Gay Today: People

A Talk with Jay Quinn,
Author of The Mentor

By Jesse Monteagudo

Jay Quinn is part of a new breed of gay Southern writers whose work defines and chronicles the gay Southern experience. He was born and raised in Eastern North Carolina, part of a family whose roots go deep in the Southern soil: "My undergrad work at East Carolina University was an unfocused combination of art, sociology and geography," Quinn recalls.

"I somehow ended up with a degree in Urban Planning. I sort of worked on a master's degree in Urban Design at Columbia University and the School of Design at North Carolina State, but quit to surf and work at an engineering firm in Nag's Head. I've spent most of my life alternately working on land survey field crews as a grunt and for ad agencies as a creative."

Quinn also worked as an art director, illustrator, video director, and independent writer, director, and producer. Quinn moved to Florida some years ago and now lives in a suburb west of Fort Lauderdale with Jeff, his partner of seven years, and a pair of huge Doberman/Labrador Retriever mixed-breed dogs.

The most important event of Jay Quinn's life took place in 1982, when he was 23: "March 1982 was like all the Marches of all the years that preceded it. But that one March changed my life. I found a friend, an older brother, a father, and a teacher - all in the lanky form of Joe Riddick. Seventeen years later, it is no overstatement to say Joe is the reason I survived as a gay man," he wrote.

Riddick taught Quinn everything he knew about gay life: "I learned of tea dances and queer cotillions, of drag queens and horny marines. I learned of dirty bookstores and discos, of romance and redemption, of sex and broken-glass break-ups." More importantly, "Joe introduced me to Holleran, Picano, White, and Merrick. He also introduced me to my own hunger for some stories of my own, unaware that I was to become a part of Joe's story and he of mine." Though Joe and Jay were never lovers, their friendship continues to be a major factor in their lives.

Joe Riddick has the title role in The Mentor: A Memoir of Friendship and Gay Identity(Harrington Park Press; 186 pages; $19.95). Though The Mentor is Quinn's first published book, it "is actually my third book . . . I had completed two novels that were making the rounds when I came up with a proposal to write a nonfiction work about mentoring. The decision to make the work a memoir was driven by a real need to give personal, relevant example to the concepts I was trying to address." Like other talented writers, Quinn has the ability to write about his personal experiences in such a way that readers can relate to them.

In his "Foreword" to The Mentor , Nicholas Weinstock defines "homosexual mentors" as "gay adults whose steps and experience guide the staggering efforts of gay youth", a tradition that goes back to Classical Greece.

As Quinn wrote in The Mentor, "In the development of a gay identity, the mentor serves as the subtle translator between the perceived reality and the real one. Oral tradition, stories, and humor serve as teaching aids to help us discern the limits of an outwardly imposed artificiality and the genuine in a functioning gay identity."

Quinn isquick to note the difference between mentor relationships and "simply sexual arrangements"; proposing instead "a concept of mentoring as a fully involved emotional relationship, not especially a sexual one." "How can one become a mentor or be mentored without some concept of honor or respect?"

Quinn agrees that some men fail to become mentors because of the "poisonous myth" that gay men "recruit" boys for sexual purposes. "However," he tells me, "I think most gay men are discouraged from becoming mentors for other reasons. Contemporary life is really about compartmentalizing time and emotional resources. Gay society is no different from the larger society in the sense that we allocate time and feelings to very specialized types of relationships: 'Friend, Boyfriend, Fuck Buddy, Office Friend.' Where does one find a place in this hierarchy of interaction for Mentor? The artificiality of these emotional boundaries preclude any but the most specific of connections between human beings."

"I think one becomes a mentor only from long association and the perspective of time. Mentoring is not a cap you wear on Saturdays or something you schedule. I would say anyone who wishes to be perceived as a mentor to first be a friend in the simplest and most caring sense of the word. Take the time to develop and sustain lasting relationships with a variety of people at different life stages, not necessarily ages. Offer yourself as an example by being simply who you are."

Are mentors born or made? "Mentors, like friends, can be made and born. Some people are inexplicably nurturing. Chalk it up to zodiac signs or a gift of empathy but some people have an innate sense of obligation and responsibility for others that make them mentors. Others simply grow into the role through long affection and a certain delight found in another's company."

Joe Riddick had his own mentor, the celebrated "Mother Poole". Has Jay Quinn himself been a mentor? "That's really not for me to say. It's not something you get a T-shirt, a beer huggie and a certificate for. I have tried to be a friend. Time will tell if I've proven to be a mentor."

Both Joe and Jay are Southerners, a common background that shaped their friendship. "I think that being Southern born provides a shared vocabulary, visual and verbal, that can create a twin language in the unrelated sons of the Tidewater plain," Quinn wrote. "For Joe and me, the similarity of our backgrounds and experiences made empathy inevitable," he wrote. The Mentor is one of a series of books by and about gay male southerners that includes works by Roy F. Wood, Jim Grimsley, John Howard and James Sears.

"I think there is something different about gay Southerners, and I suppose that makes us special, but not necessarily precious," Quinn says. "The south, for good or ill is a very socially and culturally distinct place from the rest of the country. It suffers from being interpreted as being either an overly romantic or unjustly demeaned stereotype of itself."

"The south is an easy place to caricature. But the reality of growing up both gay and southern is far less cartoonish than a distinctive accent would indicate. The south is a place of old habit and older tradition, in some ways on a collision course with the cultural homogenization that technology brings. I think what other gays can learn from gay southerners is that unique balancing act that involves picking and choosing what is important in a regional identity and integrating it with a sexual one."

Previous People Features from the GayToday Archive:
James T. Sears: Historical Scholar-Southern Style

Review: Lonely Hunters

Interview: James T. Sears

Related Sites:
Southern Gay History: James T. Sears
GayToday does not endorse related sites.

The Mentor features some precious vignettes of gay Southern life, in Tidewater Virginia and coastal North Carolina, as they were experienced by Jay Quinn and Joe Riddick. For example, "One year, Joe came back from the winter furniture market in High Point. This event draws interior designers, merchandisers, and manufacturers' reps from all over the nation, if not the world, to an otherwise sleepy industrial town in the North Carolina Piedmont.

For gay men, it is also a gathering of the tribes. The furniture market is a professional event; it is also a sexual market of incredible opportunity and diversity. Joe came back in high spirits, victorious in all his many conquests. Exhausted, but satiated and exhilarated, Joe returned to our barren little corner of the world with stories of a sexual binge that seemed as if downtown Manhattan had reincarnated itself in sleepy High Point. The business of business seemed to have become a side attraction in a carnival of sex."

Later Joe got a job as producer/director with a theater in Wilmington, a port city in southern North Carolina that's "Not as large as Norfolk, but still possessing the same randy inclinations under a thin skin of propriety, Wilmington is an open city for queers. Sailors and fishermen come to it from the sea. Horny farm boys and soldiers follow the river down from the cotton, corn, and tobacco fields or the bases and military reservations of lower North Carolina.

Tourists flood in from an entire region of cities, towns, spots, and places, all on annual holiday. Wilmington is heaven on earth for queers in the summertime. . . . Joe strode into this city of opportunity with the promise of a long overdue personal success and the hunger born of a long period of emotional starvation."

Stories right these should remind us that North Carolina and Virginia have quite active gay communities in spite of those states' homophobic laws and politicians. Quinn agrees: "My experience with the gay communities in both Virginia and North Carolina is distanced by nine years residence in Florida, but what I knew of those communities prior to that supports your contention that gay Virginians and North Carolinians were experiencing a burgeoning of political expression, economic clout and solidarity."

Both Quinn and Riddick were raised Southern Baptists: "The overriding source of comfort and pain in our similarities stems not from a common queerness but from the foundation of our world, the Southern Baptist Church," Quinn wrote. The Mentor is very critical of the Southern Baptist Church and an experience Quinn believes is "definitely a more Southern experience than a Baptist one. Outside of the region, other Baptists have distanced themselves from the operatic ignorance of the Southern Baptist Convention."

In recent years the Church has become more determined to go back in time, not only in regards to homosexuality but also on the issues of scientific research, women's rights and relations with Catholics, Mormons and non-Christians. Quinn explains why:

"Understand first that the South is by nature hierarchical and exclusionary. The primitive clannishness inherent to all Southerners requires Southern Baptists to draw heavy ideological lines to separate themselves from anyone outside of the clan. Baptists as a Protestant sect have primarily drawn their congregants from solidly middle-class populations. The economic erosion of the American middle-class has contributed to the Southern Baptists' sense of powerlessness.

"In a period of social change, access to information and evolving definitions of gender roles, family and religious ecumenism, Southern Baptists are fighting to retain their clan identity by refusing to acknowledge anything that threatens their primitive sense of man, woman, and God and the 'natural order' of things. Their longing for 'natural order,' is really no more than a myth of America as they lived it in the period before civil rights, education and indoor plumbing.

"Southern Baptists simply don't have the spiritual courage or intellectual capacity to grow, adapt and reconcile their faith to contemporary realities. They worship a very small and belligerent god whose face they must cast in unchanging stone so that they can recognize him with their limited abilities of discernment."

Not surprisingly, both Jay and Joe left Southern Baptists behind, and choose to travel other religious paths. As Quinn put it in The Mentor, "all roads lead to Rome. . . Searching for a religion less rawboned and emotional, more intellectual and politely distant, Joe began attending High Church Episcopal masses in college. I began my path toward Roman Catholicism in high school."

Quinn refuses to justify or explain his religious choice to those who might argue that he left a notoriously homophobic denomination just to join another one: "I feel no need to respond to arguments regarding my choice of personal faith. I do not proselytize, so I don't tolerate argument. I feel everyone, gay or straight, should find that practice of faith, or none, that suits them."

On the other hand, Quinn agrees that "gay people are more likely to be seekers of truth for all of the components of their lives. Being labeled as 'other' by the larger, non-gay world forces gay men and women to fashion an identity from many conflicting social, ethical and moral components. In that crafting of self, religious conversion may or may not play a factor. However, being excluded and isolated from religious expression by the faith of their families, they may choose to seek emotional and spiritual sustenance from whatever religious context that will provide it." Quinn put it well when he wrote that, "In a perverse parallel, religious conversion is a mirror experience of coming out."

Like myself and many other gay men, Jay Quinn is left-handed: "As an infant, my parents tried to break me of my left-handedness by refusing to give me my bottle until I took it with my right hand. I would take the bottle with my right hand and promptly put it in my left to nurse, Quinn recalled in The Mentor

"In a lifetime of left-handedness, my poor body has experienced many broken bones, cuts, and other injuries resulting from that split-second's time necessary to adapt to a world oriented to right-handed people." Is there a connection between being gay and being left-handed?

"From my general knowledge of human physiology, I understand that what makes a person left-handed is a part of a complex series of triggers that determine sex. At a certain stage of fetal development, a male embryo receives a tremendous surge of testosterone manufactured by the mother. This influx of testosterone primarily spurs the development of external genitalia. It also briefly inhibits the development of the left side of the brain, allowing the right side to become dominant. The right side of the brain controls abstract as opposed to mechanical thinking. . .

"All gay men are male. Some men are left handed, so are some gay men. Gay men are usually credited with being more creative and capable of abstract thought than their heterosexual brothers. Left handed people are generally more creative than right handed people. The obvious assumption is that gay, left-handed men are probably the most talented and genetically manly of the sum of all men, gay, or straight."

The Mentor makes some interesting points about gay male life; in the South and elsewhere. For example, Quinn wrote that "Gay life, for Joe and me, and for our generation, has been defined by a series of transitions between being sexual hunters or gatherers." Is the sex hunt a gay thing or a male thing?, I ask. Jay replies, "I think it is primarily a male thing, but in practice, I think gay men are Uber-males in this case. Freed from the responsibility for offspring and the feminizing influence of heterosexual coupling, gay men have both the opportunity and inclination to pursue sex as a purely experiential pastime."

Quinn himself went from being a "hunter" to being a "gatherer." Is that a process most gay men go through? Are gatherers necessarily more "mature" than hunters? "I'm not qualified to make such a sweeping generalization. I can only say that my experience as a gay man and with gay men has been that it is a progression of some sorts for everyone, sometimes linear, sometimes cyclical. That progression is defined by the relative stability or instability of individual relationships as well as personal inclination."

"I can only say for myself, my transition to a gatherer came at an age of relative maturity and my own emotional stability. However, that context for living is supported and reinforced by an ongoing relationship."

In The Mentor, Quinn makes a few comments that might seem critical of the gay circuit scene; the "sex hunt" personified. Quinn denies it: "I do not feel that I was critical of the gay circuit scene. Other than a mild amusement at circuit scene's appropriation of a sort of 'Lord of the Flies' mentality of empowerment based solely on the merits of physical beauty and exclusivity, I don't have any issue with the circuit party scene. The sex hunt component is merely a part of its larger ethos of sybaritic abandon to create a primitive tribal identity. I think if that context works for an individual, they should enjoy themselves."

Quinn used to live in South Beach, "Ground Zero" of the circuit, but now resides in the suburbs. "I think the suburbs are a good place for me now, and yes, I'm very happy here," he admits. "I think that the sense of community and social opportunity in a gay enclave like South Beach is important for many gay men and women at various stages of their lives. I am at a point in my life where the social amenities provided by a more gay environment aren't as important to me as they might have been in the past."

Is there gay life in the suburbs? "Yes, but it is a gay life of a different sort. The gay life I know in the suburbs is a haven for couples and an opportunity to forge ties with a broader community than one based on sexual, social and political sympathies. It is a more distanced type of gay life, but it is certainly amenable. I couldn't tell you if there are gay-friendly restaurants or specific gay oriented business, but I don't think that's what gay life in the suburbs is all about. After all, specifically gay life is not more than a forty minute drive away to the east, north and south. I see gay life in the suburbs as being entirely appropriate to those of us, no matter what our ages, who are more attuned to a less urban lifestyle. I think it's possible to be gay-ed out on some levels. In the suburbs there isn't the same pressure to be specifically GAY all the time."

Both Joe Riddick and Jay's partner, Jeff, are featured prominently in The Mentor. How did they react to their portrayal in the book? "My partner, Jeff, has taken the book in stride. He has such a strong sense of himself and his place in the world that being a part of this book is only mildly amusing to him. To date, I don't think he's read it," he adds. As for "the mentor," Quinn notes that "Joe Riddick is surprisingly non-plussed (but secretly proud) of his part as The Mentor. I think his most succinct comment was, "Well, it's about time somebody recognized how much effort I had to put into raising you." And I think that pretty well sums it up."

Quinn is rightly proud of readers' response to The Mentor: "The great thing about writing a book is the ability to create an intimate level of communication with a wide group of people. I have had mail from sixty-five year-old housewives who have thanked me for a view to a world they had heard of only in whispers and lies. I have heard from expatriated gay southerners who found something they could relate to on a very personal level. I've even gotten a letter from a young mother of three sons who said she'd keep a copy of my book in case one of her sons was gay, she thought it would be a great help to them.

"You've seen the kiosks at the mall that show a map with an arrow that says 'You are here.' I hope my book gives any reader a strong sense of where they are in relation to where I have been."

Happily for all of us, The Mentor is only the beginning of what promises to be a productive literary career. Quinn tells me that, "As an editor for the Haworth Press's gay fiction and general interest imprint, Southern Tier Editions, I am working with four talented writers to develop projects of their own. I am also the senior editor of a series of anthologies featuring essays and short fiction by contemporary gay Southern writers. The first book in the series is titled Rebel Yell and will be published by the Haworth Press in late January of 2001, followed by my first novel, Metes and Bounds which comes out in late April of 2001. I am currently working on a new novel." Joe Riddick must be proud.