--C. E. (Chris) Gatchalian is a queer Filipino writer; his plays have been shortlisted for 2 Lambda Literary Awards, and he is the 2013 winner of the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for Emerging LGBT Writers from the Writers’ Trust of Canada. Chris published an essay on Maria Callas in the Arsenal anthology AlliterAsian in 2015; we were so impressed by it, we asked him to write a nonfiction collection, the result of which is Double Melancholy.

--Double Melancholy is a hybrid of LGBTQ and Asian memoir and cultural commentary, in which Chris writes eloquently and movingly of the impact of art on his formative years as a brown queer young man. The title, a play on the Asian phrase “double happiness, ” refers to the role of melancholy in the lives of many LGBTQ people as they come to terms with their outsider status. In Chris’ world, the performing arts had a huge impact on his burgeoning queer and racial identity, from the children’s literary classic Anne of Green Gables to film, opera and popular music. These works of art “saved” him through their beauty and pathos, offering new ways of thinking and dreaming about the world; at the same time, he comes to understand that in many ways, these works were largely heteronormative and white, and suppressed his own self-acceptance as a brown queer.

--In Chris’s own words: “In writing this book, I wanted to work out my complex feelings about Western art that I’ve imbibed and worshipped over the years: how it’s edified me while at the same time colonized and erased me. ” The work of Susan Sontag was a big influence on him; not so much in terms of approach (Sontag’s criticism is much more detached and impersonal than that taken by this book), but more in terms of breadth and its general feeling of intellectual striving.

© 2019 Arsenal Pulp Press (Ebook): 9781551527543

Release date

Ebook: 18 June 2019