In Contours of White Ethnicity (2009) Yiorgos Anagnostou notes the exclusionary nature of Greek America, lacking nuances, “discordance, contestation and protest”, with marginalised groups like the homosexuals “treated as insignificant historical footnotes” (my emphasis, 60). As the publishing world gradually allows more room for these “footnotes”, noteworthy autobiographical novels and memoirs by Greek American gay people have finally started to appear in the second decade of the twenty-first century, available for sale worldwide; these are novels like Annie Liontas’s praised Let Me Explain You (2015), Angelo Surmelis’s young adult novel The Dangerous Art of Blending In (2018), Dean Kostos’s memoir The Boy Who Listened To Paintings (2019) and Joanna Eleftheriou’s collection of essays entitled This Way Back (2020). Such works seem to be in line with Artemis Leontis’s call for inclusivity and polyphony within the Greek American narrative to “broaden and deepen the stories that are told and the knowledge created about Greeks in America” (Leontis 2021).

Aiming to initiate a discussion on some of the key themes that are brought forth by such writings, I closely read Angelo Surmelis's The Dangerous Art of Blending In (DABI) and ponder over two significant shaping forces that grind the Greek American gay teenager—the familial and the communal milieu, including the central role of Greek Orthodoxy. In my discussion, and also for my title, I draw from Perry N. Halkitis’s volume Out in Time: The Public Lives of Gay Men from Stonewall to Queer Generation (2019), where the public health psychologist emphasises, among other things, the sociocultural pressure on the life of an ethnic gay which is “shaped by a person’s emotions, family, culture, religion, and society, structures that create the psychosocial burdens so many gay men experience” (my emphasis, 3). My article concludes with reflections on the salience of similar works in regard to the Greek American ‘canon’ and the kaleidoscopic narratives of Greek American gay identity, such as Surmelis’s, which allow us to perceive ethnic subjectivities under an inclusive and non-hierarchical new light.

The Struggle to Be Accepted: The Family Circle

In The Dangerous Art of Blending In, a young adult Bildungsroman set in a present-day Illinois town, Surmelis—an award-winning designer in the United States writing an autobiographical novel following his admission—projects the gay hero’s “multiple” identities (see Anagnostou 2018) as heavily marked on a first level by his family’s migrant status and their struggle to be respected in their local church community.

Evan’s foreign-born working class parents, Voula and Elias Panos, are engrossed in the pursuit of material success and prioritise work over family; this belief is also evident in their decision to leave their son to be raised by the grandparents as a toddler when they had moved to Austria prior to their migration to the United States, a common practice among migrating Greek families with young children in the mid-twentieth century. Elias’s jobs and night shifts drastically limit his energy and the time he spends with his teenage son, leaving parenting duties mostly to Voula. Elias’s monomania with work and the atrophy of his emotional side result in his depiction as an inert character, oscillating between apathy and silent agreement when confronted with his wife’s abusive mothering (DABI, 14). The problematic fatherly stance can also be considered indicative of the toll that the struggle for social ascension can take on migrant families and the relationships between its members, limiting the time spent together and corroding the family bonds. In this sense, Surmelis’s novel comes to problematise and subvert the narrative of success and prosperity by revealing its usually avoided ugliness, the cost on family life, affective ties, and bonding. More than that, the father’s attitude seems symptomatic of an empathetic and moral void in the Greek American world, where the aim of material success, the rigid gender norms of the home country, and the pressure to appear “picture perfect” are at its core (see Anagnostou 2018).

Indeed, Surmelis underscores propriety and the family’s public image as the main concerns of recent migrants like the Panos family; for them, the acceptance of the close circle of the ethnic (and religious) community is a goal they will go to extremes for. The free Sundays that the Panos have from their hard labour are devoted to a marathon of church services and the company of “respectable” and like-minded parish members. Steeped in religiosity of unbending traditions and heteronormative prescriptions, on a par with Joanna Eleftheriou’s mother in her collection of essays (2020), Voula is consumed with keeping up appearances: she adopts an agreeable persona when in public, while she constantly torments her son when alone with him if he dares to defy her. Suspecting Evan’s sexual identity, she sees it as sinful and a proof of his evilness (DABI, 31). Her reactions reflect widespread associations of homosexuality, ranging from the belief that it is a passing phase one will eventually overcome to the view that it constitutes a disease (Halkitis 2019, 53) or even a sickness of demonic origin. Inevitably for his mother, Evan’s sexual otherness has to be castigated and calls for extreme measures: miasmic segregation, group prayer and incense, public humiliation, corporal punishment, systematic abuse (for a transnational context, see also Capotorto 2008 and Lanzillotto 2013). Surmelis’s dark and unstable mother—an abused orphan girl herself (DABI, 248)—puts cracks on the façade of the stereotypical ethnic mother who inhabits the conventional Greek American narrative and follows the patriarchal dictates of the Holy Mother prototype as a sacrificing, selfless, almost-saintly figure. Voula’s perverse character and the shocking attacks to her son continue the chain of pain and trauma of a culture that has long favoured corporal punishment and often sees it as ‘normal’, with a mother that sacrifices her son’s wellbeing and mental health for her social acceptance, thus raising a traumatised adolescent.

On a broader level, Surmelis’s novel highlights the overwhelming expectations that children of migrant parents often need to live up to throughout their lives to counterbalance their parents’ ‘sacrifice’ of migration. The demands are high and strict: excel at school, college and the workplace, aim for an intra-ethnic heteronormative marriage, and raise another ‘respectable’ family (for a similar Greek Australian narrative, see Maria Katsonis 2015). Inevitably, the burden is multiplied for gay children, as Evan’s familial nightmares show; for this difference-intolerant culture, homosexuality has traditionally threatened concepts that are central to its survival like heterosexual marriage and procreation (Halkitis 1999, 190), also key ingredients of an ‘iconic family perfection’. Whenever the young offspring do not abide by the ‘rules’ or deviate from the goals set for them, violence may erupt to bring the ‘culprit’ to his senses, in accordance with patriarchal dictates. This is certainly an important theoretical compass guiding Voula’s abusive parenting, with friction more frequently caused by Evan’s suspected homosexuality. Through this highly problematic mother-son relationship, Surmelis sheds light on an array of taboo topics, family abuse, the trauma of gay children, and mental hazards—issues so rarely brought forth, skeletons in the closet that shatter the homogeneous Greek American image of success and perfection.

The Struggle to Survive as a Gay Ethnic Boy: The Community

The blows, literal and metaphorical, on Evan also occur outside the walls of his troubled home, at school, where the gay hero tries his best to be invisible in order to escape the constant bullying and diverse torments he is subjected to because of his sexuality (DABI, 28). The brutal attacks Evan receives putting his personal development as a teenager on hold and even endangering his life, recreate an atmosphere of terror for his every move, a “fear of retaliation for simply being who [he is]”, a feeling that Halkitis highlights as prevalent for the ethnic gay (Halkitis 2019, 166).

In the first chapters of the book, whenever the hero experiences attacks at home and school because of his sexual identity, Evan resorts to his faith or church practitioners for guidance and assistance, only to be utterly disappointed. Evan’s experiences with religion, its dogmas, its priests, and followers are negative on the whole: the torturing by his mother in the name of God, the humiliation he receives through the prayer group Voula organises at their home, the priest’s rigidity towards his gayness and the justification of his mother’s attacks (DABI, 167-8)—all these amount to his finally abandoning the Church (cfr. Lanzillotto 2015) and the ethnic community as soon as he moves to college and away from the Panos family home. In probably one of the earliest discussions on Greek American gays, Halkitis (1999) explains the intolerance of the community to allow for anything other than heteronormativity. This is a rigidity that leaves no options for young men like Evan once they manage to come out. In Halkitis’s wording: “The koinotis makes no room for his difference, has no desire to accept him and integrate him into the cloth of the community” (1999, 191). For Evan like for many other ethnic gays for which the church and heteronormativity are inextricably linked, their coming out equals their triple banishment from the homely, religious, and communal settings.

Concluding Remarks

On the whole, through his autobiographical novel, Surmelis reflects on his own psychosocial burdens as he outpours his traumatic experiences growing up as a gay ethnic with the painful juggling of his ethnic and sexual identity; simultaneously, the author reveals a still obscure image of Greek American identity that is, hopefully, beginning to come out of the family and community closet. By foregrounding today gay Greek American narratives, which have recently “emerged out of the shadows of non-existence” (Cannistraro and Meyer, in De Stefano 2018, 569) I aspire with this brief piece to contribute to the contemporary discussions on gender, sexuality, and ethnic identity, and to promote the scarce scholarly dialogue by encompassing new angles to examine migrant narratives and diverse central concepts like difference, belonging, and inclusivity. The close reading of gay Greek American narratives and their examination through a transnational and transcultural angle, as well as their inclusion in our literary classes, is essential: it shatters the uniformity of the Greek migrant narrative and the omnipresence of the heteronormative characters and contributes to the critical evaluation of the ethnic culture drawing parallels with other ethnic groups and cultures. While works like Surmelis’s destabilise the authoritative tone of the usual success narrative and our perception of Greek American identity as single, homogeneous, and heteronormative (cfr. Papanikolaou 2008), they also assist in the rejection of racist stereotypes, promoting the re-shaping and re-storing of a cultural legacy grafting “inherited cultural traditions with newer concepts of sexual identity, politics and community” (De Stefano 2018, 569). As we step on thin ice by reflecting on unpleasant, yet present, nuanced facets of the ethnic culture, we can begin to make inroads into a better understanding of the polyphonic Greek American culture.

 

Works Cited

Anagnostou, Yiorgos. 2009. Contours of White Ethnicity: Popular Ethnography and the Making of Usable Pasts in Greek America. Ohio UP.

------------- 2018. “Nation, Diaspora, Homeland, Trans”. Erγon: Greek/American & Diaspora Arts and Letters. October 16.

Capotorto, Carl. 2008. Twisted Head: An Italian American Memoir. Broadway.

De Stefano, George. 2018.“Fuori Per Sempre: Gay and Lesbian Italian Americans Come Out”. In The Routledge History of Italian Americans, edited by William J. Connell and Stanislao G.Pugliese, Routledge, 566-582.

Eleftheriou, Joanna. 2020. This Way Back. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press.

Halkitis, Perry N. 1999. “On Being Gay and Greek American: A Herculean Labor to Fuse Identities”. In Greek American Families: Traditions and Transformations, edited by Sam J. Tsemberis, Harry J. Psomiades, Anna Karpathakis. New York: Pella Publishing Co., 177–93.

-----------. 2019. Out in Time: The Public Lives of Gay Men from Stonewall to Queer Generation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Katsonis, Maria. 2015. The Good Greek Girl. Paddington: Jane Curry Publishing.

Kostos, Dean. 2019. The Boy Who Listened to Paintings. New York: Spuyten Duyvil.

Lanzillotto, Annie Rachele. 2013. L Is for Lion: An Italian Bronx Butch Freedom Memoir. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Leontis, Artemis. 2021. “Writing Greek America: Perspectives on Gender and Sexuality”. Erγon: Greek/American & Diaspora Arts and Letters. September 22.

Liontas, Annie. 2016. Let Me Explain You. Scribner. (Originally published by Simon and Schuster, 2015.)

Papanikolaou, Dimitris. 2008. “New Queer Greece: Thinking Identity Through Constantine Giannaris’s From the Edge of the City and Ana Kokkinos’s Head On”. New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 183‑196.

Surmelis, Angelo. 2018. The Dangerous Art of Blending In. New York City: Balzer+Bray.