It’s not often that I promote another blog on this one, but recently, my publisher, JMS Books, put out a call to any of its authors who wanted to guest blog on its website. Being an inveterate blogger, I jumped at the chance, and my post is running Tuesday, July 14, Bastille Day. (Vive la France.)
The post is not about France but about how I came to write “The Games Men Play” series, about power, dominance and rivalry, set mainly in the world of sports, although I’ve expanded the series to include earlier novels that have only recently been published. I won’t recount the post here, so you can discover it for yourself at jms-books.com as well as my books,, including my latest work, the short story “The Glass Door,” about love in the time of corona. (It’s a theme that’s haunting me and other writers of late.) It’s due out Aug. 10.
My new short story “The Glass Door,” about love in the time of the coronavirus, is part of my publisher JMS Books’ flash fiction series. It’s due out Aug. 10.
I will, however, discuss a subject here related to that post since many of my books are about gay or bisexual men and that is cultural appropriation. In the age of Black Lives Matter, white culture is no longer being given a pass, and that’s as it should be. White people playing people of color is no longer acceptable. Yet there are those who would note that “Hamilton,” which I was moved by all over again when I saw the Disney film over the Fourth of July weekend, gets away with people of color playing white historical figures.
By now it should be obvious that certain cultural appropriations are the price of power: The oppressor culture doesn’t get to continue the oppression by donning blackface or a Charlie Chan accent. The oppressed, on the other hand, do get a chance at owning opportunity: There’s something ironic, thrilling and elemental about watching people of color play the Founding Fathers — and Mothers. (Angelica Schuyler Church and Eliza Hamilton, you go, girls.) After all, without realizing it, it was for the future people of color that the Founders pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor. They just did know it.
In seeing the show for a second time, up close on TV, color fell away for me and the characters’ were instead distilled to their essence — George Washington’s level-headed leadership; Thomas Jefferson’s charming dissembling; Alexander Hamilton’s arrogant brilliance, Angelica’s commanding intelligence, Eliza’s transcendent compassion, Aaron Burr’s fatal hunger to belong.
In my own case, as a white woman I’m both part of a majority and a majority-minority. Many have seen women writing stories about men having sex — read by a largely female audience — as yet another shot across the bow in the fight for women’s liberation, to use a 1970s term. So as a cultural appropriator, I usually get a pass.
Is all this fair to white men, who find the tables turned on them? Perhaps not, but if history teaches us anything, it’s that you must think carefully about what you do today.
For tomorrow, those chickadees will come home to roost.