Ocean Vuong Explores the Coming-of-Age of Queerness

By his own admission, at least on Instagram, Ocean Vuong can be summed up in four words: “very libra. ultra basic.” Three years ago, when he started teaching poetry at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, his students often rationalized his opinions by pointing out that he was a Libra, leaving Vuong, who was more familiar with Chinese astrology, feeling “so exposed.” He did some homework on the traits of Libras. “One of the factors is there is a lot of pent-up emotions that have very few releases,” he says, laughing, a week before the release of his debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

The ultra-basic? “That's just growing up poor,” says Vuong, 30, who was born in Ho Chi Minh City before immigrating to Hartford, Connecticut, when he was two. “That's just growing up and eating mayonnaise and Wonder Bread sandwiches. But it's ultra-basic. We can take basic to a celebratory extreme.”

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous takes place against this backdrop of ultra-basicness, a Connecticut of mobile homes, bathrooms with “pea-soup walls,” and corner stores littered with food-stamp receipts. Framed as a letter from a 28-year-old son, Little Dog, to his illiterate mother, the novel doesn’t advance so much as unravel, freeing threads that examine queerness, class, race, and the inheritance of trauma. Throughout, Little Dog attempts to make sense of his identity through the fractured history of his mother, who works grueling hours at a nail salon, and his schizophrenic grandmother, a former sex worker in Vietnam. He begins a relationship with a boy named Trevor, who’s addicted to oxycodone, while working on a tobacco farm. In writing about America, Vuong has ultimately written a novel about American failure. “The one good thing about national anthems,” Little Dog writes, “is that we’re already on our feet, and therefore ready to run.”

GQ spoke to the writer, who won the T. S. Eliot Prize for his 2016 collection of poetry, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, about astrology, Pride, and writing about gay sex.

GQ: As someone who identifies as “very Libra,” why do you think astrology has become so popular within the queer community?

Ocean Vuong: You know, I love astrology because it gives you a framework to demystify and un-shame certain parts of yourself, even things you think are flaws, even things that the world might pathologize you for. Astrology deems it as part of your makeup, and then you can deal with it with a language that isn't shameful, which is why it has been so important for queer folks. Instead of saying you're emotional, you're terrible, you're deceitful, you're wrong, you say, Well, you're a Libra. [laughs] And now there's a home for it. We create these homes for ourselves.

Sex is a notoriously difficult thing to write about, and something you do quite vividly throughout this book, capturing the whiplash between desire and shame. I'm wondering if you had any guides through the process, particularly as it pertains to writing about gay sex?

There are a few guides, to be surprisingly honest, but David Wojnarowicz is the one. A lot of times it was just his diaries, particularly his tape journals [Weight of the Earth] that were just released, and the essay “Closer to the Knives.” He's the only writer that really just said it, unabashed, uninformed by the literary etiquette that we are often asked to perform. I read a queer book recently where the writer describes walking into a room, and it just said, "Love was made there." I thought, Okay, sure. Why have we been so whitewashed?

For so many queer folks, this is where we have the most agency. Sometimes we don't have a say in what we do for a job, how our families see us, but we do have a say about where we find pleasure, who goes inside us and who we go inside of. That's when we have a choice, and I wanted to stay there, in a place fraught with fear, terror, shame, but also power. So the sex scenes are repeated. They're elongated.

Desire is a force that coils and brews a storm in us, even when we're just looking at somebody. I wanted to turn desire into the weather, to stay in a moment of potency.

I found it quite radical, especially when Little Dog loses his virginity, and you address the messier moments that can occur doing anal sex. It's so familiar to gay intimacy and yet rarely acknowledged, particularly in literature. What compelled you to write about the underbelly of gay sex?

I specifically wrote that for queer folks. There are rare moments when I know who my audience is. I'm not a writer who likes to write for specific people—I don't like to be a representative of any group—but in that moment I felt like there has to be a moment of recognizability and, further, that that quote-unquote messiness or failure is not wrong. It's part of the coming-of-age of queerness. It's also a moment of mercy. A moment of bodily failure is actually a moment where the queer bodies are their most real. Where they are absolutely standing alone on their own two feet and they start to rescue each other in that moment. Not because they are marginalized or ostracized, but because they are so outside of the frame they find their own power.

Do you recall the first time you ever saw your queer Asianness reflected in a piece of art?

Alexander Chee would be in literature, which sounds absurd because he's contemporary, but that would be the first. But the most emblematic was Happy Together by Wong Kar-Wai, because they were untouched by whiteness, and that's so rare. It's so rare. Not to mention it's just a beautiful story. The energy was always violent and toxic, but they were on their own terms.

I wonder if that specificity can exist in America.

I went to see Crazy Rich Asians here—I didn't love the movie, I thought it was boring—but I walked into this theater in western Massachusetts, and it was packed full of mostly white people at 11:30 in the morning. I sat there, and the first song that came on was traditional Chinese opera. The movie didn't even begin—it was just the song and early credits—and I just sobbed. Because I never thought I would live to see anything like that.

Do you have a thing in your closet, an item that makes you feel the most queer?

I purposefully like to wear asymmetric earrings, one dangly, one stud. It's the one moment when I say I'm purposefully off-kilter. I want people to be disoriented by my face. Even just conceptually, I find joy in having one side be different. Even my eyes, one of my eyes is different than the other. It took me a long time to find joy in that.

I’m curious about your relationship to events like Pride, particularly as a Buddhist?

Well, as a Buddhist, it's almost at times contradictory to notions of pride, because pride is related to ego. Hardcore Buddhism would say there is no such thing as the self, that the body is merely a hotel room we try to care for and then we leave. And in some sense I think that's true. In another sense I think now is one of the most important moments to rethink Pride’s relationship to queerness. A lot of the Pride parades have been hijacked by late capitalism, the commodification of the queer body to sell Chase bank accounts. We've had fucking rainbow Doritos, for God's sake. Now let's talk about safety, health-care rights, laws to protect each other. To me Pride has to quickly translate to care. And if we don't have that trajectory, that bridge from one to another, I'm not that interested.

You write from the perspective of Little Dog, a successful writer: “They will want you to succeed, but never more than them. They will write their names on your leash and call you necessary, call you urgent.” Who is “they,” and what is the leash you’re referring to?

In general, "they" are people in power, the gatekeepers, and ultimately that framework surrounds whiteness. I didn't want to write a story that folks could just get lost in on vacation and move on. I wanted the mirror of a breathing queer writer of color in the world to be reflected back onto the reader. That's a moment when the writer himself really contemplates what it means to be successful, and how success is not necessarily a clear destination. It doesn't mean you've arrived. I mean, you got somewhere, but it's not necessarily—it's not freedom. You're not free of whiteness. People start to project their project and their sense of history onto you. You're still on a leash, no matter where you go.

The moment you're quoting there is actually a moment when the book collapses, and that was important to me; to write a queer narrative is to write purposeful collapse into that narrative. In a lot of the Western canon we ask for cohesion, particularly of queer bodies, and what I want to ask is how can we write cohesive stories when our lives do not get the privilege of cohesion? In order for a queer writer of color to write a cohesive story is to ultimately write a lie.

Speaking to this collapse, your book joins a lineage of queer narratives with a tragic narrative arch. Do you feel like you are in conversation with that lineage?

It was propelled and informed by that lineage, but I don't consider it a tragic story. As a writer, I knew I didn't want to write a tragedy. I wanted to write about American failure. Because when we think of the tragedy, we think of it in relation to the queer body: The queer body fails, and therefore it's tragic. But what I want to reframe, perhaps, is that American masculinity is a failure in itself in which no one thrives, including the characters in this book. People are lost to opioids, which is an American failure. It's not necessarily looking at queerness as tragedy, but that America as we know it is in a tragic trajectory. That's why it was important for me for the book to not end on death; it literally ends on the laughter of an Asian-American woman. That's the last line.

Originally Appeared on GQ