here is a widely held belief, among English-language writers, that sex is impossible to write about well – or at least much harder to write about well than anything else. I once heard a wonderful writer, addressing students at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, say that her ideal of a sex scene would be the sentence: “They sat down on the sofa …” followed by white space. This is a prejudice I can’t understand. One of the glories of being a writer in English is that two of our earliest geniuses, Chaucer and Shakespeare, wrote of the sexual body so exuberantly, claiming it for literature and bringing its vocabulary – including all those wonderful four-letter words – into the texture of our literary language. This is a gift not all languages have received; a translator once complained to me that in her language there was only the diction of the doctor’s office or of pornography, neither of which felt native to poetry. More than this, surely it is absurd to claim that a central activity of human life, a territory of feeling and drama, is off-limits to art. Sex is a uniquely useful tool for a writer, a powerful means not just of revealing character or exploring relationships, but of asking the largest questions about human beings. This usefulness lies in a series of interlocked contradictions. Sex is an experience of intense vulnerability, and it is also where we are at our most performative, and so it’s at once as near to and as far from authenticity as we come. Sex throws us profoundly into ourselves, our own sensations, physical and emotional; it is also, at least when it’s interesting, the moment when we’re most carefully attuned to the experience of another. In no other activity, I think, do the physical and metaphysical draw so near one another—nowhere else do we feel so intensely both our bodies and something that seems to exceed our bodies—and so our writing of sex can be at once acutely descriptive of bodies in space and expansively philosophical. Nothing exposes us more, not just physically, though that’s not insignificant, but also morally; nowhere am I more aware of selfishness and generosity, cruelty and tenderness, daring and failure of nerve, in my partners and in myself, than in sex. Finally, sex puts us in contact with our shared animal nature and is also inflected by a particular place and time. Sex in an American suburb is not quite the same phenomenon as sex in, say, an eastern European apartment block, and sex scenes can do a great deal to illuminate the social and historical forces that make the difference. All of which is to say that sex is a kind of crucible of humanness, and so the question isn’t so much why one would write about sex, as why one would write about anything else. And yet, of course, we are asked why we write about sex. The biggest surprise of publishing my first novel, What Belongs to You was how much people wanted to talk about the sex in a book that, by any reasonable standard, has very little sex in it. That two or three short scenes of sex between men was the occasion of so much comment said more about mainstream publishing in 2016, I think, than it did about my book. In fact, in terms of exploring the potential for sex in fiction, I felt that I hadn’t gone nearly far enough. I’ve tried to go much further in my second novel, Cleanness. In two of its chapters, I wanted to push explicitness as far as I could; I wanted to see if I could write something that could be 100% pornographic and 100% high art. It’s not that I think explicitness is necessarily all that interesting in and of itself. Our culture is drowning in explicitness – thanks to the internet. And yet we suffer from a dearth of representations of embodiedness, by which I mean bodies imbued with consciousness. I am not anti-pornography, but it sometimes goes to great lengths to expunge personhood from the bodies it puts on screen, to reduce them to objects. Often we don’t see their faces at all; when we do, often enough they are projecting a single theatrical feeling – need, or pleasure, or pain. Literature is the most powerful means we have for communicating consciousness. What excites me in writing sex isn’t explicitness itself, but the combination of explicitness and a particular kind of sentence I’m attracted to, a sentence with a history one might trace from the great introspective English prose writers of the 16th and 17th centuries, through Proust and James to Woolf and Baldwin and Sebald. It’s a sentence at once expansive and recursive, plunging forward but also falling back to question and correct itself. I think of it as a technology for the production of inwardness, for putting on the page what thinking feels like. In writing Cleanness I wanted to find out what might happen when that technology was applied to sex of various kinds: tender and brutal, intimate and impersonal, joyful and abject. I felt there was an intervention literature might play, that it might reclaim the sexual body as a site of consciousness. While I resist drawing lines between pornography and art, if forced to offer a distinction I might say that pornography, like propaganda, wants us to feel a single thing. Art is made of contraries, of ambivalence and ambiguity; it never wants us to feel a single thing. If I want the reader to be aroused by a particular scene, I also want them to be troubled by that arousal, to question or investigate it, to be moved by a more complicated pleasure. One of my core beliefs is that no one gets to tell an artist what kind of art they should make. I don’t feel that I have a responsibility to write about sex, but I do feel a certain urgency about the endeavour, and part of that urgency has to do with being a queer artist. In an infamous review of Alan Hollinghurst’s 1999 novel The Spell, John Updike made an argument about the fundamental unseriousness of queer sex. In contrast to chronicles of “the rites and stations of banded gayness,” Updike wrote, “novels about heterosexual partnering, however frivolous and reducible to increments of selfishness, social accident, foolish overestimations, and inflamed physical detail, do involve the perpetuation of the species and the ancient, sacralised structures of the family.” The world has changed since 1999, and queer people now, in certain very privileged parts of the world, have readier access to “the ancient, sacralised structures of the family”. But queer sexuality that doesn’t fit the heterosexual mould of family is still treated with the disdain Updike expresses; it is still dismissed as morally unserious. One of the things I have wanted to do in both of my books is to treat gay male relationships – whether partnered or promiscuous, durable or transient – as what they are: models for sociality that are as complex, as ethically and emotionally rich, as productive of meaning and value, as any other. To write something, to make art of it, is to make a claim about its value. Even in our age of marriage equality, when as a culture we tell ourselves a very flattering story about gay liberation, it remains the case that our culture despises the queer body, especially the queer sexual body. To write about the queer body not just explicitly, but with all of the resources of the literary tradition, to write it in a way that foregrounds beauty and lyricism is, I hope, a way to cherish that body. It’s a way not to argue for its value but to recognise and proclaim its value, and to lavish it with the peculiar, ennobling dignity art can bestow. • Cleanness by Garth Greenwell is published by Picador (RRP £14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.