Fin du fag?

>> The End of Gay may be the beginning of a big career for Bert Archer

by JULIET WATERS

If I'm in any doubt that being books editor of a weekly can be a stepping stone to success, I have Bert Archer sitting in front of me in the bar of the Ritz Carlton.

The recently ex-books editor of Toronto weekly Now is holding court at the hotel at which he's staying. After an afternoon of interviews, he plans to rest up before his reading at Chapters with lawyer/novelist Peter Hogg, whose book, Crimes of War, Archer has trashed earlier this week.

Archer's room at the Ritz may say something about Doubleday's faith in the commercial viability of his book The End of Gay (and the death of heterosexuality); or it may say something about this young (30, but looks younger) author's experience at getting what he wants from a publisher. Either way, Archer definitely has that Zeitgeist thing nailed. And he knows how to work it. He's got the potential Harper's cover title. And his journalistic style--cultural critique woven with threads of confessional--has a texture similar to Sallie Tisdale's controversial bestseller, Talk Dirty to Me.

"Yeah, but she had a better cover," he admits. True, Tisdale's hardcover was cleverly packaged in a mock videobox. Archer's cover is a surprisingly bleak and industrial grey for a book that advances a pretty groovy theory of sexuality. A theory which, at the risk of simplifying, can be summed up as: sexuality is too complex to simplify with labels.

Still, his cover does immediately answer one question. If a fag with a taste for minimalism decides to come out of his newly expanded closet (i.e. confess that he's attracted to the opposite sex), will he have to redecorate? Apparently not.

It's clear that Archer enjoys being an iconoclast as he gleefully describes his first negative review. "Sky Gilbert reviewed it for the Toronto Star and he was stumbling over himself trying to express the true depth of his hatred... But it's fine--it's part of the literary conversation. And it's great because so few people are willing to really go out there and attack someone in public. To actually go in print and say the kind of things that he said. I just can't help but respect that."

Turns out the Star couldn't have picked a more appropriate person than Gilbert. "The last few pages of my book are sort of addressed to a generation of people, and well--that's Sky. These people have been fighting their entire lives for some sort of place in the sun alongside their straight brothers and sisters. And in the case of Sky, have made a career out of gayness. He established gay theatre, he's a playwright and now a novelist--gay gay gay gay gay. And so I come along and say 'the end of you.' Because the end of gay is the end of you. And so it's seen as a direct attack, and in certain ways it is. But what I'm trying to say in the last chapter is that what you did was absolutely necessary. Like soldiers in a war you did horrible things for the good of us all. But it's peacetime now. Don't expect us to keep living by war rules."

It's tempting to point out the obvious: that Archer is now launching a career out of not being gay. But to be fair, his book is actually less about rejecting the gay label than its marketing would imply.

The most controversial issue at the core of this book is not whether sexuality is a cultural construct. Many people have no problem believing gender is a construct--so why not "gay." The really uncomfortable and controversial issue Archer raises is how much control we have over the sexual attraction we feel. If we can develop a taste for olives and oysters (though they may have repelled us as children), what stops us from actively choosing to develop a taste for the opposite sex, or the same sex, or your best friend?

"We all have sexy bits," argues Archer. If true, then the really interesting question is not: what stops us from being attracted to certain categories of people? But what stops us from being attracted to everyone?

The End of Gay (and the death of heterosexuality) by Bert Archer, Doubleday, hc, 310pp, $29.95