Gay Fiction Speaks: Conversations with Gay Novelists

Allan Gurganus is best known for his fictionalization of the consequences of the American Civil War, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, and for his second novel concerning the impact of AIDS upon 1980s New York, Plays Well with Others. Born in North Carolina in 1947, at twelve Gurganus gave a one-man show of his oil paintings. On graduating from high school in 1965, he attended the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. In 1966 Gurganus joined the Navy and, while on ship, started writing. He came out at twenty-one, and moved to New York to attend Sarah Lawrence College. In 1972 Gurganus won a scholarship to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was tutored and befriended by the novelist John Cheever. In 1974 Cheever successfully submitted Gurganus’s “Minor Heroism” to the New Yorker. Gurganus taught briefly at Stanford and Duke universities before returning to New York to teach part-time at Sarah Lawrence College.

In 1981 Gurganus began writing his first novel, the comic epic about the history of the South, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (New York: Knopf, 1989). Gurganus’s short stories, meanwhile, had appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, and anthologies such as Edmund White, ed., Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction (London: Faber and Faber, 1991). They were later collected in White People (New York: Knopf, 1991). Plays Well with Others (New York: Knopf, 1997), Gurganus’s most recent novel, is set in New York in the period before and during the devastation caused by AIDS. His story “Preservation News” featured in a special issue of Preservation magazine (September 1997) and was reprinted in Brian Bouldrey, ed., Best American Gay Fiction 3 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998).

Gurganus is currently working on a collection of novellas, “Recent American Saints,” and a third novel, “The Erotic History of a Southern Baptist Church.” His home is in North Carolina, where this interview took place on Tuesday, November 11, 1997.

RC Several reviews of Plays Well with Others mentioned similarities to Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. Could you comment on the relationship between them, and on whether questions of narrative and form in your work preoccupy you consciously or more intuitively?

AG Widow and Plays Well have lots in common. They’re both first-person narratives told by funny people in the aftermath of a traumatic, historically notable circumstance: the Civil War and the pandemic. They’re both suffused with the seasick psychology of surviving. They’re both offered in the voices of people who are mythomaniacs when it comes to others—the great ones they’re explaining and salvaging for us. The hosts become mythic by creating far more mythic and adored others.

In Widow we have nineteenth-century lore, and in Plays Well the recent past. Lucy Marsden, the narrator of Widow, has her own stories—including domestic violence against her by a Civil War veteran, and all his stories about the War itself, which irremediably deformed him when he was a child. She also offers the tales told her by her best friend, Castelia Marsden, former slave of her husband and his family. Lucy becomes a Homeric repository for other people’s tales. In some ways her truest voice is manifest when she’s imitating others. My intention for that book was to create a person who spoke every language available to a human being who’d lived in the hundred years she’d survived. We all speak many languages a day: one to the delivery boy, one to our beloved, one to our grandparents, one to our mother, one to the neighbors, one to the telephone operator and the cabdriver. I wanted Lucy to have all those voices available. I wanted a kind of Livia Plurabelle, comprehensive psychic voice.¹

Hartley Mims, jr. in Plays Well is a beginning writer in search of a subject. He goes to New York partly because he has to get out of a small town because he’s gay and can’t abide living there. He leaves partly to avoid being monitored and checked, and partly because of his ambition to create something beautiful. There’s also his larger fantasy: to create an address book that’s a masterpiece. He wants friends even more alive, ambitious, and gifted than he. He’s a collector of experiences and people. His tale, because it covers a shorter period—fifteen years, as opposed to Widow’s one hundred—is a slightly more linear narrative. I back into the story the way I think one does in memory. One holds onto singular images, then shifts from past to present. But I wanted the story of Hartley’s quest, his Dick Whittington arrival in New York, to have a kind of mythic fairy-tale innocence and energy. I wanted the prose of the novel to darken and simplify as the book rolled on. So the opening of the book—“Before”—is very F. A. O. Schwartz: toylike, self-consciously playful, and irresponsible; heady and game; young and sometimes coy. It was heaven to write. Having lived in New York from 1979 to 1995 myself and having survived many of the things Hartley did, I found my memory took a long time to “o’erleap the wall” of HIV; to get back to the “garden,” the beautiful innocence of the period. For me the greatest pleasure in writing the book was reestablishing as a beachhead that moment of early promise: the club scene; the wide-open casting-call for good-looking, intelligent, and immensely ambitious kids. Four thousand land every day in New York, even as we speak.

In terms of narrative strategy, I think all the best things in painting or writing come from a plan and then some unconscious inner prompting. If you’re lucky, you’re smart enough to back off then and become nanny for your own baby, saying: “Don’t go near the pond, darling. You’ve been there before. You almost drowned yesterday, remember?” I try to keep my intuitive animal free to make mistakes and slaughter what it will. Then, once its deed is done, I go in and clean up intellectually.

I think one reason my work’s been so widely received is precisely because it’s so emotional that it so unapologetically glories in narrative qua narrative. One favorite fact about the notion of narrative is that it’s from the Greek gnaurus, meaning “to know.” My great faith is that narrative knows more than I do. If I trust it, setting it in motion, it exerts its own laws and rules and will lead me to places I couldn’t have got to if I’d sat down the way some people do and blocked out the book in outline. For me, that’d be the equivalent of some soothsayer coming in the front door, saying: “Allan, you’ll die on January 23rd, 2003, and nothing you can do will change that.” To know the end at the beginning would argue against bothering to get there. I want to be startled, to make a discovery in the course of the narration as the characters do. I didn’t know in Plays Well, literally, who was going to live and who would die. I was as surprised as the characters!

RC What is known at the outset? Do you have any sense of the shape of a narrative?

AG I’m always being outwitted. When I started Widow I thought it was a thirty-page story. Boy, was I wrong! Similarly, I’ve had stories that seemed to suggest novella length that I’ve then cut down to three pages. “It Had Wings” in White People was originally twenty-two pages; it’s now three-and-a-half. I wish I could do more of that. The discipline of condensation is an immensely instructive way of learning about what you do and don’t need. The French have shown us you can get a field of flowers into a bottle of perfume. That’s the goal. One jeopardy of writing on computer—I see this in student work that comes to me—is that it all looks great. Therefore everything stays. Those of us who grew up with the arduous task of typing learned to condense for various reasons. One was that we couldn’t bear to retype a redundant page, so we found ways around it.

Sometimes the work begins with a single sentence. “Blessed Assurance” in White People—one of the six best things I’ve written—began with the sentences: “I sold funeral insurance to North Carolina black people. I myself am not black.” I started with an occupation I had heard three facts about from a young friend of my brother. He sold insurance for six weeks, then became so guilt-stricken he fled the occupation.

With Widow, I carried around the ambition to write about the South and the War for years. Every Southerner does. It’s information you get almost daily—about the War. All that is still an astonishing reality here. It was only when I saw the phrase in the New York Times in the late seventies—“Oldest Living Confederate Widow”—and after reading a little article about how many widows were still on the payroll in Mississippi, that I suddenly had her voice—or it had me.

There’s no way to predict. The only way to do it is to stand six days a week in proximity to the material. I have a friend who’s a concert pianist who writes letters at the piano. He says proximity to the instrument approximates keyboard practice itself. When I go on tour for books, there’s a kind of joy attached to visiting bookstores all over the States, Canada, and England. But there’s also a tremendous mourning because I can’t work. I’ve set up a system whereby I have printed-up material. I fax back changes to my assistant who types it in. It’s not insanely productive, but I love working on airplanes. I can’t stand flying and need something to look at other than clouds. I need to keep that constant umbilical connection to the work—frequently, to five or six things at once. I love having many things going. It’s like having six boyfriends. When one spurns you, the other will come through the door looking better than ever, holding a bouquet.

AG Maybe the period promoting a book provides that. I can’t work. I feel resigned to that fact, but I’m doing something else directly connected to the work. I’m preaching from it, reading it aloud, being John the Baptist in the wilderness crying: “The Redeemer’s here. He just costs twenty-five dollars a copy!” I find it hard to take more than one day off a week. Even when I’m on vacation, I’m reading and working all the time, for the simple reason that I love to do it. I feel, after thirty years of writing, divinely equipped to do what I’m doing.

I started out as a painter, but as soon as I wrote my first page of fiction, it was: “Here we are. I’m not imitating anybody. This is a voice. I know how to do this.” It’s like oxygen. Who’d stop breathing for a week because they’d been breathing forty-five years? Writing sustains me. Apart from publication, if I were told tomorrow that nothing I write will ever be published or read again, my schedule wouldn’t change much. I’ve been very lucky because Widow was on the bestseller list and was published in eight or nine languages, totally unexpectedly. It broke every rule, being too long and having an endless title when everything was titled Don’t or Think. I feel very blessed. The nest egg from that finally released me briefly to write full time, at the ripened age of forty-two. Now I am still trying to write for a living. I know I can earn a living in many ways—and did, for the forty-two years before Widow appeared, mostly as a teacher.

RC You spoke about the license you give your imaginative sense, then to this cautionary, editing sense. Does this suggest the literal processes of vision and revision?

AG I think there’s a constant cool and melt, like moving the hot liquid work from one vessel to another in the air, cooling with each pass and transfer. Imagining the starting text is the part I love most, but I love revision too. Auden said to be a writer you have to be a little in love with the drudgery of the profession. For me there’s this great, initial flooding out, where I’m typing ninety-five words a minute and still not moving as fast as my mind. I don’t care whether I hit the “t” or “j” as long as there’s some semblance of the word so I can go back and correct it. You’re literally blind—you don’t even see the screen or keyboard. You sit there in this kind of trance, taking dictation or describing an interior landscape or this room where something dreadful and marvelous is happening. Then you put it aside and let it cool. You print it out; you hope to surprise yourself. You write over that in longhand, then type in those changes, then do the same again—until it’s impossible to remember any revision. It becomes living pitch; serum; plasma. The circulation has to work. It has to have living access to the main artery, then the subordinate tributaries. The smallest toe has to be warm as the providing heart. That’s when you know it’s done—when it’s hot all over as a feverish baby.

RC Are there ideas you run with for a while that you then decide not to execute?

AG I never give anything up forever. I keep drafts of stories that’ve been going for years. I think there’s a reason they compel me to continue them. Finally, each of us only has about three stories. There are only about six in the whole world: “Man Leaves Town,” “Man Arrives in Town.” I have stories I’ve been working on for fifteen years. There’s something wrong with the middle, or I don’t know how to end it yet. I have a talent for beginnings, in life and art. Sustaining’s another question, and getting the hell out intact is something else altogether. But there’s a reversal that has to happen. You can wait a long time for it.

I have a story in progress called “A Stolen Bible Is a Noticed Bible,” about a child whose father puts Gideon Bibles in rural motels in the fifties—as mine did. The father’s extremely ugly but immensely charming, with a beautiful speaking voice. He sells sundries—bow ties that light up like Christmas trees; geegaws and gimcracks—at little rural stores all over the South. For years I’d take this story out every six months, saying: “Fabulous, fabulous. What? No, no.” I’d add something else, then put it back. Last year I invented a traffic accident while the son and father were out. This amazing thing happened—like a thunderclap. At the moment the child looked at his father just before they crashed, he realized his father’s secret: this beloved guy was black. That explained why his mother’d been unfaithful, was embarrassed by him, and why the father never spoke of his ancestry. It explained a little photograph of a black woman the son had found in the back of his father’s wallet.

I’d been carrying this story around for fifteen years, and I had to experience the revelation in the same time frame as the character. I had to remain almost slavishly loyal to the story. I think loyalty’s one of my great merits as a person. I’ve lost friends to death, but have a hard time giving up friends; saying to somebody who’s behaved hideously: “Honey, I can’t let you do this to me over and over again; you’re out of here.” It’s very painful. But long-range good faith is a huge merit in fiction. All it takes is three-and-a-half stellar pages to make you immortal. I want to be loyal to those pages and keep them up-to-date with my own evolution as a citizen, lover, son, brother, neighbor. That’s really what you’re doing: keeping the stories abreast of your own discoveries.

RC You speak easily of people and writing in similar terms. It made me think of the moment in Plays Well where Hartley does a double take on seeing his first story in print. The real Hartley feels distant from the implied author of the piece. Did that experience hold true for you? Has it been important to your writing to be surprised by the self you later perceive in it?

AG My goal as an artist and my goal as a person are surprisingly synchronous. That means I’m lucky. My goal is to become, through lived work and and work lovingly undertaken, a more complete person. There’s that wonderful quote about most of the mischief in the world coming from the inability of a man to sit alone in a chair. Since earliest childhood I’ve been lucky in having this immense capacity to amuse myself. My father, a very withheld and difficult if ethical man, rarely told us anything about ourselves as children. He wasn’t a person who lived in any moment but the present. Buddhists would tell us he’d achieved something extraordinary. But I think for a novelist, that’s tragedy. Even so, my father told me near the end of his life that, as a baby, I could be left with a pot and a spoon in the corner of a room for hours. They’d hear me inventing voices and moving things around. I think I’ve made a merit of that weirdness. That’s what writers do: push round the pots and spoons and make them the Peloponnesian Wars, the pandemic in New York, or the American Civil War.

My work’s very consistent. My first story “Minor Heroism,” which opens White People, was written when I was twenty-six. I’m still happy to call it my own. I was very lucky in that all the work I did as a painter made me very aware of the holiness and beauty of surface. That’s also something I think has been consistently true in my work. I’ve always cared immensely about the shape of the sentences, the coloration of the prose, its rhythms.

There’s also an ethical strain in my work from the start. I don’t think of myself as writing entertainments merely, though I’d like to think I’m often entertaining. But it’s like your parents slipping your vitamins or cold medicine into your favorite fruit juice or beloved custard dessert. I’ve a method in my madness, and I’d like to think it would be possible for a reader to finish one of my books and say: “What an immensely satisfying meal that was,” without feeling they’d been slipped a vitamin Mickey, ethically speaking.

I have an immense sense of mission politically. Widow, from the very beginning, was about the death of the patriarchy and the necessity of killing the unreasoning and brutal warrior-father. Similarly, it predicted and urged the ascendancy of the overlooked feminine principle—the generative half, as opposed to the destructive part. Lucy Marsden is so named because I wanted a word combining both war and its opposition: “Mars,” the god of war; “den,” a sanctuary. “Lucia” is, of course, light. I think the whole book’s in the battle between one vision and the other. The same scheme is more overtly true in Plays Well. There it is about a straight, a bisexual, and a gay character falling in and out of love with each other in every possible permutation. It also involves trying to achieve a destiny apart from the contempt, bias, and difficulty this culture visits on anybody other than the heterosexual with three children in the suburbs. I think the book’s ending as it does in “Paradise” is an essential aspect. Crucially, it’s a paradise in which each of us ascends to the highest order of angels only if somebody recognizes our genitals and our hands. That recognition indicates we have, genuinely, in the course of our assigned years made ourselves known, in the biblical sense and every other, to other humans. That insistence on one’s sexual substance and on sexuality’s radical, central place in our lives in this self-loathing, self-punishing culture—is just part of the undercurrent and message of the book.

RC The moral element of fiction is not something every writer would stress. Do you think of it as a rare preoccupation?

AG I’m the great-great-grandson of ministers on both sides. I have preaching beating in every corpuscle. I get up and preach to the mirror, dogs, cats, and birds if nobody else is around. I’ve made my living as a teacher until recently. I’m the eldest of four children, and this caregiving, marshall-at-arms overseeing was forced on me. I don’t think one chooses one’s preoccupations; they’re genetically encoded and come to you with the circumstances of your birth. But, given that, I welcome my obsession with “How to Live Morally.” I welcome the music of all sermons. I think it makes my work more interesting.

My early grounding was in the Bible. I had a lay minister father who read the Bible aloud before every meal. I went to church, Sunday school, and every goddamn Bible meeting. I put up with having the King James Bible drilled into me whether I liked it or not. Weirdly enough, I must have mostly liked it. It happens to be a work of consummate human genius. It’s full of wishes and laws; full of color and the assumption that human life, if told properly in all its mundane details, can amount to amazing universal meaning. The parable of the lost coin; that of the seeds that fall onto hard ground and fertile: what could be more basic? Yet as we sit here, it’s part of our amazing joint culture. So the religious fundamentals, drilled into me early on, clearly fell on fertile ground. I’ve adapted them by virtue of being gay, by despising so much of what was thrust upon me. I’ve subverted the folktales and their implicit morals for my own odd ends.

My goal by the end of my life is to have written three or five parables and fables that will be useful to people. In some of the same ways the Bible has been useful; in showing common people struggling to maintain their own decency and an accountability to their best selves and loved ones.

RC Have you observed, even inadvertently, the same preoccupation with the fable—or parable-like—in other writers?

AG I’m never ashamed of influences. I’ve been very lucky in having brilliant teachers. My reading influences come from the great nineteenth-century novelists. Henry James was my first god—then Balzac, Proust, Tolstoy, Dickens, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Isaac Babel. Preeminently, though, Chekhov and Shakespeare are the great ones for me. The goal, in terms of who’s greatest—a stupid but sometimes instructive exercise—is who understands most deeply the most kinds of people in the world? We’re living in an age where the goal is toward blandification; elimination of differences. There are no fourth-generation Pittsburgh steelworkers today who have immense necks because their great-grandfathers did; who sit round all day talking about the foundry and sparks, and how many gross of rods or sheets they put out the week before. The dignity of manual work; the pride in craft—even the craft of writing—seems in fast retreat. Everybody wants to live in Beverly Hills in a state of celebrity for something they haven’t really done yet. Everybody expects a certain amount of praise, press coverage, creature comfort.

I marvel at the age of Shakespeare and even of Chekhov. Then it was possible to write, in one story, of a princess and her gatekeeper—and with equal compassion. Shakespeare understands Lady Macbeth as a childless, immensely intelligent, and ambitious person who has fifty IQ points on all the men in the play. She’s a woman who has nothing to do but push her passive, milky husband into a course of action that turns out—precisely because of her own bottled ambition—disastrously for everybody. In the same play, the gatekeeper’s doing his job. He has his favorites, knows who’s coming to him and who’s not. He has his own dignity, power, and career. The world is reimagined, top to bottom—an astonishing achievement.

I’d like to think at the end of my career I will have understood more kinds of people than just me and my kind. I see narrative as a license and imperative for doing that. One reason I’m interested in writing about gay, straight, and bisexual people, about foot-fetishists and nuns, is that I want to do one of each. My writer’s pantheon is filled with people who’ve tried to treat as many people as possible with justice. Shakespeare was the son of a moderately successful glove-maker; Chekhov was the grandson of a serf literally owned by aristocrats. Put them alongside Dickens, the son of favored house servants in the great homes, and Proust, an aristocrat with a Jew for a mother, who was able to wander into the great salons without ever fully being part of them. I feel that I, as a middle-class person with access to upper-class circles and as a gay person who can pass in straight society but chooses not to, have all the hobbles necessary for complete freedom.

It’s a wonderful paradox that there’s never been a great novel written by a king or president. It’s always those of us that have been wounded early, who’ve been held back or embarrassed. And we wind up singing the praises of whatever milieu we aspire to enter. John Cheever believed fervently in the Brooks Brothers, Yale, Saint Mark’s, and Andover possibilities precisely because he was thrown out of school for smoking at sixteen and never spent a day in college. He always lived a marginal, hand-to-mouth existence by his wits. So his honorary degrees from both Yale and Harvard meant the world to him. We’re created by what we criticize.

RC Some people think human character is inevitably shaped by changes in material circumstances—for example, technology. Are you offering a counterstatement to that, according to which character or humanity may exist as archetypes?

AG Well, “archetype” makes me nervous. There’s always somebody who’ll say: “You’re type twenty-seven A, with a little variation in the lower register.” I think the same principles apply for me that applied for Dante or Horace. That’s why I can still read them with such pleasure. What’s interesting: to investigate the immense ancient mystery of human character as it’s brought to bear on present reality. The oldest living Confederate widow was interesting because she wasn’t telling the old war story in 1910; she was telling it in 1975. She just happened to have had half a century of hard looking. She hadn’t previously been asked to unpack her perfected stories. It’s a question of when you choose to tell a story and how the historical circumstances of the time affect that classical conception of what people will and won’t do.

I’ve found frequently the best readers of my work in progress aren’t fellow writers. Instead, they’re friends who work day jobs. They say: “I loved it until he left his wife for three days without telling her. This guy wouldn’t have done that. He would’ve left a note or something on the answering machine. He wouldn’t just have taken off four days before their fiftieth anniversary. Or if he did take off, you left out something.” That’s fascinating criticism; really something I can work with, as opposed to: “In terms of the book’s overall structure, the symbolic substructure pertains, etc.” I’d much rather have “would or wouldn’t have done that.” It implies consideration of the donnée. It implies I’ve created a person with wants, needs, possibilities, limitations, grouchinesses, biases. I am therefore wonderfully limited by the very things I’ve created, in the way a poet’s limited by the metric stanzas he’s undertaken to honor. I’ve given up my freedom by committing to these precepts; I’m damn well duty-bound to honor them. Of course, if you get three or four characters going who are running on very different clocks and at very different concepts of justice, entitlement, cruelty, or humor, then, by God, you’ve got a novel—or the energetic bassline of one.

I want to give every person who walks through this door and every person who enters any of my fiction a fair shake. It thrills me when the electricians who renovated this old house meet me in the post office and I know the names of all their kids: who’s graduated, who’s having trouble, whose mother has Alzheimer’s. I’m lucky in many ways. One is that I’m profoundly interested in others. The paradox is there are many writers who aren’t. I have an immense sense of the possibilities of community, and I celebrate that. I try to hold back from being like a bad Frank Capra ending, in which the town meeting starts singing “God Bless America.” Those small-town crowd scenes in It’s a Wonderful Life, where Jimmy Stewart says: “We may not be fancy, but by God when George’s barn burned, we all pitched in, didn’t we, George?”—I secretly love all that. It still cracks me up.

I’m really an old thirties Commie under this glittering, lacquered exterior. [Laughs] I believe and know from my own life that to be a part of a tribe is the partial antidote to this hideous end of the century. It’s not a thirties works project administration post-office mural to think people can genuinely pitch in and help with the harvest. I’ve seen what a group of three people can do for each other. It’s titanic. It’s the thing one can celebrate endlessly without running out of material. It’s what I have instead of religion: some weird faith in the common weal; in the promise of differing similarities between people. A perpetual motion machine. That’s what literature depends upon. If my emotions were murky and mysterious to the reader, I wouldn’t have three people reading me. But if I can open up all the weird particularities of my own volatile, sometimes insanely crazed and paranoid emotional life, and invite people in and orient them with a map so they always know where they stand …

I’m very conscious of not wanting unintentionally to disorient the reader. Sometimes I disorient him or her on purpose, but I never plan to do it accidentally. Once trust is established, you can take your reader anywhere. Then I think you can tackle him or her anywhere. You’re really inviting the reader not into an entertainment but into some huge investigation as to how I, as a survivor of HIV, this miraculous, Jonah-like figure belched up on the beach, this “I-alone-who-lived-to-tell-the-tale” solitary man out of an immense generation, survived. I feel profoundly privileged and compelled to tell the truth. The more inconvenient the truth, the more guile I need to get people to stay and listen. So I feel wired and blessed—and, almost daily, if not always hourly, amazed to be alive.

RC Compared to the donnée of the oldest Confederate widow, the material for Plays Well came to you a fundamentally different way. To what extent did the idea for that book, given the language you’ve just used to describe the real experiences from which it broadly grew, present itself to you in terms of an obligation, or—as you’ve talked in political terms—something with political urgency?

AG I think every writer worth reading is chosen by some sponsoring subject. He then wisely defends it, saves it, and champions it. Millions of people just went down to a disease—and are going down as we speak! More specifically, thirty or forty adorable friends and lovers—cranky, gorgeous people, gifted beyond reason, died in my company. What to make of this?

If they’d all been drowned in one flood, one could blame an army corps of engineers, maybe, or some tasteless act of God. But this story reads like science fiction. It’s a Gothic tale. Cruel, unreasoning, and heartless government agents turned their backs when the wrong kind of people were getting sick. They clapped their hands, saying: “We couldn’t have set it better ourselves. Let’s slash another forty million dollars and see how many go down to it next year,” without understanding it would soon come for their own children and wives. You put this fragile, hopeful community in the middle of this horrific, creeping malady which has no name and whose source is totally unknown, and I think a tennis racket could write a novel about it! As a subject, it has absolutely everything; it’s irresistible. And it’s impossibly hard. I knew my treatment would have to be essentially comic.

It was possible for me to write about it now after sixteen years because of recent medical advances. If the treatment of HIV had stayed the same, I probably wouldn’t be here, but I also wouldn’t be able to write about it. What interests me is that history moves so quickly we can already look back to the early days with a different emphasis. In those days, to find you had a spot on your arm was to know you had six weeks, tops. There was nothing to do but go home, get under the quilts, write your will, and shiver to death. You were going to drop seventy pounds in a matter of weeks and die of malnutrition because the virus was feeding on you. Now, when I see friends who are positive going to the gym and looking like Godzilla they’re so pumped, gorgeous, and buffed, it’s possible to look back on our old spindly ones with an amazed horror, respect, and sadness for all they missed medically, and all they missed in terms of the promise of their lives ahead.

It’s only possible for me now because I really genuinely believed this fall—1997—we’d have some kind of breakthrough. I had this psychic flash that this was going to be the fall. Of course, I’ve felt that every season for sixteen years—it’s truly pitiful. But I genuinely believed it. One reason I worked so hard to finish the book was because I had this superstitious feeling that if I could do that, I’d help make it possible. It’s all magic; it doesn’t make any sense. Magic makes perfect sense; that’s why it transcends logic, substituting rituals for reason.

RC There’s clear risk involved, notwithstanding your sense of certainty, in the book containing a narrative perspective so closely bound up with a particular contingency.

AG There is. But that becomes an interesting part of the period, too. In fact, the lack of a breakthrough, so anticipated by us all, makes me love the book not less but more. It gives the book a kind of validity it wouldn’t have had, had I been completely correct about my wishes. But writing about our looking after each other after a period of such heedless, outward, selfish, happy, frisky experimentation involved almost reliving it. Plays Well isn’t about my friends who died—I mean not about literal friends. I don’t really work that way. I wouldn’t have spent seven years in the voice of a ninety-nine-year-old woman if I were an autobiographical writer.

Part of the joy of Plays Well was writing in the voice of somebody contemporary, smart, and allusive, as gay people tend to be: full of names. To use Peter Pears, Donna Summer, J. S. Bach, Maria Callas, and Gustav Mahler in one paragraph, after you’ve lived seven years in the voice of a woman a hundred years old, with a fifth-grade education from 1888, was a little bit of OK. It was, like, multiple orgasms in thirty seconds! But I invented characters who weren’t only composites of the people I’ve known. Angie “Alabama” Burns is an amalgam of twenty career women in the arts I know and respect the hell out of, precisely for all they gave up to build their work, promote and protect it. She’s also this wish for a woman friend I’d most like to have had; the one that’s the funniest, smartest, most talented, most wild, and most loyal. One joy of being a writer is that you get to be a professional wisher. You get to make your wishes come true on the page every day. A lot of energy in Plays Well arrives from my wish for some intact community that will survive even AIDS.

RC You spoke about the proliferation of books about AIDS; within Plays Well, Hartley refers to what other writers would do with the topic. To what extent were you writing Plays Well as a response to earlier novels?

AG I “read at” a lot of the other books, but haven’t really read them. I found most too disappointing to finish. This is partly a result of where they fell in the history of the pandemic. When you’re in a burning building, you can’t be expected to have perfect form as you jump from a fourth-floor window. You get out whatever way you can. I think my book benefits from the hindsight of sixteen years—which is really like a century, since it’s hard to remember when the world was without HIV. It’s necessary that we remember then. That means we can also imagine a world without it up ahead. But I’d open a book and the gay character in a third-person narration is at a clinic, gets called in and told on page one he’s HIV-positive, so automatically we have sympathy for the character since that shouldn’t happen to the worst pit bull in the world. But the character is being defined solely on the basis of his medical tragedy.

It seemed to me all along what was needed was a “Before” to the “After.” And a “Before” that wasn’t an apology. I’ve nothing to apologize for, living in New York from 1979 to 1995. I’m not going to state the number of people I slept with because I’ve never been good at math, and I’ve seen others crucified for giving the exact score. But it was a party of such dimensions and innocence—really a long bash not seen since the twenties in New York. The Great Gatsby was very consciously in mind when I wrote Plays Well. My book is an homage to that great novel concerning one party’s beginning, ending, and failure—and an economy’s beginning, ending, and failure. I draw definite parallels between the boom and the bust of prosperity in the city and our personal tragedy coming home to roost. I also wanted to write a comic novel. What’s original about Plays Well is that it’s primarily about three funny people in trouble.

When I was growing up, I was always the class clown. Then I realized I should be the class brain to protect myself. The class clown can sit on stage and go into arterial bleeding in front of the entire school. Everybody will laugh because he’s the class clown; everything he does and says is funny, including dying in plain view. I got a brainstorm: I could be the Class Egghead and the Class Clown. That combo gave more choices, and I’m still working the contradictions. The same’s true in the fiction. I’d rather be funny; I’d prefer to be smart concurrently. I’d rather have a good time—on the page and off. I’d like to just turn off this tape recorder now and tell you forty filthy jokes, with all the sound effects.

I think this perspective’s doubly necessary when you’re dealing with a subject as inherently horrific as HIV: not only HIV, but the hatred toward those of us that dealt with it in whatever ways we did; those of us who are gay and automatically considered suspect, as in: “Don’t touch my child—you’re gay. You’ll breathe on her; she’ll die in fifteen minutes.” The equation between inversion and death has always been there. It’s just so heightened under these circumstances. The only way to look at this eclipse is through the smoked glass of comedy and farce—because it was a farce. If one form is suitable for the way we live now, it’s farce. Intelligent people love farce. Those who sneer at it are middlebrow, middle-class duds. They don’t understand we all live life at a gallop. It’s in one door and out the other. We’ve nothing but the instantaneousness of our instincts and desires, and we’ve no time to hide those properly. There’s a tremendous kind of release in farce. Joe Orton lived and died as pure farce.

So writing a comic novel about a tragedy of this proportion is my contribution. Plays Well is probably going to be creamed. I’ve been very lucky in terms of the critical response to my work. It’s so carefully and lovingly crafted even the biggest boor knows he can’t go after me on that front. But the hatred for gay people and for The Other in this culture is still so profound. I’ve been very lucky because in the first book I lined myself up—without quite meaning to, exactly—with all those people who’re obsessed with the Civil War. That’s about two million readers. I got credit from them. Even though I was out of the closet in People magazine, flaming all over the place, those first readers only wanted to talk about Gettysburg. Lucy seemed to them this immensely admirable person I’d somehow annexed. The idea that I could actually imagine her being raped on her honeymoon because somebody sorta raped me is something nobody wanted to talk about or imagine. They preferred to say: “How did you get into her head—or pants?” “Well, girlfriend, let me tell you. I once had a lumberjack after my young ass.”

I’m now coming up against the grisly reality of being a gay man who’s identified himself in and out of the book: on every page, an impenitent, shameless personality. They call it promiscuous now; then we called it popular. I walked into an interview for Plays Well and the first question from one influential straight reporter was: “I see you’re one of those who thinks only gay people are creative, right?” This—from a novel in which almost every creative straight or gay person in the novel dies. This is the question he throws in my face!

RC The unambiguously gay figure is the one who doesn’t make it creatively in the time frame of the book.

AG Exactly. It’s like Toni Morrison bopped in to do an interview and somebody asked: “All you black people can sing, dance, and play basketball, and that’s it, right?” I have to steel myself, but no matter what happens with Plays Well, I know it’s on record, and I’m immensely proud of it. I think it’ll eventually be one of the three or four texts that will be read about AIDS.

RC I was thinking of the bravura of the opening scene, in which Hartley spills thirty dildoes which bounce around a subway car. Presumably, the chance of shocking the readership Plays Well will inherit from Widow occurred to you.

AG It’s essential to me. I want Plays Well to be totally acceptable, honest, and believable to my gay and straight brothers and sisters everywhere, and especially those who lived through all this in New York. I want them to say: “I was at that party; in that hospital; at that steam bath with him—he got it all right.” I also want to reach a sixty-year-old, registered Democrat; head of the League of Women Voters in Molene, Illinois, who listens to National Public Radio and doesn’t really know any gay people, because Dwayne who cuts her hair alternate Thursdays only talks about what he saw on television, in the movies, and who his favorite film stars are. He never confesses anything to her, though she tells him most everything. And Dwayne disappears three times a year, goes to Chicago, and comes back with a black eye, but looking very happy.

I want to reach those people who’ll buy the book because my name’s on it. This is my first novel since Widow. They’ll have this moment of: “Uh oh—I just spent twenty-five dollars on a book full of queers!” By the time they think that, I hope they’ll be implicated, interested—ready to sponsor these three main characters, who are calculatedly irresistible. That’s part of my narrative strategy: to show that the circumstances are repellent, not the people, and to show that corruption involves the virus, not the sexuality that preceded it.

I want Plays Well to be the long-awaited chimera of the crossover novel, in which I’m speaking not only to the converted and preaching to the choir, but explaining gay culture and its recent, unheralded heroism to strangers. Everybody knows about the tragedy. You don’t have to be too smart to figure out that a thirty-year-old man that winds up weighing sixty-two pounds and babbling, after being the most promising and beautiful of his generation, is tragic. But there’s much more to the story than that. It’s also about the survivor, the caregiver, and that community of caregiving that stepped in when the government completely betrayed and abandoned us. A crucial national document promises a government that’ll defend its citizens’ “health, education, and welfare.” The heroism of self-help involved people who said: “I’ve got a Xerox machine”; or, “I have a friend who’s a druggist”; or, “My brother-in-law’s a doctor at Johns Hopkins”; or, “I’ve fifteen hundred dollars I can spend on printing up posters to put on telephone poles.” Call me a Frank Capra freak, but this really is community at work. When George’s barn burns, its rebuilding by the volunteer troop is acknowledged to be admirable. It seems the heroism of what we did and are doing has been completely and utterly ignored by a media that’s more interested in Kim Basinger’s waistline. It’s obscene—that a movement as immense and imagined, as powerful and incredibly effective as ours has not been lionized.

AG Yes. It’s especially hard for us to give ourselves any credit in a world that’s forever telling us we’re malformed and lack gene X, Y, or Z; that we’re reprobates; that we’ve got to keep it in our pants twenty-four hours a day; that we’re good only to the extent that we abstain; that we’re living on borrowed time and are damned lucky to be able to pay taxes. Fuck that. I’m so over shame. It’s taken me so much inhaled, then pole-vaulted shame to get to the point where I can say that.

RC Thinking of heroism, I wanted to suggest a possible tension or difficulty in execution in Plays Well. On the one hand, you want to focus upon heroism in a community. On the other, writers preoccupied with moral analysis surely need a range of moral responses to determine and clarify goodness, or even a polarity.

AG Plays Well isn’t just about these manic, attractive kids in New York. It’s really about their relationship to the former generation. One movement of the book is the conversion of the parents of these kids from Republican contempt and distance to being active participants in the lives and then the deaths of their own children; of being pulled, if only by default and against their will at first, into the very community their kids have made as a kind of substitute family, as a source for the warmth they’re not getting from their parents, preachers, and consumer culture.

Opposition comes not only from within the families but, interestingly, from one of the members of the group to others. Anybody who’s ever done caretaking knows the favorite victim of the beloved, dying object is whoever gets closest. I’ve included a scene in which Robert, dying, accuses Hartley, his primary caregiver, of being a failure as an artist. He’s withering and condescending about Hartley’s future, with an emphasis on how much time he’ll have to get it right finally. This is based on more than one such event in my life, in which the very person you’re giving up everything to protect attempts with his last energy to annihilate you and your sense of self-worth. That’s about the discipline it takes to reply: “I’ll have to consider that; thank you for telling me.” You want to say, as I wanted to under similar circumstances: “Do you think having toxins in your brain might be having an impact on how you’re judging this? Is this really the best you can do for me after we’ve slept together for years, and after I’m spending twenty-four hours a day of my life trying to help you die with dignity? Can’t you salvage a little dignity for me?” You don’t say it. You swallow it, because you know that if you confronted him with what he’d done, he’d spend the last days of his life feeling terrible. You can’t allow that. That’s part of what caregiving is—giving over your own dignity if that’s what’s required to make someone comfortable.

I’ve tried to honor not only those interior difficulties and the exhaustion of Hartley as he shuttles with pills in every pocket from patient to patient, but also the intruding political reality. One great joy was quoting William S. Buckley in his own words from 1986. He says everybody who’s HIV-positive should be interned in camps and tattooed on their wrist and ass; every person applying for a marriage license in America should be tested for HIV. If they fail, they can only marry if each agrees to be sterilized. You don’t have to go to Germany in the thirties to find villains of immense scope. Buckley was happily at a keyboard instead of pulling the switch, but we all know what he’d have done. For me, to know there are now a hundred thousand copies of my book with his name, date, and exact words is worth the price of admission. I felt I’d vindicated thousands and thousands of deaths because thousands of American newspapers printed that.

There’s a tendency to think of the whole period as soap opera. Imagine you’re thirty years old and thirty of your best friends catch this unnamed disease and die. It is soap opera; it’s beyond soap opera, it’s horror film. Trying to write about it in a way that’ll make it seem normative seems completely bogus. I didn’t want to write a middle-of-the-road, middle-class novel. I wanted to write a comic aria about this immense, sickening loss. It’s easy to do 20/20 hindsight and ask: “If Reagan had spent three hundred million dollars on the first two cases, what would’ve happened?” Instead they let the Pandora’s box open. They actively spewed it. I want those names named. On record forever.

It’s also easy to say: “Nothing could have stopped this disease” since nothing was done to stop it. But I don’t want to write a screed or tract. I’m a painter, not a poster-maker. I don’t work only in primary colors; I want to work in nuance. Posters are rendered to be glimpsed at as you rush along a cold street. Paintings can be considered indoors where it’s heated and comfortable; second and third layers of meaning can evolve in time. That’s the goal for Plays Well and the work to come.

RC Understandably, comedy has been used rarely in fiction concerning AIDS. Were you apprehensive about deploying it?

AG Well, yeah, but the period 1980 to 1995 remembers like one immense party—like the bash in The Exterminating Angel. What starts as a beautiful, sophisticated dinner party soon has people shitting in Ming vases because they can’t leave. That’s what Manhattan felt like: “The Masque of the Red Death.” This costumed, uninvited visitor comes and kills significant numbers of partygoers. Since parties are joyful occasions and every host loves to hear laughter in the house, I think it’s totally consistent to take a running start from comedy and see how far you can get. I’d love to read Joe Orton on HIV. The great poets that’ll rise out of this will be people who have the nerve not to be pious, not to deal in merest predigested platitudes.

My particular truth comes when people laugh at themselves. The laughter in the book isn’t laughter at the expense of anybody—including the parents. They’re treated with amusement and yet what I hope is a profound compassion that’s earned in the course of the book, precisely via them tending to the young and ill. There’s a scene which for me is the emotional center of Plays Well. Hartley’s in Florida visiting his parents. He hears his father breathing in an adjacent lounge chair. Hartley hears death coming. He’s become such a medical expert he knows his father’s going to die soon, because he’s heard this sound so often in boys thirty-two-years old. There’s an element of what Bergson defines comedy as: the mechanical grafted onto the natural. Nothing could possibly be more mechanical than these wind-up toys at the beginning of their revolution stopping, midstride. Farce, not tragedy, is the art form of our age.

There was something very mechanical about this whole “Studio 54” period. Even the spot on the arm is almost a rust spot; the body as non-functioning machine. The only way I know to get to the truth of this experience is to replicate our laughter in the face of it. The laughter starts in the book indolent and selfish. Disco culture was hardly about the milk of human kindness. It was all glitter, mirror balls, and appearance; heightening shoes, big hair, velvet and lace. It was very Regency dandified; very impenitently self-interested. But when that laughter begins to be tested by this terrible crisis and can hold, it becomes heroic and magnificent. Those high-drag mask funerals, in which all the drag queens put on their splendor and remember the dead, trying to look as gorgeous as possible for what little’s left—I think they’re as brave, operatic, dignified, and powerful as anything I’ve ever attended. We yucked it up because that was our habit—and because nobody’s better at humor than oppressed minorities. Jewish shtick’s the invention of people who can’t leave a neighborhood, so have to defend themselves the only way they can—by saying: “You think you know about the limitations of the Jewish character? Let me tell you how limited we are.” So: “You think I’m a silly queen? You have no fucking idea, honey. I go to bed dressed as Ida Lupino every night. I wake up like Bette Davis coughing at the end of Of Human Bondage and by 1 P.M., after caffeine enough, I’m wired and hard and painted as Joan Crawford.” This is the revenge of overstatement.

It’s this camp bravery—genuine bravery—and courageous laughter. I remember writing eulogies. In some ways Plays Well came out of writing twenty-two eulogies. Your lover or friend says six days before he dies: “I have one request.” He takes a deep breath, then: “I want you to talk about me.” You don’t say: “Look, I have a deadline. I’m extremely busy, very popular, and professional; this is going to impede. I don’t want to go to another little town upstate and pretend not to know how you died.” You say: “I can’t think of anything that’d give me more pleasure. I’m going to tell all the truth on you, girlfriend. You’d better watch out because if you ask me to do that, I’m going to dish you.” Then they laugh—the best laugh. I’ve been a professional speaker most of my life, since I was the Preacher Emcee of the Second Grade Thanksgiving Pageant at Fannie S. Gorham Elementary. I love to make people laugh. To stand up and read my work, or tell a joke and hear twenty-five hundred people literally fall off their chairs—that’s a huge joy. It’s releasing people into themselves, knowing they’ll go home, feeling this diaphragm loosening—a comfortableness you’ve facilitated. If that happens over and over, you’ve done something immense.

But the best laughs I’ve ever gotten have been at funerals. You stand up over the ashes or body of somebody who was thirty-five-years old and pure promise; everybody’s favorite—but with outrageous, opinionated limitations and flaws. You release people to an accurate memory of the dead person by saying: “Hiram had many beautiful qualities. Financial generosity wasn’t among them. I’ve never seen anybody stiff more waiters …” The release and gratitude funeral-goers feel on hearing an actual person discussed … And how do we know who we are? Through our flaws as well as our merits. Our flaws in some ways are more idiosyncratically endearing and unique than our “Brave, Clean, Reverent” merits.

RC You mentioned three or four works about AIDS that might be remembered. Do you have other candidates in mind?

AG It’s hard in hindsight to say which narratives will last, partly because I haven’t read them all, nor do I want to. I’m in this weird position of asking that people read mine, yet also understanding the aversion many people have to reading everything on the subject of HIV.

AG I love him both as a person and a writer. I’m just beginning to see how much ground he’s broken for us. He’s our Robinson Crusoe. I have tremendous respect for Edmund, not only as a writer but as an early mentor and sponsor for lots of people. He was a Fairy Godmother to my work ten years before I ever met him. The London Times asked him for the best fiction of the year, and he chose “Blessed Assurance.” He has insane generosity to other people—a quality I’d like to emulate.

RC The Farewell Symphony tells a similar story to Plays Well, if in a very different style.

AG Yes. I don’t think of Edmund as a comic writer. I think he’s an elegist, and one of immense and wry, knowing elegance. He’s got an amazing touch; he can transform any experience. He also recalls all brand names, which petulia a boy of 1975 would wear. He’s a born taleteller and a natural historian. His record will be invaluable.

RC Could you update the tradition of fabular writing you described earlier? All of your models were historic, and not American. I had Hawthorne in mind.

AG Yes. She was profoundly original. I admire, in this tradition, William Maxwell and Eudora Welty’s stories. Also the novella of Carson McCullers’s The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, her single flawless work.

AG Yes, Cheever’s a fabulist. He grew up on Bullfinch’s mythology. And Stanley Elkin and Grace Paley, two other teachers of mine. They all tell heightened, impossible events as if these were natural occurrences and in prose of stained-glass artifice and purity. They’re not realists; they’re musical fabulists. They all have an immense sense of texture, of improbability and condensation, a quality fables must have. In Cheever’s case, one subject he excelled in at school before he was expelled was mythology. The Greek myths figure in absolutely everything Cheever writes: from the names of characters—everybody’s Diana or Leander—to errant characters being torn apart by dogs. You might be looking at Titian’s paintings, but Cheever intelligently set his in the 1950s upper-middle-class suburbs, all rendered in his own inimitable, Flaubert-like prose rhythms.

RC Both he and Flannery O’Connor conveyed an intuitive grasp of how to use materials as tools for a story, and where to leave them. An O’Connor landscape has a van, a gun, and people.

AG That’s good. You read like an American, pal. I think one characteristic of fable is that it often works better in the short run than the long. I’ve never felt Flannery O’Connor’s “novels” were the equal of her best stories. She was a story writer; so was Cheever. The novels are strung-together stories written by the same characters. Melville’s tales are equally dazzling. “Bartleby the Scrivener” is, for me, as great or greater than Moby Dick. It’s my nominee, long before Joyce, for the first modern short story. All the perversities and negations and executions of the twentieth century lurk in that one tale’s stubborn refrain: “I would prefer not to.”

RC What of the Southern Gothic tradition and homosexuality, as in Carson McCullers and Truman Capote?

AG McCullers and Capote were in some ways very coy about sex. They were both gay—and busy little bees in the honeycomb of our lush sexual network. Yet they were of that unlucky generation still forced to make a sissyboy into a woman on the page. Other Voices, Other Rooms gets close to candor then veers into fandance. McCullers found it easier to write of the deaf, the dwarfed—as a metaphor for the queer. Tennessee Williams shared this with them—though, unlike them, he was a great genius, the one true genius of the period. Finally, I feel both Capote and McCullers are somewhat dishonest and therefore decidedly minor artists—as opposed to Williams, whose light gets more brilliant every day.

AG I think they’re unbelievably irritating and incandescently instinctive. There are brilliant beginnings; then you see that he drank the sixth drink. Suddenly everything fell apart. But there are inventions and psychic twists in them that are inimitable. They’re ferocious, honest, and hungry. He’s as much a poet as Dickinson. I think Williams’s Collected Stories is an invaluable book—terribly underestimated.

In terms of the sexual permission the South gives us, Faulkner’s all the permission anybody needed. No American has written about sexuality with the authority, reckless honesty, and sexiness of “Manse Bill.” A lot of people write about sex and it’s just not sexy. But the sexual game in Light in August is very homoerotic, if only because it’s so phallocentric. Joe Christmas pursues Joanna Burden, his white sponsor-mother and girlfriend. She hides at night in her plantation property. He comes and seeks and finds her and fucks her where she’s lurking bare-assed under shrubs. Light in August winds up as insanely erotic—full of S&M, full of that push-and-pull; that “I’m on top; you aren’t” that’s a quality of all sexuality—straight, gay, cross-eyed. There’s somebody who’s a boss—if only for a second—and somebody who’s taking care of the boss. I think Faulkner, with his tremendous sense of social and spiritual hierarchy, played that hand-held pipe-organ better than anybody. He’s the American Genius of the dying century.

RC People invariably speak of James Joyce or D. H. Lawrence as the sexual writers of the interwar period.

AG There are moments in Lawrence. In one story, a miner comes home completely covered in coal dust. There’s a three-page description of him washing coal dust off until he becomes this amazing, stark white, beautiful figure—fantastically erotic. But Faulkner’s characters aren’t just erotic when they’re taking a bath. Every financial decision, every marketplace bargaining winds up having sexual domination behind it. The Snopses want to fuck the aristocrats, debase them and shit on them. It’s coprophilic. That’s part of Faulkner’s insane energy. I don’t think Faulkner ever actually tried gay sex. But maybe he didn’t need to. Any man who can make himself the Poet Laureate of Bestiality can find no problem with a little cocksucking.

It’s sad because when Faulkner was about forty-five, he’d already done the great work. Essentially, the alcoholism, which involved lethal doses, could only do tremendous damage. I’ve never felt in any other writer except Poe the presence of a controlled substance as a facilitator instead of a limitation. When I was eighteen or nineteen, I had a fast car and I’d drive drunk. I’m not bragging, but some of my happiest memories would be to go on a snaking country road in this fast car, and just go at 125 miles an hour around blind curves, with that typical eighteen-year-old heedlessness. Anybody could be in the way. Usually they weren’t, because after nine o’clock everybody North Carolinian was in bed. Reading some Faulkner, that’s the image I have: this careening, drunken, erectile imagination looking for something to fuck; hunting something to plug; this rapacious, outward-oriented breeding, fertile vision, speeding, scanning.

You feel the alcohol for a while washing Faulkner into places he wouldn’t have gotten to ordinarily. But he’s the titanic imagination. What passes now for Southern literature is often the equivalent of country-cutesy. At shopping malls across America there are these little gingham bonnets that show little farmgirls herding geese in a row. It’s all very gemütlich and fantasized, and has absolutely nothing to do with living in the country, which is all about animal husbandry, mucking out horseshit, getting blisters, and having your crops wash away. There’s a lot of middle-class falsification in Southern letters now.

I love funny and hate “cute.” I love beauty and hate “pretty.” I want beautiful or ugly. “Cute” is deadly and dishonest. Nothing dates faster. A lot of nice people are writing this. They publish a book a year, which you can’t do if you’re a serious writer. My theory is it’s like having a baby every nine months. You can do three or four, but by the eighteenth, they’re idiots, and you’re often the last to know. You’ve got to save it up.

AG I love Forster, the best Alfred Chester stories, pages of Jane Bowles, Whitman. Some of the early Albee one-acts like Zoo Story blew my fuses when I was an erectile fifteen-year-old. In terms of other gay texts that have stirred me, I think in terms also of images, so Aubrey Beardsley. As a kid, I somehow got my hands on a book of Beardsley drawings which still excite me: the ornamentation; the curdled fantasies, phallic worship, militant, self-justifying decoration; that influence of fin-de-siècle license I still find a model for these nineties. It’s a paradox that every century has a life cycle. The forties and fifties are about war and prosperity; the sixties, revolution; the nineties are about mysticism, looking for alternative ways to live, numerology, and visitations from other planets. All this angel stuff now is totally consistent with Peter Pan.

Oscar Wilde’s a god and a lodestone of mine. He’s futuristic, the way all pure intelligence is. It’s almost a scientific, mathematic intelligence he had: the syllogisms, epigraphs; his clean ability to cleave the world into a single sentence that says all people are either this or that. The magic of The Importance of Being Earnest is a prophecy of semiology, of gay politics in a straight world, of living an encoded, Bunbury, erotic life. For me it’s one of the great seminal works. I read Wilde yearly with tremendous relish and profound affection. He was, tragically, one of the kindest men. I think he’s one of the least likely people to have been a good person. And yet he was. We extend privileges to brilliance that aren’t held out to ordinary folks. But the thing one loves about Wilde is that he was both the most brilliant man in the nineteenth century—verbally, conversationally—and the most generous. The tragedy of his life was his eagerness to please others. But, like most of us, he had terrible taste in boyfriends. Wilde was sacrificed by his own ungainly kindness and an overliteral Christ-likeness beloved of all the masochists.

I feel my own tombstone will say: “No good deed went unpunished.” I try every day to do something for others. It frequently boomerangs in hilarious, amazing ways. But I don’t have any choice. I’ve decided that’s my fate. I try to put as much kindness into the books as possible without sogging or warping them a bit. But Wilde is that paradox: the coolest genius and the biggest heart. That’s what I’d wish for all artists, myself most especially.

Constantine Cavafy is the first great gay artist I encountered. When I was a kid, I had a Geiger-counter sensation when I drifted near anything with gay content. In public libraries I could almost walk blind and feel the heat coming out of the back of a book. I didn’t care if it was a medical text; I’d find the hot spots. I found Cavafy early on, and knew from the beginning he was a genius. His combination of high and low Greek on a line-by-line basis is a metaphor for what I try to do in my fiction: absolute artificiality alongside complete, inevitable naturalness; comic exuberance set beside an acknowledgment of the pain, difficulty, and annihilation that’s our lot—and the option of moving from one to the other with a syllable’s notice, so the reader’s emotional registration does what mine does, which is to go crazy all over the place every second of my life.

AG Auden I loved for what truth I found in “Musée des Beaux Arts” and all those things you’re led to in school. You actually think: “This one’s really great; it’s not just they’re saying it is.” For the way he lived his life as an artist, Auden was tremendously influential. He went to bed at the same time every night; he wrote the same number of hours. He played Wagner before bedtime. That reified schedule is almost like the metric form itself—a way of remaining disciplined in the world; giving your life a shape that’s ordinarily offered by a wife and child and those exterior props people depend on.

Also Isherwood, especially those early entertainments like Prater Violet. I’m less interested in the later confessional things, though I think A Single Man was tremendously important because the sexuality of the narrator was a given and wasn’t apologized for. Anything from those so-called classics that are essentially apologies I’m not interested in, except for how they reflect their peculiar historical moment. I’m not into begging for anybody’s forgiveness. I’ve tried to live my life honorably and I have no regrets, except for the loss of friends whose exits I haven’t been able to control.

I’d say early Evelyn Waugh, too. Waugh’s the gayest writer in the world, especially in Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies. This is an influence so apparent you don’t even see it, but the organization of Plays Well—where the grown man returns to the scene of the crime—derives very much from Brideshead Revisited. But, pound for pound, Waugh’s comedy, brilliance, and merciless humor is still devastatingly fresh and instructive.

I mentioned Peter Pan, so J. M. Barrie. He’s obviously a gay writer writer and energetically a pedophile. Lewis Carroll’s an immense influence too. For me, Alice in Wonderland is one of the twenty books I’d take out of the civilization in order to found a new one. It’s a masterpiece; an unending source of joy and inspiration—and perhaps the single greatest act of sublimation I know.

RC You mentioned the urgency you felt in writing Plays Well. You have references to other projects everywhere—from years ago, a novel, “The Erotic History of a Southern Baptist Church,” is mentioned. There’s the story “The Practical Heart,” part of a longer project. Why did Plays Well supersede these projects, and what now becomes of them?

AG I was working on a collection of novellas including “Preservation News,” “The Practical Heart,” “He’s One Too” and a work called “The Mortician Confesses.” That book will soon appear as a short novel collection. It’s about how virtue gets people into the worst kind of trouble. A continuing fascination of mine is how to make a good person dramatically interesting. One reason I have the audience I do is because most people, I think, would at least prefer to be good. It’s terribly inconvenient to do that constantly, so they stop several times a day. But they think of themselves as good. If I had to describe myself, this has always been my particular cross to bear: some people would prefer to be brilliant; some, to be beautiful, powerful, alluring, or destructive. I’d like to be good. I guess it was drummed into me early. I’ve made the best of a bad situation; this yen for Virtue. Somebody’s got to do it!

As for the other novels, “The Erotic History of a Southern Baptist Church” is the second in a trilogy that started with Widow. I have this great, overarching vision of how characters from that book walk into this one. Two hundred pages of it are written. What happens often, as with Widow, which took seven years, is that I’ll be working on one thing when something else commandeers and drafts me. You have to be crazy not to follow. My plan for “The Erotic History” is to pivot on the confusion between ecstatic religious experiences and ecstatic erotic experiences—they’re notoriously commingled, interchangeable. I’d like to write the history of the U.S. from the point of view of a single rural Baptist church in North Carolina from 1875 to 1975. It ends as a bankrupt television ministry. It grows from an early, hallowed, gladelike place in nature to being mired and extinct in technology.

It’s a work which may take many years, but it’ll be a lot of fun. I have to do it now while I still remember what the erotic is. This is one thing that happens. When I was twenty-four, if I didn’t have sex with myself or others four times a day, I felt I had the flu or something. Now I’m fifty, I can actually go for a whole day without plugging the wall. That’s been very time-saving and welcome, in a way. But if sexuality’s your subject, you don’t have to be out all night chasing people. But you do have to be able to summon up those feelings for every single character. It’s not that it’s melting. I’m still virile and itchy, but the long view is setting in.

There are lots of other uncollected stories waiting for a place. But I frequently find that what I think are stories wind up part of a larger piece. With Plays Well, “Thirty Dildoes” came first. I suddenly realized: “Here is a man with a mission.” It predicted the book and called it forth. So, rather than just publish the stories in a collection of disparate entities, I hold onto them until I see they’re part of a larger pattern. Sometimes they arrive as mother’s triplets—trilogies, where I find meanings and connections between the three infant parts. It’s a crowded nursery, but I like to keep busy.