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(12/17/02 1:56 pm)
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An Interview With Edmund White
The Great White Way:
Edmund White Holds Forth On Sex,
Drugs, Stonewall and Gay Letters
Interview by Cormac Brissett
Best known for his trilogy of autobiographical novels, A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony, Edmund White is the author of nearly 20 books and countless articles. While greatly celebrated as a novelist--his work has been praised by such writers as Vladimir Nabokov, Gore Vidal, and Christopher Isherwood--White is also a witty and perceptive social and cultural critic who has contributed incalculably to the popular gay ethos.
Now living in New York and teaching at Princeton, White recently visited the Twin Cities. At the Nicollet Island Inn, I had the opportunity to chat with this gracious literary icon.
You were at the Stonewall Riots. Did you actually fight the police? Tell me what that was like.
I just happened to be walking past with a friend, and we noticed that there was a big brouhaha going on in front of the place. It was a bar I had gone to quite a bit in previous years. But it had sort of shifted in its character and become more of a black-and-tan drag bar, which wasn't really my scene. I mean, black people are, but not drag bars.
[The police] had raided the bar, and they had taken away one Black Maria full of people who were not the customers, just the bartenders. There were many, many bartenders there, but they still had a lot of employees waiting.
That many bartenders? Were some of them for sale?
They were real bartenders.
I had the impression that there were some hustler elements to the Stonewall.
No, no, no. I mean, maybe some drag queens were for money. I don't think so, no.
So, they left behind some cops to guard the premises and the people they wanted to take in the next batch. We, the customers, instead of running away in the middle of the night, as most people had always done before, decided to stay and protest.
Those were, after all, the days of black liberation and women's liberation and the antiwar protests. But nobody had ever thought of gay liberation.
Were you aware of how oppressed you where before the riots?
We were so oppressed, we didn't even see it. I think that as an event, it released all this built-up resentment and energy that came rushing out. One of the problems was that under Mayor Wagner, all the gay bars in the city had been closed down for the World's Fair of 1964, and everybody had hated that.
Then, a new mayor had come in, John Lindsay, and he had reopened all the bars. But there was a new police lieutenant in the Greenwich Village area who decided to close down all these places all over again. It was like having tasted a little bit of freedom. We didn't want to have it taken away. That was one factor.
Judy Garland had just died. It was very, very hot, and a lot of black and Puerto Rican kids had started coming down to the Village. That was sort of new. These were people who were used to fighting against the police and who weren't scared off like the stupid white people.
Your peers at this time, the men you describe in The Farewell Symphony--my impression was that they were all closeted in their day jobs.
Everybody was. I was. I worked for Time Magazine. Whether it was a transparent closet or not, I'm not sure. Maybe people did know, but nobody ever asked. Nobody ever talked about it. It was a don't ask, don't tell policy.
How did these things change after Stonewall?
Well, for me, it was very dramatic, because after Stonewall, I moved to Rome and lived there for a year. When I came back, everything was completely different. I think if I had stayed, maybe the transition would [have seemed] gradual.
When I came back, a friend of mine met me at the airport and popped some speed in my mouth. We went around to all these different backroom bars and discos and pubs, things that had never existed before.
Sprung from the loins of Stonewall?
Definitely. Because Mayor Lindsay had told the police to back off, to not arrest gays anymore. In fact, he made the police go to sensitivity classes to learn about gays and how to get along with them.
What politicized you? Were you political before Stonewall?
I was. I was a socialist, and I had been active in leftist politics. But we gays--first of all, we never thought of "we gays." We thought of ourselves as individually gay, and as mentally ill and needing treatment. That's what you were. So, I had been politically involved in leftist politics, but never did it occur to me that gay issues could be political.
Stonewall definitely radicalized me in a tremendous way. Really, a bunch of other guys and I created gay literature. I'm not saying there hadn't been gay writers before. But they had been different, because they had been addressing straight readers, and oftentimes, in an apologetic way. And we were addressing gay readers as fellow insiders.
You've played such an important role in creating a context for gay identity for so many men. How has that role changed? What are the responsibilities of gay writers today?
I think gay writers are quite free now, because, first of all, gays have many elected representatives. They have many other forms of expression. Gays are everywhere, in movies, television, and so on.
But writers had a peculiarly important role at that time, just because gays were so underrepresented in every other area of life. There were no Will & Graces, there were no Philadelphias. There were no gays. We were really invisible.
I think writers often got pushed into being spokespeople for the movement. We were aware of it. There were a lot of gay bookstores. There were gay magazines that would review gay fiction.
And there was a self-conscious group of gay readers. Gays had always been big readers, but they wanted to read books everybody else read. They didn't want to read gay fiction. Or there wasn't any to read anyway, or very little.
But I think, suddenly, there was this movement. I think it's a movement that's kind of played itself out now.
What do you think about the pederast as a protagonist in the gay novel? Prior to the 1970s, most gay writers put pederasty and homosexuality on the same level. In the 1970s and 1980s, that became less the case, and now, there are new writers who are writing sympathetically from the perspective of the boy-lover.
Like who?
Matthew Stadler, Jonathan Halloran, Paul Russell, Scott Heim. What parallels exist between boy-love and homosexuality as movements, and in literature being the precursor to social acceptance of sexual minorities?
It's hard to see pedophilia as a movement, because I think it's one of the most tormented and persecuted groups of people in our society.
Matthew Stadler is a very good friend of mine. I talk to him all the time, and I think he suffers because of his interest in this enormously. I think he almost never acts on it.
I think it could be that gay writers oftentimes like to write about people who like edge sex. Gay writers like transgression or provocation. Writers do in general. And I think it's an exciting area precisely because it's so forbidden.
I suppose Dennis Cooper could be added to your list, too.
Even a country that's a bastion of freedom like France, which has so many liberal laws about homosexuality, is very down on pedophilia now. That's probably because they've had so many murders and real transgressions.
For instance, my 1980 book States of Desire was finally translated into French. The publisher rather shamefacedly wrote me that it has a warning to the reader on the front of the book saying there's pedophile content, because in the Boston chapter, there's an interview of a pedophile child psychiatrist.
It's quite neutral, really, from my point of view. I don't defend him or accuse him. I just let him talk. But he was somebody who was sleeping with his very young patient.
It can never be a movement, because it's too hostile to the values of the society.
Is the pederast a homosexual?
Socrates would have said yes. I think most gay politicians would emphatically say no, because they're terrified. If people went around saying what you're saying right now, it would sink the whole gay movement. It really is dangerous stuff. Very, very dangerous.
Many middle-class people got outed by AIDS. Upper-middle-class gays became the leaders of the gay movement, and they weren't interested in any of these fringe issues. They were interested in getting married to a same-sex partner, adopting a six-year-old Korean girl, and both partners being highly paid lawyers living in the suburbs like everybody else.
Assimilationism became the tenor of the gay movement because of this accident in history, really. Upper-middle-class people who had always avoided the gay movement like the plague took over--the way they tend to take over anything they're interested in. The last thing in the world they want to hear about is drag queens, leather queens, and certainly not pedophiles.
What do you think about that? It seems to be a different attitude than at the time of Stonewall. It's not very liberation-oriented, is it?
No. Not very liberation-oriented. On the other hand, you can understand why they feel that way. Even though I want to be very open-minded to things like pedophilia, I find it awfully hard to defend people who are having sex with minors. I mean, people under 12, prepubescent.
Maybe, but I'm distinguishing between pederasty and pedophilia.
If you read someone like [Kenneth] Dover, who wrote a lot about just what exactly they did do in ancient Greece--the truth is, it was very rigid.
The man had to pay court to the boy a long time. He had to ingratiate himself to the boy's parents. There had to be an educational side to it. The man had to bring presents to the boy. He had to attend him at the gymnasium and at school.
Then, he was finally allowed to go to bed with him, if the boy wanted to. But the boy couldn't show any excitement, and if the boy got an erection, he was considered a slut. There was no anal penetration. It was only between the thighs.
There were so many rules, and it was very codified. I don't think it sounds any fun at all.
Was misogyny involved?
Definitely misogyny, because women were looked down on. And so the idea was to fall in love with a boy, because you couldn't fall in love with a woman, who was only one step above a slave. But you weren't supposed to fall in love with slaves, either.
In Artemidorus' dream book, he gives you lots of very concrete information about who can do what. It's OK for an older man to be the top with a younger man, but never with a slave. And worst of all is if he's the bottom to a slave. That's forbidden.
Today, it's a very loaded issue, whether it's straight or gay. I honestly think a 25-year-old man who is sleeping with a 13-year-old girl is going to have a lot of trouble, too. It's a very dangerous issue, a really dangerous one, for us to even be talking about. I really think it's one of the most loaded subjects.
Now, so many gay people are parents or potentially want to be parents. So, they suddenly have different glasses on, and they're seeing all this in a different perspective. They think, do I want my 13-year-old daughter being moved in on by a lesbian, or my 14-year-old son being seduced by one of my older male friends?
Do you think that a parent's reaction to a 13-year-old son sleeping with an older woman would be different if he were sleeping with an older man?
Look at the boy from Samoa who was with [Mary Kay] Letourneau.
She had all sorts of public support. She had a book deal...
She's in prison.
True, but the hysteria around her case was considerably less than the hysteria about boy-priest sex.
Oh, I agree. But the Japanese woman judge who heard the case the second time was furious at her. She was a two-time offender, she was a teacher, she was a mother who had children, and so on. So, I don't think that it goes over so big.
You've said religion is the enemy of gay life. What do you mean? Are atheism or humanism, then, the friends of gay life?
If you look at Christianity, Islam, or Judaism, they're all three quite explicitly hostile to homosexuality.
My boyfriend lived in Yemen, and he saw gay people pushed off a cliff, which is one of the Koranic punishments for homosexuality. And of course, two years ago, six homosexuals were beheaded in Saudi Arabia. Not to mention homosexuals who were arrested in Egypt for attending a disco.
That kind of stuff happens throughout the Muslim world, which is also one of the gayest worlds that you could possibly occupy. It's a question of, as long as you don't use the word, and as long as nobody talks about it, it's OK. But the minute it gets discussed, it's a crime or a sin.
I think the same thing is true of the Catholic world. It's true that there are things like the Metropolitan Community Church, which are trying to adapt Christianity to homosexuality, but I really think that there's something very deep in the Bible, especially in St. Paul, but throughout the Old Testament, that is wildly hostile to homosexuality. I don't really think there's any way to reconcile them.
Do you distinguish between religion and spirituality? Where did you turn when your friends began to die, or after you were diagnosed with HIV?
I'm a stoic. I don't believe in praying to anybody, because I don't think anybody's out there. I would feel foolish.
Mind you, when my French lover died, I went around to churches, and lit candles and all this stuff, but it was this funny mud-pie religion of my own. It was like a child putting together his own religion, and I felt something close to what you're suggesting--that mourning without ceremony is intolerable.
I've been to a few atheist funerals, and they are horrible. Nobody gets up and talks, nobody sings, nobody speaks, nobody says a blessing over the coffin. You just sit there in silence, and it's horrible. It's pretty grim.
Religion certainly cornered the market in handling mourning, and I think we all kind of revert to it when we're in a state of mourning. In my case, at least, I felt not like a hypocrite, but like I knew I didn't believe in it. It's like somebody who's about to be in a terrible car accident and starts praying. It's a reflex.
It's interesting to go to atheistic countries like Australia. It's a nation of convicts, descendants of convicts, people who traditionally were never very religious. The biggest single event in the whole country is the gay Mardi Gras, which has a million people marching and several million watching.
I sat in the reviewing booth with the prime minister for that, and a gay boy in a diaper was sitting on his knee. Can you picture Bush doing this?
When you're in an atheistic country, the people really don't give a damn. They just think it's a hoot. They might think that they don't want to go to bed with a man, but they don't let it bother them. Christianity is really the root of all evil.
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