Gay Fiction Speaks: Conversations with Gay Novelists

Ethan Mordden is best known to gay readers for four volumes comprising the “Buddies” series of gay stories set in Manhattan, as well as for an epic account of postwar gay life in America, How Long Has This Been Going On? He is also the author of around twenty works of nonfiction on musicals, opera, theater, and classical music. Born in Pennsylvania and raised there—and in Venice, Italy, and Long Island—Mordden took a degree in history at the University of Pennsylvania before moving to New York. His publishing career began in 1976 with a study of the Broadway musical.

Mordden’s fiction first appeared as a regular autobiographical column—“Is There a Book in This?”—in the pioneering gay literary magazine Christopher Street. I’ve a Feeling We’re Not in Kansas Anymore: Tales from Gay Manhattan (New York: St. Martin’s, 1985), the first collection of these pieces, was followed by the equally successful Buddies (New York: St. Martin’s, 1986) and Everybody Loves You (New York: St. Martin’s, 1988).

Mordden turned to other projects in the nine years before volume four of the “Buddies” series appeared—Some Men Are Lookers (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997). His first novel, One Last Waltz (New York: St. Martin’s, 1986), concerned a family of Irish-American immigrants. Under the pseudonym “M. J. Verlaine,” Mordden published a collection of short pieces about heterosexual life in Manhattan, A Bad Man Is Easy to Find (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991). He has written two further novels: the epic account of gay liberation and its aftermath, How Long Has This Been Going On? (New York: Villard, 1995); and a novel about gay identity, the love of opera, the cult of the diva, and much else, The Venice Adriana (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998).

Mordden also edited Waves: An Anthology of New Gay Fiction (New York: Vintage, 1994). He is currently working on a novel set in Nazi Germany and a fifth volume of the “Buddies” series, which may consist of nonfictional essays. He lives in an apartment in midtown Manhattan, where this interview took place on Monday, November 3, 1997.

EM It was a big accident. I wasn’t publishing fiction. Then I met with Chuck Ortleb and Tom Steele from Christopher Street and the New York Native. I was to write an arts review column, “Cultural Advantages.” Over drinks, I started telling stories about my family, which isn’t just dysfunctional, but eccentric and colorfully picturesque. They were laughing and Chuck said: “You should write these down. I’ll publish them.”

So I started another column: “Is There a Book in This?” It began as sheer journalism about my family. Then I did a piece on getting thrown out of parties. At that time I’d get into fights with people and throw drinks in their faces. Then I was running out of things that would work. I thought: “I can use something that happened, but not be entirely honest. I’ll telescope, leave some people out, sweeten this, embellish that.” So the column, from being true life, turned into fiction based on true life. It was about gay life in New York because I came here right after college, and almost all the people I knew were gay New Yorkers. I was quite young and still very much on the scene—nights at the Eagle; a summer weekend in the Pines. That’s where a lot of this stuff occurred.

So we move from an eccentric family to eccentric friends who get into interesting scrapes. My best friend did nothing all day but cruise. He had to have sex at least once a day or he’d completely go to pieces. He’d go after anyone he was attracted to without wondering if he was gay or straight. He eventually realized a photograph of himself at full mast was very handy to pull out if someone was hard to land. The guy was legendary on the circuit for being heavy hung.

You can imagine the trouble this guy gets into. Finally he runs across someone really cute but vulnerable. Somehow he touches this guy’s heart and finds himself in a relationship that’s sexual and emotional. The kid’s childlike and infantile—and also six feet tall. He’s also the most boring person ever.

EM Yes. He’d clean house wearing nothing but underpants. He’d watch cartoon shows with the concentration of a physicist. That was his charm. Try having a conversation with him! So all these exciting things were going on. You’re surrounded by a culture still making itself. What more would you want for a series of stories than that? It certainly wouldn’t have been as interesting if it had been a small town in Pennsylvania, where I come from. I just made use of what was there.

RC The stories have developed in certain ways. Your alter ego Bud emerges as the series continues.

EM Yes. He was never meant to be a character—only the narrator. I’m a very private person. Also, I’ve noticed some gay readers become very uncomfortable with first-person narratives that roam into sex; books where the guy says: “I went into the bar and took home the cutest boy.” You turn to the dust-jacket and don’t buy it. I remember this extremely good-looking guy called Glenn Person. The build was slim and chiseled. He was the biggest hung white guy in New York—and famous for it. Glenn wrote a piece for Christopher Street about being the most gorgeous-looking man alive. To this day, that story makes people explode like Mount Etna with anger. I thought: “I’ll leave myself out. I’ll be circus ringmaster.”

In the middle of Everybody Loves You, Cosgrove came out of nowhere. He’s the only character I wholly invented. Maybe I thought we needed some enriching, or I suddenly realized Virgil wasn’t going to hang around forever without his own acolyte. He was tiring of being one himself—though ultimately what tore his relationship with Dennis Savage apart was the insistence he get a day job. In the stories, Bud’s a Spoiled Rich Kid, wealthy enough to support two people. But Dennis Savage’s just a schoolteacher. That’s different from my friend Bob Trent, whom Dennis Savage was modeled on. Another Spoiled Rich Kid.

Virgil wanted to be kept; to do what Cosgrove does—simply the chores—and otherwise have time to roam around. I didn’t realize when I got to the end of “The Woggle,” the last story in Everybody Loves You, that when I came back, I had loose ends to tie up. Cosgrove had to have somewhere to go. There are some awkward last pages in that book where Bud ceased to be ringmaster and became a character. I thought I’d better end the series right there. I wrote “this is the utmost of my report” and fully intended it. I’d nothing more to say, and plenty else to write about. Then someone said: “There’s one story you never got to—Virgil confronting AIDS.” It’d be interesting to see this little tyke—a self-styled, manipulative tyke, in the long run—deal with the dramatic feelings everybody had about AIDS.

EM Yes. I get very critical of how he behaves in volume five, which I’m working on now. The real Virgil’s in Alaska, beyond our reach.

I enjoy writing these stories. The characters are so familiar to me. They’re like wind-up toys. They go their own way, but I’m in charge. I thought I’d write the Virgil-AIDS tale for a lark. That became “Exorcis,” the first story in Some Men Are Lookers. Somehow that led to another. Every now and then, over several years, I wrote a story for relaxation. Then, when I was editing Waves, I was giving $400 to every author out of my advance. I thought I’d put a nice long story in myself and save $1,200. So I wrote “The Hunt for Red October.” Then I thought: “Fuck it, I’ve gone this far.” My St. Martin’s editor Keith Kahla liked the stories; it seemed sensible to put them together, then fill out the collection: Some Men Are Lookers.

Ultimately, I was driven to write about all this because I felt there was something very spectacular about a culture based on man-to-man sex. It produced an extraordinary number of very deep and important man-to-man friendships—and where else but New York? There’s so much street traffic here, whereas everything’s in cars everywhere else in America. It was a unique time; something historical was happening. I wanted to get down the day-to-day living of some basically ordinary guys—

I didn’t want a bunch of Titans. I wanted regular people and some Titans. Then they could look at this world of Titans and figure it out. Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance does that too. It’s narrated by someone we know nothing about—the letter writer. I was impelled by a love of the characters and storytelling. I had this advantage: I could never have run a story cycle if I were straight. What would I have been writing about? Or if I’d been gay in the 1940s. What would I have said? It’d be the same if I started out now. It’s too various; there’s no uniform anymore. A lot of the stories depended on there being certain places one went to find the stories: bars, dance halls, even the baths. It’s all gone; replaced by the Internet. Back then, you had only to show up along the circuit, and one friend would lead to another, and soon you were watching all these odd happenings. The eroto-romantic meeting of two lookers knee-deep in surf at the beach, touching each other and hungering and falling in love as they stood there, oblivious of a few of us staring at them. This world of ours. Ours!

But others would sneak in. I slightly knew—but mainly knew of—a construction worker named Bert something, rumored to have a wife and kids somewhere but, because construction moves you around, a regular visitor in Stonewall. Bert was a steamfitter or whatever, so he had the extremely heavy upper torso that early Stonewall taste doted on. He wasn’t exactly handsome, but in those days that didn’t matter if one had the rest of it—physique, authority, power. Bert didn’t talk much. Was he a towering hunk or just vacuous? But he did have an enormous dick, really long and thick, with a pointed end. A snake. When he stripped for sex, his partner jumped out the window. So Bert developed this soothing Daddy rap to mesmerize them with some sort of mean-streets poetry. But in so doing this Titan who was supposed to be nothing more than your hot date accidentally fused the physical with the emotional. He became ultimate not just in looks but in meaning. So of course all of his partners fell in love with him.

It was a neat tale to know of, especially when Bert tried shacking up with some kid and came home the first day to find his boyfriend cooking dinner naked in an apron. “Hello, honey.” This is Stonewall? There are different versions of what happened next. But, anyway, look how different it is today. Who knows a construction worker, not to mention this mother of all daddies? A whole way of life is gone. Our democracy’s gone, along with our mythology. All the rules have changed. There used to be two ages in gay—young and invisible. Now there’s totally twenty-two, twenty-eight and looking, thirty-four and cashed-in, forty-something but holding it together, and so on.

So today they write about other things. One reason why men become “gay novelists” is that they want to be perceived in a certain way. One thing that’s not prestigious for some reason is to have an all-male, all-gay cast. Maybe ghetto life’s so real they don’t want it. But that’s what Edmund White and Eric¹ and Larry Kramer were first writing about—the subculture. Our founding generation writers chose to write about what was around them. Now it’s just the opposite—writing about how artistic you want to appear to be. The notion of novels like Dancer from the Dance or Faggots: there are no straights in them! We’ve gotten away from that—I don’t think to our profit. A lot of times books are written because the authors have figured out a way of being perceived of as “Important”—a crummy reason to write a novel. The idea of making your characters bisexuals and straights because otherwise the straight world isn’t going to like it is extremely dreary.

EM Not necessarily, but I find a lot of fanciness about it. My term for the bisexuals I’ve known is “60/40’s.” They tend to be working-class men from a very narrow background, like Bert. The notion of a gay life, of coming out or admitting they’re attracted to men, is absolutely unthinkable. However, only 60 percent of their sexuality needs women. Forty percent wants men. The 60 percent enables them to have sex with women, be happily married, have a family, even cheat on their wives with other women. But there’s always that 40 percent, lurking and beckoning. In books I don’t see “60/40’s.” I see fraudulent icons created by gay writers who want a larger audience than “gay.” They want the approval of straights. It’s not something I respect.

EM That’s amazing. Can you imagine a black writer saying that about an all-black-characters novel? It’s homophobic, stupid, self-hating. I’ve a feeling I know who those people are. Looking at them, I’m not surprised. It’s a very common source of homophobia now which didn’t exist before Stonewall: “This system’s made so people like me can’t get into it; we can’t have success in it.” I don’t mean literary success. I mean social or romantic success.

I can see straights saying it too, because they take themselves for granted. They think there’s something wrong with something that doesn’t have a lot of straights in it. They wouldn’t dare say this about black or Jewish writers. The fact they can say it about us shows how vastly casual homophobia is. If you said: “That’s so homophobic; you’re a fucking bigot!,” they’d say: “It’s not bigotry; it’s literary judgment.” They don’t see us having a culture; being different from them as blacks or Jewish people are. I think we’re more different.

I’m not saying these writers are disloyal to gay culture. They make their own choices. I just can’t fathom why they’d want the approval of straights. I never did. I never even thought there was anything wrong in being gay. Hearing about all these teenage gay suicides today makes me so disgusted. You’re going to give up the only life you’ll ever have because Mommy doesn’t love you? Who says the cunt has any love to give in the first place? It’s like wanting the approval of your parents if you want to be a cop and they want you to be a doctor. I’d say: “What the fuck gives you the right to an opinion? You want a doctor in the family? Go to med school! I’m interested in self-fulfillment. That’s why I was put on earth.” “No, we nurtured you.” “No. You fucked and I came out. That’s all it is.”

RC Being published in Christopher Street meant you could presume your readers were largely gay. Did that affect the stories?

EM This is a cliché, but probably true: you write for yourself. If you see yourself as really smart, really educated, know a lot—you write for that guy.

RC I’m interested in the series’ trajectory. You started recording actual events, then invented certain elements—even whole characters, in Cosgrove’s case. After that, your alter ego Bud emerges as a character and you kill the series. Why?

EM It became too dangerous for me—not because I decided to give myself a cute boyfriend. I couldn’t end the series sending Cosgrove onto the street. What I thought happens is, out of sympathy, Bud takes Cosgrove in, with the idea that the kid will soon get a job, build up a little bank account and move out. It never occurred to me that Some Men Are Lookers was going to have this symmetry, whereby both Dennis and Bud now have their live-ins who were comrades-in-arms. Plus, we have Uncle Carlo, thereby creating a perfect gay, nonbiological family. We’re all runaways.

EM Yes. Now there’s a really stable family structure. Carlo’s the only real-life model I didn’t do anything with: no embellishments or modifications. In I’ve a Feeling, I utterly failed to catch him, because he was so implausible. I figured if I put him on page as he is in life, no one would buy it. I kept trying to middle-class him in various ways, so failed to do him justice. After that, I realized you have to let him be as eccentric as he really is. He does talk funny; he is huge; he does make his own rules; he has a thuggish side.

EM I did. I’ve a Feeling, after all, wasn’t written as a book. Those were separate stories which I filled out with others. That was also true of Buddies. Everybody Loves You was the first book conceived as such, though a few stories had been published before. Some Men Are Lookers was all written fresh—though, again, not as a book. The idea was that I was creating, finally, an ideal situation for gay people, where the older guys, having enjoyed all the choices of being a gay man in your twenties in New York after Stonewall, can settle down in a stable environment which is kept enlivened by the almost surreal exploits of the two kids. I cover that by being such a naturalistic narrator that you’re fooled. Bud narrates as though everything he’s talking about is the most plausible everyday stuff.

So there are two fathers and two sons. You’ve got surprising dangers—and a federal marshal. No bad guy can get through with Carlo around. Ultimately, what was reached was something a lot of people would like, and some have in Stonewall: the stable environment your biological family never was; somewhere you get accepted for what you are without qualification. There’s nothing but support, and the hope that no great crisis hits, like AIDS. And it didn’t. Though I’ve lost two principals, neither died that way. I promised myself when I realized this was a series that I’d never kill off a lead, no matter what happened in life.

EM Imagine if E. F. Benson had suddenly killed off Miss Mapp. You’d feel jarred. You hate her, but she has to live on so you can hate her. And, though I’m certainly aware of the impact of it, I only really had one relatively close friend who died of AIDS. I knew of tons of people. But AIDS didn’t strike home in any important way to me. That’s reflected in the series.

The worst thing I did was virtually putting Virgil out of the family. He has no one to protect him, cosset him, and put up with his antics. But he made his own choices. He’s now living with this hot “60/40,” who’s totally devoted to Virgil. But he’s not going to be happy. It’s the kind of devotion where, if Virgil tries to leave, he’ll kill him. In real life, Virgil has a boyfriend more or less like himself. He’s approaching thirty-five, but still looks like a sixteen-year-old—not through a gym. He’s just genetically marvelous; very youthful.

RC I wanted to ask about the eternal youthfulness of Virgil and Cosgrove. Doesn’t realism concern you? Are you interested in them maturing as characters? They’re in their thirties now.

EM Cosgrove developed extraordinarily in Some Men Are Lookers, though not in terms of maturity. He’s compelled by two things: first, a need for security; a roof over his head. Second, he needs love. Virgil supplied that; I supplied the roof. We had this great deal—except it makes for a very odd relationship between Bud and Cosgrove because they’re not precisely “lovers,” a term I hate. I like “live-in,” which is completely neutral; “boyfriend” I love. That’s very rich. It suits everything from musical comedy to film noir. “Lovers” suggests Feydeau or Somerset Maugham.

The problem is that Cosgrove has to remain under Virgil’s strict regime as an acolyte. Virgil’s very manipulative, and strict with Cosgrove whenever he strikes out on his own. Cosgrove’s very asocialized too. We don’t know about his background, but he makes weird choices and can never figure out why people are appalled. Bud finds it all very funny—as Bob Trent always did. He loved the bizarre.

EM Yes. Bob didn’t like how Dennis Savage reacted in the stories. He thought he’d been made crabby, when in fact he was very funny and charming. Eric used to say Bob and I had this running comedy act which was very excluding of others. You know how best friends develop certain tag lines and shoot them at each other. So Dennis Savage and Bud have a completely different sense of humor from the other two. My sense of humor only comes out of Bud’s mouth. Everyone else’s is his own, though I created them. And it’s only funny because of who they are. If you take a line out of Cosgrove’s mouth and put it in another character’s, it isn’t funny anymore. Like Friends; it’s character-based.

RC Could you comment still further on how the relationship between the stories and real life changed? It’s now a very peculiar setup: Virgil’s based on a real person; Cosgrove’s invented; two characters’ real-life models are dead; Bud is based on you.

EM I think this is connected to writing a series well. Once you know these people that well, they take on a life of their own as literary characters. These people are so vivid that once I have a premise for a story, they write it.

RC There are moments where Bud starts discussing the processes of fictionalization with Dennis Savage. Bud’s justifying the fiction to the friend who appears in it, which is deeply odd.

EM I know. Bob and I used to meet regularly every Friday. He’d see his shrink, then we’d go to lunch, come back here and, every time I had another ten or fifteen pages of a story, Bob would sit where you are and I’d give him them. He liked to perform, so he’d read the stories aloud, acting all the parts. Every time he came on a line of Dennis Savage’s that he’d in fact uttered in real life, Bob would stop, with this mock despair because I was taking something else from him. I’d say: “What do you care? You’re not using it.” Or he didn’t like it if Cosgrove got given some line. Bob would say: “Does that have to be in there?” So he was reacting to it as if it were real. There was a touch of paranoia in Bob. He had this theory that I was using the stories to demote or belittle him. I said: “No, this is what the characters do.” You just know that with Cosgrove and him, it’s ontological. It’s why they’re on earth: to destroy each other.

RC What do you mean exactly? Bob could only “know” that on the same level as any fiction reader—the only level on which Cosgrove exists.

EM You have to remember Bob and I had palled around since we were eight. Bob knew me well enough to know what I’d want in my story and what I couldn’t use. In that sense the series was real even when I was inventing it. Bob knew it was real in my head.

EM Carlo never read anything. He thought it was great I was making a living as a writer though. The real Virgil read one volume, for certain.

EM I have extremely good work habits and an effective imagination. I think writer’s block is a euphemism for someone having written himself into a corner because he started out with not enough material in the first place. A real writer never gets blocked.

RC Are there experiences you find more difficult to describe in fiction than others—sex, for instance?

EM Not as long as someone else is having it. There’s a certain amount of graphic sex in all my fiction, because it’s a unique opportunity for character revelation. One of the reasons so many men have as much sex as they can—that is, with as many partners as is, to them, reasonable—is that sex is the most honest thing in their lives. It’s pleasure, it’s connection, it’s an experience of the divine. But it’s also information. Sometimes, when a guest is over, I’ll play Anyone You Want. I show him three photos of naked porn models and ask him to choose the one he prefers. Some love to and some refuse—what will it reveal about them?

There’s a lot of sex in Stonewall, so there’s a lot of it in my work—for instance, in volume five, how some men regard bareback sex not as reckless but as a definition of their masculinity. The joke used to be: “Real men don’t eat quiche.” Now it’s: “Real men don’t use condoms.” Remember how Diane Keaton laughed at William Atherton when he tried to sneak one on in Looking for Mr. Goodbar?

RC You’ve used the phrase “in Stonewall” a lot, and have called “Stonewall” a state of mind. For some, the sense of cultural cohesion it implies is a fantasy. For you, presumably, it’s a reality.

EM Yes. The original title of How Long? was Stonewall. It begins before the riots, but the idea is that modern gay culture as a concept and the people it has in it: that’s Stonewall. To me, it’s the sexiest, richest, most imagination-teasing word.

RC But to insist on the phrase “in Stonewall” suggests something more tangible than others feel it to be.

EM Well, they’re wrong. The straights and the homophobic gays are wrong. There is a unique life. It’s anything you want to make it. It’s an ethnicity. “Stonewall,” to me, is like saying “the Italian tradition” or “the Irish tradition.” It conjures up all sorts of associations: a certain politics, a certain religion, a way of looking at the family; music, theater, secrets.

RC For some, AIDS ruined the potential of gay liberation captured in “Stonewall.” Carlo describes this danger at the end of Buddies. He talks about leaving town because it’s all over.

EM Yes. I went against what really happened there. Carlo did leave town—back to South Dakota—and didn’t come back. But the books needed him to.

RC What if somebody said your fiction lies: AIDS has wrought these changes; people have died, sobered up, left town?

EM There’s a moment in How Long? that has been vastly misunderstood. We’re told in a very dramatic way that one of the major characters has the symptoms. Later, when he dies, it’s only mentioned in passing. So people said: “Wait a minute. I didn’t get the preparation.” But that’s what was going on then. People weren’t going to memorial services anymore. They’d become exhausted. They wanted to say: “I have to tell you something. Davey died; let’s get on with our lives.” I was trying to reflect that in the narration: the idea that this is so painful that it has turned into whispered headlines. We can’t bear the stories anymore. We hear the news and run.

RC You’ve written other, more clearly invented fiction. Didn’t AIDS appeal as a topic for these?

EM No. I guess this has to do with promising myself I’d never kill off a lead character. I always want the series, even now that it’s ending, to have the same excitement and hope.

I was an absolute frequenter of the Eagle when I first started going to bars. I was there every night—not because I was taking all these people home. I just loved the excitement of being there and thinking: “How do I know something really special isn’t going to walk in and change my life—or at least my night? That excitement, the feeling that there’s always something wonderful coming around the corner, is what I wanted in the series from beginning to end. That’s what was so exciting about gay life. It’s got so much wonderful performance and transformation in it, which the straight world doesn’t have. Straights keep getting married. I don’t know why.

EM A couple of radical gays do. No one I know has any intention of that. The frantic terror with which these straight males deal with the notion of gay marriage must mean they’re all closeted gays. Otherwise what are they afraid of? I really believe the leading homophobes are 60/40’s—if not mad, screaming, closeted queens. The problem is, homophobia’s been with us so long and is so widespread that everyone accepts it. But I think caring what someone else does for sex is like caring what vegetables someone eats. There must be something deeply sick and stupid in you.

RC What’s so different about the emotional investment some gays want to put into marriage and the satisfaction your characters derive from family? There’s a similar stability.

EM Yes, but it’s created and shaped by ourselves and our needs, not according to what society demands.

RC Do you feel the idea of family encompasses a sense of volition, whereas marriage can’t?

EM There are good marriages. But marriage is essentially a placating of the furies of the religions of Church and State. If they didn’t create it and demand it of us, very few people would marry. Certainly straight men wouldn’t marry until they were forty. There’s just too much dating open to you.

There’s no biological family like the one in my series, which involves a lot of freedom. My characters don’t rip each other to shreds all the time the way people in families do; where everybody lets everything out, then expects everyone to recover immediately. I’ll say one thing for my parents. My mother’s a dreadful nag and my father a loony idiot, but they didn’t believe in unloading everything all the time. Our family had a lot of secrets, which a family should have. There was a movie in the fifties called I Want to Live! Susan Hayward played a woman accused of murder. She was being strapped into the electric chair in the poster, screaming: “I want to live!” I remember as a little boy thinking of my mother strapped into an electric chair, screaming: “I want to nag!” You don’t have any equivalent for that in this liberated family of mine. They joke; they don’t nag.

EM No one’s perfect. Virgil turned out a flawed, somewhat selfish person. But even he never broke the rules of conduct.

EM Virgil’s going to fade out in the fifth book, though never entirely. He brings this very odd 60/40 into our midst. We get a chance to see what a “Real Man” who wants to fuck a kid is like. He reminds me of my brother Jim. Jim lived to date and dated to live. That was all he was interested in—making out with women. He could never understand why they had to be taken to dinner to be fucked.

In the series, this guy takes polaroids of girls. On the back he writes down their measurements. He loves making a big sensual thing out of using his tape measure. He has a beer that goes slowly flat of an evening, as he lies in bed going over these polaroids. At the same time, Virgil deliberately teases him. He’ll come down the hall to stare into Virgil’s room. Virgil pretends to be asleep. But the covers are all the way down. This guy has so bought into a culture of lies, he doesn’t know what he is. There’s this old joke: “In Soviet Russia, everything that isn’t forbidden is permitted. In Communist China, everything that isn’t permitted is forbidden.” In my series—in Stonewall, in gay life as I see it—everything is permitted.

RC You mentioned Dancer from the Dance earlier. I’d like to introduce Andrew Holleran’s career for contrast. The Beauty of Men concerns the dissatisfactions of aging. By contrast, your series retains harmony between generations. For many, gay culture does discriminate strongly on grounds of age, as The Beauty of Men suggests. Your stories suggest otherwise.

EM That may have something to do with the fact that Eric left New York a long time ago. Even when I first knew him, he was at his parents’ house every Christmas and New Year’s. He claimed to be completely defeated by those holidays and parties. Each year the vacation got longer and longer. Eric was coming back in April or June. Finally he wasn’t coming back. He was living down there. Now, that happened a long time ago, and Eric didn’t have to reach a certain age to do it. It may be that he has a completely different mentality, even though we were founding members of Stonewall in real life. Something went wrong for Eric, I guess, long before he was Lark, the figure in The Beauty of Men. He could’ve written that novel fifteen years ago. It would’ve been the same, though Eric certainly wouldn’t have been remotely old enough to talk about age that way.

RC You’re suggesting he pulled out of gay subculture before he needed to. His novel suggests the subculture is made only for a certain age range and type of person.

EM The fact is, Eric pulled out of this liberated, make-it-what-you-will, protean culture, to go to the closest thing he could find to pre-Stonewall culture: basically, queens looking for trade, as he describes it in The Beauty of Men. It’s like: “I saw a house painter; he’s so beautiful; I want him.”

RC A lot of people tire of the subculture. The development of family in your stories offers a kind of retreat from it.

EM It does. Part of the thrill of that family was having everything going on in this building. You didn’t have to go scrounging around. In fact, at one point Dennis Savage complains: “I can’t go out by myself. I’ve forgotten where everything is.” What he means is, everything’s gone—at least, his everything. The culture changes, but also your own needs change. I think people have to make a lot of accommodations. If you asked me what the moral of this series was, I’d say: “Nobody gets everything he wants, and you have to pay a price for everything you get.” It means you make certain compromises. It doesn’t mean you can’t have a good life; it means the number of joys is finite.

I picked five people. You might say they lead charmed lives. I’d say: “Not charmed, though they are under my protection. I’ll guarantee none of them dies while we look on, and though one selfishly wrote himself out of the series, still the family will survive.” When Virgil moved out, Cosgrove felt he wouldn’t get a decent meal. So it’s a rule every Thursday that Virgil comes to dinner here. That’s how Virgil remains in the series.

EM At my apartment—in the stories. It used to throw people when I’d say Cosgrove is such-and-such, and it wasn’t in the stories. But I’d figured it out. I don’t have to publish something for it to be real.

RC You said you invented Cosgrove to find a way to keep Virgil around; actually, Virgil cuts free.

EM In the long run. The fact is, if Cosgrove hadn’t come in, maybe Virgil wouldn’t have been so offended at having to maintain a day job. But I think he regards that the same way I did with my parents’ ceaseless determination that I get a summer job every year when I came home from college. I explained: “You’re paying all this money to send me to an Ivy League school so I can become a member of the leadership class. Since the only summer jobs available are pumping gas and bagging groceries, these seem like two mutually exclusive projects. This is my summer vacation; why can’t I enjoy it? All right, you’re not going to give me an allowance. Fine. I’ll function without one. I can sell things if I need money.” The truth was that my mother, that enraged control freak, wanted her house free of other people in the summer. The younger ones would be shipped off to camp; the two older ones had left the family. I was the remaining problem. I knew this was a completely bankrupt, typically parental thing, whereby they say: “It’s for your own good—to learn the value of money,” or something.

They’re not directly analogous experiences, because that was hypocrisy, whereas Dennis Savage was being reasonable when he said: “On my salary I can’t afford to support two people.” Still, Virgil saw it as a scam.

RC The slippage between the series and your own experiences is remarkable. You move between the two with such ease.

EM I think all writers do. Maybe I have this irresponsible view that anything that happened is fair game. Eric used to warn people: “Be careful—everything he hears goes right into the typewriter.” But if you don’t use what really happened, then it’s nothing but invented.

That may prove a great weakness in volume five. Maybe the verisimilitude will fall out of it. It may disappoint a lot of people too. Instead of stories, these are essays on gay life, using my characters as illustrations and eventually developing a throughline. It’s to make it more interesting for me, instead of spinning yarns again. When you’re up to volume five, you need something to change the texture.

It’s like what E. F. Benson did after the first Lucia book. He looked at what he had, saw he was going to continue with it—Lucia was so wonderful. But her husband was a lump. He killed him off between books. He also realized the gang he’d created in Riseholm weren’t eccentric enough. There should’ve been a lesbian. So he moved the whole thing to another town, taking Georgie with him. He realized, too, the one thing the other book hadn’t had was a pathetic, would-be Lucia: Miss Mapp—forever foiled, and increasingly crude in her attempts to seize Lucia’s crown. It’s obvious, but brilliant. He says: “I can’t use what I have. I have the lead, this crazy gay friend, and an idea. I’m going to move them.” After that he didn’t vary it. You either like them or you don’t. If you like them, you’ll always want more. But I can’t write like that. At a certain point it’s got to have a new angle for me to stay interested.

EM I don’t think so. Actually, I got to his books long after I started the series. I greatly admire many writers: Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Austen. It’s a very classic canon I adhere to.

EM Isn’t every long-established classic, except Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, a yarn?

EM That’s too recent. We don’t know how those books will fall out. But the nineteenth-century titles are secure, though in their day they were much disputed. They’re linear narratives, stuffed with action. I say you can’t have fiction without a story. Story contains everything. You have to have good characters; once you have those, they do the story for you.

EM Well, I enjoyed Tristram Shandy, though there’s no story in it. But I’d never consider writing fiction that wasn’t all story. Ultimately, a story shows us how real people react. I think that’s everything. That’s how we understand humankind and what life is—through different characters interacting.

RC Which other contemporary gay writers capture elements of this storytelling tradition?

EM You know, no one jumps out. I hate to say this, but I could more easily tell you who I think is terrible; who has nothing to say; who’s fallen into stylistic quirks that are meant to be regarded as contemporary, hip, and true, but there’s really no content there.

RC What about Alan Hollinghurst? He talks of having nineteenth-century models for plot and character.

EM The Swimming-Pool Library is an ideal example of a novel where story creates everything. It’s extremely rich for that reason. He’s got characters, and a very subtle interaction among them that at first isn’t apparent and after a while becomes quite shocking. He’s got two different generations, and the interaction that we understand is not occurring between them is also eventually deeply shocking. It’s a brilliant book for that reason; without the story, there’d be nothing there.

I liked that book very much, but I liked the author also while I was reading it. He was good company. I think you feel that about Michael Cunningham, too, from his books.

RC In the introduction to Waves, you take a swipe at some of the writers associated with the early flowering of “liberated” gay fiction in the late 1970s. Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance you forgive the most.

EM It’s the least irritating of the three: that, Edmund White’s Nocturnes for the King of Naples, and Larry Kramer’s Faggots. Whether I like it or not, I think Dancer’s definitely established as a book that will be read. Faggots is very controversial. A lot of people say it’s not well-written. A lot don’t like what it represents—Kramer’s moral tone. I think it’s the lowest piece of shit and its author a jackass. I remember when he said every gay should boycott Philadelphia because it didn’t show the two guys kissing. It was an incredible breakthrough for Hollywood finally to deal not only with gay life but with AIDS—and for Tom Hanks to put his imprimatur on it. I felt what Kramer was saying was: “I’m so furious that they didn’t ask me to write it that everyone should join me in a worthless act of personal vendetta.”

RC This is only one way of reading a work: to get a sense of the author through it.

EM Dan Menaker, an editor I’ve worked with, says he feels that’s part of bad writing—not merely how you put words together, but the personality that comes through is part of your talent. If you’re a red-hot enraged queen, you’d better cool down while composing.

RC Your own relationship to your narrators is complex. In the stories, the Bud figure lives in this very apartment; we “know” it’s you. The Venice Adriana has an invented first-person narrator, Mark Trigger. In How Long? you’re the author of an omniscient narration. The “M. J. Verlaine” stories appeared pseudonymously in A Bad Man Is Easy to Find.

EM Well, I’m not writing the same book every time. My narrative style is deceptive, because the strong sense of humor and enveloping plot material leads some readers to expect popcorn fiction—just jokes and fun. They get bewildered at the lack of guidance about the character relationships. But I find all that authorial “telling” clumsy and cheap. If one presents the story properly, one needn’t tell. The intelligent reader has to investigate the action, analyze for himself why the characters behave as they do, what they’re not saying, when they’re mistaken. So I prefer first-person narration, because readers can’t expect omniscience from someone who’s himself part of the story.

EM I got the idea for that a long time ago. I thought of every possible version for four years: “Where does it start? Where does it end? Is it coed?” I also wondered: “Shouldn’t it be narrated by this guy that knows everybody? He’s virtually the protagonist. He’ll be there at the beginning and still there at the end?” I thought: “No, it can’t be in the first person. What do you do with the sex scenes?” Furthermore, no one knows everybody. Imagine two lesbians having sex, and this guy narrating it in the first person. That’s ridiculous.

So the whole thing slowly developed. After four years I knew the best thing was to move in these heavy chunks of narrative: L.A.; Stonewall had to be in the middle; New York would be the one place we’d return to—for the Parade, so I could get as many of the principals who haven’t been violently killed off as possible in together. I’d end with the narrator revealing he is The Kid. He takes this poor, younger version of himself home, and tells him the story of the novel.

I got into terrific trouble with it at Random House. It was the worst time of my life. Bob Trent killed himself right in the middle of it all. Ultimately, Random House suggested changes I didn’t want to make. I remember Bob Gottlieb saying:² “You have a choice. You can refuse to make the changes. Say: ‘Go ahead and publish it, because you bought it.’ Or you can make the changes—or pretend to make them; that is, make some changes, but nothing definitive.” That appealed to my sense of mischief, so that’s what I tried to do. It didn’t fool them, and we reached the lawyer stage before they capitulated.

EM I thought if you start before Stonewall, you can show the seeds of that politically, but also the development of an ethnicity—gay culture. You can show, for instance, how when you start everyone works for straights. Over the book, people develop new professions, in which they don’t have to work for straights. A guy who’s a cop at first becomes a bartender, then a maker of porn.

EM No. The difference was that what I usually write—short stories—if properly outlined, can be done in a couple of days or weeks. Then you know what you have. This time I spent the entire year and a half writing it not knowing how I was going to come out of it.

EM Not until I’d finished it. I didn’t know if certain sections worked. Frankly, a lot of people who claim to be readers of mine have mixed feelings about How Long? Bob read the whole thing out loud, then said: “I don’t know. It’s been so long, over the course of a year and a half.” Normally he’d have read the book in a week.

By then I knew what I had. When I got the letter from the editor at Random House about the changes, I knew they were wrong. They were the worst possible things. He didn’t like the idea of older/younger sexual liaisons. He said when he came out, everyone was twenty-two and having sex with each other. That’s his book. He wanted the entire “Twin Cities” section removed. But each section supplied a number of other pieces of information that, gathered together, tell us how gay culture evolved. You can’t take out the middle. Everything before it leads up to it; everything after it develops from it. But I made lots of cuts to pretend I was going along with them. The book, long as it is, is shorter than what I handed in.

RC Is there anything in some readers’ reservations over the idea of epic narrative? Everything’s tightly stitched together and consequential. In reality, when the sexual liberation of the seventies is followed by AIDS, nobody knew what was going on. How do you stitch that sense into a book with such narrative coherence?

EM That’s a built-in paradox of any epic novel, unless things aren’t tied up and it’s all a big sprawl. The problem for some was it takes a lot of intelligence to get through a book of that size and keep everything in mind. A lot of readers might be happy, eager readers, but not necessarily smart. They wouldn’t notice, for instance, the word “home” appearing through the book, but especially in the last hundred pages. It gets very laden with meaning. “Home” is the last word in the novel. Did they notice the terrible storm at the parade? Did people realize the way those two men were talking about the rain, that it’s AIDS? A conventional novel always gives the reader what he expects. This was an unconventional novel in a conventional form. A lot of people didn’t get that.

There’s that strange end of the “Twin Cities” section, which builds up to the reconciliation of Luke and Tom, something we’ve presumably been looking forward to for the last four hundred pages. The mundane writer has to give you their encounter in full. It’s the traditional scène à faire. But I had already, in various ways, sorted out what was likely to happen. There was no reason to write that scene, so I cut out at the moment they met. It’s much more dramatic that way, especially as Walt caps the entire section by referring back to something extremely key that occurred nine years before. Such procedure defies generic demands, of course—but I wasn’t working within genre; I was subverting it. I think some people kept getting annoyed at the book they had expected me to write rather than the one I wrote.

EM Yes. My book and Felice Picano’s Like People in History were twinned a lot. One idiot reviewer said: “In neither book do you ever see anybody at work; it’s like we’re all rich people and have no day jobs.” Well, I can’t speak for Felice. But I troubled to show people at work constantly. There’s the cop. Chris, the one straight lead, is always involved in the theater world. Lois is a tavernière, then runs her antiques store. The idea was to show how the main way people have created gay culture is by pulling away from jobs where they work for straights, and creating these other things. If this guy is that stupid he didn’t see it . . .

The book got the worst reviews of all my novels, but outsold the others by far. Reviews are irrelevant, anyway. They’re too often by dummies, or they’re about the reviewer, not the book.

RC The novel we haven’t touched on is One Last Waltz. What was the genesis of that?

EM One Last Waltz is the only thing I’ve written I didn’t outline. It must be autobiographical, I guess. It doesn’t seem so, though my brother did try to drown me when I was a kid. I wrote it in five weeks. It’s not gay. I honestly don’t know where it came from. I was sitting in this very chair and suddenly realized I had a whole novel in my head. If you’d said “page two hundred and thirty-eight,” I swear I could’ve told you what was on it. I opened up a fresh notebook, thinking: “Let’s put this to the test. Yes—I’ve got a novel in me.” Out it came.

I knew it was two different stories that were the same: one taking place then, one now; they were going to interconnect. I thought: “I’d better do some research. I don’t know anything about Ireland.” The folklore’s just out of my head. Like this whole idea that, at a time of so much immigration from Ireland to America, a lot of times the guys already had a sweetheart who’d say: “You will come back?” They’d say yes, knowing they never would, because no one before ever had. There was this belief that if you sewed into the lining of his coat some of your pubic hair, that would put a hold on him. That’s how you know how smart the woman is in the novel. She says: “I’ll mend your coat.” But you know what she’s looking for. She finds these hairs, takes them out, and says: “He’s mine.” I don’t know where I got that from.

RC Why did you put that book out under your own name, and the M. J. Verlaine project pseudonymously?

EM I didn’t think One Last Waltz would be bizarrely different from what I’d been doing. It had one major gay character. Also, at that time I didn’t think of myself as having to be limited to writing about gay life in a ghettoized way.

EM I seem to be more in it now. After all, four of my books have allgay casts. Then again, The Venice Adriana is about Maria Callas. The narrator isn’t me. He’s a young American gay guy in 1961; not entirely out. He goes to Venice to ghost her autobiography. Not that this really happened, of course—this is untold tales of Callas. It’s like a gay “coming out” novel. Also, it’s about Maria Callas. Thirdly, it’s a debate on free will, using Dante and Byron as foils. Dante says everybody has free will, but as he saw the world, no one does. Byron’s hero never makes a choice. Everything’s done to him, yet he enjoys total freedom.

RC One awkward comment here: since you describe a world in the stories which is integrally and comprehensively gay, maybe you get the readership you deserve.

EM Or you could argue that it gives you a head start in getting a readership in the first place. A gay novel is its own marketing hook. It’s unfortunate that when you veer away from what you’re known for, whole crowds won’t follow you. I’m thinking of John le Carré’s The Naive and Sentimental Lover, which broke out of his line of spy novels, so it’s the one no one reads. Of course, it’s homoerotic as well. What I’m known for is what I call “the gadget”—the Buddies stories—because the whole cycle is misperceived by many to be really no more than a construction of moving parts. Press the button and good-looking guys have sex and camp around. In fact, it’s about how men passionately create a culture they can use, to replace the one that loathes them. And there’s nothing mechanical in the treatment. On the contrary, it’s unpredictably vexed by emotional overloads and constantly games with its own naturalism. Maybe that’s why I wanted to call it quits after the third volume. I was tired of being misunderstood, and went on strike.

In any case, my next novel takes me far from Stonewall, to Nazi Germany. I’ve always been fascinated by modern German history, because it’s so filled with eerie mischances that had tremendous impact. The sheer number of accidents that led Hitler to power and then saved him from fail-safe assassination schemes is unbelievable. The entire Nazi era is unbelievable in ways that most educated people don’t ken even today. For example, it wasn’t Rudolf Hess who flew to Scotland in 1941. Hess took off, but was intercepted and a double substituted for him. I know that sounds crazy, but everything about the Nazis was crazy. One can’t view them rationally. So I have Hitler making a pact with the Devil, who’s a comic figure, as in Goethe’s Faust. Goethe’s in it too. All the main characters are invented, but some figures are historical, especially Rosita Serrano, a star of late-thirties German musical films. They called her “La Chilenita.” This isn’t a gay novel in any real sense, but a gay writer with even a shred of decency has to include that touch of cabaret.

RC What was the genesis of the “M. J. Verlaine” stories? They read like heterosexual versions of the gay stories.

EM I honestly don’t remember. I think I thought the book would be a great idea, but I’d only amassed a gay readership. I thought: “I’d better do this under a pseudonym. If I do it under my own name, I’ll disappoint my own readers and won’t be able to get new ones.”

I always think it’s attractive to put together a book of separate stories that interlock in certain ways. Unlike the regular story series, these interlock in subtle ways. Someone turns up in another story in a walk-on part, or becomes the protagonist of a later story, or vice versa. But there’s no throughline.

RC What about writing about heterosexual sex? You give the reaction of a woman to what she finds disappointing in lovemaking. Does imagining this kind of situation come as easily as anything else you write?

EM Yes. The reason why is the same reason someone like John Preston was a terrible writer. He never looked around; never listened to anything. Imagination takes off from observation. You build up a store of observation from which you have, first of all, real-life data. You can quote people from different cultures and accents; you know how they sound. Also, with this much that’s real, you have something to leap off from. If you’ve never heard what anyone’s said, if you’ve never looked around an apartment, how are you going to invent anything?

EM Never. I’m probably a congenital voyeur. I’m always curious—not about my friends’ personal lives, say, because I’m very private myself.

RC Could one be observant by habit, while in fact already knowing enough about human nature for one’s writing?

EM How could you ever know enough? Each person’s a new encyclopedia of stuff.

RC But you felt the characters in the series have full autonomy now. What more would you need to observe to feed into their characters?

EM That’s true—nothing; I know them so well. But if I want to do anything else, I’d better keep my eyes and ears open—and I do.

RC I wanted to ask you about the relationship between sexuality and cultural expression. You state in Waves that no gay writer was influenced by the example of Tennessee Williams. But isn’t there a case for sexual sublimation leading to great literature on occasion? Williams found his great subjects—the slipperiness of the social status of women; and of Southernness in American culture; arguably, he couldn’t have got to the Southernness without the women. In the end, though, how did he get to the women? There’s a strong argument for saying he got there through sexual sublimation.

EM I suppose so. But I’d emphasize your use of “slipperiness.” It’s a slippery sexuality his characters have. In almost every play, Williams shows these beautiful men who’re supposedly straight. In real life they’d be hustling or gay.

RC But when he moved to a more open expression of his homosexuality, Williams’s plays fell apart. Maybe that was an accident.

EM There are no second acts in American lives. Williams ran out of material. The last good play he wrote was Vieux Carré—a retrospective of the earlier icons. Williams says: “Now, for my last great work, I want to review the tales by which I identified the human condition.”

EM I don’t think the sublimation was ever over. Williams never wrote “out” gay plays: not Outcry, for instance, or the one I saw him in: Small Craft Warnings. They’ve got the same materials as before. They’re no more “out.” He was out. I think he thought: “Since I’m out when no one else is, that’s enough out!” I think there was this belief on the part of many people of his generation that being out was for real life and having sex. They had this ingrown homophobia in the idea that writing plays wasn’t about being out; you don’t have out characters. It takes a whole other generation to see there’s material in gay life and gay characters. We still have allegedly major gay figures saying you have to have straights in or it’s not real! That’s so strange to me. You don’t have to have anything in particular other than imagination, observation, and a view of the world. You can have nothing but Eskimos, horse-traders, or plumbers. It depends what you do with your materials. The notion that a work’s quality would inhere in its setting or selection of characters—only someone penetratingly stupid would actually believe that! Talent’s necessary; vision’s necessary.

RC One author I’d like to ask more about is Edmund White. We haven’t talked about the book that is key in many ways to White’s reputation: A Boy’s Own Story. It’s perhaps at the forefront of a tradition of confessional or “autofictional” works—his term. The reception of that book by the wider literary establishment was important in seizing on the idea that its portrayal of adolescence allowed a universal readership access to its concerns.

EM Yes, because you’re not gay until whenever—though the character is already not only thirteen—that is to say, pubescent—in the very beginning; he’s fucking a ten-year-old. So he’s already a gay man as far as I’m concerned. I think they’ll do anything to say a work isn’t gay, or an author isn’t entirely gay. They still cannot understand that we’re different—and better. They know blacks are different; they look different. They know Jewish people are different; they got killed in their millions, right? But they don’t think we’re different.

I suppose some gay writers who’ve made the statement that gays aren’t different probably think that’s a badge of approval. We might have slightly different politics, or a slightly different sexuality is all. I think that’s utter bullshit. If I felt that way, I could never have conceived “the knowledge,” that love of movies and Broadway and camp.

RC Fans of your books acknowledge your tapping into the urban codes they understand. A Boy’s Own Story does something very different. It’s not about urban gay experience, except very implicitly. It’s about the universal gay experience of another context: the family.

EM Yes. It’s possible that growing up gay in America in relatively recent times means you’re really growing up as two people. One is the person you really are; the other’s the person you present.

That’s why I always say gay life really is showbiz. You get to choose the person you try to play. You choose your character. Because no one else in America growing up is able to see the one me that is me—the gay me—the other is the role I play. The curtains go up; I play this thing.

That makes you unusually conscious of yourself, your reactions, and other people’s. Wouldn’t that indeed lead to a heavy component of confessional fiction, where gay writers come into their own because we—much more than straights—are used to noticing our surroundings from a very early age; how much we react to them; how much we’re allowed to show, and how much we select not to show? Kids usually haven’t learned what to select. Teenagers have such a hard time in high school. It’s as with Cosgrove and his asocialized behavior: he doesn’t realize everyone regards him as a little freak when he’s just saying what he felt was a cute, funny thing.

Gays don’t usually make that kind of mistake. We’re already selecting. We’ve already figured out we get in trouble if we just present ourselves. Everything has to be prepared, sifted, “straight-cultured.” I suppose White’s confessional books reflect that. A Boy’s Own Story would be the major such work of that kind. It had to happen. Someone had to do it. Since White was earlier established than others, he’s the one who got to it first. Also, he’s the one who could get away with it, because by that time he’d been somewhat anointed. I think if David Leavitt had wanted to do it, he could have—and what did he give us in Arkansas? A very confessional sort of book. This is the kind of thing you expect from gays, because we’re aware of our surroundings in a way straights aren’t.

RC A Boy’s Own Story was taken to confirm the “anointment,” as you put it. It’s been an important book for many people. Was it for you?

EM I don’t know. A lot of times I feel it’s not important whether I like a book or not. What’s important is what it represents; what it succeeds in doing. The point is, unlike Forgetting Elena or Nocturnes, this is White’s classic work of fiction that has to be slotted into the publishing phenomenon that goes with Dancer from the Dance.

RC How, then, did you edit Waves? Were you looking for the story that pleases or the “great” story?

EM You pick stories you think are really good. As Waves shows, those can be very different. It’s basically effect; the effect of a story on you when you finish it is: “I want it in my anthology, or I don’t.” It’s visceral.

I certainly didn’t want nothing but ghetto stories. Variety’s the one thing you want. An anthology is a carousel ride. You’ve no idea where you’re getting on or off. What killed me was, if ever there were an anthologized people, it’s American gays. Yet, to my knowledge, no one had ever taken advantage of editing of an anthology to write a piece on gay literature as an introduction. That’s the only reason I did Waves. Originally, I was going to write a much longer essay for the New Yorker. But there was so much reading involved. I thought: “I’ll never be able to get a handle on this.” It’s like opera: you know all of it or none of it. It’s too varied; too large. So I gave up. But I thought: “If I do an anthology, I can write a little introduction.”

EM Some stories didn’t need editing. A few needed a tiny bit—like where I felt a sentence wasn’t clear enough. A few needed considerably more work. I wrote half Bob Trent’s. But I thought somewhere along the way I was going to run into somebody—besides Bob—who couldn’t take editing. It didn’t happen! Everyone was very glad to be part of the package and very easy to work with.