to name the parts of the body, to name a part of the body and then have the narrator say “I love you, I just want the pure love of your body.”

I want emotion in art to be profound and I think one of the things it means when we talk about profundity in emotion is that profound emotion contains its opposite. That’s what profundity is. So as I was falling into this joyful, loving, celebratory space, I also felt great grief. When a muscle has been clenched for a long time, when it relaxes, it hurts.

BN: For me, it’s also the main source of tension in the scene, between assertion and submission. “I’m asserting who I am, I’m submitting to who I am.”

GG: Because that’s what it is to be a person. You know, there are so many things we are that we don’t get to choose. We don’t just get to produce our identity. Having an identity means you are meaningful in a field of signification that you do not control. Other people control what you mean and you are in constant negotiation with their attempts to make you meaningful. You don’t get to say “I say signify this” because signification requires more than one person. In some ways we have to live as though we get to say, “I signify this.”