My first novel, Pouring of Eternal Light, was something of an escapist mechanism, exploring a relationship between two men, which was devoid, mostly in part of my age at the time of writing it, of sex and of hardship, of overt lust. In my following books, I shifted to something more heterosexual, avoiding romance for the most part in Fervent Hope, and focusing on a relationship between a man and a woman, from the woman’s perspective, in Josella.
In a time, however, when queerness is quickly bricked over, when aspiring to the standards of heterosexuality is becoming popular, I want to make sure that I present queerness in my work, not as a deviation, not as a convenience, but as something that is normal, as something that cannot be escaped.
In recent times, we have seen both the aestheticisation of queerness and the erasure of it in search of normalcy and subservience. It is, and we cannot judge, a response to the current political times, the rise of authoritarian conservatism and a branch of liberalism which sacrifices the weak to stop the extreme right. However, it seems apt now to state that queerness is inherent, that it is an immutable quality, and that it will always be there, within us, and within society.
When Tom in A Union of Blood was rejected by his friend, he did not turn back to heterosexuality, for he had been less so changed and more so enlightened to his disposition. I wrote him to not fray from his queerness when times got tough.
In A Small and Forgotten Time, however, I wrote Marcel as a figure of frustration, for he is pretty enough to conform to the standards of the gay community, he is socially disposed to be able to find his queerness, and yet he hides behind it as an aesthetic. He must realise that it is immutable, and that he has realised so.
In the future, I want to write about the intersectionality of class and queerness, the sort of thing which is long missed by the flashy rich-kid queer television shows. In queer literature, we must present the good and the bad, and it is important that there is more queer literary realism and literary fiction.
I am limited in being a white, cisgender, gay man living in a country which is sympathetic to the queer cause, but it is essential to tell our stories, and the stories of those around us. It is a form of normalisation and a resistance to the shift of culture. In telling stories, we are fighting, and we are presenting the world as we see it.
Bleys Robertson 