Marco Roth

We’d both separately become fascinated with what we called “ephemeral views,” the opening one gets when a building has been demolished, usually preparatory to the erection of something larger and more looming. These rents in the grid exposed wonders: the back gardens and solaria of brownstone residences ordinarily shielded from street view, the rear buttresses and stained-glass nave of a midtown cathedral, old advertisements painted onto brick walls, a pyramidal shadow cast on a windowless blank wall, a sudden deepening of perspective.

It was the wrong moment in American letters to be a gay, Black man writing about the South. It didn’t matter if you could write a sex scene of the kind that would, twenty years in the future, earn Garth Greenwell a national book award nomination, while also channeling the blues cadences of Alfred Murray. If you weren’t Toni Morrison or, on the mass market side, Terry McMillan, you weren’t anybody. Publishing had no room for a diversity of diversity.

For an age where more people are porn-literate than literature-literate, the nerdy Roth may prove to be his most transgressive persona in posterity, although there’s another candidate for the role. As all the tributes pour in and multiply in thousands of bytes on our screens, there’s another thing that no one has really mentioned: his political astuteness.

News of the massacres in Paris reached me about fifteen minutes before Nina and I were supposed to see Agnès Varda’s “Jane B.” The showing was at a former mausoleum factory and warehouse in north Philadelphia, a space built to advertise its wares, a white-marbled rectangular tombstone in the middle of brick houses, neon-lit gas stations and chicken joints, and a fortresslike Citizens Bank, down the street from a gun shop. It was all stupidly overdetermined. We went in anyway, not so much on the “mustn’t let the terrorists win” principle, more like “well, we’ve come this far.”