Tropic of Turpitude

I got the call from my author shortly after he landed at Newark's Liberty International Airport. “I've got good news and bad news,” Sebastian said. “The good news is: they all know about the book. The bad news is: they all know about the book.” Sebastian was being held for questioning. He was able to make one phone call.

Sebastian Horsley is my friend, and he's the author of a memoir, Dandy in the Underworld, which my company just published. Sebastian was on his way from London to New York, a city he's visited before, for a launch party and some media. I fell in love with his book the moment I picked it up at the London Book Fair just a year ago. The combination of punk rock, pop art, drug abuse, sex, crucifixion and, ultimately, as the Los Angeles Times so pointedly said, “the constant thread of his father's epic indifference for his son,” moved me. I knew this wasn't a book for everyone, and I didn't expect a bestseller. But what I did expect was for Dandy in the Underworld to find its audience among the readers who loved Junky and Queer, Basketball Diaries and From A to B and Back Again.

But Sebastian was denied entrance by U.S. Customs and asked to leave the country on grounds of “moral turpitude.” His fingerprints and top hat give away something I already knew: this man was a bit different. Yes, he lives an exuberant, eyebrow-raising life. But he's traveled to the U.S. several times without incident. So why now?

Sebastian wrote to me, “A copy of the offending publication lay on the table. And yes, the dust jacket did give the game away a bit. 'Dandy in the Underworld follows the career of an irredeemable dandy poncing around in make-up, fixing up drugs, sleeping with whores and failing successfully to be an artist,' it declares. They had a point—though how the Americans could be so sure of it, I was not certain. The country has seen such a scandalous flurry of fictitious autobiographies that I suppose I should have been relieved that they believed mine to be true. Instead, my stomach plummeted to the floor with the weight of disappointment as I realised that my dreams of a few days with an entire new continent to show off to were about to come to a very abrupt end.”

What were we being protected from that day? Sebastian said to me later, “Look at me! I'm harmless. I've gone to America to do the absolute most American thing. To tell my story.”

So what does this mean, exactly? Will we never meet a writer, artist or musician with an unconventional past? What bands won't we hear, which writers and poets won't we read, which painters will have their works barred from our eyes?

A friend recently reminded me that no one has banned Sebastian's book. And that's true. But as the writer Terence Blacker said in an opinion piece in the U.K.'s Independent, “Banning an inappropriate writer from speaking in a country is but a small step from banning inappropriate books.”

What can a publisher do in this situation? You speak to friends, you call for help. You send e-mails asking booksellers and librarians for support. You ask authors to blog about it and start a discussion. You help deal with the media and try not to sound stupid in interviews. Mark from Politics & Prose tells you about the environmentalist writer Farley Mowat not being allowed in from Canada in 1985. A MySpace friend tells you about the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami not being allowed to visit America in 2002 to see his film screened at the Tribeca Film Festival. You go home and listen to the Sex Pistols. And then PEN vows to help you out, inviting your author to participate in two events at its World Voices Festival in New York City later this month.

I'd like to think publishers want their authors to speak their minds, and wish for books to be published unencumbered—even the ones deemed “inappropriate.” It's books like this that inspired me, a punk-rock girl from the Midwest, to dream just a little bit bigger than her neighbors.