Limitations of the Craft

I've known I wanted to write professionally since about my sophomore year in college. I had a knack for it. I'm not being conceited; everyone has something they are born to do and I was born to write. The hardest part, though, is knowing what to write and how to write it. But the wall I kept running into was what is acceptable to write? How far can your content and subject matter go before it is deemed unacceptable? What things are taboo to write about? What things can an author subject a reader to before they are called "twisted individuals" and cast out of literary circles? Most of the subject matter I am referring to is sex, which is one of the four things that most literature is about (and the other three have eluded my mind). Sex is always a sensitive subject, dependent on the reader, mostly on their age and religious preferences. I'm not saying that I'm going to start writing imitative works based on the Marquis de Sade, but how much of a novel can deal with sex and how much is too much? Michael Cunningham's novel A Home at the End of the World deals with the experimentation and depiction of two young boys going through puberty together. Bobby is a boy who has a rough home life and Jonathan has a rather normal life. They experiment together sexually. In the ensuing years, they lose touch and Jonathan accepts his homosexuality. This book, as well as the musical Rent, opened my eyes to the ways it can be handled in modern literature and culture, but that is from a more liberal culture. Southern and Christian cultures (most times both simultaneously) put sexuality on the back burner and homosexuality is either something to be changed or something to be ignored.

This entire argument could be turned in and changed into a different discussion on what is deemed indecent. This is where the limitations come in. We are told that you can write about anything you want, but that is not true. In one sense, you are only able to write what people will read. In another, you can only write what is decent and acceptable in the social mores of your specific culture. We're supposed to write what we know, but what if all we knew was deemed indecent by popular morality? What is more unacceptable? Holden Caulfield's ramblings about necking or Moses and the Israelites purging their way to the Promised Land? I know that is a far out comparison, but the point is what can be more unacceptable- sex, murder, blasphemy, treason? How far can the boundaries of acceptable content be pushed?