For the QLP Book Club, we only focus on fiction, since we already publish quite a bit of memoir and personal essays at The Queer Love Project. In particular, I’m always eager to talk to writers who have investigated various forms of love, and Cinema Love definitely fits the bill.
So I was excited to talk to the author Andy Jiaming Tang about his debut novel released in May 2024. A bit about Andy: He’s the winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Prize for First Fiction; the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction; and the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction. And Cinema Love was also a finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and a Lambda Literary Award in Gay Fiction.
Cinema Love is about many things, but the central focus is the gay men in rural China—in particular Fuzhou, which is located in southeastern China—and the women who marry them. The scope of the book is quite large. We follow several characters over 30-plus years, from China in the 1980s to the U.S. after they immigrate. Then we check in on them later in life in contemporary, 21st-century New York City, during the pandemic and after.
While in Fuzhou, we are introduced to Bao Mei, a ticket taker at the Workers’ Cinema. This is a space of defiance, where gay men go to cruise and hook up with one another. But it’s also a place of “betrayal,” where many married men “had to humiliate their wives to satisfy their desires,” as Andy writes in the book.
We spoke about mixed-orientation marriages and the pain that people experience by staying in these relationships. In particular, Andy explained how he was more focused on the women’ s experiences and how both Bao Mei and another central female character, Yan Hua, are different facets of his mother and her complicated relationship to the idea of her son’s gay and queer identity.
Andy explained that he spent time listening to women when his mother worked as a nail tech, which is how he could understand the female friendships—especially the gossip, rudeness and humor that infuses the novel. For anyone interested, he also wrote an essay about that for Jezebel.
The book obviously required a lot of research, and it was originally inspired by a trip he took when he was 16 to China when he saw an older man touch another man intimately. As for the other descriptions of cruising and working-class immigrant realities, Andy explained that, not only did he get inspiration from Samuel R. Delaney’s classic nonfiction book, Times Square Red/Times Square Blue—which details the writer’s experiences in the New York City’s Time Square porn movie houses—Andy also used Peter Kwong’s Forbidden Workers and Patrick Radden Keefe’s The Snakehead to better understand the complexities of Chinese immigration to the United States and the underworld of New York’s Chinatown.
Andy says he’s currently working on another book project and is only reading works by Alice Munro and Elena Ferrante at the moment. “People kept saying about my book that the love in it was really tender, which is not a bad thing,” Andy explained. “But I’m really curious about Ferrante because the love in her books is furious… And I want to think about anger more deliberately.”
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