The Mighty Quinn: A Conversation with Jay Quinn

Jay Quinn is executive editor of the Haworth Press’s Southern Tier line of gay male fiction. He is also the author of the novel Metes and Bounds and the memoir The Mentor; as well as editor of two volumes in the series Rebel Yell: Stories by Contemporary Southern Gay Authors. Quinn, himself a major figure in Southern gay literature, has set much of his writings on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Such is the case with his latest novel, Back Where He Started (Alyson Books). In our conversation, Quinn talks about this latest book.

Many books have been written about “gay marriage.” In Back Where He Started, Quinn deals with “gay divorce.” As Jay puts it, “we have finally gotten to the point where gay marriage is a possibility. So what I did was project forward into the future because along with the reality of gay marriage I think that we have to look at the reality of American relationships and how American relationships, gay or straight, as a whole get that bump at midlife where people’s lives are reevaluated in terms of who they were at the beginning and who they are now. And so I thought, if it follows that gay marriages dissolve at the same rate as straight marriages, I wanted to look at that midlife crisis and how it affected a long-term, 22 year committed relationship between two men, and take that as my initial premise.”

In many ways, Chris Thayer and Zack Ronan, the couple that unravels in Back Where He Started, have a traditional marriage. Zack earns a living and Chris stays home and raises the children from Zack’s previous heterosexual marriage. “I thought if we are going to think about gay relationships in terms of something as traditional as marriage then what I wanted to do was approximate a relationship that was as traditional as it could be and that is one where one person was the breadwinner and the other one was primarily responsible for staying behind and rearing the children.” And while Chris is portrayed as a nurturing “mother” figure, Quinn did not intend to feminize him too much. Rather, “what I wanted to do was really create a character who was sort of the embodiment of the female side of what they call ‘family values.’ And I thought in order to do that I had to completely cast him in a role that was that of the supporter in the relationship, the emotional nurturer in the relationship.” And if Chris appears to be a bitch sometimes,. It is because “he’s put in a position where who wouldn’t be a bitch.”

In the book, Zach leaves Chris for a woman and this too is intentional. “The relationship between bisexual men and gay men is one of those areas that has always fascinated me and which my work has dealt with several times. I think that the inherent nature of bisexual men is a fascination for me and a topic for my work because I think they offer a lot of gradations of color and emotional variety in an individual that is alluring and mysterious to me personally.” Quinn’s speaks from experience. “My first marriage, many years ago, was an on-again, off-again relationship with a bisexual man and, by way of that emotional distress and that intellectual learning process, it is a subject that remains, if not unresolved, certainly an area that captures a lot of my creative imagination. I will amend that very quickly and say I have been in a stable gay relationship with a gay man for 14 years and I am much happier and better off.”

Zack and Chris are both middle aged; Zack is in his fifties and Chris is approaching 50. In other words, they are older than the average gay literary character. This too is intentional. “I myself will be 47 in the summer and my way of dealing with the world and looking at the world are very much a middle aged perspective. I have to, with some degree of genuineness, look at my life’s attitudes and be informed by my life experience in order to create situations that I can really put myself into. Here is this story of a middle aged gay man who’s left certain aspects of gay life behind that are much more in a rearview mirror than they are in front of the headlights. And I really wanted to talk about being gay at middle age in a very positive and affirming sort of way. I wanted to say that we are constantly in the process of making ourselves over. And I think it’s important for gay writers to touch on that aspect of being middle aged in a way that’s positive and forward looking and not elegiac and sad.” But Quinn’s book also features young gay characters, like Chris’s youngest child, Schooner, and Schooner’s partner, Frank.

After Chris and Zack “divorce,” Chris moves to Salter Path, a small community on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Chris’s move to Salter Path is very successful, as he is accepted by most of the locals. Is Quinn idealizing life on the Outer Banks, as some critics were quick to point out? Definitely not, says Quinn, noting that the critics “want to tar small places, especially Southern places and Midwestern places, as being very intolerant and very prejudiced. And I am not saying that bad things don’t happen. But small communities, small cities, small towns afford a level of security and comfort in some gay lives of some gay men that is not found in larger cities. And I think it’s unfair to cast places that are outside of New York or Los Angeles or Atlanta or San Francisco as being utterly backward, violent and antigay. Gay people have existed in these places forever and they continue to live there today bound by ties of family or love or feelings of security. And I think it’s important that we talk about gay life that happens outside those areas that are usually discussed in many gay books.”

Quinn does not hide his affection for the Outer Banks, which “are, in many ways, home to me, both past and future. While I find myself living in South Florida now I hope some day to retire to the Outer Banks.” There is plenty of local color in Quinn’s book, which could only be written by someone who’s familiar with the region. There’s even a hurricane, which is “a fact of life on the Outer Banks, just as much as they are a fact of life in South Florida. And hurricanes are very much of an emotional time. They are filled with a lot of gathering unease and gathering emotional power that is relieved in a sudden storm. You have these days of anxiety leading up to them and then there’s the storm itself and so there is a very cathartic aspect to hurricanes. And I think that talking about hurricanes in literature you have an opportunity to make it a life changing event for the characters or make the hurricane a life affirming event in their lives. And what I had hoped to do was talk about how it was very much a life affirming event in the lives of these characters.”

One of the most notable aspects of Back Where He Started is the way religion, especially Roman Catholicism, in the lives of Chris and his family. Chris is a very spiritual man, a devout Roman Catholic to whom religion is a shield and a comfort. Here again Quinn stands apart from other gay writers. As he tells me, “there was a very real intent on my part to display how spirituality, especially the practice of a religion such as Roman Catholicism affects Chris’s character and influences his day to day life. I never read gay books that speak about religion in any sort of affirmative stance. It’s always a whip at people’s back psychologically or is it a part of their lives that they are reacting against rather than in concert with as a part of their lives that moves them to good and not for ill.

Quinn himself is “a practicing Roman Catholic; and I have very strong feelings about the Church, some of which are extremely positive, some of which I feel very contentious about. But no religion is perfect. But I think there are people who at middle age rediscover either the religion of their youth or a religion that they are comfortable with because there is something about the approaching end of your life and the coming fears of aging plus the emotional and intellectual growth that you experienced in the first half of your life that leads many people to faith. And whether it’s the faith of their childhood or the faith they discovered on their own I think it’s part of the middle age that spirituality is part a growing part of middle age’s impact on an individual’s life.” Both Chris Thayer and Jay Quinn “have chosen to engage and keep an ongoing dialogue with the faith from within it.”

Jay Quinn’s next book will not be set on the Outer Banks. Instead, it will be “set in the affluent western suburbs of Broward County” where Quinn now lives. “The book is about adultery. It’s about a relationship between a married neighbor on one side who has a wife and two children and a gay neighbor next door who is involved in a long-term relationship. Once again it revisits the emotional conflicts and social conflicts between a gay man and a bisexual man and explores larger things of adultery and what brings a couple to adultery, what sort of dynamics are going on in each of their families and what brings people to the point of physical and emotional intimacy for a time and then what brings that connection to its conclusion.” If Quinn’s new book is anywhere as good as Back Where He Started, it will be well worth the wait.

Jesse Monteagudo is a freelance writer and activist who has been working for GLBT rights in South Florida for thirty years. Write him at jessemonteagudo@aol.com.