Kyle Green | Roanoke Times

JEFF MANN

Age: 46

Hometown: Hinton, W.Va.

Residence: Pulaski

Education: B.A. in English and B.S. in recreation, M.A. in English, West Virginia University

Job: assistant professor of English, Virginia Tech

Publications: “Loving Mountains, Loving Men” (Ohio University Press, 2006), nonfiction prose and poetry

“Bliss” (Brickhouse Books, 1998), poetry

“Mountain Fireflies” (Poetic Matrix Press, 2000), poetry

“Flint shards from Sussex” (Gival Press, 2000), poetry

“Bones Washed with Wine” (Gival Press, 2003), poetry

“Edge” (Harrington Park Press/Haworth Press, 2003), memoir

“Devoured” (“Masters of Midnight,” Kensington Books, 2003), novella

On the Web: www.english.vt.edu/~jmann/

“An earthly heaven can be difficult to construct when your loves seem irreconcilable,” writes Virginia Tech creative writing professor Jeff Mann in the introduction of his just-out memoir.

“For gays and lesbians in Appalachia who want to live full lives, who want to embrace both their gay and their mountain identities … it can be very difficult to find some compromise.”

In his new book, “Loving Mountains, Loving Men” (Ohio University Press, $19.95), Mann — who half-jokingly refers to himself as the “Brokeback professor” — describes the life of the “double outsider” in both poetry and prose. Taking full advantage of the “Brokeback Mountain” buzz, his publisher describes the memoir as the first book-length treatment of the topic.

Mann, 46, spoke recently about the perils of growing up gay in Hinton, W.Va., the increasing homophobia he sees on campus, and about why, when he finally ventured out to see “Brokeback,” he wore his steel-toed boots.

Was this book the result of your wanting to be, as you write, a “warrior in a frighteningly conservative nation,” a voice for those who are afraid to speak out?

Yes. As much as I’d like to have a more mainstream audience, the people I think about first are people in subgroups like me: Appalachians and gay people. I didn’t used to be such a political person, but this book is my response to the state of the nation and the state of the state.

How important was the film “Brokeback Mountain” to you?

Extremely. It’s the first time I’ve seen in a mainstream movie a reflection of a good bit of my concerns in life: gay love in small-town and rural America and the dangers inherent in that.

What was your reaction to the film?

I was hesitant to see it in public. I am so angry at this point [about homophobic attitudes]. I’d been to movies before where as soon as the gay characters started to get intimate, the audience went crazy with disgust.

Those who were gay were so happy to see a movie depicting our experience, but we all sat there cringing, waiting for the response [of straight theater-goers]. I saw the film in Charleston, W.Va., and I wore my steel-toed boots. I was sizing up every man who came into that theater. I know it might sound paranoid, but this is the way it feels to be queer in George Bush’s America in 2006 in this part of the nation.

Do you think the movie could help combat homophobia?

The whole theme is the way that hatred creates the fear that keeps those men apart. I know it’s got to help some people somewhere.

Was your coming-of-age experience in West Virginia as shame-filled and fearful as the characters’ in “Brokeback”?

I relate to those characters so deeply; I couldn’t stop dreaming about them. But the big difference is, I went to college. I couldn’t be out in Hinton, God no. But I had a whole crew of gay and lesbian friends at West Virginia University. Those boys in Wyoming and Texas in that movie, they didn’t have any of that support; they were the only two gay people they knew.

Your parents were supportive of you, too, right?

I had great parents. They weren’t pleased at first, but they came around. My father writes all these liberal articles now for West Virginia newspapers, God love him. The fact that I could use my education to stay in a university community, that’s what has made my life so much easier. I’m so grateful to have had the life I’ve had and to have a partner and to live fairly openly here.

Did the audience react respectfully when you saw the movie?

Thankfully, yes. But I’ll be buying the DVD as soon as it comes out in April. I’ve already ordered a cowboy cookbook, and my partner and I are going to make a great meal and watch it in the privacy of our own home. I can’t wait.

Are things better for your students than they were for you?

They’re better than when I was in high school, but not entirely. I created a gay and lesbian literature course at Virginia Tech in 1998 because I wanted to give queer kids an affirming mirror of their experience through literature.

I remember those students saying to me, almost patronizingly, “Well, yeah, it was harder for your generation. But things are changing, and that nasty homophobia is dinosaur stuff.” I remember thinking, I hope you’re right; I think you’re naive.

That semester Matthew Shepherd was killed. [Shepherd was a college student beaten to death in Wyoming in a widely reported hate crime.]

The most recent time I taught the course, my students were feeling exceedingly besieged. Part of it is, gay issues are more to the forefront in the American consciousness, the backlash from all the years with George Bush.

How does Tech deal with discrimination incidents?

We have a Safewatch program, an online reporting service for people who experience hate crimes or bias-related incidents. [Administrators] are on the problem, but the fact that they have to spend whatever effort they do is an indication there’s a long way to go.

I have very few parental instincts, but I feel parental toward these gay kids on campus, and it’s frustrating not being able to protect them. Some students are afraid to take my [gay and lesbian lit] course because they don’t want their parents to know, or they’re afraid future employers might hold it against them.

Excerpts from Jeff Mann’s “Loving Mountains, Loving Men”:

“ … Now that I have settled down with John, however, I find myself in a better relationship with my father than I ever might have imagined and surrounded by good, kind, nurturing men, both straight and gay. My father sends me back to Blacksburg with home-baked bread and fresh applesauce, John surprises me with a birthday trip to Key West, Phil and Dan treat us to long talks and big dinners. … I want to be the kind of man who knows how both to box and bake bread.”

“ … It takes some losses, some age, to make us realize all that could at any moment go wrong.

‘What is it like when you finally have it all?’ I asked my buddy Jim once. We were sipping Guinness in the Blacksburg bar called the Underground, talking a bit before he started into the dart-throwing again. Still mourning the loss of Thomas (an ex-boyfriend), I envied Jim greatly. He certainly seemed to have everything a straight man might want. … His life was so different from mine that I felt like an anthropologist studying an alien culture.

Jim smiled and took a gulp of beer. He looked at me, his black mustache moist. ‘Once you have it all, then all you can think about is the many ways you might lose it.’ ”

From Jeff Mann’s “Homecoming,” a poem:

… Hinton, West Virginia, is much the same, that Appalachia

my teenaged years so wanted to escape. There’s a storefront

preacher shouting about perversity, a bookish boy with a split lip.

There’s a gang outside a Madam’s Creek farmhouse shouting

“Come out here, you queers. We’ll change you.”

Now I know only five hours away, amidst DC traffic,

crowded sidewalks, men are holding hands along 17th Street,

buying gay novels in Lambda Rising, sipping Scotch

and flirting in the leather bars. But I want to be here. . . .