One night in 1988 in Kingston, Jamaica, as eight gay men rehearse a play in secret, the unthinkable happens. Or, rather, something Eddy Porteus has been dreading his whole life happens. Eddy isn’t an actor when he’s cast in the play, nor are any of the other performers. Many can’t even explain why they’re there. They’re staging John Herbert’s 1967 prison drama, Fortune and Men’s Eyes, a visceral account of men’s struggles for sex, power, domination, and revenge while incarcerated. The rehearsal is suddenly interrupted by an act of homophobic brutality, one that sends shockwaves through the ensuing decades for all involved. So begins Marlon James’s new novel, The Disappearers.
The Jamaican author spent the better part of the last decade penning sprawling fantasy novels of near-psychedelic beauty and violence, rooted in the mythology and history of medieval East African societies. Here, James returns to realism for the first time since his 2015 Booker Prize-winning epic, A Brief History of Seven Killings. The Disappearers is also easily his most personal novel yet. James is deeply attuned to the sensations and rhythms of the period’s language, but he also writes with an unflinching honesty about the torments of a masculinist society. (The writer spent the first several decades of his life in the closet in Kingston; he was so distressed by years of repressing his attraction to other men that he once requested an exorcism.)
The Disappearers, ultimately, is a novel of erasure. Characters vanish from their communities and the narrative after the attack, either by choice or by force. Queer life is pushed to the margins by a society shaped under great power imbalances. But above all the novel is concerned with the everyday negations that an individual may seek out, either in pursuit of self-defense or simple pleasure.
Told in five parts, the book contains a clatter of voices: Jordan Brown, a young hustler who recognizes himself in the college rock sounds of Nirvana and Mission of Burma; Streggeh Don, a reggae artist stirring gay panic; Havelock Titus, a middle-aged theater director writing one-sided letters to a former lover from Oxford. The characters navigate the limits of their desires through excursions to Miami for clandestine encounters with other men, the specter of HIV or violence always looming.
As for James, he now lives in New York with his partner, James Baldwin biographer Nicholas Boggs. (He also co-hosts the literary podcast Marlon and Jake Read Dead People, in which he and editor Jake Morrissey dissect not-so-contemporary lit.) Ahead of the release of The Disappearers on Sept. 1, we caught up with the author to talk about new wave, code-switching, and Jean Genet.
What are you drinking?
Black bourbon tea. I’m a tea snob.
Very chic.
Not very bourbon-y. I was expecting a little alcohol. I’m obsessed with teas, but I’m also obsessed with microplastics. And teas are one of the biggest offenders of microplastics. Because of the little bags. Once you drop that in water, it just explodes. There are people out there like Harney [& Sons, and The] Republic of Teas that have, let’s call it, “responsible tea.”
Do you do it British style with milk?
I always add milk. Like a proper British colonial.
I read that you used to work in the music industry.
A lot of art direction in the music industry. My niche was when Jamaicans wanted to break into the American market. The main artist I worked with was Sean Paul. I also went to school with Sean.
Really?
Yeah. He’s that old. I remember when Sean was still writing song lyrics at my friend’s studio. It was a whole crew, and he was the only one who would stay back and write lyrics. And we go, “Yeah, I think he’s gonna be the one.”
I bring it up because of the music in this book. Both Eddy and Jordan find such solace in these artists: A Flock of Seagulls, Rage Against the Machine, Depeche Mode, Nirvana. There’s all these layers when Jordan points to Mission of Burma’s “That’s When I Reach for My Revolver,” which is itself pointing to a Nazi play. Could you talk about how you were deploying these pop cultural references?
I’m an ’80s kid, and we grew up on pop culture. It was the first thing that united everybody in the world. Gen X is mono[cultural]. In 1984, you probably were listening to Prince. You had that Michael Jackson Thriller windbreaker, which you bought on a budget because nobody could afford leather. I remember reading Karl Ove Knausgård, and he talked about the Sonic Youth album Goo. That was my first Sonic Youth album. We were all watching MTV any way we could. Our rich friends taped six hours on a VHS tape, and then we’d sit down the whole weekend watching Yo! MTV Raps.
I got used to using pop culture as a shorthand way of talking about things. Sometimes, for my characters, it’s almost easier to reach for a song lyric than to say how they really feel. When Eddie says to Jordan, “Some Great Reward is your favorite Depeche Mode album,” a music maniac will know exactly what he means. Especially in Jamaica, [music] was a way of separating yourself. I was already one of the school freaks ’cause I was a class gay. So, I rebelled against the orthodoxy, which says I must listen to reggae music. I love reggae, but to me, reggae was a system, which is funny because reggae is anti-establishment music. I remember being just thrilled when I heard Eurythmics and Michael Jackson and Van Halen. I didn’t know those were the possibilities for music. I’m still doing it. I’ll still use Heathers-isms: “What is your damage?” And I’m like, “Dude, you’re Jamaican. Stop that.”
Music is also an interesting refuge because perhaps somebody like Jordan isn’t interested in community. He knows somebody else in the world is listening to “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” He’ll never meet that person. It’s just him and Kurt. It’s a way of owning your outcastness. Music certainly did that for me.
One of the most villainous characters in the book is a reggae musician. What was the inspiration there?
Steggeh Don is an amalgam of a ton of reggae artists. Some genuinely homophobic, some just giving the people what they want, all of them narratively irresponsible. It’s this sort of, “I’ll start the fire, but I won’t stay for the firefight” kind of thing. It’s a huge part of our culture, because when it comes to masculinity, the goalpost is always moving. What makes you safely heterosexual today won’t make you heterosexual tomorrow.
What’s an example of that?
The tightness of your pants. Now in Jamaica, all the bad boys are wearing tight jeans. When I was a teenager, that was you screaming, “I’m a homo. Beat me.”
The characters code switch in their different communities. That’s something you deploy so well in all your books, the way language shapes and shifts in the world.
Without spoiling too much of the book, one of the reasons why my “disappeared” could disappear so completely is just by shifting social class. Jamaica’s a small country. Kingston is a small city, and yet there are people who have never seen other people ever despite living across the street because across the street is a different social class.
It’s actually not hard to disappear. People can hide in plain sight all the time because of how our society is; it’s a very British colonial thing. In a lot of ways, we never really let go of Victorian society. In terms of class and in terms of race, in terms of our attitudes towards sexuality. We think we’re very moral. We have more churches per square meter than any other country in the world. On the other hand, just about everybody was born out of wedlock—there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. What’s wrong is the effort we go through to be “normal.” The price we pay for that is a lot of times we punish “not normal” with violence. My characters have to negotiate that, and every day is another negotiation.
The sexual antagonism, the terror of living in the closet in the book—it’s a hard world to live in. You’ve been in the States for a long time. Why was now the time to reimmerse yourself in this world?
Because I never lived that [life], which is what a lot of people don’t understand. I still hear people go, “How did you escape the violence and homophobia?” I never experienced it. Unlike all but one of my characters, I ran to the church, ’cause the church was gonna fix me. I prayed away the gay long enough, and I really believed it.
This book was kind of a FOMO book. Not just the bad, ’cause there’s a lot of bad, but the good too. The community, the camaraderie, the survival, the hope—all of that. Most of that I did in the States. But I wanted to know about the people who didn’t or couldn’t leave. It was hard picking [at] the very thing that made me scared of being gay: being bashed. It’s almost like facing your nightmare.
In the book, there’s the throughline of men’s prison and these contained homosocial environments where you’re also stuck with each other. It’s pleasurable yet dangerous.
I think people forget that even people going through certain things find reasons for the laughter, if not joy. It was important to me that some sense of humor come through in this book as a counter to all the darkness in it, but also I think Jamaicans are very funny people. I think I’m a pretty funny guy. I actually used to write comedy.
What comedy did you write?
I used to write the monologue for this Jamaican TV talk show. I really love voice. I love hearing people talk. It’s why a lot of my books are carried by dialogue.
I’m curious about the play they’re performing, Fortune and Men’s Eyes. What was your relationship to that original play?
The first play that was in [The Disappearers] was actually Pygmalion, but it didn’t tie into anything about queerness or subversion. Then I think I tried A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, and The Importance of Being Earnest. At the same time, my partner Nicholas Boggs had just published Baldwin: A Love Story. He’s the one who suggested Fortune and Men’s Eyes, which Baldwin produced in Turkey. At first, I heard “gay prison play,” I’m like, Eh. But when I read it, it does talk about queerness and domination. The very idea of doing something so subversive that they thought was secret made the play really resonate.
Throughout the book, I kept coming back to Jean Genet. Was he in your head as you were writing this?
He was a big influence on me. I can’t imagine John Herbert, who wrote Fortunes and Men’s Eyes, not being influenced by Genet. Genet is very interested in spaces where absolute brutality and absolute tenderness come from the same place. What does that do to somebody, especially if you’re also trying to be yourself?
[Fortunes and Men’s Eyes] is a play about identity. Are you a queen? We’re gonna call you Queenie. Are you a relentless victim? We’re gonna call you Mona, even though that’s not your name. Are we gonna misgender you or misidentify you as a means of humiliating and dominating you?
You also nod to stories like Maurice by E. M. Forster, which shows up in Havelock’s section. How were you thinking about being in conversation with the larger literary gay canon?
In this book there’s a lot, including John Rechy’s The Sexual Outlaw, which Jordan is reading. They also talk about The City and the Pillar [by Gore Vidal] and Finistère [by Fritz Peters]. They have a pretty raucous time tearing down [the play] The Boys in the Band.
What are your thoughts on William Friedkin and Cruising?
I do think it’s a homophobic film. That doesn’t necessarily mean I wouldn’t watch it or that there isn’t some merit to it, largely because Al Pacino is Al Pacino. But it still feels like a straight fantasy or a straight nightmare about straight culture.
It reminds me of something that Jane Smiley said about Heart of Darkness: The problem with Conrad is that, instead of representing or embodying the other, he merely projects his fears and desires onto them and then reacts to them, which is kinda what Cruising is. It’s, I’m gonna project my fears and desires about leather culture or homosexuality in general and react to it. So ultimately there are no people in that movie. There’s some nice sexy jeans, and somebody got fisted. Whoopee.
Did you see the remake of The Boys in the Band?
I saw the remake. I hated it. I’d much rather watch an old Western and watch the cowboys fondle their guns.
You’re a Howard Hawks fan?
Maybe I’m one of those people ruined by The Celluloid Closet [a 1996 documentary by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman]. Maybe I see gay subtext everywhere. Up until the ’80s, you’re desperate for subtext. For a lot of [queer] teenagers, straight erotica was our gay erotica. Sure, the man in it is having sex with a woman, but he’s naked. You take your pleasures wherever.
I think about the role Miami plays in the film. What was your relationship to that city?
In places like Miami, you could be anonymous. Disappear. There’s a sense sometimes, especially in a small country, that you’re always being watched, scrutinized, and judged. In Miami, you’re just another person.
I would never pick up a Blue Boy magazine in Jamaica. Not even now. If I pick up one in a Miami 7-Eleven, nobody knows who I am. The anonymity certainly gave me a brief taste of freedom.
Do you often go back to Jamaica?
I do. I even have a house there. As I said, the country’s complicated. I remind people that my book ends in 2005. A lot has happened in 20 years. I remember once when I went back to Jamaica and I was talking to LGBT students associations: I’m giving my “It Gets Better” speech, and they’re like, “We don’t wanna hear that shit. Do you know Beyoncé?” I almost cried. I’m surrounded by queer kids who are demanding the right to be kids. Which is why I knew things have changed—have started to.
I’m doing a documentary, actually, about returning. I spoke to a lot of gay men, and one showed up [with] pink hair extensions and a pink jumpsuit. But at the same time, I spoke to a lot of lesbians who say men threaten to rape them every week. It’s very easy for me to paint a picture of queerness if I cut the women out. But then when you put the women back in, we’re really not there at all.
There is only one lesbian [that] appears in my book. She’s a narrator. I really wanted to focus on gay men, because I think it’s a story that’s not told, and, ironically enough, we have a strong tradition of queer female literature in Jamaica. We have Michelle Cliff, Patricia Duncker, Nicole Dennis-Benn, Patricia Powell, and Staceyann Chin. The women got it going on. In some ways this was me trying to catch up, ’cause our queer female literature is on point, and it’s been going on since the ’70s.
Are you working on any other projects?
I’m always working. I do have a trilogy [and] people keep asking me when am I gonna finish it.
You’re a classic fantasy author in that way.
There are two characters in previous books who I feel their story isn’t done, and I think I might explore them. Havelock actually started out as a character in a different novel, because I really wanna write about queer post-war London. I wanna use Polari [coded slang language used by gay men in London in the early 20th century]. I could write half of that book in Polari. I’m just fascinated by queer spaces when the stakes were higher.
Why do you think that is?
It’s a helpful slap in my face to remind [me], You actually didn’t have it that bad. There were people who were hung. There are people who were castrated. The United Kingdom did not decriminalize homosexuality until 1967. When people ask me if I think Jamaica will come around, I go, “I do, because look how quickly Britain came around.”
How do you reckon with the archives without trying to reenact or rectify some of the sins of the past?
The problem is not the archives, the challenge is how you read them. Do you read them to relive the time? Do you read them with a skeptical eye? They’re human too. We’re just as imperfect as they were. The cool thing about history is that it’s always changing because we’re always learning. Look at the archives as a living document.
That’s one of the great things about the book too, is that it’s about the aftermath of the attack.
I am very interested in how people survive. In a lot of my books, that means shifting identity or roleplaying as a means of survival. One of the things that happens a lot in queer communities, certainly queer male communities, is fabulism. People think they’ll be lying. It’s not lying. There’s a difference between telling a lie and inventing a story. Sometimes you do it out of necessity to save yourself. Drag names didn’t just come out because people liked the name of their street and their first pet. It was assuming an identity. It’s survival, defiance, and humor: another tool you use to live your life.
How do you walk the fine line between a clear-eyed reckoning with the realities of violence and something more lurid?
I’m always accused of using too much violence. Some of my books are very violent. Recently, I wrote the new introduction for Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, which everybody thought, How inevitable is that? Mr. Violence Guy with the Violence King. I challenge a Harold Bloom line in his previous introduction where he said the reason why he could finally read the book is he realized that the violence wasn’t gratuitous. All the violence is gratuitous. This is not how normal people behave. I’ve got so many issues with Bloom. Since I’m not one of those people to gladly speak ill of the dead, I’ll just stop here.
When I write violence, I don’t forget to include suffering. Especially in American violence, nobody ever seems to suffer. We think there’s this bloodless mass violence, and there’s no such thing. I write screenplays every now and then, and every time there’s a scene with a gunshot, I always ask them, “What type of gunshot do you want? Real gunshot or Hollywood gunshot?” Because honestly, if you got shot in the leg, you’re dying.
Did they want the real one or did they want the Hollywood one?
It’s always the Hollywood one. The character needs to bounce back to solve the crime next week.
Is that the kind of stuff you’re writing?
I did write a detective show for HBO called Get Millie Black. It came out two years ago. I’m not doing that now. I’m writing some other things that are probably still in development hell. The stuff I write is history. I’m concerned that things are going unnoticed, or unrecorded, or unremembered. One of the things about societies is as they get more oppressive, “unremembering” is a major thing they do. We’re erasing civil rights struggles from textbooks. It makes me wonder if sooner or later fiction is gonna become some subversive act.
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