Says a narrator in Marlon James’s freshly Booker-nominated The Disappearers, “I’ve made such a terrible mess out of being a homo.”
The novel’s protagonists are all gay men in ‘80s and ‘90s Jamaica; each makes similar proclamations. “But the statement is unfair,” says James from his home in Brooklyn. “It’s a statement that I think battered people, bruised people would make. There’s this idea of what a perfect homosexual is. Was he out enough? Did he sleep with enough people? Did he fight for rights?”
James has spent most of the last decade in the fantastical Dark Star Trilogy. The Disappearers, set in the smothering Kingston of his childhood, is his most personal work. “It’s not autofiction,” he specifies, “but it’s the first novel where I’m drawing so much from my life. I know that’s usually a debut novel for people. I had to wait six novels to do it.”
The result is revelatory. An unblinking portrait of gay joy and pain in a society that derides gayness at every turn. “Jesus, I don’t think about it a lot but people want to kill us,” writes 18-year-old Eddy Porteous in his journal, the book’s opening segment. “Us, I’m a part of an us that people just want to beat to death.”
James attended what he describes as a “pretty posh” high school in Kingston. “I was never physically bullied,” he says of those days. “But I didn’t need to be. Verbal bullying was enough. This pressure to conform. What does it mean when you’re the class sissy?”
Some of the prejudice in The Disappearers is lifted straight from James’s own boyhood, as when Eddy resists buying Prince’s Lovesexy because the album cover will tarnish his already sullied reputation. But James also interviewed dozens of queer Jamaicans while researching the book. Many of these stories come from them.
“It’s like when I wrote Brief History,” he says. “I didn’t have to imagine much. The truth was stranger and wilder, more violent and more disturbing.”
The inciting arc of The Disappearers involves a six-man play staged by Havelock Titus, he of the “terrible mess.” The amateur, all-gay, multigenerational troupe is set to perform John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes, a 1967 production about homosexuality in prison. Havelock, who by dint of an Oxford education is more worldly than his players, plans to make a statement by putting on the show in Jamaica in 1988—until a horrific act of violence interrupts rehearsals and scatterers the actors to the proverbial winds.
While James didn’t experience physical homophobic attacks, “I knew about them, and all it did was send me further into the closet,” he says. “I was one of many who ran to the church, because the church was going to make me straight.”
Here lies the novel’s autofictional divergence. Young Eddy Porteous, who spends his days “blasting cum all over pictures of Michael Hutchence,” is swiftly embracing his homosexuality. And Jordan Brown, narrator of the novel’s longest section, says, “I’ve always failed at appearing straight, not because I acted like a faggot but because I fucking hate straight people. Liking people who hate you is what the X-Men do. […] I could fuck a pretty man. I could let an ugly man fuck me. The thing is, both pretty and ugly are interesting in their own way. Straight people for the most part never grew up having to be a sexual anything, so they are just an ordinary form of nothing.”
“It’s not autofiction,” he specifies, “but it’s the first novel where I’m drawing so much from my life. I know that’s usually a debut novel for people. I had to wait six novels to do it.”
Because each narrator inhabits a more advanced stage of sexual discovery, I ask James if they represent progressive facets of his own coming out. A particular age, say, or a frustration, or a relationship. No, says James, that’s not quite right. Rather, given his flight to the church, “Part of this book is a weird kind of FOMO for me. Even the bad stuff.”
James didn’t move to America on a permanent basis until 2007, when he began a 15-year teaching career at Macalester College. “But I was definitely escaping to New York quite a bit [before then],” he says, “sometimes up to six months every year.”
James remembers living “pretty dissociated lives” during this time. “In America,” he says, “I wouldn’t be cruising or anything. I mean, I wouldn’t have dared. But I would be putting on what you would call faggy clothes, almost as if I’m impersonating a queer person, and walking around downtown New York and being myself.”
In the Bronx, where he stayed with Jamaican relatives, James remained buttoned up. It was only when he crossed the Harlem River that he donned his Levi’s Offender Jeans (named for their low-rise cut). “I’m living this sort of bohemian queer life, but it was like Cinderella,” he says. “By 9 or 10 p.m., I had to run back to the Barnes and Noble bookstore and change back into my normal people clothes. One of the reasons I moved to the Midwest, I think, was to go somewhere where family would never visit, somewhere I would never get the scrutiny.”
Minnesota isn’t an option for the men in The Disappearers. For the most part, neither is New York.
“No faggot in Jamaica is living, we’re not even existing,” says Jordan. “We’re just surviving. Some survive better than others, not just the ones who can pass, but the sissy who passes just enough that nobody asks him questions to his face.”
A 25-year-old “sometime prostitute,” Jordan is the novel’s vengeful Ahab, a bottomless vessel for James’s— and, presumably, his interviewees’—rage. The actors are bewildered and alone after the attack. (Per James, “battered, bruised.”) But Jordan’s reaction is the strongest, especially when local media blames the victims instead of searching for the perpetrators.
“I didn’t think about it that deeply until I started researching lynching in the States,” says James. “Nine times out of ten, the white witnesses say that people lynched themselves. It was ‘Black-on-Black crime,’ or ‘They’re so excitable.’ I realized that in Jamaica, and in a lot of homophobic countries, they say, ‘Their brains are not the same’ or ‘He was an abuser,’ or ‘He made a pass at somebody.’”
The parallel grew more defined with further research. “It was shocking to me,” says James. “The language of bigotry really is the same, no matter what you hate. Bigotry is kind of unimaginative in that way.”
“Hanging, castrating,” Jordan rants to Eddy, “beheading, burning, beating, what else? Stoning, bludgeoning, boiling, from before the dark ages until now they been killing us […] Sometimes I get so mad I wonder how one fucking body can hold all of it. So I go to the gym to get fitter and stronger. And every time I fuck a closet case I bite him in the ass or neck, or better yet—give him a hickey that his wife can’t mistake for anything else. Or I dare them to hit me so I can beat the shit out of them. So fucking mad at so many people I still think my head goin’ explode.”
Jordan’s vitriol is a perfect match for James’s talent. But when the anger finally ebbs—and it does, not often, but it does—The Disappearers channels the love and humor that makes its characters tick.
“A therapist once asked me how I felt about being gay,” says Jordan. “I said to him okay, if you strip all the fuckery that God lay in my way ever since I started sucking dick and just focus on the fact of faggotry, how do I feel? You know what the answer was? I fucking love it. Maybe not love so much as fascinated by it. Enthralled? More like spellbound. Yeah, spellbound with being gay from when I was eight and didn’t know what it meant or that it would have anything to do with sex since I also didn’t know what the fuck sex was.”
Its passages like this where James’s own bildungsroman drifts, perhaps, into view. The love. The discontent. The “FOMO.” Driving a guileless Eddy around Kingston in the novel’s early pages, a more experienced Jordan tells his passenger, “You do realize that there is a Jamaica underneath this Jamaica, right?”
James never received such mentorship from a gay friend. It wasn’t available. “I had one lesbian friend,” he says, “and it put a huge strain on our friendship. When she came out, I immediately started finding ways to distance myself.” As a result, “I spent most of the 80s in my bedroom listening to The Cure.”
“One thing about being in a former British Colony,” James explains, “is that in some ways it never stops being a Victorian Society. We’re obsessed with morality but have all these undergrounds.”
In The Disappearers, James embraces a Jamaican subculture that he long held at arm’s length. But signs point to improvement back home. A younger generation of queer Jamaicans is staying on the island rather than migrating, he says, which means that “Every kid in Jamaica now has a gay friend.” This could make all the difference in the world. Especially when those kids grow up.
“Does it mean I’m going to hold my fiancé’s hand and walk on a street in Jamaica?” James asks. “Probably not. But I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody does it. And I wouldn’t be surprised if nobody really cares.”
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