In which your intrepid writer provides an overview of the state of play in the legacy literary world, knocking over a few of their sacred cows along the way, before going on to propose a movement in which we, society’s male, pale, and stale cast offs may turn a negative into a positive and finally start pushing back against the gatekeepers of Wokeopia.

 

“A friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good; they are just not interested. This is heartbreaking for writers who may, in fact, be brilliant.’” Joyce Carol Oates, 2022

 

An Age of Labels

To be or not to be used to be a decision we were able to make for ourselves as writers. Alas, not anymore. Increasingly, we are being gatekept out of the literary world for no worse a crime than being pale, male, and in many cases, hale. Nowadays it is the young white male writer who will suffer most from this prejudice, not the oldies. It’ll be the first timer. The scribe in his salad days. Many of you are already aware of Wokeopia’s only permissible prejudice—that whitey is always fair game—and that to even raise this as an issue is to have more worthless labels flung at you as at your average London Fashion Show.

Take James Pattison. He called out the unfairness faced by white writers as a form of racism—calling it out by name, no less—and, immediately faced by a righteous backlash, horde upon horde of get-back-in-your-laners, Tweeted out a wretched mea culpa in his defence: “I apologize for saying white male writers having trouble finding work is a form of racism. I absolutely do not believe that racism is practiced against white writers. Please know that I strongly support a diversity of voices being heard – in literature, in Hollywood, everywhere.” In other words, please don’t cancel me, I’ll be a good boy from now on, and I’ll know to keep my trap shut. As Cultural Revolution-lite struggle sessions go, this one was a mild affair, but it did go to show how even established literary names can be three-line whipped into lane before anyone can find time to say, Hold on a sec, he may have a point!

At the risk of stating the obvious, surely it’s the case that all racism is bad, no matter who it’s aimed at. Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet? Yes, naturally. By that same logic, would a new form of racism by any other name smell as bad? Yes again. Would it appear even worse if caught in the glow of gaslight. Yes, yes, and thrice yes. It struck me at the time that the backlash Pattison felt was probably commensurate with the fragility of the argument levelled against him: They knew that they were peddling racist BS, and they knew that we knew that they were peddling racist BS, and therefore, the only way for them to stay on top and keep us schtum—with logic and reason batting for the opposition—was to scare everyone into a nervy and compliant silence.

And it’s been working a treat ever since.

Now of course your garden variety white male writer isn’t being gatekept out of the industry solely for this reason, a mere deficiency of melanin; no, there are plenty of other factors keeping him off those shelves too.

Factors like his not being a her, for one. Any would-be writer who has slogged his way through a new edition of the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook will know that most publishers and agents are women, and their “interests” are definitively themselves. Many an agent will declare in her online bio, “I’m looking for strong female leads” in the new literature they’re willing to promote, and by that they mean to say, “I want to read about an alternate version of myself absolutely crushing life.” Women publish books for and about other women. Feminists publish books for and about other feminists. And BIPOC feminists publish books for and about other BIPOC feminists. You get the drift. So where does this leave your first-time male writer? Who cares, is the raspberry of a reply you’ll likely get, if you get one at all. But remember, this is entirely justifiable because Patriarchy™, right, in order to redress the rotten inequity after years of oppression and whatnot, and, BTW, acknowledging this in print or online is a form of neofascism so invidious that cancellation may be the least of your problems, boyo. Quite how one sex can occupy the majority of positions in an industry and still manage to be oppressed by patriarchal forces is beyond me. And if you think I’m exaggerating, just try and find a publisher or an agent anywhere whose corporate bio doesn’t show a fondness for the misnomer “Women’s Fiction”: the craftiest of collocations where a prejudice becomes, ever so politely, a pseudo genre.

We’re not done with the identity politics yet.

Anyone who’s suffered through that yearly festival of cringe where everyone adopts Huxley’s dystopian social mores as a lifestyle choice will know that non-whites and women aren’t the only underdawg in town. You can (alpha)bet your life on an unsolicited manuscript finding representation if it’s coming from a non-heterosexual, non-heteroromantic,  or non-cisgender complainer who’s terribly oppressed and also terribly sex-obsessed. Any card-carrying member of the LGBTQIA+ Squad will get a doubleplusgood from the publishing world, even if they’re driving everyone into a mad dance around the midsummer maypole with their narcissistic madness. Especially if they are.

That is not to say that I object to any of these voices in literature per se.

I’d simply like to see a bit more, ahem, diversity.

What I’ve covered may not be new and may even seem self-evident to anyone who’s been in spitting distance of one of the few remaining book shops on our high streets in recent years, or anyone who’s perused what counts for literary review in the legacy media, and yet one must concur that to call it out as such, publicly, to urge caution to the wind (of change), is to risk one of several labels being unfairly lobbed at you: Far Right or Hard Right or even Radical Right have become so ubiquitous, so obviously weaponized, that I sometimes feel a touch of nostalgia for the simpler term, right-winger, a long-forgotten people who, for all the media attention they appear to garner, only spring into life around election time. Today, what does it even mean to be a right-winger? The Overton Window has been greased up in order to slide it along the political spectrum with as little effort as possible whither radical lefty ideas have become not just acceptable, but incontrovertible. And while what passes for (“far,” “hard” or “radical”) rightwing thought may have changed—to include, for example, dangerously radical ideas such as wishing for sensible border controls—the stigma attached to these labels hasn’t changed, and writers will often try and conform with popular opinion to avoid the name calling.

 

Label These, Loser!

Now, a lot of what I’m going to argue may strike you as absurd. You may snort, smirk, pull all sorts of grimacing, constipated expressions, and, who knows, even laugh like an old Hollywood villain at what I’m about to suggest. (Roo-ha-ha!) Do as you will, just don’t sit still. Inactivity is as good as a backwards slide in this game, remember. We need to recapture a cultural space that has been ceded to these numpties. We need to show some real pride—not the manufactured kind of multicoloured cringe that we’re forever beset by—no, a real pride, in ourselves and in our literary output.

To that end, I propose a new movement in literature.

It has a name.

Gamlit.

It is of course a cheeky portmanteau of “gam,” which is short for gammon, a delicious ham that has been cured or smoked, and a neo-racist label applied to white people by imbeciles of all creeds and colours. Its suffix, “lit,” whose abbreviated meaning will need no explaining, can also mean that something “is really good, intense, fun, or exciting, similar to other slang terms such as poppin’, or off the chain.” Gamlit also sounds pleasingly like Hamlet, perhaps the greatest play ever penned in any language, and written by a man who would have struggled to get his foot in the door of most publishing houses by today’s intersectional criteria.

You’re probably thinking that I’ll be writing a manifesto next.

No.

This isn’t Dogma 95.

You don’t fight a series of prejudices and restrictions with a list of to dos and to don’ts.

Nor is this a gimmick.

Gamlit is a state of mind.

Its target audience is mankind. Or rather, the kind of man who’s rarely thought about nowadays. Gamlit is about finding the universal in the everyday; it’s about shining a light on the Truth no matter where it’s lurking; it’s about tickling the funny bone no matter where it’s hiding. Gamlit will be about writing bravely while the insults and accusations come raining down hard and fast from the ideologues in their MSM top-floor studios, while their very online botshepherds and griftards are painting you as a neo-this and a proto-that, you’ll be writing your next masterpiece.

Gamlit will be a rubber stamp to show that you’ve been inoculated against their mind viruses.

While modern fiction stays in its lane, Gamlit will have its windows down on the motorway, swerving this way and that, sleeves rolled up, caring little for that fast-reddening forearm as it bathes under the sun’s rays. You stay in your lane if you want to, pal, but gamlit will be treating the road and its many junctions as a series of opportunities.

All barriers will be there for the breaking.

Gamlit could involve a male lead, unashamedly heroic, staring down into a bottomless pit with barely a thought for his own safety, all the while holding a lady close by the waist, a rope tightly gripped in the other hand, before swinging them both to safety and a candle-lit night of carnal abandon. Gamlit is what men want; gamlit is what women want in men. Gamlit isn’t reactionary—it’s affirmative, bursting with confidence and blazing a trail across Wokeopia’s barren and sexually-neutered landscape. Gamlit laughs at your pathetic labels as they bounce off its hide because it cannot understand your ideology, your narrowing of the human experience; gamlit is instinctive, natural, and unforced, and, first of all things, gamlit is fun.

The n-word was successfully reclaimed many moons ago and the word “queer,” for so long a homophobic slight, is now so commonly used instead of “gay” one fears that the sexual connotations of the latter term may be going the way of happy, the quaintest of anachronisms. I humbly propose that we play the game by their rules and reclaim a pejorative levelled at us and start, ahem, gammoning that intersectional space!

Gamlit is ours.

As is the world.

And everything in it.

They won’t publish our works anymore and they use stigmatizing labels that can be conjured out of thin air to justify their prejudices. I propose that it’s time we start the fight back. Our response need not be as petty and disingenuous as theirs. We’ll simply produce work that’s great, intent on occupying cultural spaces that the mainstream have long vacated, so that the publishing world will simply have to sit up and listen. UK publishing is in a terrible mess. No one wants the gruel that is being ladled onto their plates. Soon readers will come looking for counter cultural outlets to save them, outlets which aren’t parroting mainstream prejudices, and that’ll be our opportunity. It’s our duty to push back. Living in such a sanitized, Huxleyan nightmare we are all John the Savages holding a mirror up to this enslaved new world, showing it up for what it truly is.

The future can be brighter.

With gamlit.

Who’s to say what we can achieve?