The seventh annual Provincetown Book Festival concluded on Sunday with an event that might have given Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis an aneurysm. Titled “Banned Books, Banned People,” it featured local drag queens reading from some of the country’s most frequently banned books.
Provincetown Book Festival
PROVINCETOWN BOOK FESTIVAL
A Maiden Voyage for an ‘Aging Pervert’
Janet W. Hardy’s radical queer savvy comes to Provincetown
By a strange twist of fate, the Provincetown Book Festival, hosted by the public library and running Sept. 29 to Oct. 1 this year, always seems to happen the same week as Mates Leather Weekend, a five-day romp through town of leather, kink, and fetish enthusiasts. For one of this year’s book festival participants, the coincidence might seem especially fitting.
“If you met me, you wouldn’t see me as a transgressive or radical person,” says Janet W. Hardy, the well-known kink enthusiast and polyamory apologist. “I look like someone’s mom. Except when I’m done up in leather, in which case I look like someone’s mom done up in leather.”
Hardy is looking forward to her first visit to the tip of the Cape: “I like being in places with lots of queer people,” she says. “It’s nice to be places where I don’t have to spend a lot of time explaining myself.”
She’ll be in conversation with author and trans activist Oliver Radclyffe in an event on Oct. 1 titled “Transgressive: Radical Approaches to Gender and Sex.” Words like “transgressive” and “radical” seem to follow Hardy wherever she goes, a reputation she says she readily accepts, especially as time goes by. “I actually think I’m more transgressive as I get older,” she says. “I’m not quite as wedded to the party line about kink or about queerness or about gender.”
Most will know Hardy for her 1997 book coauthored with Dossie Easton, The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships, and Other Freedoms in Sex and Love. The landmark work has sold over 200,000 copies in three editions and has been translated into five languages. It’s considered a classic in the relationship self-help category and has made Hardy a standard-bearer for the queer and sex-positive.
As far as she knows, Hardy’s books have not been banned anywhere. But her talk will occur on the first day of Banned Books Week — a nationwide effort launched in 1982 by the American Library Association with a coalition of others defending intellectual freedom.
She calls the current wave of book banning “reprehensible” and says she lives by the motto she learned as a child: “If you’re old enough to want to read it, you’re old enough to know what’s inside it.”
She doesn’t believe it’s possible to influence anyone’s sexuality. “If it were possible for parenting to turn a child gay, then I would have the queerest kids in the universe,” she says. “But somehow, they both turned out straight. Go figure.”
Hardy’s appearance coincides with the release of her new book, Notes of an Aging Pervert, a memoir about growing older as a queer adult, from Unbound Edition Press.
She intended this book, her third memoir, intending it to be cowritten with one of her children on the subject of generational inheritance. “But I kept finding myself writing about aging,” she says. “Eventually, I threw up my hands and said, ‘Okay, my brain wants me to write about aging.’ ”
As one might guess, sex is one of the aspects of aging she’s found most interesting. “There’s been a big movement in the last decade to talk about sexuality among older people,” Hardy says. And it’s not a bad thing that the medical community and media are acknowledging that older people still have mental, spiritual, and sexual needs, Hardy says. Humans, especially older ones, she says, “need intimacy, affection, and touch.”
But, Hardy says, “We’re not giving much recognition to the fact that some older people don’t want to be sexually active.” Libidos change, she says, and sex might not be the path to intimacy for everyone. She is on the waiting list for a continuing care community, for example, because she hopes it will ensure that both she and her partner can, when they need it, be part of a nurturing collective.
Then there are the realities of queer aging, in which the “elevator promise,” as Hardy calls it, of heteronormative love — dating, living together, marriage, kids — is not necessarily fulfilled. What’s exciting about that, she says, is that queers have the opportunity to pioneer new kinds of family structures, “ones formed on bases other than romantic love — like, for example, best friends who set up house together and raise each other’s kids.”
Writing this book, Hardy found inspiration in works by Barbara Ehrenreich, Abigail Thomas, Elizabeth Strout, Larry McMurtry, and Anne Tyler, all of whom have explored aging and dying in their work.
In the course of her meditations on aging, Hardy has also come to feel a peculiar kinship with the character Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, who becomes “unstuck in time” and travels unpredictably and wildly through his life.
During her years as a BDSM practitioner, Hardy says, she had some experiences that suggested what may happen when she’s “no longer stuck in space and time.” She has written about ways in which intense sexual experiences can be on a par with spiritual transcendence. And she says she believes death will be a similar loosening of the shackles of the body.
Reflections on that are the beating heart of her latest book. Her “weird, kinky” years were fun, she says. “But what I value more is the wisdom I acquired in the process.”
Transgression
The event: Janet W. Hardy and Oliver Radclyffe on radical approaches to gender and sex
The time: Sunday, Oct. 1, 9:30 a.m.
The place: Provincetown Public Library, 356 Commercial St.
The cost: Free; see provincetownbookfestival.org
WRITERS
Francine Prose Reads Your Amazon Reviews
Her new novel, The Vixen, is a comedy about the Rosenbergs
Simon Putnam, the young protagonist of Francine Prose’s newest novel, The Vixen, is still figuring out who he is. Fresh out of Harvard, having studied folklore and mythology, he has landed himself a job as a junior editor at New York publishing firm Landry, Landry, and Bartlett, mostly thanks to a well-connected uncle.
But Simon can’t hold his liquor during the three-martini lunches. He falls in love with every woman he meets. He cringes recalling the moment in his job interview with his boss, Warren, when he said, “I’ve always liked books!”
Preparing for my interview with Prose, I felt a bit like Simon. I hadn’t had time to read the last third of The Vixen — with its many twists — as carefully as I would have liked. I was reminded of a scene where Prose describes the writers in Simon’s slush pile who purposely leave out or glue together pages as attention checks.
The former president of the PEN American Center, Prose is the author of 21 works of fiction, most recently Mister Monkey and the New York Times bestseller Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932. She has also written nonfiction about Anne Frank, Caravaggio, and Peggy Guggenheim. Prose will be discussing The Vixen with historian Aaron Lecklider on Sunday, Sept. 19 at 4 p.m. as part of the Provincetown Book Festival.
The plot of The Vixen is set into motion when Simon is given his first editing assignment: The Vixen, the Patriot, and the Fanatic, a bodice ripper with Ethel Rosenberg as the unlikely protagonist. Prose artfully weaves in hilariously bad excerpts. Simon learns that the financial future of the firm rests on his ability to transform this hideous manuscript. But Warren doesn’t know that Simon’s mother knew Ethel.
This aspect of the book is loosely autobiographical, Prose says. Her mother went to high school with Ethel on the Lower East Side. “They weren’t close, and their politics were quite different,” she says. She remembers watching news of the Rosenbergs’ execution on television. “I was seven,” she says. “It was traumatic for our family.”
Though the book draws on Prose’s experiences, “It’s always very disguised,” she says. “My kids are always saying you would have to know us really well to know how much of what happens in the book really happened.”
This summer also saw the publication of a new biography of Ethel by Anne Sebba, reviewed in the Independent. “There may be an uptick in interest in the Cold War and that era because there are so many things about the ’50s that seem eerily similar to our situation,” says Prose. “The way in which people have been convicted without trial. And it ended. The McCarthy era ended. People are looking for any kind of hope.”
Prose reached out to documentary director Ivy Meeropol, the granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. “I was concerned how the Meeropol family would read the book,” she says. “They’re very smart — they’re readers. Her father, Michael, was laughing out loud.”
Writing The Vixen required historical research, says Prose. For example, she had to reread Njal’s Saga, the Icelandic epic that is the topic of Simon’s thesis. For Lovers at the Chameleon Club, which takes place during pre-war years in France and Germany, “I had to actually do honest-to-God research,” she says. “I don’t have the greatest memory for it. I kept forgetting what I learned. But it all just fed in there.
“It’s more fun for me to write fiction because I don’t know what’s going to happen next,” continues Prose. “With nonfiction, you do research, get material, and tell the story. There are surprises in the research, but not in the writing. When I realized that there was going to be this scene about the Jell-O box, I was ecstatic. Again, it was made up. If I were writing a real history of the role of the Jell-O box, I’d never be able to do what I did.”
With youthful audacity, I said I preferred nonfiction because it’s full of facts. “Fiction has a lot of information,” responds Prose. “The most basic information — what it’s like to be a human being — is useful. How people really were in a different time. To read something like The Vixen makes you feel less lonely in a way — part of this continuum of human life.”
Prose makes a point of reading all the reviews of The Vixen on Amazon. “I was concerned by how people would perceive a comedic book about the Rosenbergs,” she says. “Everyone I know liked the book. Why wouldn’t you? But this is a recurring thing that I’ve noticed in the reviews — how little sympathy there is for the fact that Simon is young. People say, ‘He’s so naive, he’s so wishy-washy. He can’t make up his mind.’ ”
The time right after college is one of transition, says Prose: “I was really surprised that people would not remember what it was like.”
On the Same Page
The event: Provincetown Book Festival
The time: Friday, Sept. 17 through Sunday, Sept. 19
The place: Provincetown Public Library, 356 Commercial St.
The cost: Free; full schedule at provincetownbookfestival.org
Friday
6 p.m.: Rose Dorothea Award honoring Karen Finley
Saturday
9 a.m.: “Reading Local” with Elaine Bennett, Peter Kazon, Steven Myerson, Michael Nolan, and Judith Newcomb Stiles
Noon: “Real Fiction/Real Life” with Brandon Taylor
4:30 p.m.: Robert Jones Jr. interviewed by Aaron Lecklider
6 p.m.: “Provincetown: Life at the Edge of the World” with Paul Lisicky
Sunday
4 p.m.: Francine Prose in conversation with Aaron Lecklider
Booking It (Ongoing)
The Provincetown Book Festival will kick off on Saturday, Sept. 18 with “Reading Local,” a curated reading by five local writers, who will be judged by novelist and part-time Provincetown resident Lynne Hugo. To submit: send three pages of prose, or three poems no longer than three pages total, along with an intro and bio to [email protected]. The deadline is Aug. 20.
