Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)
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"Without getting into any details, I've just had this very very very tempestuous and short-lived relationship that I bumped into in San Francisco. I just bumped into him on Saturday night… Our last contact was just sort of a very peremptory and vicious email, and I saw him and talked to him and we didn't raise our voices or anything. We were talking, and my friends pointed out that they noticed two things. One, they noticed that obviously we were angry but that there was an incredible intensity about the relationship.
"There was something between the two of us that just crackled when we were together. And I guess I do like that. It keeps me from being bored."
"Being married doesn't mean you're less alone. I think a relationship can be the most intense form of being alone if you're not careful… Friendship is what really resolves and mitigates loneliness while not compromising the self in the way that love does, romantic love does. And More was not completely alone. He had his daughter, who was very close to him, and he had some wonderful friends."
"That's a big question: 'Why are you alone? I mean, we're all alone. Aloneness is… that's life. It's the quality of our aloneness that matters. Whether it's quality solitude. I am a solitary person. I always have been, ever since I was a kid. I guess it's hard… it takes a lot for me to let somebody in."
"Someone once pointed out: 'Among straight people, you're a gay guy. Among English people, you're a Catholic. An Irish Catholic. Among Americans, you're sort of English. Among the academia establishment, you're a hack. Among the hacks, you're a sort of academic. You keep displacing yourself out of any particular team.»
"It might be a defensive response. I mean, the Republicans don't want anything to do with me. Neither do the Democrats. People on the right are very suspicious of me. So are people on the left… I like to think that I try to think and write for myself, and sometimes that means that you do piss off people, on a regular basis. Solitude is a natural place for a writer to be. And, again, it's not like my models… like Orwell was the hero of any group of people, I mean, he was very much on his own. I'm very leery of attachment."
"It's terrible, the minute I feel like everybody agrees with me, I want to change my mind. I'm such a sort of-and this is probably why I was not very good at the management side of being an editor-because I was literally more comfortable in opposition to my entire staff than sort of gently uniting them. Or even our readership [of the New Republic], I always kept people, I tried to keep everybody on edge.
"Obviously I've thought about this to some extent. I don't want to problemitize it in some ways. I think it's how you are, but… it's what makes me feel secure, I think, that lack of security."
"I'm not interested in being well received or not well received. When you start thinking like that, you're finished, I think. The only interesting question for me is whether I can convey certain things I'm trying to convey more effectively through the medium of fictional narrative than through trying to write stuff that is argumentative. You know, right now, out there there's either factual stuff, biographical, historical stuff, or there's fiction. The genre of political or moral writing for anybody to read is really slim, which isn't purely sort of temporary political I'm-right/they're-wrong kind of Jim Carville stuff."
"Virtually Normal was a weird book in the sense that-I don't think of it as a weird book-but it was an attempt to say that an issue like this, which is so mired in emotion and psychology, could be written about in a classical rationalist fashion. Its model, that book, was the sort of nineteenth-century polemicists and pamphleteers I sort of admired-not too long, and anybody could read it and generate a discussion, and those sort of pamphlets in the late nineteenth century were wonderful things."
"[Virtually Normal] came out in 95, so I wrote it in 94 while I was still editor, and I did a sort of prototype of the argument in an essay in the New Republic in 93 ['The Politics of Homosexuality']. And meanwhile I wrote about a lot of other things and kept writing a kind of American commentary for British papers, which eventually I got a good deal with, and write for the Times, and sort of carved out a way of paying the rent that way. But subsequent to leaving the New Republic, I've sort of moved out of editing and I'm concentrating more on writing."
"It wasn't quite drama, but it was energy. I don't think it was manufactured drama. It was energy. And I had that sort of interaction with my fellow editors, too… It was just a tempestuous place. A lot of big people with strong ideas butting heads. I mean, that's the nature of those sort of places. They attract people like me, and people like me don't get along with people like me."
"… To begin with, that's what I wanted to be when I was a kid. It's where I thought I was going to go, elective politics… I think that I do do that in part. I think that politics is what you make it… I go around the country and I speak. I go from high schools to political rallies. I'll speak at big fund raisers, and I do all that stuff all the time… It's interesting, but I think that what I'm trying to do is both a forensic thing-to simply dissect and point out the inadequacy of the argument on the other side, whether you're against Jerry Falwell or Pat Buchanan or whoever-and, secondly, you're doing, you're performing an exemplary role, you're saying, 'I'm also a gay person and I'm here. That very fact changes the debate we're talking about, precisely because part of what we're talking about is shame, and the capacity to resist shame and overcome it. And that is something that cannot be argued. It has to be shown. It has to be felt by people who see it for them to absorb it, and grow from it, and do it themselves. And I feel that half the time that's also what I'm doing. That I achieve ninety-five percent of what I'm doing merely by showing up. You look at them straight in the eyes… It's funny, but I was on Politically Incorrect with Lou Sheldon last week, and he said, 'I don't think it's a disease. It's a dysfunction'-talking about homosexuality-and all I did was say, 'Hey, I'm here. Stop talking about me as if I don't exist'… You can't talk about us in the same way anymore, because we're here. You have to take us seriously."
"I don't know what my role should be. I've struggled with it. You'd be amazed, the hostility I still get thrown at me… I think as soon as I held a position I'd be completely demolished by the people I'm supposed to represent… It's a very tough world out there… There is extreme resistance to that sort of leadership in the gay and lesbian world. It's a very fractious place… I hate to sound so vague and confused, but I don't know. I think we're feeling our way. I'm feeling my way."