My Favorite Literary Character

One of my latest mixed media owing to archaic Cherokee
petroglyphs at Judaculla Rock.
Mixed media painting by
Phillip Hoyle

By the time I had read several hundred novels I was hit by how so many of the protagonists were writers. I was interested in what seemed to be a self-obsession of so many writers. It made sense to me as something I should keep track of. Back then I had no idea that I’d someday try to become one of those writers.

When I met Bud in the books of Ethan Mordden, his tales about gay Manhattan, I developed a greater appreciation for these writers about writers. I liked Mordden as a writer and Bud, his character, as both a writer and character. And now it all makes sense to me. Creative writing teachers often encourage their students to write about what they know; writers get to know writing and themselves as writers.

Looking back over my reading history I now suppose that the literary characters, some of whom I could barely stomach, helped sustain me as I hung out in my closet and prepared me for my self-revealing when I no longer could tolerate the many aspects of duplicities of either being a gay who lived straight or being an artist who didn’t paint or being a writer who didn’t write. (Long sentence. Where's my editor?)

Let me describe the character, my favorite literary character: probably I am he:

He walked through life as the lonely poet of Langston Hughes’ “Carolina Cabin” for I was lonely in that only a couple of people really knew the gay me;

He hung out his heart to discover no one was curious as did Pierrot in Hughes’ poem of the same name for I suppose I was somehow waiting for a man to love me like I wanted to be loved;

He discovered the beauty of the bear people as did the boy in Leslie Marmon Silko’s poem “Boy from Bear Country” and novel Ceremony, for like that boy although I stayed with my people I was never the same;

He loved observing the ups and downs of gay life like Bud did in Mordden’s Buddies series for I made some gay friends with whom I maintained mainly non-sexual relations; and

He finally started to write his urban life, revealing a self with its many themes deeply entrenched in gay experience, for I left my old life and embraced gay life in the city.

So, while I never considered any character to be my favorite literary character, I did somehow become that composite character always involved, always other, and somehow always joyful.

Denver, 2014