It's Coloreds. Not That There's Anything Wrong With It!

Last May, a piece I wrote for the magazine about colored people’s new-found respectability caused the digital highway to buckle ever so slightly. Despite my professed admiration for many colored people, I was blasted for thinking that human people are superior to colored people, and for not noticing that the zeitgeist had come and gone while I was presumably immersed in “The Golden Bowl.” Apparently, the dichotomy between colored people and human people isn’t just old news—it’s no news, it’s finis, or so the critics on Slate’s Culture Gabfest and the folks who run other literary Web sites informed me. The coloured-people writer Ursula K. Le Guin, for instance, announced that humanity “is the extant body of living humans. All people belong to it.” Is that so?

Yes. Yes, Mr Krystal, that is so.

Oh, wait. Did I accidentally switch "genre fiction" and "literary fiction" for "colored people" and "human people" to illustrate that Arthur Krystal is a middle-brow petit-bourgeois Yahoo whose opinion on literature is about as worthy of consideration as that of a 1950s Segregationist on humanity, and for largely the same reasons?

My bad. Let's try that again.

Last May, a piece I wrote for the magazine about gay fiction’s new-found respectability caused the digital highway to buckle ever so slightly. Despite my professed admiration for many gay writers, I was blasted for thinking that literary fiction is superior to gay fiction, and for not noticing that the zeitgeist had come and gone while I was presumably immersed in “The Golden Bowl.” Apparently, the dichotomy between gay fiction and literary fiction isn’t just old news—it’s no news, it’s finis, or so the critics on Slate’s Culture Gabfest and the folks who run other literary Web sites informed me. The gay-fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, for instance, announced that literature “is the extant body of written art. All novels belong to it.” Is that so?

Yes, actually. Again, that is so.

Oh, wait. Oopsy. I did it again. I only went and got genre fiction mixed up with gay fiction this time. You see my mistake though, there being dedicated gay presses, magazines, labelled shelves in bookstores and all that palaver, right? All the stuff that allows one to talk of Gay Fiction as a commercial marketing category? As a genre even? Which would make, say, a short story collection published via Lethe Press a work of "genre fiction" anyway, I guess. And therefore inherently inferior to, say, the exact same collection published via Macmillan.

Yeahno.