008: Haters versus Historians
Hi friends!
There’s a ton of new followers here since last week’s post got shared around (hi there, new faces!) so I thought I’d do a quick re-introduction to myself and this Substack.
I’m a writer who has worked and written primarily in the specialty coffee industry for years. I live in Los Angeles by way of Paris, DC, and Dallas. I began this Substack as a twice-monthly newsletter to tell stories I didn’t think editors would be interested in publishing elsewhere. I write a lot about art, history, some personal experiences, and writing. I trained as a historian, so all of my work has that bend. Recently, I finished writing a fantasy novel with my writing partner, and we are currently querying agents! It’s harrowing! You can follow me on Instagram and Twitter, though I use Instagram a lot more than Twitter these days.
A lot of people were really into the bookshelf analysis I did last week, so I want to share a template for doing an audit of your own bookshelves. If the past few weeks have brought up a niggling worry that you might not be as egalitarian in your reading as you think you are, this is for you. Use the spreadsheet to find out what percentage of your books are fiction or non-fiction, by White authors, by Black authors, feature POC characters, feature LGBTQIA+ characters, etc. Then act on that data.
I’m going to warn you—it takes a long time. And if you have unread books that you’re not sure about the content of, looking up the gender/sexuality/race of the protagonists might spoil minor (or major) plot points for you. So, use this spreadsheet how you like. I’ve included a few samples of books so you can see what a filled in dataset looks like. The same graphs I used are at the bottom (and filled in with the sample data). To use this template, you will need to duplicate the sheet into your own Google Drive. To do that, go to File > Make A Copy and save it to your Drive. The columns are mostly defined-option dropdowns, which will make creating the graphs easier. If you want/need to change the options for the dropdowns, here is a video about dropdown lists created by Google. To understand/modify the graphs I created (or create better ones, mine are very simple), check out this video. I’m not a pro by any means, so I’ll only be able to answer very simple questions if you have any.
Okay, now that I’ve blabbed on and done the requisite warnings, here is the template:
Remember, who we read is who we care about.
And now, on to what I wanted to write about today.
During the last few months that I was living in Paris in 2017, I wrote a memoir.
To be honest, that sentence makes me want to gag, because somewhere along the line I began to absorb our new cultural hatred of memoirs. I think that hatred started after the rise of Twitter—people tweeting every single thing that came into their head created a culture of over-share, which has in turn created a culture of hating over-sharers. And I get it—there’s only so many times I want to read about someone’s minor frustrations with their boss or how house-training their puppy is going.
But I’m coming back around on memoirs, so this post is honestly as much for myself as it is for y’all. Here’s why:
My Master’s thesis is/was about “dissident sexuality” in the Sherlock Holmes stories, as well as the erasure of anything-other-than-heterosexuality in the Sherlock Holmes adaptations. The first chapter looked at the cultural attitudes toward male-male attraction and the rising identity of the homosexual in London in the late Victorian Era (homosexuality as an identity was only being invented in the 1880s, largely based on work by Richard von Krafft-Ebing). In the second chapter, I looked at how Sherlock Holmes fit those stereotypes and how Arthur Conan Doyle’s choices made him exist outside of normative heterosexual Christian male standards of the day. In the last three chapters, I studied how fan fiction (starting all the way back in 1900 through 2017), BBC’s Sherlock, and Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes all treated the sexuality of Conan Doyle’s most famous character.
(Why yes, my thesis was about 75 pages longer than I was told to write it. Why yes, my advisors did encourage me to publish it as a book. Why yes, I do have imposter syndrome about it and therefore have avoided doing exactly that for 2 years even though, let’s face it, I wrote a book.)
I say all of this because one of the hardest damn parts of my thesis was finding out how the Victorians interpreted Sherlock Holmes. I knew he was beloved (people wore mourning bands for him when Conan Doyle killed him), so that was something. But I didn’t know if they raised their eyebrows at two middle-aged bachelors living together when both were financially able to live alone. I didn’t know how they felt about John Watson reminiscing about ‘his wooing’ at Holmes’ door. I didn’t know what they thought of “Three Garridebs” and Watson saying, “It was worth a wound—it was worth many wounds—to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind [Holmes’] cold mask.”
I didn’t know because even then only the rich and educated had the financial means and leisure time to write letters, pen diaries, etc. Paper and ink were still so expensive for the Victorians, and when they could afford them they were rarely used for silly pondering about things like if their favorite fictional characters might be sleeping together. And even if they were used for things like that, well-meaning families often destroyed any writing that betrayed any sort of sinful thoughts, especially when a person died, to protect their reputation. Diaries and letters that did survive that initial purge were often lost to time, destroyed by the elements or by descendants who didn’t think it was worth keeping.
A good example of why diaries were destroyed is the story of Roger Casement and his diaries which were used to kill him. His so-called ‘Black Diaries’ told stories of sexual liaisons with younger men. They were discovered (or “discovered,” as the story goes) when he was arrested and charged with treason by the British government in April 1916. There wasn’t enough evidence to support a conviction for treason, so the government released the diaries to the public, basically saying, “Hey, if he’s morally corrupt enough to have sex with men, then he’s morally corrupt enough to commit treason, and therefore should be executed.”
I’m not kidding, that’s the case they brought. A strange if-this-then-that logical leap of morality where one crime is equivalent to all crimes. They called him “sexually degenerate” and therefore unable to tell right from wrong. He was put on trial, found guilty basically of being immoral (not really of treason), and executed, based largely on these diaries. Which some evidence suggests may have been forged by the government.
So, yeah. Even in 1916, you could love your gay kid, but you still wouldn’t want evidence of their so-called ‘deviancy’ to exist, especially if you heard about what happened to Roger Casement. Diaries were burned. Letters destroyed. Boys sent away. Because of this, first-hand accounts of the LGBTQIA+ experience pre-1900 are rare. There’s some fiction, some erotic “memoirs,” and medical journals, all of which anonymized the protagonists, but that’s it. There’s hardly any day-to-day accounts of an LGBTQIA+ life that wasn’t interrupted by tragedy. And there are even fewer accounts of allies writing about loved ones who experienced same-sex desire.
Of course, this didn’t just happen in the LGBTQIA+ community, though it happened more there, and for longer. Accounts of the lives of anyone other than the rich and powerful are rare. That’s why we know lots about King Henry VIII, but less about his wives and even less about his mistresses.
‘Normal people,’ or at least not-powerful people, rarely had access to the tools to write about their own lives. When they did, those accounts don’t survive to today. The accounts that do survive (and I’m thinking specifically of slave narratives here) are highly edited to be palatable and still only tell stories of the exceptional people who had help telling their stories. This makes a historian’s job much harder. The further back we try to go, the less we know about how non-famous people lived. We can guess what their day-to-day looked like and how they felt about their world only through laws that were enacted, through newspapers and magazines, through little snatches of graffiti, through scraps of letters, through mentions by the rich and powerful. Almost never through them.
Which is what makes memoirs about modern normal lives so amazing to me. When historians study the 2000s, they’re probably going to have the opposite problem I had—they’re probably going to have too much information. Even if the internet collapses and everyone’s blog is lost and the Twitter archives disappear and newsletters cease to exist, they’re still going to have our published memoirs, our private journals, our daily planners. They’ll know exactly what individuals thought of the acceptance of gay marriage, of Black Lives Matter, of Kim-Jong Un, of the imprisonment of the Uighurs in China, of Trump’s rally-gone-wrong in Tulsa. That’s so rare. What a fucking treasure for future historians! I would give my left arm to know what an average Victorian thought of Arthur Conan Doyle defending Roger Casement and Oscar Wilde when they were punished for their sexuality.
So write your fucking memoir. I don’t care if you never win an Emmy or write a bestselling book or witness an assassination or take part in a historic rally that changes our world. Write down everything that happens to you. Write down everything you see, everything that happens to your friends and your family, everything you think of the things happening around you. Keep tweeting about what you had for breakfast. Keep posting photos of your dog wearing a new bowtie. Someday, there’s going to be a historian of food, or human’s relationship with animals, or of the role of allies in ending systemic racism during the Black Lives Matter movement, and they are going to be hungry for what you tweeted and wrote in your diary. And sure, maybe haters gonna hate. But trust me, historians gonna appreciate.
Some Things I Read and Loved Recently
Once you’ve finished your bookshelf analysis, check out this bot by Liz @ecmoy, which recommends books by Black authors based on genre, then recommends a nearby bookstore where you can get it.
This Texas Town Is America’s Covid-19 Future, by Anne Helen Petersen.
As always, thank you for reading. If you want to respond just hit reply. Your message will get to me (and only me). If you like this and think your friends might too, feel free to forward it on.
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Stay healthy, friends.
xx,
Valorie
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