Gay Fiction Speaks: Conversations with Gay Novelists

Felice Picano has been a prolific author in many genres, and on both gay and nongay themes for the last twenty-five years. He is probably best known to gay readers for the best-selling thriller The Lure, for two volumes of memoirs—Ambidextrous and Men Who Loved Me—and most of all for his epic novel on postwar American gay life, Like People in History, the title of which Picano borrowed from an unpublished novel by his friend Edmund White. Born in 1944, Picano grew up in Queens, New York, where he also studied. After a year of travel, Picano returned to New York in 1967, taking various jobs and writing in his spare time.

Picano’s first three published novels—Smart as the Devil (New York: Arbor, 1975), Eyes (New York: Arbor, 1976), and The Mesmerist (New York: Delacorte, 1977)—were popular, best-selling thrillers with little gay content. Picano established a gay publishing house, the SeaHorse Press, in 1977, for which he edited A True Likeness: An Anthology of Lesbian and Gay Writing Today (New York: SeaHorse, 1980). His fourth novel was the acclaimed gay thriller The Lure (New York: Delacorte, 1979). It was followed by a novella, An Asian Minor: The True Story of Ganymede (New York: SeaHorse, 1981), and the novel Late in the Season (New York: Delacorte, 1981). Between 1979 and 1981, Picano belonged to the “Violet Quill,” an informal discussion group of six gay writers that included Andrew Holleran and Edmund White.

Picano next worked with two small publishing houses under the collective imprint Gay Presses of New York, through which his collection Slashed to Ribbons in Defense of Love and Other Stories appeared (New York: GPNY, 1983). House of Cards (New York: Delacorte, 1984) saw Picano returning to nongay fiction. Two volumes of memoirs were next: Ambidextrous: The Secret Lives of Children (New York: GPNY, 1985) and Men Who Loved Me: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel (New York: New American Library, 1989). To the Seventh Power (New York: Morrow, 1989), Picano’s last work of the 1980s, was another mainstream bestseller.

In 1992, Picano coauthored The New Joy of Gay Sex with Dr. Charles Silverstein (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). David Bergman, ed., The Violet Quill Reader (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994) featured excerpts from Picano’s journals of 1978–1982, and an unpublished story, “The Symmetry!”

In the 1990s, Picano continued to be characteristically prolific. Like People in History (New York: Viking, 1995), his celebrated fictional account of gay life in postwar America, was followed by three further novels: Dryland’s End (New York: Richard Kasak, 1995), a science fiction work; the historical Looking Glass Lives (Boston: Alyson, 1998); and The Book of Lies (London: Little, Brown, 1998; Boston: Alyson, 1999), a witty fictionalization and satire on the “Violet Quill” group and gay academia. A third set of memoirs, A House on the Ocean, A House at the Bay (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1997), also appeared. Picano’s short story “The Geology of Southern California at Black’s Beach” was included in 1998’s Men on Men 7 (New York: Plume, 1998), edited by David Bergman.

Picano’s poetry has appeared in two collections, The Deformity Lover and Other Poems (New York: SeaHorse, 1978) and Window Elegies (Tuscaloosa, Ala.: Close Grip, 1986). He has also written for the stage, in 1986 adapting An Asian Minor for an off-Broadway run as Immortal! A second play, One O’clock Jump, was produced the same year, during which Picano adapted Eyes for film with director Frank Perry.

Picano is currently working on a new novel. A collection of previously published short stories, True Stories, recently appeared (Boston: Alyson, 2000). He lives in Los Angeles, where this interview took place on Thursday, November 20, 1997.

RC You began writing predominantly third-person narration; now it’s mostly first-person. Slashed to Ribbons seems to mark the shift. Could you comment on it?

FP Yes. Both 1998 novels—The Book of Lies in Britain, Looking Glass Lives in the U.S.—are written in the first person. But the book I’m beginning now comes back to the Flaubertian narrative; that third-person, objective, postmodernist style. That’s pretty much how all of us from my era learned to write. Modernism was dead; you wanted to drive a nail in it to say so.

The first four or five novels I wrote from a very strict third-person point of view, except I started screwing around with it as early as my second, Eyes. I was having a lot of trouble with the heart of Flaubert. Of course he has no heart, whereas Henry James and Turgenev, who use that same style, do. They get around this problem in various ways. I kept trying to figure out how to do that. Eyes is told from the point of view of two people, but it’s unequal. The male protagonist voice I use involves an almost camera-on-the-shoulder technique. The voice of the female protagonist, however, becomes first-person as you get deeper into it. The narrative strategy was to make her appear more and more desperate and hysterical. I wanted the reader to get closer to understanding what she was going through and why.

In the end, it all comes down to how much you can expose through one method rather than the other. In The Lure and Late in the Season, I reestablished the third-person in a contemporary manner I call “camera-on-the-shoulder.” It is a camera—with two lenses, one of which sees only what the narrator sees. The other looks into his mind. So in fact we aren’t dealing with Flaubertian technique; cinema got in the way and forced us to reconstruct our literature.

You’re right to point out the experimentation in the Slashed to Ribbons collection, but the real turnaround happened with Ambidextrous. I said: “I will not do another conventional narrative.” The problem wasn’t so much point of view. It was the texture of the prose. I felt increasingly constrained by what could be done with prose in third-person narrative. There wasn’t enough “play” to it. Incidentally, I was amazed the other day when I started writing in the third person again. What I thought would be a very tight, limited voice is actually very rich now. I was surprised to find I’d cut through the constraints I felt were there in the early eighties.

The main problem in narrative is time, actually. In the earlier novels, time’s a closed construct, whereas in all my memoirs, I open time up, so as to say there’s no such thing. I’ll be writing from the point of view of an eleven-year-old; suddenly I jump to a thirty-five-year-old, then back again. Ambidextrous is an anti-Proust memoir. Whereas Proust really wants everything to stay in fixed time, absolute time, I’m saying: “I’m not quite sure what the past is. The fact I can recall it so intensely at times suggests it’s quite a different type of material to what we’ve been told.” If you can relive things so intensely, who’s to say what’s happening when?

RC You’ve used the first person not only in the memoirs but also in invented fictions like Like People in History.

FP Yes. What I learned through writing the first two memoirs—Ambidextrous and Men Who Loved Me—freed me up to do other stuff. When I was writing A House on the Ocean, there are two sections in which I consciously sail into the present tense, which wasn’t easy. The copy editor kept saying: “You can’t do this!” I said: “By God, I am doing it. I’m aware of what I’m doing here!” I specifically did that knowing people would be startled, and that the moment of surprise would give way to the seductiveness of something occurring in the present. When I segued back into the past tense, people wouldn’t even notice. That was specifically done to make something vivid, but also to destroy the reader’s sense of comfort in reading about the past.

Recently I wrote an essay called “My Problem with Time.” It opens with me having seen on my television three years ago some films taken at Coney Island amusement park around the turn of the century. There were all of these young men doing athletic antics with the camera. Among them was one particularly good-looking guy who was adored by his group of friends. They were all touching him and so on. I realized I was haunted by the fact that by the time I was born, these men were my grandfather’s age. By the time I was sexually active, most of them were dead. So how could I have this lustful attachment to someone who’s been dead most of my life?

So, especially with the invention of the moving camera and computers, time has become an absolutely fluid medium in which it’s difficult for us to assess who we are at any given point. That’s something I want to show in my books. In The Book of Lies, that’s crucial when the character goes back and deals with a personality who’s long dead. In Looking Glass Lives, too, I deal with people who were dead many years before the narrator was born. I wanted to bring time out as a real problem for us.

RC How did you come across the distinctive structure of Like People in History? It has been called an “epic novel.”

RC If so, it’s a new epic—a fragmented, episodic one. What’s the relationship between this fragmented structure and the book’s content—its attempt to cover such a vast range of human experience?

FP For that we have to go back to the story’s source. A month after I’d completed The Lure, I’d already put down the basic story for Like People in History. It came from the summer of 1978 and was about two cousins living openly gay but different lives in different places. At that time, they’d have been in their thirties. It would’ve been the fourth of seven fictional sections in the entire book. But evidently I didn’t know what to do with it. For many years I had no idea, though I kept going back in my mind to the idea. Finally, a year before I sat down to write it, I had the framework for it—AIDS—and the ending. The book had been open-ended until then. Suddenly it had closure.

Something I’d noticed, going around the country doing readings, is that we’d not only lost the bulk of my generation of American gay men; we’d also lost the history. I saw these bright, young people who’d grown up in what was essentially a gay world. They had no idea how they’d gotten there. There was interest. But not many people like to read history books. So I thought if I did the book right, I could kill several birds with a single stone. I could make this a history book and also a story about the various lives gay men led in the past and how different these were—not only from now, but from each other. I started fooling around with which stories I’d tell. That was pretty easy. A hundred percent of the book is true. About 45 percent actually happened to me; the rest happened to the real people I name over two pages in the book. Those are people who’d told me their stories. So essentially every anecdote, scene, joke, play of words, piece of language, drag name in that book was told to me or was part of the gay world I lived in.

I wrote Like People in History to give those people a voice. I came out of this quite unique blend of people, and I’d like to convey who we were as a group to another generation. The best way to do that was to use their words. I had a vast amount of unassimilable material from these incredible characters who’d never been written about. Andrew Holleran and Edmund White knew a few of them, but everybody else who knew them was gone.

Even in my memoirs, I’m a less interesting character than the people around me. I just don’t interest myself or other people that much. On the other hand, I’d known all these wacky, extreme, remarkable characters who should be included somewhere in our literature. Once I knew which of their stories I wanted to tell, I sat for a year, looking for some manner of getting at it.

FP Early on. The only thing that related the stories was the relationship between the two cousins and the third character, the lover, when he walks in. So I knew it’d have to be fragmented in time, place, and background. That was okay with me, because that size of writing—between twenty-five and thirty thousand words—is my favorite. James called it “the blessed novelle.” You can read it in a sitting, yet you can fit tons of stuff into it—unlike that bastard form, the short story, which is very difficult to work with in the best of circumstances. It took me a year of not worrying about it, and not thinking about it while I was writing other things. Then I came up with the birthday party. I sat down, saying: “Let’s see where this goes.” Where it went was the shape of the book.

RC Ethan Mordden’s How Long Has This Been Going On?, Michael Cunningham’s Flesh and Blood, and Patrick Gale’s The Facts of Life, all novels of similar scope and ambition, were published in the same year. Why do you think that happened?

FP I think a couple of us said: “My God—we’re still alive. We’d better do something about this.” When we looked back, the story—the size of which we weren’t quite sure of—got larger and larger. My idea behind shaping it as an epic was to be as pushy as possible—to say: “OK, you may not call it an epic, but . . .” Everybody complained about the comparison to things like the Aeneid, saying: “This isn’t Virgil; this is no epic!” But an epic is the story of a group of people over a number of years. I looked it up, in fact. I really wanted to present the book that way: stick people in the eye with it and say: “We may be outrageous faggots, but we have our epic story. This is my telling of it.” Living on the cusp of the sixties and seventies, we were uniquely placed to see the creation of something that hadn’t existed before, and beforehand and afterwards.

RC The epic novel had already been used to describe dynasties—family narratives, running over generations. To describe gay culture in those terms is daring.

When I was on public radio and television and on reading tours for The New Joy of Gay Sex, someone would always call in to say: “Where did you people come from? Why don’t you go back there?” I kept saying: “If you really don’t want to deal with homosexuals, you’re going to have to stop having children who are homosexual. It’s your doing. We’ re not going around having homosexual children. You’re the cause. Stop having homosexual children!” They’d say: “How the hell do we do that?” “Stop having sex—period.” [Laughs] In Like People in History I wanted to rubbish the idea of what family is. These gay kids come out of great middle-class, happy families—I did want to push that in people’s faces. It pleases me a lot that a younger generation of heterosexuals buys this book, reads and understands it. I don’t know how many older heterosexuals do.

RC That triggers a question about readership. Have you ever imagined an ideal reader?

FP I had an ideal reader—a living one; my friend and partner, Bob Lowe. He read my books up to Dryland’s End. He never read A House on the Ocean or Like People in History, which were being written either as he was ill and dying or afterwards.

Do I think of a readership in Edmund White’s terms: a sixty-year-old straight woman?¹ No. When I’m writing gay novels, I write to people like you. You’re a fairly ideal reader. I wouldn’t know what a sixty-year-old straight woman thinks of—and I am getting there, age-wise. I haven’t a clue what Edmund was thinking of when he said that.

RC From what you’re saying, the gay content of some books suggests a gay readership. Yet you’re happy at any crossover success.

FP Yes, especially with Like People in History, which is written in a fake gay English. It’s not an English anybody’s ever spoken, except me and my group in the seventies. The German translation took a year instead of six months, because it’s written in what I call “gayspeak.” You picked up on it instantly, I’m sure. Younger American and British Gen-X’ers had no trouble getting into the book either. I’d think a sixty-year-old woman living in the suburbs might have trouble. It’s about the way we use language; where one boyfriend says: “See you downstairs in Szechwan Sewer”—just the idea of calling a restaurant that; automatically making fun of things. We do that; I don’t remember my parents doing it.

RC You don’t think that esprit—camp, even—has always been used by gay men when presenting themselves to mainstream culture?

FP What we call camp in the mainstream—Paul Rudnick’s sort of camp—isn’t real camp. It’s an interim form designed by gays with the consent of some smart and hip straight people to allow people to play the role of insider when they’re actually not.

FP It is false camp. It’s designed. Some people are very handy with it—sitcom writers and playwrights. Novelists aren’t particularly good at it. The way real gay people talk isn’t camp. I think camp’s an interim form where gay and straight life are supposed to come together honestly and meaningfully. That’s basically impossible.

RC Couldn’t you argue that heterosexual readers of Like People in History, given what you’ve said about its style of writing, are doing the very thing you say is impossible?

FP No. I assume if they get past page ten, they either know gay people or are willing to accept this is the way gay people talk. It’s interesting that in The Farewell Symphony Edmund White for the first time bridges that gap. For many years I saw him writing “an explanation of.” Now he doesn’t seem at all concerned with explaining anything—as I’m not, from The Lure on.

FP Betrayal? I’m not sure. But it’s saying: “Like me; give me your approval.” I’m not interested in anyone’s approval. From the very beginning as a writer, I wanted to shock and make as much mischief as possible.

RC Couldn’t “explaining” a subculture be less about seeking approval than about responding to interest? Ethnic subcultures must be explained to those outside.

FP No question. But there’s a big difference between explaining and presenting. I present my subculture—or sections of it—but explain nothing. What’s to be explained? You’re either getting it or not. Even writers whose work I don’t necessarily approve of for other reasons I think are wonderfully bold when they present material without explaining it. I give an immense amount of credit for that. Some of the most popular gay authors present and don’t explain. Armistead Maupin presents his 1975 San Francisco life just the way I remember it, without a word of explanation; not asking for anybody’s approval. It’s universally accepted. Some of mine have been among the most popular gay books. I never explained a word.

RC Does “explanation” suggest the exploration of motive? In other words, is there a consequence for characterization in your refusal to explain? Justifying motives is an obvious thing to want to do in some contexts.

FP I think this relates to a personality flaw on my part: I’m very bad at social lying. According to friends of mine, that was a distinct personality flaw. I didn’t know how to lie socially; it offended me. That got me into trouble with close friends like Robert Ferro and Michael Grumley constantly. For six months at a time we weren’t talking. I’d failed to lie socially in a situation where they insisted I had to. There’s nothing I can do about it. But I do recognize it’s a character flaw, and we all bring those to our writing.

RC Does the camp element in a successful play like Tony Kushner’s Angels in America involve explanation along the lines you’ve described?

FP I saw Angels two days after it opened on Broadway, not knowing much about it. I was immediately deeply offended because it revolved around one gay man abandoning another because of AIDS. I’d spent the last five years watching gay people doing heroic feats to stay together with other gay people. We’ve seen gay men and lesbians acting with the most astonishing heroism and dignity compared to straight people under the same circumstances. Whatever else I might have thought about queers before that, AIDS sure changed my mind: watching an AIDS tragedy unfold scene-by-scene, with a straight family and a gay family undergoing it. So to see these gay people on stage acting in the way I thought straight people acted really bothered me. It was untrue on so many levels: a misrepresentation; a libel. I wonder if Kushner at some point didn’t say to himself: “In order to make this work on the largest possible scale, I’ve got to show a weak and betrayal-oriented gay couple. Straight audiences won’t accept anything else.” Anyway, I despised that aspect of the play. It disturbed me so deeply.

Also, I’d dined with Roy Cohn twice—not of my own volition. He couldn’t have been more contrary to the representation of that character on stage. Cohn came to dinner at a house I was visiting at the Pines in around 1976. We were having a high old time among some rich old queens. My partner Bob was very handsome; I was young and quite famous. They were very interested in us. We were having a lot of fun when suddenly there was a knock on the door. Our host vanished, came back ten minutes later, but didn’t sit at the head of the table. Instead, this person who I instantly knew was Roy Cohn sat there. He ate our host’s meal and kept putting his fork into my dish because I was next to him. He knew everybody at the table except me and Bob. They were all his clients. I watched him make mischief around the table. But he did none of it in the over-the-top, pushy, extreme manner Kushner showed. Cohn did it in this quiet, cold, snake-like manner. At another dinner party his behavior was exactly the same. At that point I asked my host: “Is this his personality?” He said: “That’s Roy. He never hides anything.”

Aside from those two things, I had no trouble with Angels. I thought the plays well-constructed. They moved in an emotionally honest manner. The story of the young Mormon was well done, and I enjoyed the attempt at a heroic dimension for the sick gay character left on his own.

My general feeling is that I’m very happy for anybody gay who makes it by doing something that’s not harmful to gay life.

RC There’s surely a tendency in storytelling for things to need to be imperfect; to go wrong, in order to come right. Couldn’t that be in tension with a requirement not to write something “harmful to gay life”? If the desire for a positive or healthy representation of gay characters is taken too far, what’s left of interest to describe?

FP These ideas have come up with Larry Kramer’s Faggots—a deeply untrue book, I believe; motivated by hatred, internalized homophobia, and a sense of alienation from the group in which Kramer found himself, and by his being rejected by a lover. Some people still say: “Yet this book stands for, represents various elements.” I’ll not gainsay that. They’re probably right. But couldn’t it have been done another way? Was it necessary for Kramer to be so astoundingly negative? He presents a picture of that group which I know was a distortion because I was in the middle of it.

FP Yes. Michael Denneny thinks it’s a brilliant satire.² I never knew what Michael was thinking at any given moment. Maybe he also felt excluded, alienated, and isolated from that scene.

RC Can you comment on the general tension I’ve described between the desire to represent gayness positively and the ways in which narrative requires something—mistakes, flaws—to work through?

FP I don’t think the two are necessarily mutually exclusive. Like People in History has a real hero—somebody who begins and ends a hero. Very few reviewers have talked about the love story between the narrator and Matthew, which fails initially. They’re brought together again to make another attempt. The second time it works beautifully—and on a completely unexpected level. The one straight woman reviewer who mentioned that in the New York Times found it boring. Yet I don’t know any other book where this has been presented: a grown-up, mature, worked-out gay relationship over a period of years. Is it ten years ahead of its time? Twenty? I’d like to say to people: “Recognize this is part of our lives; we’re capable of this.”

RC Stories describing the satisfactions of gay life are hard to find. Isn’t it probable things are changing in that respect?

FP As of yet I don’t have any indication of that. A lot of it has to do with what Stendhal called the description of the world: “mirrors on the highway.” What you actually see is fragmentary because these are spaced-out mirrors. With Like People in History, I got such mixed reactions to the character of Alistair. People have told me he’s one of the most fabulous characters they’ve ever read; he can’t possibly be real. He’s as close to real as I could make him. I could’ve thrown something and hit five people like him at one point—not exactly so, but close enough—people who constructed their personalities at the age of eleven and worked at it tirelessly. Then a lot of people said: “What a really wicked person. Why write about him?” I said: “Number one, there’d be no book without him; number two, there’d be no Roger without him. He constructs Roger as his counterpart. Very early on, Alistair figures out Roger is a large force in his life. He’s not quite sure what to do with him, but he’d better not ignore him. So he pulls Roger in whenever he can. At some points he leans on Roger very heavily. Roger becomes the fabulous gay person: strong; able to do things Alistair could never do because he doesn’t have any ethics.

RC Other gay novels have similarly contrasted two gay men—one embodying reflectiveness, reserve, ethical possibility; the other, immediacy, engagement, aesthetics.

FP Dancer from the Dance is a famous example. I think it’s part of a specifically American literary tradition: James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer and his Indian counterpart; Mark Twain’s Nigger Jim and Huckleberry Finn; Herman Melville’s Queequeg and Ishmael in Moby Dick. I was aware of this tradition when writing Like People in History.

Michael Bronski reviewed Like People in History and kept trying to figure out what everyone’s politics were—even when they were eight years old; long before gay liberation. Every once in a while I’ll pull out that review and howl. Brilliant as he is, Michael really failed to get what I was doing with those characters and their presentation of themselves. We read a book in psychology class in college called The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, from which I learned that people present themselves in a constructed manner: at work; among their family; sometimes to themselves. That’s infused everything I’ve written in the first person: the belief that people play with their personalities. It’s something gay people especially did, and, probably to a lesser extent, still do. The people I knew when I was first coming out were astonishingly closeted and false. They’d engaged an entire repertoire; they had different personalities. I think everybody in society does, but gay people do it a little more. We’re more willing to play with character and personality. That’s the key—not their politics!

RC Couldn’t this idea of self-staging run contrary to the nature of autobiographical fiction, though, which often aspires to the “truthful” confession? To put it another way, does it matter in what Edmund White called “autofiction” which strain dominates: the fictional or autobiographical?

FP Autobiographical fiction’s been there from the very beginning in Western society—from early Greek novels. What I remember of Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller, which I first read in college, suggests this sixteenth-century book could really have happened to someone. With Defoe, there’s no question this stuff happened to him. It may not have happened on an island somewhere with Robinson Crusoe; he was never a woman like Moll Flanders. But he’s really telling us what life is like in eighteenth-century London. We can reconstruct society from that in a way I don’t think we could from anybody else but Pepys, maybe.

RC Defoe was forced to package the things he’d invented and pass them off as true autobiography. There was no such thing as fiction—the idea of it was illegitimate.

FP It was considered illegitimate in England because of the Reformation. Cromwell and his group stopped the theater completely. From a very basic understanding of Christianity as a belief system, Cromwell said: “If you dress up, make yourself up and get up on stage and say you’re someone else, you’re lying!”

FP To a large extent what happened in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries provides a continuous line to us. Our literature goes back to Defoe; maybe back to Nashe. Even gay stuff adheres to the questions that arose then. The strategies we utilize are merely fashion.

I’m working on a collection now called True Stories or Tales from Life. It consists of five or six shorter pieces—incidents that actually happened to me, presented as fiction—and maybe a dozen other essays, articles, and travel pieces. By putting them all together in one book, I’m saying there’s no difference anymore. I don’t think there was to begin with. I think Anthony Trollope, sitting there writing about Barsetshire, knew exactly who he was writing about. He’d been in those homes; he’d been listening in the vestry when Cardinal So-and-So did such-and-such to Cardinal So-and-so.

RC What about Charles Dickens, who spoke of the importance of fantasy—of presences dictating themselves to you? You’ve also spoken of characters appearing before you when you’re writing.

RC Dickens lived in a pre-Freudian age, so even if that were true, he wouldn’t necessarily have conceived of it that way.

FP This brings us back to the function of the artist. That was defined for me early on. I accepted it, saying: “If I’m going to bother to do this at all, no matter what rewards eventually come, I have to adhere to what I think an artist is.” That was set up for me when I was ten by a cover of Life magazine. It was a special edition about Picasso, the artist of the century. He was drawing a perfect Picasso sketch on a piece of glass using a flashlight. I said: “This is what an artist does. An artist does it, whatever it is, automatically; without being able to control it, beyond a certain amount of digital and mental control. He cannot help doing it.” In the interview inside, Picasso said: “I’m a medium between some force that wishes to express itself through me, and what’s left—whether it be a piece of sculpture, a painting, or a sketch. I’m not being humble; I think I’m skillful and technically adept. But I’m the medium this has chosen to use.”

The interesting thing about this is watching artists fail. Everybody begins in a group of young artists—fifty of you or so. After twenty years, there are one or two of you left. It seems a fact of life that for every artist that makes it, twenty people have fallen in front of a truck. It may be they never figured out that this thing has to happen; that you have to re-create yourself constantly as a medium for some other force.

RC I wanted to ask how conscious and how controlling you were of the shifts between the different genres you write in. The idea of a medium still leaves unanswered the extent of personal control over form.

FP I’ve worked in all kinds of forms: poetry, essays, screenplays, plays. That’s based on two things. First, from the beginning I had enormous amounts of energy. I didn’t notice it at first. When you’re young, everybody has a lot of energy. By the time I was in my mid-forties, I still had a lot of energy, but a lot of people had wound down. I have less in my mid-fifties, but I’m still way ahead of the game. Having that much nervous energy and time to spare gives me an advantage. I can do more. From 1975 to 1985, I was using large amounts of psychedelic drugs every weekend, partying very heavily three days a week, having as much sex as could humanly be had by anybody—and writing at least a book a year, as well as running a publishing company.

Second, to go back to Picasso: he said an artist should work in every medium. Why not? It’s a matter of technique; of learning the form. I had no deep pretense of understanding what happens in playwriting. But I’ve written plays people react to on a constant basis. I feel I have more control over prose fiction, but my drama works also.

FP Generally the subject itself, though I have had ideas that have gone into three different media, looking for a final form, and have still not worked.

FP Yes: prose—a novella—and a stage play. I don’t see why we should limit ourselves. I was an art major at a city university, a very hoity-toity place then, around the end of abstract expressionism. I was a talented draftsman, colorist, and sculptor, and wanted to be an artist. Increasingly, it became clear that art as it was being practiced by everybody around me was at its end. I was damned if I was going to do these splotches of color. So I rebelled. I was taking literature as a minor and being heavily encouraged to go into writing and publishing. It took a while, though. I could’ve gone in either direction. The one thing I learned from my entire experience of art in the sixties was not to close myself down—and not to believe teachers. However much you admire and respect them, don’t pay any attention to teachers, who are only commenting on the past. It’s up to you to perform the future. You don’t know what that is until you’ve actually done it.

Most teachers can’t look into the future because they’re beholden to something already constructed. Some aren’t. Eric Auerbach wrote a brilliant book—Mimesis—all about the past, yet it also told me a lot about what my potential as an author was. Another book by Wayne Booth—The Rhetoric of Fiction—opened up the world and looked to the future; it didn’t eliminate it. I learned a lot from both.

FP Never. Maybe I’ll get’round to it at some point. I’d forgotten about it until recently. I’ve left a lot of gaps. But the art period never led to anything. It was a path not taken.

FP Yes. My literary forebears are pretty specific. When I was first writing and wanted to solve a problem, I’d go back to these four authors time and time again—either to see how they’d done something or how they’d failed. One was Balzac, who said that if you’re living in a specific time and place, you should write about it, which I believe. Readers should know what people were wearing, what the furniture looked like when you were writing. Very few contemporary novelists give that. Balzac also believed if you set up a historical framework accurately—not overdoing it—at worst, people will read you for history. Balzac did it so accurately, and his work’s so vivid, even though he’s overwrought. He also takes on astoundingly stupid themes and makes a lot of them work.

Also, he had this sense of the importance of sexuality; the way people are moved by it—sometimes without even knowing why. I remember reading his Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes—how it opens with Lucien de Rubempré!³ A character I use talks about Lucien appearing at the opera—this astonishingly beautiful man everybody wants. At the end of the opera he ends up getting into a carriage with another man and having sex with him. I couldn’t believe it was happening. Balzac operates at a level of sophistication I admire instantly. You can’t escape him if you read him when you’re young.

Number two is Henry James, who I fought desperately against reading. I read Portrait of a Lady for the first time this year.

FP Yes—terrible! Who would know but somebody who had read everything by James? His own work is fine. His effect on other writing has been 90 percent disastrous. James inherited this idea from Flaubert and Turgenev of what a literary artist has to be. Luckily, James didn’t live it or write it. He wrote prolifically and covered a lot of areas, so we can see the play of his mind over a variety of surfaces, to use a Jamesian term. He wasn’t afraid of being brilliant, which Flaubert was. But because James seems to have been taken up in the thirties and forties as the writer’s writer, a lot of people would read one James story or novel, then build their entire writing career based on that, which is the error.

RC The question of James’s legacy is tricky: which one do you mean? The influence of which stage of his work?

FP It’s not only the stage. It’s the particular story someone reads. Did he read “The Jolly Corner,” not The Bostonians? If you read one but not the other, you’re seriously screwed as an artist.

FP I’ve read all the late books and enjoyed them immensely. I hung onto the pages of The Wings of the Dove to the last sentence. But if I ever write like that, push me in front of a bus! I want to write much more clearly, even though I understand James earned the right to write that way. He did; others have not.

FP Well, only when it’s unclear. I do a lot reading in contemporary fiction. Take Martin Amis. I’ve attempted to read London Fields fifteen times. I can get fifty pages in. I have the same problem with Dale Peck. I cannot doubt the perfection of the sentences, the beauty of the paragraphs, the marvelousness of each page. But I’m asleep on page forty. There’s a cavalier disregard for the reader in a writer saying: “I’m more important than you. I can do whatever I want. You have to sit here and read it, by God—otherwise you’re not trendy or fashionable.” I don’t think there’s a meeting on equal grounds between writer and reader.

Jonathan Swift did the same. He just happened to be a lot better at it. As a result we got Gulliver’s Travels. But he had nothing but contempt for his readers. He wanted to keep himself entertained, so while we get Gulliver’s Travels, we also get just the contempt—in something like “The Tale of the Tub,” which is unreadable.

FP Not really. I seem to experiment in different ways, formally and thematically Take A House on the Ocean, which was literally a folio of four unwritten books. People have said: “This is so beautiful.” To me it’s still this incredible hodgepodge of different things. It’s like somebody dropped the teapot and put it together backwards. But writers especially like that book and the way it’s put together. What that means is I wasn’t afraid to experiment, given all that mess. Ultimately, I think you have to hold the reader’s attention. You make a pact with the reader early on. Because of its subject matter, The Book of Lies plays more with language than most of my books.

FP Thomas Mann I read early on: first Buddenbrooks, then the short stories, then Felix Krull, the Confidence Man, which was hysterical, then pretty much everything else. Even where there were long, dull patches, there’d be these moments of astonishing imagination and lucidity. In The Book of Lies one character talks about Joseph and His Brothers, that long book which, more than any other novel of Mann’s, has these incredible moments where something happens and you’re just astounded. You think: “How did he get there?” There’s a scene in Egypt where Joseph goes to fetch his first masters, a brother and sister who are vaguely related to the Pharaoh. Joseph goes into the temple and watches this ceremony to Seti in which everybody is singing, chanting, and hopping on one foot. Hopping on one foot! I felt: “Boy, am I in a strange place!” I don’t doubt it happened. Mann connected in there and got to some truth intuitively.

I’ve gone back to Mann again and again to see how things are done. The fourth influence is Tolstoy, who’s also capable of amazing things. One reason I never wrote an AIDS novel was because of his The Death of Ivan Illych. Why bother writing a book about dying when he did it perfectly?

FP Almost totally. A couple of stories in Allen Barnett’s The Body and Its Dangers I like. But even they’re not equal to a moment I had with him two years after the publication of that at the Outwrite conference. Allen got up and said: “I’m supposed to be discussing narrative ventures in contemporary fiction. All I can think about is the two weeks I spent at my eye doctor’s trying to be able to see.” He went on for fifteen minutes. Our mouths fell open. The reality of the experience was so much more intense than even what he had gotten at in The Body and Its Dangers.

I have vivid memories of four people dying of AIDS while I was in the room. I don’t know how to present that in literature. I don’t know whether I should, frankly. It was a remarkably bad series of luck for me to experience it. Why force it on anybody else?

FP If that’s true, it’s realistic. It’s not that I don’t think the material can be handled. It can, in context; not quite obliquely, but not exactly head-on.

FP Yes. Edmund White did it in The Farewell Symphony. I’ve done it again in The Book of Lies. Probably I’ll deal with it again in some form. But the only person who can make it his story is somebody who went through the whole thing, then died of it. How the hell does he come back and tell us? Every death experience appears different. I don’t think anybody did death as well as Tolstoy. Instead it gets sentimental and bullshitty.

RC A number of books and films have recently appeared dealing with the great, sexually explosive years of the New York gay subculture before AIDS. What’s the appeal of that moment?

FP There are time periods in which certain things happen. The seventies was one. Right now, straight America is beginning to get into it with movies like The Ice Storm and Boogie Nights. I don’t think the world was ever sexually that free. Anywhere in the world you went—except deepest Africa or South America—there was this incredible sense of sexual freedom. It changed a lot of other things, too: the way people dressed; the way they moved, talked, related, had relationships. Until AIDS came along, it looked like that would be so forever, frankly. Gay culture happened to reach its first peak at that time.

I think it’ll be back again. One reason why I’m telling it is to do so unapologetically; to say: “I see nothing wrong with it.” We were experimenting. We didn’t know what the hell we were doing. We knew we didn’t want to be like those straight people. American heterosexuality is an incredible disaster. Everybody admits it. We were smart enough not to be like that, but we didn’t know what else to be like. It was a matter of constant self-invention, and it happened very quickly. Also, there were far fewer of us. We were probably about two thousand people. Many of us were actively engaged in professions which then affected the rest of the world within six months.

We were just trying to figure out what to do next in every single aspect of our lives. It was unprecedented. You couldn’t go back to Ancient Greece or sixteenth-century England. It was a brand new culture. By God, we made some bad errors of taste, but it was very much experimental. A lot of it worked since, number one, it spread to the rest of the world fairly intact, and number two, it hasn’t changed substantially since 1975.

RC The influence of gay men in determining taste for the mainstream hasn’t really changed subsequently, has it?

FP No. But it was never so subversive or instant as then, because it also coincided with the new burst of magazines that developed in the seventies, and color television. A variety of things happened simultaneously that allowed it to be as instant. If I write about it being a peak, it quite literally was. Also, I want to suggest it can come back again.

RC Some say we’re still in a highly liberated sexual culture, and that in recent times, gay culture has become even more confidently sexual despite the epidemic. Many people still have a lot of sex. Are you sure we’ve retreated from the seventies?

FP I used to come to Los Angeles a lot doing film work in the late seventies and early eighties. At an outdoor place called “Vaseline Alley” people would be having sex day, noon, and night. They were having sex in broad daylight in Fire Island and the Village. I used to have sex at night in the middle of the street. It is very different. I don’t know if that world could have lasted.

RC Others say the moment passed naturally; that sexual liberation was part of a series of different fashions and wouldn’t have lasted anyway.

FP It didn’t pass naturally. I remember the moment we realized we could trace the sexual connections between all our sick friends. Immediately we said: “This disease is sexually related.” It instituted a fear I don’t think has gone away yet—a deep, distressing fear, which goes beyond the reality of the situation, unfortunately. It’s very easy not to get AIDS these days, yet the fear surrounding it in the gay community operates on many different levels.

RC You spoke of Balzac’s stress on writing about the culture one inhabits. A contrast occurs to me here between your career and Andrew Holleran’s. There’s a sense of progression from his Dancer from the Dance to The Beauty of Men which relates to his getting older, but also to changes in culture. In your case, A House on the Ocean appeared only recently, long after the world it describes has passed. What would you reply to the critic who said: “Stop writing about what’s over. Write about what’s happening now”?

FP A few people said that. I’m allowing A House on the Ocean to appear now because I want to encourage young people not to be fearful or apologetic; to go out and reconstruct gay society so there’s a less fearful way to live.

RC To some extent the book is historical, though. Couldn’t it do just the opposite, by suggesting a golden era that cannot be recovered?

FP No. The only reason you mention a golden era is to get it back. I was persuaded by younger friends to put out that book. I brought up these same questions, and a few reviewers have gone after me specifically about that. But most have gone after me because I’ve refused to rewrite history in the light of AIDS. I’ve refused to say this was immoral or wrong. I won’t tailor the truth to current realities, which may change next year. I’m unreconstructed in that respect.

RC You’re suggesting there’s a cultural need now to say that sexual hedonism was bad. Isn’t it as acceptable not to comment, to present it neutrally? Anthony Haden-Guest’s book about Studio 54, The Last Party, doesn’t have to say the seventies were bad; in fact, he celebrates them, but with a certain distance.

FP Except he never understood what was going on. Look, homophobia isn’t dead—certainly not in the media. It exists on a widespread level. It’s just a little more hidden now. I’m a great enemy of homophobes because from the very beginning I came right out. I may have been the first publicly gay author in the world. I’ve never given straight people two minutes’ attention. I pretend they don’t exist and they don’t like it. They choose various ways of going after me which I don’t care about. I do care about younger gay men and women who’ve chosen this prevailing fear; who go after people of their generation. They’re trying to set up a new form of Puritanism. One thing I liked about people in the seventies was we were never sure what was going on. Nobody ever made judgments. You’d say: “That’s what’s happening now; that’s your thing.” I see people making judgments all around us now.

RC I wanted to ask about the experience of writing not merely about a different time, but a different place: the Pines and New York. You’re far away now, living in L.A.

RC Still, in the seventies, New York and San Francisco were seen as the two great centers of gay subcultural life. Do you have any time for some people’s concerns that works such as yours reflect a narrow metropolitanism; that they don’t reflect the realities of typical American gay lives beyond these urban centers?

FP I heard that for years. I always said: “Write your own books.” A lot of people did, and we got a much broader picture of gay life. I was fortunate because from 1979 I was traveling around different cities in the States and was able to see different gay lives. Consequently, it was a very specific strategy of mine with Like People in History and The Book of Lies to make sure national and even international aspects of gay life were written about. In Like People in History, you see gay life in San Francisco, in L.A., in different times and places. The same thing happens in The Book of Lies, though there’s a natural cultural bias on my part towards places I spent most of my time in during this formative period.

RC Were these metropolitan subcultures ever very different? Gay urban subcultures can appear monolithic.

FP I’ve never seen anything monolithic about gay culture. Even in New York, because of my friends and the people I danced and had sex with, I was aware of a very large Latino, Cuban, and Puerto Rican culture that abutted ours. The two came together at sex clubs, dance clubs, and parties. A growing black gay culture pushed in very fast and affected a lot of what we were doing. I was aware of a poor working-class scene, and a very wealthy scene—the uptown, snotty art crowd. It was so diverse. One nice thing about being gay then, as now, is you could float among these groups. All you needed was interest and whatever abilities were required.

RC The subculture was and surely is discriminating on some basis—looks, for instance.

FP It wasn’t all looks. Looks got you in the door. They didn’t keep you at the party.

I said to somebody of my generation the other day: “Remember the worst insult you could give somebody—the one you could ruin their lives with? “‘Bad sex.’” He said: “Yes, you could destroy somebody by saying: ‘He’s cute, but bad sex.’”

Dancing was a very large subculture. If you were into dancing and knowledgeable about music, that got you in. If you used drugs a lot, that got you around. There were some very attractive, able people who should’ve been part of these private membership clubs. They tried to get in and couldn’t: they were bad at sex, bad dressers, and couldn’t dance. The club owners were smart enough to pick up on who belonged and who didn’t.

RC Isn’t this concerning though? It’s a ruthless, unsparing culture that thinks of someone largely in terms of how good they are in bed, particularly in addition to the social stresses of accepting yourself as gay.

FP But that was the party aspect of it. Do you really expect something less superficial? On the other hand, I gave poetry readings at all the big dance clubs in New York. Doesn’t that seem totally out of context? And a nightclub like Flamingo was essentially an art club. Every weekend it was a completely different art show. One time we went there and it was a Versailles garden. Amazing. It wasn’t as shallow a scene as people pretend it was.

RC I can see that in a way you’re simply capturing the spirit of that scene and documenting it. Still, in not condemning it, a key principle for you, aren’t you in danger of surrendering a necessary objectivity? Must one be either participant and supporter of the sexual subculture or a critical outsider like Larry Kramer?

FP You couldn’t live in that culture and give an objective report. Nothing about it was objective or measured. Edmund White attempted that in States of Desire and didn’t do a bad job, but even he admitted he’d failed.

There was a belief at that time in the counterculture in being nonjudgmental about a whole variety of things, people, and activities; in effect you achieved a wider objectivity. You presented the material as clearly and multifacetedly as you could and let other people judge its value. I’ve always written with that in view. Maybe that’s something I learned in the sixties—how to distrust people’s judgments and values.

RC I noticed how much discontent you expressed at the gay media in the seventies diaries published in The Violet Quill Reader. The debates seem the same now as then: Larry Kramer’s views on sex; the question of positive images in culture. Should we be worried at the fixity of our preoccupations? After all, many things have changed since then.

FP First I have to backtrack a little. Though it’s very difficult to see now, especially for those of us right in the middle of it, AIDS didn’t have to happen. It wasn’t our destiny. AIDS represents a very large but temporary blip on the screen of gay culture. I was intimately involved at all levels of it—a former housemate of mine was the first person on the East Coast to get it. Still I have to say that to a large extent AIDS is irrelevant to what else is going on. It’s taken an enormous amount of energy and time out of the gay movement, gay literature, and culture. Now I wish people would put it in its place. It’s time to move on to something else. We have to go on—not by pretending AIDS didn’t happen, but by giving it its place, which in the end is going to be much smaller than anybody now has a clue. The whole AIDS crisis forced us to grow up a little faster than we otherwise had to. It also destroyed a lot of our most talented people. That’s its legacy. But in terms of the way we look at the past and the future, if we’re only influenced by AIDS, I think it’s really putting us in deep trouble. AIDS is a disease that happened to come around and strike a lot of people. That’s all the credit I’ll give it.

RC I’m interested in the long-established politicians/artists divide. In A House on the Ocean, you specifically document ways in which the Fire Island set were politically engaged. That seems to contradict Dancer from the Dance, whose introductory letters suggested two clear worlds—the politically engaged and the hedonistic.

FP Dancer from the Dance was written around 1976. I don’t think the merger had happened by then. Even though Randy Shilts, in the very distorted and skewed And the Band Played On, quoting virtually nobody but Larry Kramer, said the gay community responded to AIDS much too late, I’ll go out on a limb and say that if AIDS had happened to any other group of people anywhere, it would’ve taken another ten years for anything to have been done. We reacted with astonishing rapidity and large amounts of attention, money, and time, on a level I can’t believe, looking back. I’m just amazed a bunch of supposedly sex-crazed, drugged-out queens did all that so quickly.

RC Allan Gurganus has spoken of several books he hasn’t written because of his caretaking role. Does that strike a chord?

FP Sure. Caretaking and organizing; being in intensive care rooms; washing sick people down. We never lost sight of living at the same time, despite it all. I want that on the record.

On the question of things changing yet remaining the same: a lot of that’s true. A lot of basic issues to queer life remain unsolved. They’re never going to be solved. In terms of culture, gay life is a very large, middle-class bar culture. It’s uninterested in the arts. We’ve forced the arts down their throats, but they’d rather see Mr. Leatherman Contest than read Edmund White’s new novel.

RC Hasn’t that got worse? Twenty years ago, surely, one went to literature looking for resonant voices, fellow travelers. People don’t have to do that now.

FP It’s the same. People still want to read about their lives, which is what gay literature offers queer people. I’m pleased and surprised that when Edmund or I make public appearances, most people in the room aren’t fifty-six-year-old queens. They’re in their twenties and thirties, which means we’re continuing to speak to people about their lives. We’re not historical anomalies.

There used to be a whole bunch of gay readers who’ve vanished though. A lot died of old age or alcoholism long before AIDS came along: the cultured, single gentlemen of Anglo-American society. To me they were dinosaurs. I was outrageously open and they hated me. They tried to get me in bed, but hated me.

RC In the seventies diaries you mention a seminar on the gay novel in which, to your surprise, John Rechy’s name didn’t come up.

FP To this day I don’t get that. Rechy’s written several of the most important gay books that affected people then. If you read Numbers now, you’re surprised how subversive it is. He’s turned away from the gay aspect now and does other stuff in his writing. That makes sense. But I don’t know if he’s really any longer aware how much some of us appreciate him. He provided a moment of liberation with City of Night. When I read that in 1963, it almost sent me back into the closet. It presented such a frighteningly real look at what gay life could be. I said: “I don’t want any part of this.” Then I realized it was just one look. But City of Night was strangely liberating too. It cut away a lot of romantic crap we were getting then from other quarters.

RC Rechy was also astonishingly explicit. I wanted to raise the question of art and the erotic or pornographic. I’m always surprised by the extent to which American gay authors with literary reputations are prepared to write expressly erotic or pornographic stories.

FP But why? Sometimes our difference lies only in the sex we have, and if we don’t write about it, who will? John Updike? Ian McEwan? Spare me! Slashed to Ribbons was burned on the docks of Liverpool and London because of one particular “pornographic” story. In Like People in History I wanted to write more sex, but couldn’t get around to it. There was too much other stuff to cover. I told this to my English editor, who said: “Maybe you can get some of it in your new book.” I said: “OK, I’ll work on getting some hot sex scenes in.” As it was in The Book of Lies, I got in two, tops.

RC When you said you never got around to it, I thought of the moment in A House on the Ocean where you talk of the writer’s single-mindedness in leaving a nightclub when a good idea strikes, or abandoning sex midflow if you’re inspired. You write: “I’m no longer sure it was worth it.”

FP Well, I’m not. A couple of those parties got very interesting; I had to hear about them from others. That’s the great dichotomy between living your life and living your art. You decide at the oddest times to give up your life.

FP I had a moment where a boyfriend said: “It’s me or the novel.” I said: “Forget it. Don’t even joke about that.” I’ve had these movie scene moments in my life. Another was when a Hollywood producer actually handed me a cigar. I turned and said: “I hope everybody’s catching this.”

RC I wanted to ask about film. Long ago you almost saw a film made of The Lure.

FP In an interview years ago I said if a lesbian film producer and a gay film director wanted it, I’d do it. That’s pretty much what we have. A company’s been formed with a gay screenwriter, a gay director, and a lesbian producer. By the time they asked me for the rights, they’d storyboarded it already. Their respect for the book goes way beyond mine. I’d rewrite it totally.

Eyes, which isn’t gay, is still too subversive to be made into a movie. It got as close as Frank Perry—who did Mommie Dearest—and I writing a final screenplay. Then he made another film and his company went down the tubes. Eyes has been under option for nineteen years. Finally I took it off the market. Recently, a group in New York City were interested in doing a stageplay. I’ve given my consent and signed an option contract. If it succeeds on Broadway, I think it’ll go straight to film.

FP It doesn’t particularly. I was out here in 1977 doing screenplays for Universal. Before that I was doing something with Eyes. When that was put on hold, they kept me here and had me do various things with other movies. But the pay was too high; the life, too fabulous. I knew I’d never get any novels written if I’d remained.

RC The prospect of tackling gay themes in film must have felt slim then. The developments in fiction in the late seventies weren’t matched in film for many years.

FP The sad part about that was being out here. I met a lot of really smart, interesting gay people in film. None of them would take a chance on anything. Many specifically held back gay projects. It was that level of hypocrisy and closetedness that sent me spinning back to the East Coast.

RC Finally you seem to have settled on writing prose, having written in so many genres.

FP Yes. I could give you a couple of glib reasons like: “That’s where I make the most amount of money.” One good reason, however, is that I keep finding things to write about and problems to be solved. I keep on writing books nobody’s written before. Take The Book of Lies. It’s the most literary gay novel I’ve ever read. I kept asking: “Why isn’t there anything like this: pink and postmodern?” I wanted it to be a literary mystery story and fun.

The Book of Lies probably has the most unreliable narrator ever—apart from the governess in James’s Turn of the Screw. I’m a firm believer in making readers do extra work. With Like People in History, obviously I wanted everybody to suffer the way I’d suffered. They did, I’m happy to report. When people said: “I was in tears all day,” I’d say: “Now I’m happy.” With The Book of Lies, ideally at the end I want people to say: “I think I misread this entire book” and to have to read it again.

RC Could you say something about writing practice? Do you write directly onto machine?

FP Ambidextrous may have been the last book I wrote by hand. I always hated typewriters, which gave me a great deal of trouble. After the first computers came out in 1983, and as soon as I could afford to, I got one with a pretty good writing system on it.

FP I do much more revising now than I ever did on those damn typewriters. I guess I was lucky. Computers came to me when I’d already been writing pretty solidly for about ten years. I knew what I was doing.

RC You mentioned things you’d change in The Lure. Do you ever want to return to a finished project?

FP Only the film version of it. This came up when Frank Perry asked me to write a screenplay from Eyes. I said: “This means I’m going to have the read this book. I don’t want to.” The book was maybe a decade old at that point. I put it off forever. Finally I read it, and had no problem with it. It read, as a lot of these things do, as having been written by someone else.

One thing about writing the memoirs, as you pointed out, is there’s a twenty-year gap between the events and when I write them. That’s on purpose. The person who experienced those things wasn’t me. In some cases, the experiences have changed me incredibly from who that person was when I was twelve or twenty-one or thirty-three. That person is so different to who I am now that I have trouble identifying with him. Recently, I went through some things I hadn’t looked at in ten years. One was a series of photographs of me from 1977—probably at the height of whatever looks I had. It was at a high point in my career, too—just before the publication of The Lure. A photo was taken for the back cover of The Mesmerist by David Duncan, at that point a famous New York celebrity dance photographer. He took some book jacket shots and afterwards, as I was changing, came into the room and locked the door as I was pulling up my jeans, still wearing no shirt. He started taking more photos of me. As it was the seventies, I got into it, saying: “Take your dirty photos!” They weren’t dirty exactly, but they did reflect his view of photography as erotic art. They were mostly of me buttoning myself up. But he took what turned out in retrospect to be two of the best, most accurate photos of me. I looked at them recently and remembered the session with vivid detail. I just don’t know who the hell that guy is in those photos! I can see aspects of my personality and character there, but I’ll never have the ease, confidence, or savoir faire that man had because of my subsequent experiences. So this gap does change things.

RC Is this gap paradoxically what allows you to write memoirs in the first person? You know it’s still a fictional “I.”

FP It isn’t if you can recapture it. If you selected one paragraph from each of the memoirs, you’d have three different voices. Really I’m trying to be as accurate to who that particular person is as I can be. But, yes, without the gap you wouldn’t have a take on what the specific “I” is.

FP Yes. I work at a lot of different things at different paces. Big projects I’ll generally try to cope with at one time—except for Like People in History, which I sat on for a year. I was really afraid to write the last sections. That was artistic cowardice. They were extremely difficult to write without self-pity or sentimental falseness. Yet I had to get my heart into them. I didn’t know how to do that to begin with. I had to let it sit there and stew.

I wrote the scenes of Matt in the hospital with tears streaming down my face. It was very hard—and they weren’t particularly true to what my experience had been. It was just that I was remembering the gestalt of the whole thing. I knew I had to be in a position of extreme grief to do it right. But who wants to be in that state, day after day, week after week, to write something?

FP No, I’m very lazy. I’ll put off writing something for a week, until I feel it’s really ready to be written. With a book like Like People in History—around five hundred pages—I’d say there’s maybe fifty pages I rewrote a dozen times each. The rest was pretty fast.

FP No. I work two or three hours in the morning, tops. Toward the end of a project, when I can’t shake it off, I may do some more work later in the day, or work four hours. Then my mind turns to jelly. I have a very short attention span. I’m really scatterbrained.

RC Is it important to be surprised by what you are writing? Or do you sketch everything out in advance?

FP I recently found some sketches I did for The Book of Lies in an old journal. I can’t even figure out what they mean anymore—a year after writing the book. Before Ambidextrous, I used to plot out everything on a large scale. I had long notes on the character’s fortunes. Actually, I recommend that to somebody writing that type of novel who’s unsure where they’re going. With Late in the Season, a smaller book at around fifty thousand words, I sketched it out, but it was devised in such a way I didn’t have to do too much sketching. With Ambidextrous I had no idea where I was going. I knew I wanted to tell these particular stories that had happened to me and people around me. I threw it up in the air and let it come down where it was going to. I was pretty surprised when that worked in the first part. I tried it again with the second part—that worked. Again with the third. At that point I suddenly had more trust in whatever this combination of conscious and unconscious things is that makes me a writer.

Nowadays I have a lot of general ideas. I’ll make notes beforehand on what I’d like in this book. Then I’ll conveniently forget them all and start writing. But the notes are necessary in the early stages. Then I’ll write the damn thing, reminding myself of certain things in my daily journals: “Better include this; don’t forget that.” At some point I’ll go into a panic and return to one of these completely baffling sketches. They appear to satisfy me at the time. To a normal human being, they look like so much fol-de-rol.

FP Well, David Bergman has approached me. One of his graduate students was getting his postgraduate degree in literary autobiography. David sent him to look at the journals. The guy said: “Are there more of these?” There are tons more! So this young man approached me directly about doing a volume when I was on book tour. I said: “I haven’t read these things, essentially, since I wrote them. For the Reader, it was David [Bergman]’s selection. But if you want to go to the Beinecke [Library at Yale] and read what’s there, I’ll give you safe passage.”

Everybody tells me this stuff has some value. It may well have some historical value. So, maybe in time a book of selected journals—up to 1990—will come out.

RC We’ve spent a lot of time reviewing your career since the seventies. I wanted you to name some works of gay fiction that have given you pleasure.

FP Dancer from the Dance, definitely. I read a lot of Edmund White which I like a lot. The book I go back to again and again is States of Desire. I also like his short stories in Skinned Alive, which got extremely short shrift here. To my mind they’re still the best book of fiction he’s done. Eighty-Sixed by David Feinberg I read every once in a while and adore. It’s perfect of its kind.

FP Samuel Delany; Harlan Greene. I love Bernard Cooper’s books. Truth Serum was just tremendous. The way he evoked Los Angeles was perfect.

Of the younger writers, I liked Scott Heim’s Mysterious Skin and Patrick Moore’s Iowa. There’s The Captain’s Fire by J. S. Marcus, about a bisexual in Berlin. And Kevin Killian. I’d like to read more stuff by Kevin Esser, who writes about man-boy love—unfortunately not very often these days. I love Michel Tournier. Gemini is a strange, wonderful book.

Then we go back to probably the one gay writer who’s been consistently overlooked in this country. He wrote one of my “desert island” books: J. R. Ackerley’s Hindoo Holiday. From beginning to end, it’s completely delightful. It’s about the gayest book I’ve ever read. It assumes everybody in the world’s going to be homosexual, unless you say otherwise. Then you get a book like My Father and Myself, which is so strange, and that really funny book about his dog, We Think the World of You. But Hindoo Holiday stands by itself.