We Are Made of Stories

Two weeks ago I returned from my first GayRomLit in Portsmouth, Virginia.

I enjoyed the convention. The only similar thing I can compare it with is Yaoi Con, which was my home con for many years.

Gay romance is different from yaoi and boy’s love. I’ve come to realize that what I write is off to the side of m/m romance: it’s more in line with gay literary or LGBTQ fiction. My stories are a niche within a niche, in other words. But they’re a close enough fit with gay romance that I felt at home at GayRomLit.

This convention was an opportunity for me to meet many people, readers and other writers who were as unfamiliar with me and my stories as I was with them and their stories. Especially after covid, it was a somewhat intense experience for me. This year has been the year that the conventions returned - even Comic Con was held in person again. Aside from a brief visit to Sac-Anime in Sacramento last year, this was my first post-pandemic convention.

I really enjoyed meeting people, and if you signed up for my newsletter I should be emailing out the first one in the next week or two, so keep an eye on your inbox. I’m leaning heavily toward going to GayRomLit again, so I hope to see you all there next year. :-)

After the convention, I went to Washington, D.C. for a few days.

I spent a beautiful day at the Smithsonian art museums, starting with the National Gallery of Art and its adjacent Sculpture Garden. The above photo is of “Typewriter Eraser, Scale X,” by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje Van Bruggen, which stands in the Sculpture Garden.

Thirty years ago, on another trip to D.C., I came across an exhibit I never forgot. I didn’t remember which of the Smithsonian’s many buildings it was located in, but it was in the back of my mind as I went through the day.

And late in the afternoon, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum - I found it.

This is The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly. When I saw it for the first time, having come around a corner and suddenly been confronted with its magnificence full-on, I burst into tears. It’s an extraordinary example of millenarian art, or art that depicts the artist’s conception of the second coming and a thousand-year golden period of heaven on earth.

There are better pictures of it on Google, but no pictures can do it justice. James Hampton was a janitor who worked for the federal government. At the end of his workday he would retire to a garage where he built this singular vision of the throne of the most high using aluminum foil, discarded furniture, cardboard pieces and paint.

The image of Hampton silently working alone night after night, year after year, giving glory to the God of his understanding in a rented garage is one that I find deeply moving. There is a private ecstasy in creating art, whether one agrees with the religious basis for Hampton’s work or not, and this ecstasy shines through in The Throne. The Throne of the Third Heaven evokes emotional responses from those who visit it, and I hope you will consider taking the time to see it the next time you visit Washington, D.C.

In the same museum was an exhibition called “We Are Made of Stories.” It featured the work of self-taught artists, the ones society typically views as outsiders due to race, gender, and/or class.

The artwork and poem at the top of this post is from that exhibition.

I took the pieces you threw away and put them together by night and day,
washed by rain,
dried by sun,
a million pieces all in one.
-- Howard Finster, Poem for the Garden

We are all made of stories. You have yours and I have my own, and there are universal stories as well. I love the fact that our stories, and artworks such as The Throne and those I saw in “We Are Made of Stories,” are there for us to appreciate.

And speaking of stories - I’m currently doing Nanowrimo, writing Tales of the Queendoms. I’ll update about that soon. :-)