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In Sherman Alexie’s The Toughest Indian in the
World, there is a road-trip story, “South by Southwest,” similar in ways to [Alexie’s movie] Smoke Signals, but Victor and
Thomas have been replaced by a nutty white guy named Seymour and a fat Indian whom Seymour nicknames Salmon Boy. They kiss in the front seat of a 1965 Chevrolet Malibu on their way to a McDonald’s in Tucson, Arizona. Seymour and Salmon Boy meet when Seymour attempts to rob a pancake house,
Pulp Fiction style. He takes $42 in change from the customers and then says he needs someone to go with him to Arizona, someone who will fall in love with him along the way. Salmon Boy is the only volunteer.
“Are you gay?” Seymour asks. “I’m not gay.”
“No sir, I am not a homosexual,” Salmon Boy says. “I am not a homosexual, but I do believe in the power of love.”
...Homosexuality informs many of the stories in The Toughest Indian in the
World. The title story is about an Indian journalist who picks up an Indian boxer who is hitchhiking. The tired, conflicted writer is in awe of what he perceives as the fighter’s mythic purity. “You’d have been a warrior in the old days, enit?” the journalist says. “You would’ve been a killer. You would’ve stole everybody’s horses.” The story explodes when they share a hotel room and, late at night, the fighter -- who, it turns out, is gay -- climbs into the writer’s bed and coaxes the journalist into a new experience.
“I’m becoming more urban and also spending more and more time in the art world, which, you know, is heavily populated by homosexuals,” Alexie says. “So, simply, my experiences have grown, so the characters represented in my fiction will grow accordingly. And one of the hatreds that bothers me the most is homophobia. In some sense I wanted to use my fiction as a way of addressing that directly, by celebrating [homosexuality] in all of its forms and including it as just another aspect of love.”
-- Russ Spencer, “Sherman’s March,” Utne Reader
 Don and Winston
(known
homosexuals), Denver, Colorado
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