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Macbeth is about murder [1]

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Date: 2023-06-15

Macbeth is about murder. The murder of Duncan, the murder of Macduff’s wife and children, and eventually the murder of Macbeth himself. It is also about the consequence of those murders on the Scottish people, who rise up, in the person of Malcolm, and replace the king. Stripped to the bare bones of its plot, the play has a fundamental likeness to my novel Ceremonies, about the anti-gay murder of a young gay man, Charles Howard, in Bangor, Maine, on July 7, 1984. Charlie’s murder destroyed the complacency of gay and straight Mainers and the accommodations they had made with each other, who are now, fifty years later, still feeling the effects of his death.

Linking the murder of Duncan in Macbeth and the murder of Charles Howard in Ceremonies in this way suggests the classic nature of the plot in both works. A murder for private reasons—ambition, hatred—fatally infects the body politic and brings about political catastrophe.

The first publisher who read Ceremonies turned it down because the population of Mainers who responded to the murder were all gay “so you’ve only told half the argument.” For others, the book was too long to be commercially successful, too much a downer, unlikely to be a cross-over book. Yet just the other day, in preparing to give my papers to The History Project here in Boston, I found among my letters one I wrote June 8, 2002, which described my going to Gay Pride that year. I ran into a gay man who had read Ceremonies and who wanted to talk. He said of it that the book “made you think, you know?” He said a couple of times that Ceremonies surprised him. I think he meant that he hadn’t expected to be so challenged. It was, he said, a thoughtful political novel, a “m***f***” that challenged all his received opinions. He said there was an extended argument among the characters as to what Charlie’s death meant. He said, I hadn’t expected that. Then, I wasn’t prepared for that. He said, This book changed my life. There is, in Macbeth, an extended discussion among the characters on the subject of What is going to be the effect on all of us of Macbeth’s murder of Duncan? The play ramifies into a discussion among the playgoers as to the Queen’s age and lack of heirs and what an unstable kingdom means for all of them. He also said something about how it made him think about himself in all these different ways—just himself, himself and one other person, his little group, their place in the queer community, all the other little groups in the queer community, and the place of the queer community in the culture. “All of us in the big culture.” He listed those possible permutations as if he had prepared the list before hand. And while this whole conversation was going on, five feet away from us, all these different groups were going by—a bar float with mostly naked young men dancing, a group of Unitarians, Lesbian Avengers, the AIDS Action Committee The play and the novel are fundamentally serious political works.

The problem we book readers in 2023 have today is that we lack publishers now, in 2023, who can see beyond their bottom line and can see how queer people are meeting the same catastrophes as the protagonists of classic drama. People of all ages meet aggressive and hostile abuse from anti-queer persons. We suffer as much as Macduff’s wife and children and are sometimes as heroic as Prince Hal. Yet we don’t have a literature about these matters. The fault is with the publishers, who get to choose what they want to publish and choose only what makes them the most money. The fault is also with queer readers, who, most of us, are content to read fluff rather than novels on the order of Faulkner’s great novels on race or Melville’s Moby Dick on race and sexual orientation. We have no Macbeth on anti-gay murder, no Portrait of a Lady on a queer man giving up freedom for financial safety, no Absalom, Absalom! on a straight boy’s discovery of his family’s anti-gay bigotry and therefore his family’s guilt in sexual murder. We have let the publishers get away with this. The fault also lies with writers, who sometimes ignore the horrific stories in front of them in favor of a story about the two most beautiful actors in Hollywood. There is obviously a place for As You Like It. If we don’t also demand a place for Macbeth, we will, as the lady said, only be getting half the argument. As a result, our queer literature is as light as cotton candy—and not nourishing.

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