RH: Some people might ask why we need another novel about New
York in the '80s, but you've said elsewhere that the necessary
perspective wasn't present for you until now.
AG: It always takes me fifteen years to look back at any event
in my life and to see a shape, to flatten it, heighten it, and simplify it
in the way that fiction requires. I think with the present advances in
medicine, it's possible to look back at those first cases in that very
early time, and to see the medieval terror and the concomittant
coming together of the community to defend itself. I think it was a
weirdly heroic moment and that future generations will see that the response to the AIDS pandemic ranks
as one of the great moments in civic history. The fact that so many
people in the artistic and the gay community put their heads
together and used their skills as artists, writers, and publicists to
reverse the early suspicion and terror, to inform themselves and
protect their friends, is an immense and beautfiul subject. It seems
less immediately inspirational, but as medicine has made people live
longer and longer, it's now possible to parenthesize that particular
moment and dramatize it.
RH: This had actually started out as an essay, right?
AG: As I say in the context of the novel, I think that finally
my address book may be the greatest book I ever write, the greatest
book I ever assemble, and the truest testament to my achievement
in life as a gatherer of wonderful friends. It was in the process of
purging the dead from my address book, or considering getting rid of
them, that I began to understand yet again the scale of what had
been lost. I had to come up with an alternative filing system so that I
didn't just jettison people who had the bad taste to die young, but
somehow kept them on record, kept them in places of honor. And as
I wrote about this in an essay, I realized that while it was good in
and of itself, it needed characters. It needed amplification. So I
invented Robert Gustafson as an emblem of all those kids that I remember as being
talented and gorgeous and highly visible and full of promise. Then it
began to be a novel. You never really know where the work is
coming from, and to be really responsive you just have to follow it
like a dowsing rod wherever it will lead you.
RH: In an interview with Donald Antrim that appeared in
BOMB, you had an interesting comment about moral
responsitivity, which is that if you think about being morally
responsive, you aren't really. I think that holds true for creative
responsitivity as well. You have to live in that moment and write
what occurs to you.
AG: If you trust the work and give it a daily place in your
existence--and by 'daily' I mean that even on a book tour, you're
writing on a yellow legal pad, even though there's a distinct
possibility that none of these sentences will ever see print, just to
keep your chops going, just to keep your hand in--you do find that
your major ethical and personal concerns come to rest
biorhythmically in the fiction. Just as the work becomes essential for
you, there's a possibility that it can become essential for dozens and
hundreds and thousands of other readers.
It's a curious bargain that we make as writers to assume that our
emotional lives are synchronous in large part with those of every
other member of the species. That's the great lesson of literature,
that it's predicated on the notion that we are not just similar but
unanimous. It's the only form that I can think of right now that
makes that its basic assumption. It's thrilling to think that I can sit
down and read a passage from Montaigne and weep real tears, or be
moved by Dante's vision or Chaucer's vision. These people have been
fog on a coffin lid for four or five hundred years, yet they've left
their emotional traces with such precision that those traces become
my own.
It's a great source for idealism in a world that has given up on
idealism, and it's one reason that I keep writing novels and short
stories and not screenplays. I have sovereign accountability over
these texts, and because it's relatively inexpensive to produce a book,
the artist has greater control over that book. I want to keep doing
what I'm doing.
RH: You mentioned precision, and I notice that your language is
very precise in a particular way; you're precise about the look and
feel of things without having to resort to jargon.
AG: of the many missions of a novelist is the renewal of the
language. I take that very seriously. We're endlessly reinventing the
English language. The problem with jargon is that it's almost a
subtractive element of language. Fiction writing has an additive
quality. It takes preexisting forms and recombines them, freshens
the language and makes you think, "I've never seen it said that way."
When you really think about how abstract language truly is, and how
immediate it becomes for us emotionally, when we say, "I thought I
was the only person who felt that, or sensed that..."
I like the idea of how language looks on the page. It matters
immensely to me where the paragraphs fall and how the verbs
scintillate and oscillate. So I think in some ways my language is
becoming more and more precise and specific... and joyful. I think of
this as a very joyful book to read and to have written. Although the
subject matter is often dark, there's some weird ration betweeen the
livingness and the energy of the prose and the darkness of the mood
of the book.
RH: The joy does emerge out of very tragic circumstances.
AG: Nobody needs to make up the worst things; they will find
us. That's just the movement of experience. Trainwrecks and
earthquakes and tumors and dead children and social
embarrassment are the stuff of fiction and the stuff of reality. It's
how you approach it, explain it and experience it on the page that
makes you either a tragic writer or a comic writer. My bias is to see
people head-to-toe. My preference is the long shot as opposed to the
closeup. I like to see this great pageant of experience, to see people
in an almost farcical third dimension of comic possibilities. I had a
great time in this novel, finally writing a French farce bedroom
scene. One person hides in the closet, another person comes in and
then has to be tucked in the closet, then a third person arrives...I'd
always wanted to write one of those scenes, and I had such joy in
getting it down.
It's a constant question of mechanical experimentation, of pushing
skills that you've developed to a second or third level. Finding new
ways of talking about old truths.
RH: In that vein, I'm fascinated by some of your thoughts about
gallows humor as a path to self-knowledge.
AG: I also think of it as the response of an oppressed minority
in transforming their oppression to a source of levity and a source of
relief. The great Jewish joke is, "Why don't Jews drink?" Because it
dulls the pain. The gay community will have a million similar jokes
at their own expense that make the insults hurled from passing cars
and the gaybashings more tolerable, precisely because we anticipate
what the world will say about us, then transform it into something
beautiful and emotionally completing by making a joke of it. It's
really a form of magical thinking, a kind of amulet protection from
the world. If you can wade into the darkest of human circumstances,
and certainly the pandemic is one of the darkest moments -- it's the
darkest moment in my adult life --, there's a protection and
illumination that comedy offers you.
RH: I'm of a generation for which the pandemic completely
defined our sexual lives. The testimony of authors such as yourselves
is one of the few ways we have of knowing what it was to be an
adult before the pandemic and what it was like when the pandemic
began.
AG: I wanted very much in the book to divide the book into
"Before" and "After," and I added "After After" as a way of
anticipating the cure, which is definitely coming and which we wait
for daily. What I found, which is not surprising, is that having set the
"Before" section in motion I was loathe to end it. So "Before" ends up
being 200-odd pages. I couldn't bear to introduce the culprit into the
party. But in those pages, I tried as hard as I could to evoke the
innocence of the period before HIV. It was an innocent period,
though many revisionist thinkers will tell you that we courted our
own doom and deserved what we got, that anybody who had
unprotected sex with several partners should expect to be
punished.
You have to realize that one of the few benefits to being a gay man in
1980 is that there was no such thing as protected sex. The idea of
wearing a rubber was something that only suburban husbands who
didn't want to impregnate their wives had to worry about. One of the
real advantages of being gay was that you didn't have to carry major
equipment with you anywhere, not even the rubber in the wallet. It
was just you, me, here in line at the grocery store, I like your looks,
you like my looks, I've got an hour and a half, you've got an hour,
let's go.
For judgmental middle-aged and older people to cluck and shake
their fingers is to misremember the incredible erotic energy of
somebody in their twenties, especially somebodies like me and my
gang, who had thrown over the traces in little towns and managed to
swim like brilliant salmon upstream until we found New York and
found each other, got an apartment, got started as artists... There
was this tremendous sense of invigoration, and it coincided with a
tremendous burst of prosperity in New York. There were enough
leftovers for us to feast on for years, and it seemed like only a
matter of years before the great parties and great openings were for
us and for our work. Given the circumstances, we were wildly and
beautifully experimental.
I really learned so much from my erotic education, so much more
than I could have from books. Just to go with somebody, that weird
act of trust, and wander into a stranger's apartment, and wind up
with European aristocrats and housepainters, get naked with them
and have conversations afterwards that explained who they were
and what they wanted, was a great experience. Though I know it still
happens, there's an element of danger and risk and deathliness that
clings to it now that was missing in those early days.
RH: Like Edmund
White in The Farewell Symphony, you're looking at a
historical moment without guilt or shame, because you didn't feel
guilt or shame then, and to say otherwise would be a lie.
AG: If anything can be counted on, along with death, taxes,
and the force of gravity, it's this unbelievable Puritanical impulse in
American culture, and to think that it emerges only in straight
culture is a big mistake. Every ten or fifteen years, there's a "New
Puritanism" in which those who have escaped a particular disaster
would prefer to blame the victims rather than look at the whole
thing in all its complexity and all its simplicity. It's accusatory and
fascistic and dreadful and shaming. But it's not shaming of the artist,
it's shaming of the culture that seems endlessly bent on clucking and
shaming. Part of the joy for me in writing this book was that I
psyched myself into that state of mind before AIDS; it took a
tremendous amount of doing, sort of like trying to imagine the
twentieth century without the atomic bomb. I did it in a very simple
way, by psyching myself into the state of mind I had when I
approached New York for the first time as an adult.
I had a Toyota with everything I owned in the world packed in
cardboard boxes: all my cowboy shirts, my drawings, my favorite
books, my huge stereo speakers strapped to the top of the car... I
somehow got into the memory of what was in every box, and all my
expectations and hopes, an incredible sense of elation as I drove
across the bridge into New York, with the sun rising behind it. That
was my mneumonic trip for getting beyond that wall that separated
the late '80s from the early '80s. It was a great and joyful exercise,
very cathartic.
RH: The relationship between Hartley and Alabama is a very
touching and deep friendship.
AG: I wanted very much to render a praise song to the
friendships between gay men and straight women. I think there's a
lot of self-hatred in the gay community, though I'm not the first to
have noticed, which is projected into a hatred of the people who find
us interesting and attractive, so that women who find gay men
interesting are called "fag hags," a term which manages to bash both
gay men and straight women. I wanted to get around that self-
hatred and show how Hartley really adores Angie in a way that in
some ways is more healthy and complete than the relationships he
has with men. The bravery of straight and gay women in standing by
those early victims of HIV really deserves a lot of attention and
sympathy, much more than it's received to date in other people's
work.
RH: Hartley and Angie are both in love with Robert, but they're
also bonded together emotionally and creatively.
AG: The picture that's considered Alabama Byrne's
masterpiece is in fact a collaboration between her and Hartley. He
writes on the canvas and then she paints over it, using it as a warp
and woof of the picture. In that and a million other ways, I try to
play with the title, "Plays Well With Others," to suggest that those of
us who arrived in the early '80s, thinking only of ourselves, who felt
the great tragedy of our early lives was losing the fourteenth eyelash
from the left -- how could we possibly be seen at the clubs that
night? --, somehow transcended our early selfishness and formed a
bond with other people like us, other small-town escapees who were
too talented and gorgeous and queer to last in the little towns that
bred us. The book is an investigation of how "I" became "us," even
after "us" became "dead." Hartley becomes a container, holding all the
stories, all the lore of the lives of the people he's adored. Like the
Oldest Living Confederate Widow, his mission, his last personal
joy as a caretaker, is to set down the story. I'm looking out my hotel
window at San Francisco now, and this whole town in being run by
the liquid of the dead. Narratively and personally, that's true of each
and all of us. We become the combustion engine fueled by memory,
maybe regret, and certainly joy at all that has gone on before us.
RH: How do you live with such a strong presence of death?
AG: It's a typical circumstance for a 90 year old to have
outlived her crowd. It's anomalous to be only 45 years old and to
have lost a generation. But what it's done for those of us who are
fortunate enough to have survived is to give us an almost
superhuman strength and conviction, a philosopher's delight with
every moment of our lives. You participate in your own life in a very
active, shaping way. A lot of people who haven't had the good
fortune of misfortune don't recognize what a privilege every second
of life is. After you've delivered twenty or thirty eulogies to young
people and seen a number of people expire before your very eyes,
your relation to time is irredeemably altered.
I feel in some ways that I'm just getting started as an artist. I feel at
50 that I've just begun to fall through the floor and recognize that
I'm in a whole new level of reality. I'm running around like a kid at
FAO Schwarz, wondering where I can go next. It takes thirty years of
learning the keyboard, what jazz musicians call "woodshedding,"
going out to the woodshed and making all those terrible notes that
nobody should ever have to hear, before you're really ready to take
on the big subjects.
RH: You've been called a "post-gay" writer by Edmund White
because of your ability to publish books on gay and non-gay subjects.
Although as a writer the distinction is somewhat meaningless, does it
matter critically?
AG: It's going to be interesting to see how the next book and
the next book are perceived. There's a difference in the response to
this book, which I think is every bit as good as my first two, in that
because it's perceived to be about gay people, and particularly sick
gay people, which are the least attractive kind, it's thought to be
another AIDS novel. That's one of the disadvantages of weighing in
17 years after the beginning of the plague; people are yawning, and
they're so sick of thinking about the subject they immediately, with
the glibness of the media, fast-forward over it and say, "This is
over."
I find that this book has not been taken up by a lot of the media that
loved the first two books. Before, I was interviewed on "All Things
Considered" and "Morning Edition" and "Good Morning America"...all
those shows that guarantee serious consideration of your book and
guarantee sales. But my publicist can't get this particular book on
those shows at gunpoint. I was naive or hopeful enough that the
reputation of my first two books would guarantee me a hearing. And
I have had a hearing in certain circles; the gay press is much more
alive and widespread than I'd ever imagined. But it's almost as if you
make a decision, I hope a book at a time, as to where you want to be
placed. If you're writing about gay people, there's a distinct
possibility that you can count on only the gay press covering you.
My hope for the book, and I think it still has this possibility, perhaps
after Vintage publishes it in paperback, is that it will reach both
populations. That it will make those who lived through the pandemic
in close touch with those who were going down to the disease
remember some of the beauty and some of the difficulty, and make
some of those for whom HIV is just an acronym in a USA
Today pie chart open to some of this experience, that it will show
them just how heroic and fascinating and energized these past fifteen
years have been.
I'd like to think that I could be a double agent in this world. I don't
think of myself as a gay writer or a straight writer; I just think of
myself as a person who knows a great story when he finds one and
wants to tell it honestly, with consideration for both sides.
RH: Another instance of the 'turning away' of the mainstream
media took place when Harper's rejected the story "Thirty
Dildos," which appears at the beginning of this novel.
AG: I've had a long and very happy relationship with
Harper's, and the conversation with Lewis Lapham that
happened the day that chapter was to go to press was predicated on
his assumption that I, as a professional writer and as somebody who
stood to benefit from having Harper's publish the first chapter
of my book, would naturally cave in on the title. He told me that he'd
published a photograph of a lesbian couple in an earlier issue and
that he'd lost advertisers as a result. As a good team player, I was
supposed to immediately say, "Well, in that case, Lewis, please just
let me write about my wife and three children because advertisers
like that sort of thing." What happens is that magazines like
Esquire and Harper's want the cachet of publishing hip
gay writing, but with none of the risks. They don't want any of the
toxic aftermath, they just want the coolness of being thought liberal
and forward-looking and enlightened.
There's a cost that accrues to me as a writer for not writing, as some
writers have done, the same bestselling book over and over. You
know, Oldest Living Terry Cloth Robe Soaks Up Even More. I
refuse to do that. I'm living a book at a time, an experience at a time.
I'm not a commodification or a franchise. I took real risk in
publishing this book, and I looked for magazines that would be
willing to share that risk with me. Unfortunately, Harper's
turned out not to be one of them. Thank God GQ stepped into
the fray and published the story as written.
Nobody would have known if I'd changed the title from "Thirty
Dildos" to "A Fool's Errand" or Lewis' suggested title, "Thirty Friends."
But it's important for me, as somebody who's interested in ethics, to
try to live my ethics. It's a luxury to be able to do that, but it seems
essential to my own sense of well-being to have a clear conscience
and keep a pure relation to the work, to take these chances to grow
as a writer, to risk critical brickbats in the short term so that you can
look back in the long term over a list of books and say, "Every one is
different, every one is new, and yet they share a common ambition
to tell the truth as I learn it." I know more now than when I wrote
Oldest Living Confederate Widow, and I think the novel should
reflect that.
