A Little Life is a hate crime
Hanya Yanagihara kills her gays
There’s some discourse around straight women writing gay men. While an author is allowed to write what they want, there is an element of cultural tourism to the practice. They are outsiders, glimpsing a culture that is distinct from their own. It’s not as bad as something like British authors of the early 20th century, writing about worlds outside of their own while constantly asserting their superiority, but it’s still not a completely authentic experience. There are many cases where a book is by and for straight women, and the men depicted aren’t like me or any of my friends but are a fantasy for the creators - someone handsome who won’t misunderstand your attention and get weird and threatening. These fantasies start you on a path where you get bachelorette parties at gay bars and women trying to flirt with me on social media. I’ve definitely experienced people who want me to be their “gay bestie” and don’t recognize that I’m not like the men in these works, and I can’t fulfill the fantasy that pop culture has created for them.
Which doesn’t mean that women can’t write about gay men, instead they just have to put in extra work to ensure that the men they are writing are true to life. There definitely are women who put the work in, try to tell the story from an honest perspective, and do have a respect for and appreciation of queer people as a whole and gay men in particular.
The worst case scenario is a woman who just outright hates gay characters and allows that to define her work. For example, Hanya Yanagihara.
A Little Life is the work of someone who hates gay men. She might deny it, but the text on the multitude of pages is evidence to the contrary. Her gay characters are difficult addicts, they’re the victims of abuse, both sexual or physical, or they’re just faking it out of pity. Her gay characters aren’t gay because it’s a natural part of the world, they’re punished into it. To become gay is the ultimate result of unrelenting cruelty, not anything natural.
The book is about a group of gay men - who are given cushy jobs seemingly to counter the litany of horrors the author plans to subject them to throughout the course of the book. The real center of the book is Jude, a man who has been abused since childhood, which extends long into adult life. Priests and boyfriends, subjecting the child and adult to the worst abuse the author can imagine. Why does he get this treatment? Because to be gay is to be hated, beaten, tortured.
Late in the book, Jude gets married to Willam, his friend and an actor. At this point, it’s emphasized that their marriage is sexless, and that Willam goes out and is constantly having sex with women. It’s as though the author is saying “it’s okay, this guy is such a good person that he’ll marry his friend even though he doesn’t really desire him or any man. Look at the sacrifice he’s making, it is such a noble act for a man to attempt to love another man.” This character can’t truly be gay, because he’s not damaged enough. He’s just a Good Guy, helping his buddy avoid more damage.
He is then killed in an accident, and Jude kills himself. Because that is the fate of all of us, our abused little souls inevitably marching towards a self-inflicted end, because being gay can’t be happy, even though gay is actually a synonym for happy.
Even the title is offensive. A Little Life suggests that our lives are small, unfulfilled, tragic. We are not deserving of more than that, because that would mean that we are complete people, while Yanagihara believes us to be nothing more than empty shells of abuse and sadness.
She doesn’t understand gay men, nor does she want to. This is her “straight woman’s burden,” driven by her belief that we are half-wild, half-children. She might as well start advertising for conversion therapy.
I read this book before I was out, before I was able to articulate how I felt about myself and my existence. But for all the feelings I had of confusion and guilt - born out of early life in a small town and Catholicism - I wasn’t abused like the book’s characters, I wasn’t the product of systematic torture. If there was abuse, it was from the world where I grew up, where I was told that my very existence was an affront to god and that if I tried to be myself I would be rejected. But this wasn’t specifically targeted at me, it was just a cloud of negative sentiment that the world in general had created. It was the result of millions of Yanagiharas telling me that there was something wrong with me, an affliction that everyone queer shares no matter what happened in our home life.
But it’s almost to the book’s credit that it’s so cruel and artificial. While it is rare that I see myself in media, I definitely did not see anyone human in this book’s world and characters. I did see the author’s mixture of hatred and pity, but I saw that enough that it wasn’t a new experience.
Since then, I have come out, and while my life has been complicated, stressful, and chaotic, actually embracing my queerness has been a revelation. It has made me happier, it has improved my relationships, it has connected me with some of the best people I’ve ever known. I don’t have “A Little Life,” I have something that is significantly better than what I had before. Something Yanagihara’s book suggests isn’t possible. In real life, a guy can transcend the oppressive miasma to find happiness and a place to belong. In her world, you might as well just die.
People need entertainment where they can see themselves. This isn’t just queer folks, I know a woman who cried happy tears when she saw Moana, because there was a young girl who looked like she did and she was the hero. She didn’t have that, and she said that if she did she wouldn’t have felt lesser because she wasn’t white and thin.
Like her, I didn’t see myself in media growing up. If I had some entertainment that depicted a bigger gay man with a beard and a varied mix of interests, I might have felt more hope for the future, that there was a place for me, that there was somewhere I would not only exist, but belonged. I would find people that not only loved me but understood me. That’s still something difficult to find, and that’s why it’s important to have gay men telling our stories. It’s still hard to feel understood by a lot of the art dedicated to us - I’ve got John Grant and Bob Mould and not a whole lot more.
But I still think that art that celebrates us, even if it’s coming from outside the community, has value. It might not be completely accurate, and I might not see myself in the work, but at least being created with love means something. If I'm being celebrated wrong at least I'm being celebrated in some way. I'm not viewed as some kind of damaged, broken, inferior being.
That’s why a work like A Little Life is damaging. It’s a reminder that people out there still hate us. That they think of us as lesser, that they are reaching out to tell us that they pity us and our tiny existence. They want to beat us like they beat their characters, they want to push us down and drive us to suicide. They feel like this is the earned fate of a gay man.
A Little Life is a hate crime.