Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

I have spent considerable time in countries where I was advised to keep my sexual identity secret. My husband-to-be first accompanied me on assignment on a 2002 trip to the Solomon Islands. I was surprised by how difficult John found the situation, but he had devoted many years and much psychic energy to coming out and did not welcome a return to the closet. While we were not facing potential execution in the Solomons, we were repeatedly discouraged from booking a room with a shared bed, or from any overt expression of affection that might be “misinterpreted”—which actually meant “correctly interpreted.” John’s outrage initially annoyed me. How much of a problem was it to accommodate this nicety of the place we were visiting? Over subsequent years, I came to feel that while observing local standards of privacy was an appropriate adaptation, retreating into dishonesty was not. The line often remains unclear. As I grow older, I have grown angrier at visa forms that ask whether I am married, on which I have to negotiate the reality that at home I am, and in the place I wish to go, I will not be. It feels like having multiple personality disorder. When my book on depression was translated into Chinese, references to my sexuality were removed without my consent. As a mental health advocate, I was glad to be helping depressed Chinese people, but it was disquieting to find my story bowdlerized. Full disclosure would have rendered it impossible for many Chinese people to hear what I had to say, but expurgation meant that others I might have helped were forsaken.

Censorship is hardly restricted to issues of sexual orientation. In 2015, I became president of PEN American Center, an organization devoted to American and global literature and free expression at home and abroad. PEN champions writers silenced by censorship or oppression, including many who are jailed for the open declaration of views that contradict those of the people in power. Since assuming this office, I receive word daily of violence against writers abroad who are pushing recalcitrant societies toward transition. PEN also monitors restrictions in the United States on writers who feel stymied by surveillance, by racism or other forms of silencing prejudice, by fear of losing jobs or housing, or by those who would close down speech in the name of some ostensibly higher ideal. “Words are no deeds,” says Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, but I would disagree. Hate speech is dangerous: Holocaust deniers or the Ku Klux Klan, for example, sow great darkness, and my time in Rwanda brought home to me how easily propaganda can drive ordinary people to appalling acts. Conversely, the suppression of provocative ideas does not result in social justice, nor is it a constituent of freedom. Open discourse leads to righteousness more readily than enforced control does, no matter how well intentioned. There is courage in refusing the very idea of forbidden statements, and a radical brilliance in saying what is forbidden to make it sayable.

A common moral value is to seek for others the advantages one enjoys, but we fight for global free expression out of more than noblesse oblige. “Until we are all free,” the American poet Emma Lazarus wrote, “we are none of us free.” The embrace of human diversity implied in Lazarus’s words is part of my purpose as a reporter, as evidenced in this book. Every voice that is muzzled deprives those who might have heard it, and detracts from the collective intelligence upon which all of us draw. In 1997, the Burmese Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi asked the American people, “Please use your liberty to promote ours.” Our liberty is contingent on everyone else’s. In fighting to sustain the freest possible expression here and abroad, PEN is engaged not in two separate projects, but in a single campaign for the open exchange of ideas.

I started off as a voyager to ensure I would always have someplace to go and I came to understand that I had to give others a place to go, too. I felt a dramatic sense of disconnection when the first of my Soviet friends came to New York and stayed at my family’s apartment (I was living in England, but was home on a visit). The world of the Moscow vanguard had seemed so removed from my bourgeois New York existence, and finding the radical performance poet and artist Dima Prigov enjoying a drink with my parents in our living room seemed like a scene out of Buñuel. It took me some time to recognize that you do not learn the world by compartmentalizing. Nowadays, friends from abroad are always staying at our house; it’s a constant cultural exchange program.