Hear us Out: Conversations with Gay Novelists

CHRISTOPHER BRAM is the author of eight novels, including Father of Frankenstein, which was adapted into film as the Oscar-winning Gods and Monsters (1998), directed by Bill Condon; Gossip; The Notorious Dr. August: His Real Life and Crimes; and Lives of the Circus Animals.

Bram was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1952, but grew up outside Norfolk, Virginia, where he attended public school. He then studied at the College of William and Mary (1970–1974) before moving to New York in 1978. A first novel, “Gunny,” dating from his first years in the city, remains unpublished. Christopher Street published Bram’s short story “Aphrodisiac” in 1979; it subsequently appeared in Christopher Street, eds., Aphrodisiac: Fiction from Christopher Street (New York: Perigree, 1980). Bram meanwhile completed his next, and first-published novel, Surprising Myself (New York: Donald Fine, 1987).

Hold Tight (New York: Donald Fine, 1988), a historical novel set in New York during World War II, followed. Bram’s third, In Memory of Angel Clare (New York: Donald Fine, 1989), concerned the impact of AIDS on New York gay life. Almost History (New York: Donald Fine, 1992), a long historical novel, moves between America and the Philippines.

Father of Frankenstein (New York: Dutton, 1995) concerned the last months in the life of cult British horror film director James Whale; for the 1998 film version of Bram’s novel (Gods and Monsters), director Bill Condon received an Academy Award for his screenplay. Bram’s sixth novel, Gossip (New York: Dutton, 1997), is a contemporary political thriller set in Washington, D.C., while his seventh, The Notorious Dr. August: His Real Life and Crimes (New York: Morrow, 2000), returns to more distant historical material. It tells the life story of one Augustus Fitzwilliam Boyd, a musician. Beginning in the American South of the Civil War, it ends in Harlem in the 1920s, with interludes in Germany, Turkey, and Coney Island. Bram’s latest novel is Lives of the Circus Animals (New York: Morrow, 2003).

Bram has written several screenplays, including the scripts for two short films directed by Draper Shreeve. He has reviewed movies for the New York Native and Premiere magazine, and books for Christopher Street, New York Newsday, and Lambda Book Report. His many essays include a portrait of his neighborhood, “Perry Street, West Village,” published in John Preston, ed., Hometowns: Gay Men Write About Where They Belong (New York: Dutton, 1991); “Mapping the Territory,” an overview of gay male literature that introduces Robert Giard’s book of photographs, Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers (Boston: MIT Press, 1997); “Faggots Revisited,” in Lawrence D. Mass, ed., We Must Love One Another or Die: The Life and Legacies of Larry Kramer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998); and “Slow Learners,” in Patrick Merla, ed., Boys Like Us: Gay Writers Tell Their Coming Out Stories (New York: Avon, 1996). Bram also wrote an introduction to Richard Labonté, ed., Best Gay Erotica 1998 (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1998).

Recipient of a 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship, Bram continues to live and work in New York City. The interview took place on two occasions—Monday, April 20, 1998, and Wednesday, February 6, 2002—in his office. It was substantially revised and updated in June 2002.

RC Why do you work in an office?

CB Well, it’s New York City. My boyfriend and I have a very small three-room apartment in the West Village. Draper is a graphic designer and filmmaker. We both worked at home. So when I got a little money for the movie of Father of Frankenstein—and it was a low-budget movie, so it wasn’t much money—we decided I should get an office. As you can see, it’s not much of an office: a big white cube with a window. My books are still in boxes stacked against the wall; I still need to buy bookcases. That duck decoy on top of the filing cabinet was carved by my father. Dad took up woodcarving after his retirement from the farm chemical business.

There’s a therapist in the office next door; a realtor on the other side. Around the corner is a man who trains security guards. Down the hall is a jewelry designer. Our landlord is an accountant who chucked it all a few years ago to become a yoga instructor. It’s a funkier, more laid-back New York than most people know.

RC But you’re not originally from New York.

CB No. I grew up in Virginia, in the Norfolk–Virginia Beach area. I went to the College of William and Mary down there, on an ROTC scholarship. I didn’t come here until 1978, when I was twenty-six, ostensibly because I thought all writers needed to live in New York, but actually so I could get away from the straight guy I was in love with. And to meet some real gay people and to get laid. I spent a year with the Social Security Administration, then seven years at Scribner’s Bookstore, which was my equivalent of grad school.

RC How would you describe yourself as a novelist?

CB Oh lord. All over the place. Polymorphous. More polymorphous than perverse. I’m something of a realist, but I like to try new things: different subjects, voices, genres. It’s hard to say what kind of identity or unity my body of work has. There are themes, I suppose.

I’m known as a historical novelist. But of the seven novels I’ve published, only three are set in the historical past: Hold Tight, Father of Frankenstein, and The Notorious Dr. August. The others are set in my lifetime, if not limited to my experience. In Almost History, for example, the State Department protagonist, Jim Goodall, comes from a different generation than mine, but his niece Meg is my age. In fact, I gave her my family and some of my college experience.

Maybe if we separate my historical novels from the nonhistorical ones, we’d find two different novelists. But the truth of the matter is the historical novels are about contemporary issues: sex, gender, and race. I find race easier to write about when it’s set in the past. And the contemporary novels are all embedded in a historical present, a similar case of time and custom. In the middle of writing Gossip, which was aggressively set “now,” the Republicans won control of Congress. It radically changed the Washington I was writing about. So even when I write about the present, it becomes historical. Maybe I write historical novels about the present.

I suspect I’m known as a historical novelist only because so few other gay novelists visit the past. I’m the low-rent Gore Vidal. But I like to tell stories. Working in the past just gives me a bigger lake where I cast my net and fish out more stories.

RC You don’t draw immediately upon your own life, however?

CB I do, but it’s heavily disguised. My books are full of emotional autobiography—private little allegories, conscious and unconscious. It would take a couple of very close friends and a really good psychiatrist to translate them.

I’m not sure why I don’t write more overt autobiographical fiction. But I don’t find my life all that interesting. And I don’t trust my judgment writing it. I can’t be as objective about it. Also, I’ve been with Draper for twenty-plus years now, which creates privacy issues. Besides, it’s more fun trying out new stories, new experiences, lives I’ve never lived. Pieces of myself can’t help but turn up anyway, only changed, like in a funhouse mirror.

RC What do you consider your themes?

CB I was hoping you’d tell me.

Let’s see. I like moral dramas. I like to let my characters paint themselves into moral corners, and see what they can do to get out. I’m addicted to ambiguity. My good characters are always behaving badly, and my bad characters sometimes behave well—which I find drives some readers nuts. They want their categories neat—I guess to assure themselves that they could never slide into bad behavior.

One subject, I notice, that recurs again and again, is the life of the artist. It’s rarely writers, but everyone else. I’ve done filmmakers, musicians, actors, a failed poet in Gossip, a woman historian in Almost History. The novel I’m working on now is about New York theater, so it’s packed with actors, directors, playwrights—successful or otherwise—and a theater critic from the New York Times. Hold Tight is probably my only novel where no real artist is present.

I write about artists chiefly because I love the arts: movies, music, books. But I’m also fascinated by vocations—careers and work. As Freud said, we find satisfaction in life only through love or work. One gets tired of writing about love all the time. I don’t know enough about banking or business to imagine a character in those trades, but I do know something about movies and theater.

RC You write more about politics than any other gay writer I can think of, except Sarah Schulman perhaps.

CB But Sarah’s politics tend to get narrow and sentimental. It’s all good guys and bad guys, the damned and the saved, without the messy gray zone of choice and compromise where most political life takes place. That’s where the politics of my novels happens, but I’m not the only one. Michael Nava does it in his Henry Rios novels. The books are mysteries, but his protagonist is a lawyer at work in a real world. There are always trade-offs and choices. Mark Merlis is a very political writer too—first in American Studies, where he explored a McCarthy-era betrayal. Then in An Arrow’s Flight he produced an even better novel with a larger political meaning, a comic allegory about war and the State and gay men’s lives.

RC I noticed how often you move between first- and third-person narrators from one novel to the next. Has there been a pattern?

CB Not really. I just choose whatever tells the story. First person is wonderful for the way it immediately plunges you in a character’s life. But then you’re stuck there. In my first-person novels often I get restless and find myself playing with devices—letters, journals, newspaper articles—just to vary the voices.

RC What exactly do you have when you start a novel?

CB A situation and a couple of characters. I’ll think about it for a few months, and then start making notes. It’s a sketching phase and can last a month or so. Sometimes the notes will turn into scenes. Sometimes I’ll sketch out most of the story, although I never know exactly how it will end. At some point during this messing around, I’ll hit upon a scene and realize: “This is the beginning.” Then I’ll start writing. I write steadily from the beginning of the novel to end, but will continue to sketch scenes up ahead as I go.

For the very first novel I wrote—my unpublished novel—I did an outline. I plotted it out and knew exactly what everything would mean. But then writing the book was a chore. I already knew how it would end. From Surprising Myself on, I leave things open. I need to write the book for myself in order to find out how things turn out.

RC I suppose that’s even reflected in the title. Has it always been easy to find an ending?

CB Well, I always found the ending I needed. There have been times when I wrote past the ending—when the novel went on an extra scene or two. But a surprising number of my books end with epilogues, as if I’m reluctant to say goodbye to my characters.

RC Then there are your open endings, such as the last line of Surprising Myself: “We weren’t finished yet.”

CB It’s an open ending to an epilogue. Draper complains about my long goodbyes with real people too. He says I have a separation anxiety.

I rewrote the epilogue of Surprising Myself more times than I care to remember. Basically I was trying to come up with a plausible happy ending for a gay novel. Back in those days, gay novels always seemed to end with one of the lovers dying or disappearing. I wanted my two men to stay together. Earlier drafts sounded a bit too “yippee!”

RC Rereading Surprising Myself, I wondered if there was a danger of Joel, the gay narrator, becoming too good to be true. In trying to invert the earlier, negative gay stereotypes, there must be a danger of going too far.

CB But Joel can be a selfish jerk. Originally, when the book was longer, he was even more of a jerk. He didn’t come out until page three hundred. My original idea was to create a prickly, difficult, closet case where even straight readers would want to see him come out. Being gay would make him human. There were chapters about the lies he tells himself and how badly he treats Corey after they first go to bed together. And so on. All that got cut or telescoped when I rewrote the book. It was much too long—seven hundred pages. I heavily cut the first half—the coming out story, which other people had already written. I kept the second half—the living together story, which nobody had told yet.

RC I noticed that the fatalistic, self-destructive character in Surprising Myself was the heterosexual, Kearney.

CB You’re right. I hadn’t thought of that. He’s an army officer and treats Joel’s sister very badly, but then goes AWOL in pursuit of her, which is the end of his career. It’s a brash, romantic gesture … not least because she no longer loves him. The marriage is over.

RC Do you still heavily cut your novels when you revise them?

CB No. After Surprising Myself, I’ve usually had to add. There’s almost always a scene or two missing in the middle. As I said, sometimes I write a scene or two past the ending though.

With Father of Frankenstein, I originally wrote an epilogue I couldn’t make work. But then Bill Condon was writing the screenplay and he wanted something stronger for the ending. I told him about my failed epilogue, in which Clay Boone, years later, is married and a father. He wakes his son up in the middle of the night to watch Bride of Frankenstein on the late movie. Bill said, “Do you mind if I try something like that?” “Go ahead. Maybe you can make it work.” And he did. He needed less explanation and setup with film. And he added Brendan Fraser’s wonderfully spooky walk in the rain, which I still find extraordinary.

Incidentally, Clay was one of the hardest characters for me to write—a straight man in the 1950s. There would be none of the doubt or self-awareness that you find with straight men today. He’d seem like a complete asshole. But then I made him an outsider. He sees himself as a loser, and insists he’s a rebel, but there’s nothing very rebellious about him. But he’s not married and has no children, so he sees himself as a failure, even though he’s only twenty-six.

RC A nice irony is that, in gay terms, he gets treasured for the very things which make him feel redundant in the straight world. To be in your mid-twenties when you’re gay means to be starting out on a journey, whereas to be straight at twenty-six …

CB Yes. In the 1950s especially. You needed to be established by the time you were twenty-six if you were “a real man.” Straight people have become more like gay people over the past decades.

RC In plot terms, the idea of someone inviting their own death at the hands of a murderous lover bears comparisons with Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat.

CB I don’t know that book. But it’s certainly a well-established, well-worn trope. It’s such a strong trope that I was often afraid of it while writing Father of Frankenstein. The ultimate rough trade fantasy: a gay man wants to find a real man who will kill him. Usually out of guilt. James Whale has other reasons, but there was always the ghost of that old fantasy hanging over the plot twist. I’m glad to hear there’s a heterosexual version of the myth.

RC Some writers don’t engage with the process of their work being turned into film. Presumably with Father of Frankenstein and Gods and Monsters, you did.

CB Oh yes. I told Bill Condon early on: “This is your baby. I know I have no control over it. But if you want to pick my brain or bounce ideas off me, please do.” And he did. He used my failed ending, but made it his own. He asked me for casting ideas and showed me drafts of his script. He used my good ideas and ignored my bad ones. But he worked very closely to the book. He trusted it. He knew that I’d done a lot of the work already. The book was halfway to being a screenplay. He didn’t feel that he needed to put his fingerprints all over the project just to make it his. He used a lot of my dialogue. And he knew what to leave out—which I didn’t.

It was a wonderful experience from beginning to end. It’s not supposed to be. It didn’t hurt that I’ve written screenplays for short films that Draper directed. So I already knew that what’s in your head when you write won’t be what appears on the screen. All that really matters is that it works. And Gods and Monsters works.

RC Perhaps it helped that Bill Condon both wrote and directed the movie.

CB There were fewer cooks in the kitchen. But there were still producers—the money men—and Bill had to explain to them again and again the dynamics of the story. First they feared that Whale was a homophobic stereotype and needed to be softened. Then they feared that Clay was too negative and should be “a straight role model”—as if there’s a shortage of those. Bill had to explain how each man was a mess and they needed each other. If you screwed that up, you threw the story out of balance.

RC In Father of Frankenstein, you played with the story’s chronology slightly. With In Memory of Angel Clare, however, there was a much more radical playing with time. I felt you solved one problem for novels concerning AIDS in those days—the sense of a closed narrative, one that must end with death or loss. You played around that, in the chronological disorder, while not being untrue to the bleak realities of the subject.

CB You’re right. And it wasn’t accidental. It’s what enabled me to write the book in the first place.

I wanted to write about AIDS. I needed to write about it—not for political reasons but for selfish ones. I wanted to address the pain and fear that was suddenly filling the lives of my friends and myself. But AIDS in the eighties dictated one simple brutal story: you get sick and die. I didn’t know how to tell that story without drowning.

I started hearing stories about a particular young man whose older lover had just died of AIDS. First I heard from one friend how badly this boy behaved when his lover was sick. A few months later, however, after the man died, another friend met the boyfriend. He’d become the classic widow. His apartment was a shrine. All he could talk about was his grief for the man whom he had treated obliviously while he was still alive. I wondered: “Who is this person?” So that’s where I started the story. It’s one year later and Michael, the young widower, has inherited not only his lover’s money but his friends. As I needed to explain things to myself or the reader, I’d step back in time, circling and circling the dead man, who we keep hearing about but never meet—not until the next-to-last chapter. I was building up suspense, but also needed to work up my nerve to write a scene from the point of view of a PWA.

RC Both In Memory of Angel Clare and Father of Frankenstein are about filmmakers. Angel Clare is a frustrated director whose only movie was a cheesy horror film.

CB Yes. That was a complete accident. Not until I was in the middle of Father of Frankenstein did I realize that James Whale is a successful “Clare.” I’m not sure what that means, if anything. As I said, I like to write about artists, so long as they’re not writers. Through Draper I know about Clarence’s world of film gypsies. In fact, Clarence’s movie—Disco of the Damned—is the kind of cheap, sleazy first feature we used to joke about making.

Another connection I didn’t recognize until later is that Father of Frankenstein is also an AIDS novel. Whale fought in the First World War, when half of his generation perished. He survived. Only now, forty years later, does he find himself mourning the friends he lost. So the novel is full of things—illness, grief, survivor’s guilt—that I wouldn’t know or need to think about without AIDS.

RC In all your books, in fact, characters are asked to cross certain borders, and then justify it. In Gossip that border is more obviously one of ideology. I wondered how the problems with the characterization of Clay compared to those of the right-winger Bill O’Connor in that book.

CB Bill was a challenge. I needed to make him round and human enough so that my leftist narrator, Ralph, would find other attractions in him beside the thrill of “sleeping with the enemy.” I like to think that, given time, Bill could have become a sane, decent person. But he gets trapped in Republican success, and then killed. But there’s a naive quality under all his noise—a hunger for affection. Ralph says at one point that he was a better man in bed than in print.

RC Almost History must be at least 50 percent longer than the other novels. How much does a story dictate a book’s length to you?

CB There are fat books and there are lean books. Surprising Myself was first conceived as a fat, friendly, nineteenth-century novel, but I had to cut it down to a trimmer yet husky tome. The next two books, Hold Tight and In Memory of Angel Clare, are fairly short at 250 pages each. I still wanted to write a fat book. Almost History was first imagined as a family chronicle about a brother and sister. But the brother, Jim Goodall, a gay Lord Jim in the foreign service, took over the story before I wrote a word. His sister’s daughter, Meg, then became the second protagonist, a young woman my age who becomes a historian. The novel spans thirty-plus years. It was wonderful to work in that kind of space. Afterwards, however, I was exhausted; drained dry. And to be crass: it’s harder to sell a fat novel than a lean one. I swore I’d never write another fat one again.

Nevertheless, a few years later, I started to think about writing a picaresque novel about a clairvoyant pianist. He was inspired by Francis Grierson, also known as Jesse Shepherd, a real-life musician and writer described by Edmund Wilson in Patriotic Gore and David Bergman in Gaiety Transfigured. But I knew it would be a fat book, running from the Civil War to the 1920s. I delayed writing it, and while I delayed, it grew in my head. My clairvoyant pianist falls in love with an ex-slave. (Grierson was gay, but his lover was a Polish tailor from Chicago.) The ex-slave falls in love with a white governess. It could be like Huck and Jim stumbling into a Henry James novel. And then I saw a wonderful documentary called Coney Island: City of Fire, which ends with the Dreamland amusement park fire of 1911. So I had my ending. I had no choice now but to write the damn thing: The Notorious Dr. August: His Real Life and Crimes.

RC You don’t obviously owe a structural debt to any nineteenth-century novelist, however. Your longer books don’t feel Victorian.

CB No? You say that as if “Victorian” were pejorative. But you’re probably right. Even in Dr. August, it’s still my voice, with a slightly different beat and vocabulary. There were so many wonderful words I was suddenly free to use: bombazine, flapdoodle, prevaricate.

Now that I think about it, though, Victorian novels aren’t always fubsy or archaic in their diction. Look at Henry James in Daisy Miller or The Bostonians. And there’s a sort of post-Victorian Victorian novel that combines Victorian scope with modern storytelling—books like Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks or Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale. That’s the right period and feel for Dr. August.

RC I wanted you to comment on the analogy that Fitz makes between his narrating and his improvisational composition of music. Do you see novel writing in those terms?

CB Absolutely. I believe the best storytelling is improvisational, with the first draft anyway, and the draft before that—the one in your head. As I said before, I write my novels in order to find out what’s going to happen, much as Fitz plays around at the piano in order to find out what he thinks or feels about something. Not until I was deep into Dr. August, however, did I realize how much he and I had in common. I don’t mean only in our experience with “art” and imagination. There’s a good bit of that unconscious autobiography I was talking about earlier.

RC You introduce a number of encounters with real-life composers. Fitz meets Brahms in Baden-Baden; he attends the Wagner festival at Bayreuth. Did these opportunities present themselves through research?

CB Yes. Brahms really was in Baden that summer, visiting Clara Schumann. If history gives you something interesting, you should use it. If it doesn’t, you can make something up. But I try to keep to the facts when possible.

I love Brahms. I was tickled I could include a performance of his Piano Quintet, one of my favorite pieces of music. It was composed just a few years before Brahms meets Fitz. One of the pleasures of writing the book was that I could indulge my love of classical music, explore new recordings, and imagine how it sounded back when it was new—before it was “classical”; when it was just another piece of the music scene.

RC In the “Author’s Note,” you acknowledge a number of historical and reference works. But you also mention visiting Istanbul. Did you need to do that for the book?

CB Actually, Istanbul was a happy accident. The whole Lady Ashe–Freddie episode was originally going to take place in Venice. But everybody does Venice. It’s been done to death, so to speak. But then Draper and I went with friends on a trip to Turkey. I discovered the European section of Istanbul, Pera, which is an imitation Paris built around 1860. When I got home, I did some research about the European community there, saw that Lady Ashe could be part of it, and so Venice was replaced by Constantinople.

RC I was interested in the conceit of Tristan, the “recording angel” of the book. The novel is in first person, but Fitz is dictating his story to Tristan, whose role expands as it goes along. Toward the end he takes on more definite qualities. A rather rarefied, second-person voice emerges. How did your understanding of Tristan alter during the writing of Dr. August?

CB Right from the start, with Fitz talking to an invisible “you,” I liked the fact that the novel was a conversation between two people, but where you only hear one side. I hoped Tristan would grow—and he did. As the story went on, I found I could play more and more with this person who wasn’t there. And it was fun to reveal things about him. Not until a third of the way through the novel do we learn that Tristan is the son of Isaac. Since Isaac is Fitz’s lover at this point, we wonder how that happened.

But I continued to discover things about Tristan myself as I wrote. I didn’t realize he was gay until just before Fitz found out. It came out of the material. It made sense. And it made good trouble—how would his mother Alice respond?

I’m still intrigued by Tristan. I’d love to write a whole book about him. I’m not yet ready to let him go. That’s my separation anxiety again. I’m often reluctant to say goodbye to characters in a novel and hope to write a sequel. I haven’t done that yet, but maybe I will with Tristan.

RC He fulfills a role as inheritor of the story which commonly, in historical or dynastic fiction, falls to the offspring of the main characters.

CB Yes, and that can’t happen in gay fiction that spans large periods of time. But we can use nephews and nieces, uncles and aunts. I do it with Tristan here. I did it with Meg in Almost History. Dorothy Allison plays with similar ideas in Bastard Out of Carolina. Gay and lesbian writers have this whole other territory to explore—auntdom and uncledom. We get to have children, even if they’re only half shares of your actual chromosomes.

RC Fitz describes himself as “pure mountebank” at one point. Are figures who practice deceit innately interesting?

CB Sure. They’re mysterious. All mysteries are interesting. Fitz is a charlatan, but he’s not corruptly corrupt. He’s not malicious. His deceptions are all benign. He’s like a good actor. He captures a kind of truth by make-believe, by lying. He even helps people with his lies. He’s like a good novelist.

RC There are some bold uses of hindsight in Dr. August which seem intentionally to startle the reader out of the book’s historic present.

CB Yes. The past has its own past, and its own future. Fitz tells his story in 1925, so he can suddenly leap forward from the “present” of 1864 to Einstein’s theory of relativity. His long life is a lens through which he—and the reader—can see the past enlarged and sharpened. It was fun to play the time card, but I was careful not to do it too much. One thing that drew me to Fitz as a character early on was the idea of somebody who has lived from 1850 to the 1920s—just how much their world has changed. That collision of the old and the new fascinated me.

RC In general, it’s clear that reading has been very important to you as a writer.

CB As a writer, yes—but also in every other part of my life. Reading is very important to me as a gay man. I mean, I read my way into homosexuality. I wrote an essay about it last year, “A Body in Books: A Memoir in a Reading List,” exploring all the books I read.

Looking back on it, I’m amazed by the authors I stumbled on without knowing they were gay—and even before I knew I was gay: Thomas Mann; James Baldwin; E. M. Forster. Early in high school came Thomas Mann—the scope; the ambition; the sheer literariness. As a side benefit, there were all these male infatuations. Mann treated them as perfectly normal. Now we know the truth about him—that his own infatuations were not just adolescent. I recently reread The Magic Mountain in a new translation. It’s such a proto-gay book. Settembrini is just a garrulous queen—clucking at passing servant girls, sure; but the way he courts the two cousins is like an older gay man.

One of the strangest, happiest accidents was the summer when I was working as a counselor at Boy Scout camp. Another counselor left out a copy of An End to Innocence by Leslie Fiedler. What an appropriate title! The book includes Fiedler’s famous essay “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey,” where he argues that a major theme of American literature is the flight of the white male into the arms of his black lover. I was stunned. I read it with my mouth wide open. Here I was, sixteen years old, learning that my crushes on other counselors weren’t a perversion. They were as American as Huckleberry Finn.

Years later, while working on Hold Tight, I realized how much Fiedler was in there, unconsciously. The main characters are Hank Fayette and Juke. Juke sounds a lot like Huck, but starts with a “J” like Jim. Hank Fayette has the same initials as Huckleberry Finn. It all takes place in Gansevoort Street, a haunt of Herman Melville when he was working at the New York Customs House. I saw this about halfway through, and played these aspects up a little. At one point I was jokingly thinking of dedicating the novel to Fiedler.

RC People sometimes claim this form of “gay liberation”—this journey to self-realization through literature—isn’t necessary anymore, now that there’s widespread representation of homosexuality in the visual media—in advertising, film; more immediate forms.

CB Well, things have changed. But a book is still a good, private place to explore your sexuality and try out fantasies about sex and love. A book’s like a portable closet—at least without a jacket. With the jacket, it can become a little billboard or handheld placard. But books still offer far more colors and shades of gray than movies or TV. There’s more variety, more flexibility.

RC You clearly have a love of films, though—the very things which some writers fear threaten the novel with obsolescence.

CB Yes. Sometimes I think of myself as a failed film director. Or not failed, just distracted. In college my ambition was to make movies. The short stories I wrote often began as ideas for a movie. But screenplays are such a bastard form. A screenplay doesn’t really exist until it’s made as a movie. So I thought I’d write the thing up as a short story instead. By the time I finished college, I was enjoying that much more than I would have enjoyed making movies. For one thing, you can do it without half a million dollars. Also, I don’t have the temperament for movies. I’d rather write novels.

I went to college in the seventies, which was a golden age in movies. People were experimenting with new subjects. They said: “Let’s do something real!” There was an electricity and excitement about it all, which there very rarely is in movies today. There still is that in fiction. So, for me, the novel has taken over the role movies had in the seventies, and that foreign films had in the fifties and sixties.

RC In your introduction to the 1998 volume of Best Gay Erotica, you talk about the importance of strong sex writing in your development of a gay self. Did it also influence you as a writer?

CB Definitely. Writing about sex is the most primal kind of writing. Immediately after college, I began to stumble upon good fiction about sex that went beyond porn, that showed how dramatic and expressive the sex act really was. And it wasn’t always the usual suspects. One writer was Harold Brodkey. This was around 1974. He was publishing chapters of a work-in-progress, A Party of Animals, in the New American Review. One—later published as the short story “Innocence”—was a forty-page description of a man trying to bring a woman to orgasm. What I found exciting was that Brodkey was writing through sex to a hundred other different things.

Then there was The Story of Harold by Terry Andrews. This is the fictional diary of a children’s writer, Terry Andrews—now said to be the pseudonym of George Selden, author of The Cricket in Times Square—who loves men and rough sex. What excited me was how the book embedded sex in real life and real emotions. It could juxtapose a lush, lyrical description of fisting a doctor with the account of an evening spent taking care of a sad little toddler.

Other good, strong sex writing followed—sometimes gay, sometimes straight: Endless Love by Scott Spencer; The Family by David Plante, where a young Catholic boy has an erotic vision of Christ while looking through his father’s copy of Health and Fitness magazine. Books like these encourage you to take risks. They give you permission to write similarly. They’re little keys that unlock your imagination.

RC What other writers have influenced you in your work?

CB Influence is hard for me to talk about, simply because I love to read. The variety of my loves dilutes the influences.

There are writers I worship, but I know I write nothing like them. I mean, for me, the four giants are Henry James, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Vladimir Nabokov. These are people I read and reread constantly. I’m as fascinated by their lives and careers as I am by their books. And I’m sure I’ve learned things from them, but I don’t write a bit like any of them.

James is a dramatist—as I am, I guess. I don’t mean that he’s a playwright or plot-driven, but that he needs to dramatize his ideas; bring them to emotional life. He looks for dramatic situations that will enable him to explore his subjects. For the sake of the drama, he can be remarkably generous to his characters, even when he disagrees with them—even when he writes about anarchists. Compare James’s radicals in The Princess Casamassima to Conrad’s in The Secret Agent.

Nabokov’s a great storyteller, too, which people often forget. His prose style is so glorious that we don’t always notice how strong his stories are. He’s also the great literary seducer, using language to make readers complicit in the most alien dramas. He, too, is remarkably generous to his characters, with an astounding range of sympathy. His mixture of cruelty and pity is amazing. In an early draft of Father of Frankenstein, I toyed with a pesky Nabokovian author-narrator, but I couldn’t make it work. It went against the grain of the story. But maybe—and I just thought of this—that laid the groundwork for some of the narrator games I play in Dr. August.

Proust isn’t just a novelist, but a philosopher, with a complex view of being. He sucked the memory business dry—you can’t copy it—but his feeling for social texture and comedy is wonderful. He also wrote great party scenes. He’s usually present in any fictional party I create, such as the George Cukor party in Father of Frankenstein.

And finally there’s Virginia Woolf. I don’t think there’s a trace of her in my work, even when I’ve tried to include it, as in In Memory of Angel Clare. I love her quickness; the sharp jumps in her prose; her wild mix of humor and poetry—the heady combination of the lyric and the comic which all of these writers use.

RC Which nineteenth-century writers have you enjoyed? How about Trollope? I noticed that Ralph in Gossip reads the Palliser novels.

CB I wanted to juxtapose the craziness of contemporary Washington with the quieter, frock-coated craziness of Victorian politics. And I wanted to read more Trollope. But I have a Trollope block. Maybe because a teacher back in college told me I wrote like him—meaning only that I wrote steadily and regularly. I had that reputation even then. Despite my intentions for Gossip, I gave up on Trollope again and read George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda instead—a glorious, exciting mess of a novel.

I love Eliot, especially Middlemarch. Her prose can get awfully tangled, but it doesn’t matter. The emotion keeps punching through. Tolstoy was my first great love as a writer. I keep moving on but falling back in love with him again. But you can’t learn how to write from Tolstoy. He’s his own creature. The same’s true of Dickens, who I also adore, but there are no lessons there—nothing another writer can build on.

It’s the usual suspects. The only odd note in my reading is Thackeray. He writes great dialogue. It doesn’t sound stagy, as Dickens’s and Eliot’s do, even at their best. And there’s a wonderful improvisational quality to his writing. You never know from page to page if you’re going to get good Thackeray or bad. He can be very bad, or wonderfully wasteful, giving his best lines to minor characters. That makes his novels lifelike.

RC What about the gay writers you read? You mentioned Terry Andrews and David Plante. What about Christopher Isherwood?

CB I love Isherwood now, especially Prater Violet and Down There on a Visit. But he was a little too pure for my tastes back in my twenties. I had to get older to appreciate him.

Somebody I read early on was Jonathan Strong, who wrote a collection of stories called Tike and Five Stories back in 1969. One, “Supperburger,” concerns a nineteen-year-old, working-class Italian boy who falls in love with a married composer, Arthur Supperburger. He’s then passed on by the composer to his college-going nephew Louis. I read that in freshman year and fell totally in love with it. I’d just read and reread it. Part of it was the link to my own experiences. With the other gay books I’d been reading—James Baldwin, John Rechy—it wasn’t my world at all, or one I wanted to live in. It was a gothic realm, whereas Strong wrote about an everyday world I knew, albeit through this romantic voice.

RC How significant were 1970s gay authors like the Violet Quill group?

CB I’ve read lots of Edmund White and Andrew Holleran, if that’s what you mean. I’m baffled, though, when people talk about the Violet Quill as if it signified something. It’s two first-rate writers—White and Holleran—who we’d be talking about whether they met each other or not. And two good writers—Robert Ferro and George Whitmore—who died before they could prove themselves. Otherwise the label is air. These men did not influence or shape each other. The name doesn’t even suggest a shared sensibility, the way “Bloomsbury” does. And there’s the assumption that the Violet Quill “invented” gay literature as we know it, which is nonsense.

If you want to discuss the rise of post-Stonewall literature, you should talk about Charles Ortleb and Christopher Street magazine. Ortleb made enemies later with the New York Native and his theories about AIDS. But what he did for gay fiction in the 1970s was remarkable. He and his editors Patrick Merla and Tom Steele did terrific work. I first read White and Holleran and a hundred other gay writers in Christopher Street. And I was eventually published there myself, so maybe I’m prejudiced. But I do believe they deserve far more credit than they get.

RC So did White and Holleran influence you as a gay writer?

CB Yes and no. They’re not like father figures but older siblings. I was already developing my own identity as their books appeared. But their best influence on my work was simply: “These gay men are writing fiction about their lives. I can write about mine too.”

I liked Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance when it first came out, although I wasn’t sure why. It doesn’t work like a novel. It’s all mood and voice. The chief event is what doesn’t happen—Malone’s ex-lover doesn’t kill him. I recently reread it, however, and loved it. It still doesn’t work as a novel, but has become a wonderful scrapbook about New York in the seventies—and not just gay New York either. And it’s all mood—but what wonderful moods! I remembered the book being soaked in F. Scott Fitzgerald, but now I’m better read and I hear other voices: Capote, Proust, even Firbank.

As I get older, I find myself getting fonder of Holleran’s books, for all their weirdnesses. You know, there’s always that “Woe is me” note in his work, even before AIDS. He’s always been writing elegies: “Oh look at that beautiful boy over there. He’ll never look at me. Or if he does, he’ll never go to bed with me. Or if he goes to bed with me, he won’t call the next day.” He’s the Eeyore of gay literature. But I find myself enjoying him more and more as I get older. I also find I identify more with Eeyore.

RC And Edmund White?

CB I’ve read White ever since I picked up the Seymour Kleinberg anthology The Other Persuasion when I was still in Virginia. It included a short story, “The Beautiful Room Is Empty”—no relation to the later novel. When I started writing for Christopher Street, the editor—Patrick Merla—gave me a stack of back issues with the articles that were the basis for States of Desire. They were wonderful. I especially liked how White could start with a gay point of view and then capture and characterize an entire city. Then came the short story “First Love,” the first chapter of A Boy’s Own Story, which was published in Christopher Street and then in Aphrodisiac: Fiction from Christopher Street. I read and reread it. I couldn’t wait to read the rest of the book. When it was finally published, however, it wasn’t what I’d expected. It felt too episodic and detached. Then I realized that the book I wanted to read was the one I was writing, Surprising Myself, so I was relieved. Now I can go back to A Boy’s Own Story and admire it for what it is.

I find something to admire and enjoy in almost all of White’s fiction—even the books that don’t entirely work. The only book I don’t like is Nocturnes for the King of Naples—a silly book—the Last Year at Marienbad of gay fiction. I’m baffled by the people who praise it, usually in the course of trashing his later, better, more open books. For me it’s a throwback—a tony piece of stoner closet fiction.

The Other Persuasion, by the way, was also where I first read the Jane Rule short story, “Middle Children.” It’s about two women who become lovers in college. Basically they want to balance their private and public lives together—that is, how much they should live for each other, and how much for the world at large? At that point I think I needed to be told, both as a person and a writer: “You can be gay and it doesn’t have to take you out of the world. You’re still in the world.”

RC What about Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City?

CB I enjoyed Tales. It was like a great comic strip in prose. I love a good comic strip. But it worked even better on film than it did on paper, when you had actors to flesh out the world of the books. I like Maupin’s last novel—The Night Listener—far more. It’s a wonderful novel. It doesn’t need actors. It’s fully there.

RC And then there’s Larry Kramer. You wrote a generous essay about Faggots, arguing that we should listen to the tale and not the teller.

CB Yes, well, Kramer is a better playwright than he is a novelist, but Faggots is not the one-dimensional screed that his enemies or even Kramer said it was. It’s as if he believed the attacks and no longer noticed what’s in his own book. Faggots is actually a very good novel folded up inside a bad novel. The good novel is full of wonderfully dangerous, mixed feelings about sex and love and community, but Kramer can no longer admit that, now that he’s become the village scold.

RC Which other contemporary gay writers do you read?

CB Well, Alan Hollinghurst. I’ve read each of his novels twice, despite his cool indifference to story. He will get three or four balls of plot up in the air, and then drop them and toss around a single new ball at the end. But it doesn’t matter. I enjoy the prose and sex and texture of his world.

Allan Gurganus is amazing—as brilliant and inventive as Tony Kushner, who also awes me. There are two stories in White People—“Adult Art” and “Blessed Assurance”—that I count among my favorite life-changing works of fiction. Stretches of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All offer some of the best American prose since Moby-Dick. The ending of Plays Well with Others is stunning: a vision of heaven that is both comic and chilling after the AIDS deaths that precede it.

RC Both Russell and Gurganus are fascinated by breadth.

CB They both love to swing from the macro to the micro. The scope of Russell’s Sea of Tranquillity is extraordinary, ranging from two teenagers fucking in a basement to the astronaut father of one walking on the moon. His next book, The Coming Storm, is utterly earthbound, with four protagonists in the very real world of a prep school: a sexually repressed headmaster; his wife, who understands him better than he understands himself; a young, new teacher who’s gay; and a fifteen-year-old boy discovering sex. Each time you’re reading one of those characters, you want to stay with him or her.

All three writers—Gurganus, Kushner, and Russell—have capacious, generous imaginations. They want to write it all, gay and straight, but from a gay perspective. Michael Cunningham is like that, too. I especially enjoyed A Home at the End of the World.

These are exciting works. They start with a gay point of view, but go on to take in the whole world. This isn’t to dismiss ghetto writers. I don’t think even ghetto writers are sealed off from the rest of the world. The world can’t help spilling in.

The frustrating side of all of this is the mainstream doesn’t want to be seen through our eyes. They get very uncomfortable when gay people write about straight people. Read some of the reviews that Cunningham got for Flesh and Blood. There’s this indignant note of “How dare a gay man talk about us?”

RC Isn’t there something implicitly political about granting gay experience some importance alongside heterosexual lives too?

CB Definitely. Straight people have far more in common with gay people than they care to admit. The critic Michael Bronski was at a symposium several years ago when the question came up: “Are gay people different from straight people?” He surprised everyone who knew his politics by saying: “No. They’re the same. It’s just that straight people lie about it.”

Back in the early sixties there was a slew of attacks on Edward Albee and Tennessee Williams. They were claiming: “These are gay men, and they’re writing about gay life under disguise. They’re not really telling us anything about us.” Yes, they are! Nowadays, we have gay writers saying: “We’re gay, and we’re going to tell you about us—and about you.”

RC Despite the number of books being published, you don’t sound too optimistic about the future of gay-themed literature.

CB Not this week. A few years ago I thought: “It’s going to happen soon. The breakthrough’s around the corner. They will read our books as naturally as we read theirs.” But I’m getting impatient. Even Michael Cunningham, after the success of The Hours, said in an interview: “I can’t help noticing that as soon as I write a novel without a blowjob, they give me the Pulitzer Prize.”

RC It’s weird to think of where we’ve come in twenty-five years. There used to be straight novelists writing about gay experience—Iris Murdoch, say. Maybe the appearance of identity categories makes other writers think they shouldn’t write about gay characters.

CB But Murdoch was an exception. Some of her gay men are actually better than her women. She was quite pansexual herself.

Things are changing, just not as quickly as I’d like. Nowadays there are several good straight writers who include gay people in their worlds. Peter Carey in Jack Maggs, his twisting of Great Expectations, has a gay Pip and a gay footman. An Israeli novelist, A. B. Yehoshua, wrote a terrific novel called Late Divorce, with a gay son and the son’s lover. The lover is likable, and he and the father become friends. The son’s a shit—not because he’s gay but because he’s too much like the father.

RC You seem to read very widely.

CB I’m very promiscuous. I read lots of contemporary fiction. I’m always hungry for news. Russell Banks; Nadine Gordimer. A few years ago I read all of Gordimer, looking for ways to write about politics. Then Mary Gordon, especially The Other Side, which is like a Mrs. Dalloway set in Queens. Bharati Mukherjee, an Indian-American writer. She grew up in India but went to college in Iowa and has been in the United States ever since. She wrote an incredible book, Jasmine. The first chapter’s about being an eight-year-old girl in a village in the Punjab. In the second, she’s twenty-six and married to a banker in Nebraska. The rest of the novel is about how she got from one place to the other.

And Yehoshua, who should be a household name. He seems to be able to get into the skin of anyone—male, female, young, old, Jew, Arab. More recently I read all of Charles Baxter, a great short-story writer who has also written an amazing novel, Feast of Love. He too includes gay men and women in his world. I’m not saying that’s required, but I’ve noticed that writers I like will eventually write about gay men and lesbians. After all, we’re a great subject.

I read a lot of history and, more recently, tons of biography. I’m not sure why I’m suddenly addicted to biography. Maybe it’s middle age. I want to know what shape a life might have. I read some poetry, some philosophy—just enough to get me in trouble. I read more literary criticism than is probably good for me.

RC You don’t find it useful for your craft?

CB Not really. Literary criticism is all about meaning, not about how to achieve meaning. And it’s full of things that a writer has to unlearn—those clever systems of metaphor we used to hear about in New Criticism, or the abstract anti-meanings we get in post-structuralism. They just get in the way when you try to do them deliberately.

The most useful critic I ever read—the one who taught me the most about storytelling, and something about life too—is Pauline Kael, the film critic. She was wonderful about story construction and the games we play with genre—how you can achieve serious ends by playful means. She was not afraid to bring her own life into her criticism of a movie—just as a reader brings his or her own life into the reading of a book. And she wasn’t afraid of sex or humor. She loved their complications. She understood how the disruptive energy of lust can feed a work of art. Draper and I own all her books. She takes up a whole shelf at home, under my volumes of Edmund Wilson. But I reread her more often than I reread Wilson.

I reviewed movies for the New York Native back in the eighties, and quickly learned there was too much Kael in my voice. I experienced more anxiety of influence over her than with any other writer. That might be why I stopped reviewing movies.

A few years ago, Draper and I got a chance to meet her. We drove up to Great Barrington, where Kael lived in a big Victorian gingerbread monstrosity. We took her out to lunch. She was a short, friendly, feisty, opinionated old lady. As Draper said afterwards, she was like a grandmother, but one who said “shit” and “fuck” a lot.

RC Now, a leap. Are you able to support yourself as a novelist?

CB Usually. I haven’t had to take a full-time job since I sold my second novel back in 1987. But I’ve done most things writers do to make ends meet: teaching, freelance journalism, even some screenwriting. Screenplays are all structure and dialogue, the two things that come easiest to me. The hard stuff—character, psychology, description, texture—are added by the actors and director. It pays better than novels. On the downside, most screenplays never get filmed and are read by only four people.

I enjoy teaching too. I’ve been writer in residence at a couple of schools, including my own alma mater, William and Mary. But I can’t write while I teach. It seems to draw on the same performance side of my brain. Also, you find yourself being very wise and all-knowing with students, only to find when you sit down with your blank page that you’re just as stupid as ever.

RC You seem to have been very prolific—especially in the early years.

CB It looks that way, but it’s misleading. I took seven years to write Surprising Myself. It went through three complete drafts. The next two books took about nine months each. It was like I had all this energy built up. I was overjoyed just to be writing something new. Looking back, I’m amazed I wrote both Hold Tight and In Memory of Angel Clare so quickly. Almost History took much longer. It’s fatter. Also, as you get older, your energy goes down. You grow more self-critical. You explore things a little more slowly.

RC But you’ve never been stuck for an idea for the next novel?

CB Not yet. There’s usually six months between the time I finish a book and start another. But I often have all this energy when I finish and immediately start making notes for the next project.

RC Are you friends with other novelists? Are you part of a literary group?

CB I’m good friends with several writers, but not many novelists. Even those whose work I admire—Gurganus and Merlis—I see rarely. I know them chiefly through their work. I’ve become close to Paul Russell over the years, but Paul’s up in Poughkeepsie. We talk on the phone every month or so, but he rarely gets to New York.

On the other hand, there’s my friend Ed Sikov, who lives just around the corner. Ed’s a biographer, author of books about Billy Wilder and Peter Sellers. We see each other once a week anyway, and have a million other things to discuss besides our work. But we read each other’s works in progress. There’s Michael Bronski up in Boston, who’s a culture critic and historian—incredibly well-read; the great unnatural resource of gay and lesbian letters. We talk on the phone regularly.

There are playwright friends—Craig Lucas and Tony Kushner—who I see rarely. They’re often in my head. And there’s Victor Bumbalo, an excellent playwright, author of Adam and the Experts and What Are Tuesdays Like. He moved to L.A. a few years ago, but we talk or visit regularly, and we recommend books to each other. He turned me on to Arnold Bennett.

I’ve met most of my peers, who can be interesting. But you usually get the best of a writer in his books. The first time I ever went to the baths—I was shy back in the seventies—was in 1992 with Andrew Holleran. This was down in Miami at a literary festival. One night, a pack of gay writers went to the baths together. Andrew and I just sat on a bench in our towels and talked about books. Andrew would jump up now and then to see what was going on down the hall, but would return and resume conversation. I don’t think either of us got laid that night. Well, I know I didn’t.

RC But you don’t need the company of other novelists?

CB I read them and hope they read me. Maybe that’s company enough. But writing, like reading, is a fairly solitary activity. We like our myths about wolf packs of writers—Bloomsbury or the Violet Quill. But we all do our best work alone. Part of the appeal for me of filmmaking and theater as subjects for my novels is that these are highly social, collaborative worlds where you get lots of company.

More important than the company of writers is having a few trustworthy readers—good friends who can read a work in progress. I’ve accumulated five or six people over the years who I trust. One, Mary Gentile, I’ve known since college. The most recent is Paul Russell. We found that we not only liked each other’s fiction, but could talk about raw work in a mutually useful manner. But the best reader doesn’t have to be a writer. Mary used to teach at Harvard Business School but is now a consultant in diversity training. And Draper is an invaluable, ruthless reader, although his experience with film editing makes him a kind of writer.

I’ve also been lucky in my agents—first Eric Ashworth; now Edward Hibbert—and my editors and even copyeditors. I’ve hit upon some wonderful details or turns of phrase only because a smart copyeditor flagged a dubious sentence on my manuscript.

RC You talk a lot about movies. Do you think you’d be happier as a screenwriter or a director than as a novelist?

CB There are things I love about movies that you can’t get in novels. Actors—God, I love actors. What they can express with a look or inflection! And I love good photography. And music. But it takes a million dollars to make even a small movie. And it can take years to convince a few unimaginative people with money that your movie is worth making. With a novel it’s just you and your brain and many, many, many hours alone. My only real complaint about novels is that there are more moviegoers than readers.

RC Bill Condon’s screenplay for Gods and Monsters won an Oscar. Did your own career change as a result?

CB Not really. Alas. You’d think movie people would be snatching up my other books, but no. Gossip was optioned by a young producer, but that was before Gods and Monsters. Never underestimate the homophobia of Hollywood. Even now, even after the success of wonderful work like Six Feet Under or lousy work like the American Queer as Folk. They dislike gay material—especially the gay people in the business; even when they’re out themselves. Very few are in the closet anymore. But they don’t want to be seen as too gay, or narrowly gay, or politically gay. They want to be seen as universal. I often joke that I’d sell out in a minute, if only someone were buying. But being a gay writer has kept me honest.

However, I should add that the movie experience itself was amazing. You can’t imagine how wonderful it is to hear your words delivered by people like Ian McKellen or Lynn Redgrave. Or what it’s like to sit in a box at Lincoln Center during the New York Film Festival while a very smart audience of a thousand people catches every joke, every shift in emotion. And then it’s over and they erupt into a storm of applause. Novelists don’t get that. We don’t get a thousand readers reading a book together and finishing it at the same time—though maybe, just maybe, it’s going on in secret, dispersed all over the world.