Interview With Edmund White
by Lawrence Chua
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People who have met Edmund White frequently remark on his generosity. It is not only his literary output (fourteen books in nearly thirty years), but the unstinting way he shares experience that have helped build this reputation. White is considered one of America's finest writers of fiction. His novels, essays, biographies, and short stories have paralleled the birth and growth of the fiction of late twentieth-century homosexuality.
White was born on January 19, 1940, in Cincinnati, Ohio. After his parents divorced seven years later, he moved with his mother and sister to Evanston, Illinois. White has written about searching for books on homosexuality in the public library there and finding only Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and a biography of Nijinski. He studied Chinese at the University of Michigan and later moved to New York City. Throughout the 1960s and early '70s, he worked a number of jobs in publishing, including editorial stints at Time-Life Books, The Saturday Review, and Horizon. White was active in what became the gay liberation movement from the beginning, and even participated in the Stonewall rebellion, an act that he considered "a rather silly event at the time ... more Dada than Bastille, a kind of romp." He and six other gay writers in New York formed the influential Violet Quill group in the mid-1970s, which included White, Andrew Holleran, Robert Ferro, Felice Picano, George Whitmore, Christopher Cox, and Michael Grumley.
White's first novel, Forgetting Elena, was published in 1972, but he had completed several unpublished manuscripts prior to that. He wrote two other novels, Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978) and Caracole (1985) before embarking on the trilogy for which he is most widely known: A Boy's Own Story (1982), The Beautiful Room is Empty (1988), and The Farewell Symphony (1997). He also co-wrote The Joy of Gay Sex: An Intimate Guide for Gay Men to the Pleasures of Gay Life with Dr. Charles Silverstein (1977). His 1980 travelogue, States of Desire: Travels in Gay America looked at gay life in America just before the AIDS crisis was to transform it forever.
In 1983, White went into a sort of self-imposed exile in France. Two years later he learned of his HIV-positive status. He was one of the first novelists to address AIDS directly in his fiction and essays, and wrote, with Adam Mars-Jones, A Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis, and the landmark essay, "Esthetics and Loss" (collected in The Burning Library). In 1993 White published a biography of Jean Genet, a meticulous and beautifully written monument to the great novelist, playwright, and petty thief. Genet was an interesting choice for White, whose prose owes more to the tradition of Nabokov and Isherwood (and, going farther back, of Henry James and Marcel Proust, of whom he has also written a biography).
While living in Paris, White embarked on an intense and influential relationship with the architect and illustrator Hubert Sorin, with whom he would publish Our Paris, a collection of Sorin's drawings and White's sketches of their life together in the city. Sorin died of AIDS-related complications in 1994, but his memory suffuses White's most recent novel, The Married Man. At its core, White's work is autobiographical, but not in the misleading documentary sense. Experience in White's novels functions like a virus. It is never limited and never complete. It finds its way throughout the novel's body, and in White's hands it blossoms into revelation.
Lawrence Chua: You've described The Married Man as a portrait that is loosely based on yourself.
Edmund White: It is and it isn't. I was happy because it's come out in England already and a lot of the reviewers really recognize that it wasn't just me. People who have been following my books see that Austin really is a different kind of character. But sure, I met a French guy. We lived together for five years. The last three-and-a-half of those years he was ill. He died in Morocco. I was living on the Ile St. Louis. All those things were very similar. But Austin is different from me. He has a different profession, a different family. He's a lot lazier than I am. I have a lazy, disorganized side, but it doesn't last very long. I usually snap back. He's someone who's inundated with dinner
parties and travel and meeting people, whereas in real life I'd say I alternate between that and being kind of austere so I can write. He doesn't write. Well, he's written these two books. Everything is based on something in my life. But I think if you know any writer well enough, you'll see them in their work. I'm reading Joyce Carol Oates's Blonde. She's a colleague of mine and a dear friend, and I can see an awful lot of her in it, although there's nothing precise you can point to. But she's projected herself onto the parts of Norma Jean's life that she can identify.
LC: In the introduction to Our Paris, the illustrated book you did with Hubert Sorin, you write, "I loved him too, in a cold, stinting, confused
way." How would you compare Austin's love for Julien with the "cold, stinting" love you describe.
EW: I wrote that the very day he died, and I think I was feeling guilty the way people feel when anyone dies, especially when they're only 33 years old. He was very angry at the end of his life, and just as in the book, he said to me, "I despise you." They were virtually his last words. I kept feeling guilty that I had taken him to Morocco in the first place, although he was the one who insisted that we go. I felt guilty that we hadn't turned back sooner, although he insisted we go on. It's like one of those situations where you have a parent who is old and crazy. At what point do you stop obeying their wishes and become the parent yourself and say, we have to go to a hospital or an old age home? I think any young person who does that to his parent feels terrible. I never had
that experience, but I can imagine. In the same way, I was so much under
his spell that it never occurred to me to lay down the law to him, and later I thought I should have.
Anyway, I felt very guilty when I wrote that piece. I remember my agent saying, "You're really exaggerating. If anybody was ever nice to somebody, it was you to Hubert." I was quite pleased when a guy from Poz magazine who came here to interview me said he couldn't believe how generous Austin was to both Peter and Julien, how much he gave in taking care of him. I thought it was a pretty fair reflection of what I had done in real life, but it had never occurred to me that it was especially generous. I tend to be pretty harsh in judging myself. But I guess toward the end I probably was exhausted by Hubert's sickness and relieved in a way that he was dead, although feeling very lost and confused and guilty.
LC: Would you describe the process of writing this novel as a reckoning of sorts?
EW: It didn't make me feel better. People always say "I wrote this and I got it out of my system, and then I stopped worrying about it." But in fact, it added to my guilt, because I kept wondering what his brother would say (who won't read it until it comes out in French in September). He's a typical family member in that he wants only praise, and he's always idealized his brother out of recognition. I think he will be offended by
his portrait, although I think it's a very good portrait and will make him live on for a while, which an idolatrous portrait wouldn't do. But still, I feel very worried and guilty about that too. I feel that maybe I didn't show him in an attractive enough light. He was a very difficult person, and maddening, but also wonderfully charming and appealing.
LC: You were talking about Blonde and projecting the self onto your writing. I was hoping I could draw you out a bit about your shift from first to third person.
EW: I found it very liberating in a number of ways, which you as a writer will understand. If you write in the first person, there are things you can't say about yourself. You can't say, "I was charming." Or "I was a good host." There are an awful lot of things you can't say about yourself because you sound ridiculous and vain, and if you criticize yourself you
sound masochistic. You're really quite limited and so much of your concern if you're writing an autobiographical or first-person novel (if it's not clearly about a lunatic like Humbert Humbert in Lolita) goes into positioning yourself vis-a-vis the reader, just as you would if you were a speaker or giving a lecture. You're constantly worrying about the impression you're making. Whereas, when you write in the third person, you're not saying, "I'm offering you an apology for my life." You're just saying, "here's a
character called Austin, and he's interested in old furniture, and he's from Virginia, and he got to be this old, and was living in France all these years and he met this man."
LC: There's a real confessional quality to your trilogy A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony. Was that something you were conscious of moving away from? There are still qualities of that in The Married Man.
EW: I think it makes people feel less uncomfortable, in a way. A friend of mine who read The Farewell Symphony said, "I don't really want to be this intimate with anybody." I couldn't quite tell if it was a compliment or an insult. In any event, I could see that it made him uncomfortable. Whereas, I think there are two things that have made readers, at least in England, more comfortable with this book than The Farewell Symphony. One is that there's less sex, less graphic sex. And the other is that it's not an "I" telling the story; it's this character. So they feel free to talk about the character. One reviewer said he's a ridiculous snob. Most of them seem to think he's a likeable character. I'm so guilt-ridden and neurotic that it worries me that they like him more than they like Julien, because I feel that I've just been self-serving and pretending the character based on me has a better life than Julien. But in a way, people feel freer talking about Austin than they did about the narrator of the trilogy.
On Political Correctness
LC: When Austin goes to teach in Rhode Island, he's just in time to experience some of the debates around political correctness. Austin's character owes much of its development to this moment of identity politics. How have those same politics been a help or a hindrance to you as a novelist?
EW: I never succumbed to it. I never felt bullied by it. Mind you, I wasn't a junior professor fighting for tenure; I was a senior professor who already had tenure. My situation was probably better than Austin's because I had a more secure job, and I was better known than he was. But I found it very dismaying, because there were some actual things that I don't mention in this book that happened at Brown. Just to name two incidents: One is that I taught a course in lesbian and gay literature and I tried to make some general remarks about the difference between lesbian and gay men. I felt
it was a sign of the sexism in our society that the population despises effeminate men more than it does masculine women. So I gave the
example that if you went into a branch bank to apply for a loan and talked to the vice president and he was a very effeminate man who wearing lipstick and a half dress, it would be very worrying. Whereas, if you were received by a woman dressed in a man's jacket in a coat and tie, you would find it slightly reassuring. Well, anyway, three young women got up and slammed the door in my face and dropped the class and made angry denunciations. They were lesbians and they felt I was denying their oppression. So that was one of the real-life incidents.
Another was that I was a great friend of Robert Mapplethorpe, and one of the first people to write about him in the '70s. I felt that when he was taking pictures of black men it was a very liberal thing to do. No one was taking pictures of black men, not even other black photographers. Many black men would tell me at the time, "Thank God he takes these pictures,
because now we have something to jerk off over." They were interested in
themselves and each other and images of black sexuality, which weren't available elsewhere. Very shortly after he died, black gay men began to denounce Mapplethorpe, especially Essex Hemphill, for treating black men as sex objects. The case he always cited was "The Man in the Polyester Suit," who was seen from the neck down with this enormous penis coming out of his suit. I was asked what I thought about all that. There was an exchange of slightly nasty letters between him and me in a West Coast gay magazine, and my students somehow got hold of that. Then he came to our campus and read to the students and denounced me, and they all gave him a standing ovation, which kind of shocked me. The truth is, the Man in the
Polyester Suit was Melvin, Mapplethorpe's boyfriend, and it was Melvin who said that Mapplethorpe could either take a picture of his face or his body but not the two together, because he didn't want his mother to know he was gay. So far from being a model who was exploited by the photographer, it was the model dictating to the photographer how he was to take his picture. Of course, nobody wants to know the truth.
LC: Is the ability to see beyond identity one of the things that you lose when you are writing from an autobiographical position?
EW: I wrote a book of short stories called Skinned Alive, which gave me a taste for writing in the third person and exploring variations on myself. The hero of the long story called "An Oracle" is a
former pretty boy with a Ph.D. in philosophy, who has sort of lost track of who he is when he falls under the spell of an older man. The older man, at the point when the story begins, has died. So, our hero is going through both a midlife crisis and a search to recover his identity. He goes to Greece, and so on. I'd gone to Greece and had some experiences with hustlers like the one I recount. I'd had none of the extra emotional baggage, but a friend of mine did. So I imagined what it would
have been like if my friend had gone to Greece instead of me and had lived through the same experiences but had different reasons for living through them. That was a variation on an autobiographical theme or a transposition of another person into my shoes.
In the same way, in another story of mine, which was called "Palace Days," I had a boyfriend years ago who had a gay travel agency. So I tried to imagine what it would be like if he had come to Paris instead of me. Whereas I was bookish, he was a playboy. Whereas I was interested in learning French, he would never learn another language. Whereas I had intellectual pretensions, he just wanted to go to cooking school or something like that. So I thought it would be fun to put him, again, in my shoes. Sometimes the fit doesn't work perfectly, because there are certain scenes you want to recount that happened to you in real life
and it's implausible that the character would do that.
The Isherwood Connection
LC: In your interview in the Paris Review, you talked about being convinced that the self is an illusion, in the Buddhist sense. Does that
point of view still hold?
EW: There's that tension in my work, and I even talk about it in The Beautiful Room is Empty. In that book I talk about how as a writer I
always felt very torn between this Buddhist idea I absorbed when I was very young that the self doesn't really exist -- that we're just a pile of skandhas and all you have to do is undo all these packages and see that there is no ego.
There's a contrast between that idea and my own very Western, very novelistic interest in all the details, particularity of an individual. Of course, my great mentor is Christopher Isherwood, and in a way, The Single Man and The Married Man are sort of bookends, as far as titles at least. But I think already in Isherwood's The Single Man, he was expressing some of those same tensions. Although he doesn't talk explicitly about Hinduism (which is what he was, a Hindu), it lies in the background, behind everything. At the very beginning and end of the book
he talks about what happens when you wake up in the morning or when you fall asleep or die and there's this kind of dissolution of the self. He compares it to a rock pool, where there's all this swarming around and then it just drains away. That precise tension is one that has animated all my work. I wouldn't say I could come down squarely on one side or the other, but I definitely still entertain those Buddhist ideas. I don't know if I
can reconcile them with my other ideas.
LC: For me, the process of writing a novel is becoming very close to reckoning with that truth, that there isn't anything to cling to as self.
EW: All these ideas interest me. I wrote a novel that nobody ever reads, because it's probably not very good, called Caracole. In that book, I was very interested in an idea that I half absorbed from Michel Foucault. I wanted to show this character, a boy living in an almost savage state in
nature. That whole section, which is the first part of the book, I thought of it as being uncoded. That is, no one has coded him with any social rules. Then he comes to the big city and his uncle takes him in and teaches him the ways of the world, and that whole body I thought of as coded. Then at the end, the boy sees through all these rules of society and discards
them, and I thought of that as being decoded. So it's uncoded, coded, and decoded, which isn't so far from what a Buddhist would want to do, the process or the arc of it.
On AIDS
LC: You mentioned Christopher Isherwood as a mentor, and his presence, among others, is clear in so much of your writing. In terms of style and subject, there is also something about The Married Man that is reminiscent of Henry James.
EW: Interesting. Well, there I deliberately cultivated certain things, like the international theme. It's Proustian/Jamesian in the sense that it's the encounter of middle class people with aristocrats. The middle class are quite fascinated with all of the strange ways of the aristocrats. There's not too much of that in my book. What I wanted to do with this book ... Well, let me start by saying that AIDS is the great theme -- certainly for gay men, but maybe for anybody in this last decade -- and that it's one of the great catastrophes that's happened to the world. Twenty-four million people are positive. People write about it, but I still think it's a subject to be exploited that hasn't been fully dealt with. At the same time it's a subject everybody holds off of and doesn't want to plunge into because it's so despairing and unsettling and frightening. A little curtain comes down in people's minds the minute the subject of AIDS comes up. They become reverential; they start edging away from you; they don't want to talk about it.
I thought the way I could trap people into reading about this was to start off with the tone of light social comedy and then pull them into this whirlpool. In my own life, I was leading a fairly frivolous, mondaine, self-indulgent life. I had fled America partly for hedonistic reasons, just to keep the party going a little longer in France, because AIDS was slower to arrive there. But at the same time, I always knew in the back of my mind that I would have to go the full distance and take care of somebody. So I was very careful to choose who it would be. There are not that many times that you can devote four or five years of your life to taking care of somebody, and you don't want to do it over and over again. But you do want to do it. Anyway, my turn came. So, in real life that was my experience,
going from the frivolous to the serious and almost the tragic. I wanted the book to imitate that arc, but also for strategic reasons in terms of
drawing the reader in.
LC: In The Married Man Austin takes care of two people.
EW: I did too in real life. I had an American who I lived with in Paris who was sort of a half-lover, and we had always agreed we would take care of
each other. My boyfriend Hubert disliked him so much that I wasn't able to see him as much as I wanted to. It was a horrible situation, and I felt very much like a traitor to him. I like to put real moral problems, even when they're autobiographical, into books. People often get very lofty in judging my characters or me, but what would they have done? Elizabeth Bowen once said that a genuinely tragic situation was one in which you have only two choices, and whichever choice you make you lose, or you give up something really significant. The things that get called tragedies are usually just the things that are sad, but they're not excruciating morally. There are things in real life that are excruciating morally, and this to
me was one of them.
Culture Clash
LC: On another level, The Married Man reminded me of James' The American in that they both deal with the formation of new identities in the middle of old ones. Not only is Austin an American in Europe, but he is constantly coming into conflict with a French understanding of sexuality and how much more fluid it is than an American one. Julien is married to a woman, and
Austin never understands exactly why Julien married. It's not a marriage of convenience. It's not necessarily a marriage based on love, or romantic love anyway.
EW: He's very mysterious, isn't he? That's another thing that the French prize so: their privacy. They esteem discretion. They basically have a "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy about everything. For Americans, who are so hell-bent on sincerity and confession and telling everything, there's a constant tension. I was talking to Francesca Dellavante, an Italian novelist, and she was saying that in Italy if somebody got AIDS, the doctor wouldn't tell the patient what he had, nor would the patient ask, nor would the parents ask, nor would anybody ever say the word, even after the person died and was buried. So many cases of AIDS in Italy are undeclared, really. She said that in front of two other American writers, and they were so shocked. They couldn't understand why the patient wouldn't want to know. The whole idea that something might become ambiguous and somebody wouldn't lay all their cards on the table seemed very foreign to these guys.
LC: Why do you think there is such an emphasis on confession in American culture?
EW: Americans move a lot. They always have and oftentimes don't stay in a place for more than two or three years. If they're going to have any friends at all, they're going to have to make them quickly. The way you make friends, really, is by this almost instant intimacy. Whereas the French only make one move in their lives, and that's from the provinces to Paris. Once they're in Paris they never move, and they can take years and years to get to know people. They're very cautious about becoming entangled with people they might later want to shed. They don't mind going alone two or three years until they slowly put together a bouquet of absolutely perfect friends. And they have a cult of friendship, which means that once they have a friend, they never get rid of them. That friend can ask for their last penny and they'll give it to them. They have an incredible generosity and egalité in friendship that is unimaginable to most Americans. They're very slow to use the word friend. They'll see someone for two years every day for lunch and you'll say, "I saw you with your friend." "Oh, he's not really a friend; he's a connaissance."
All that's very different, but I think another thing too is that America has been very shaped by evangelical Christianity. The avowal, the confession, the sudden enlightenment, where you suddenly embrace God and
tell everyone your sins and have this wrenching moment of avowal, is very characteristic of that kind of evangelical religion, but not at all characteristic of continental Catholicism. There must be other historical reasons, but those are two of the main ones.
LC: From my superficial understanding of Christianity, I understood the confessional as something absent from Protestant religious practice.
EW: I see what you mean, but I think the Catholic confession, when you go into the confession box, is a very ritualized thing. It's not terribly deep, and you're telling a priest in an anonymous setting, who absolves you. You're not telling the whole community, and you're not defining yourself as a sinner who's been saved. The whole idea of this sudden salvation within this life, over a weekend at a camp meeting, is very Protestant. Now in order to get some of the excitement and glamour of Protestantism, you've recently seen this ecstatic, charismatic form of Catholicism. It's very dimly viewed by the Vatican because it's too Protestant in their eyes.
I will say one other thing, which is that America is based on identity politics, whereas Europe is not. In America you have nothing but lobbies and special interest votes -- nothing but ghettoes in the world of literature, and real ghettoes, and so on. Everyone is from somewhere, and almost nobody is a native American. So again, the avowal, if you're gay for instance, is a way for establishing that you belong to a particular minority group. Whereas in Europe people, even gay people, will say, "Why do you want to talk about
your sex life?" You try to say, "It's part of who we are." "Oh, no it isn't. It's more important to me that I'm a lawyer than that I'm gay." Or, "It's more important to me that I'm from Brittany than that I'm gay."
The Rise of the Modern Homosexual
LC: Your books were really instrumental in forming what today is not just gay identity but a gay marketplace. Yet as a writer you've managed to transgress those categories.
EW: Well I must say that what has happened in commercial gay culture doesn't interest me very much. I'm happy that people are doing it, and I
hope they find some satisfaction from it, but as a man who is 60 years old and who isn't going to the gym every day and doesn't have that orientation, I find it a very alienating culture. I'm much more interested in men who are marginal to gay life. Even in The Married Man, the scene where Austin goes into the woods and has sex with that funny truck driver who's just gotten out of prison is more characteristic of the kind of thing that would turn me on than going to bed with some perfect Chelsea boy (if I could get him -- and I couldn't). It wouldn't even really necessarily seem very sexy to me to go to bed with a guy like that.
In the same way, movies like Fight Club, which I didn't really liked, really turn me on. Even The Talented Mr. Ripley turned me on, because I thought there was a real transgression there that was sexy and
exciting. On the most primitive level, my sexual interests are no longer
really focussed on the gay community as it's defined in Chelsea. In the same way, I found Marjorie Garber's book about bisexuality, Vice Versa, very interesting because it wasn't at all about some closeted person trying to find an alibi for really being gay. It was about somebody who was really post-gay, and who was trying to say, are my eyes as open to heterosexuals as individuals as I think they should be to me?
Anyway, there's a way in which gays have been very tightly defined to create a package that can be serviced by manufacturers, so that they can be represented and controlled politically, and so that they can be dismissed as a subject by heterosexuals, who after all are 96 percent of the population. When I was a kid in the '50s, nobody ever said the word homosexuality except in textbooks once in a while. It was possible to have sex with quite a lot of straight guys. Of course, there was no threat of
AIDS, but there was this whole shadowy area that people, if a label had been given to it, might shrink away from. Since it was all unspoken, there was a lot of slippage in the system. The net result of inventing homosexuality, which is what we've done, as a very and narrow and precise and highly visible category, is that it has discouraged millions of heterosexual men from having homosexual activity who used to have it or would have had it had they been young in the '30s, '40s, or '50s.
If I look at the life of Jean Genet, he was himself a working class boy, or lower than that. He was a foundling and a delinquent, and then a soldier, and then a delinquent again, and then a prisoner, and so on. But when he got some money he would fall for cute, tough, straight guys whom he would help. He would build them a house so they could live their with their wives and kids. There's nobody going to come along, neither the wife, nor the guy himself, nor the guy's parents, and say, "You are a homosexual and you're corrupting this nice straight boy," because nobody would have ever talked about that or wanted to get into all that. They just thought it was nice that he was helping this boy. He was an older man, and wiser, and had some money. Of
course, the working class population was desperately poor in the '30s and '40s, when most of this was happening. And there was no birth control, there were no antibiotics, and there was not much promiscuity in the working class until marriage, except with prostitutes. It was the old Mediterranean world, which now exists only in Arab countries. When I was a boy it still existed in Greece and Italy. But this Mediterranean world really permitted a lot of homosexuality. I hear in Thailand there's a lot more, kind of, slippage.
LC: Oh yeah. There's a lot of slippage going on in Thailand. The category of heterosexuality is much more interesting to me than homosexuality. Homosexuality seems so much more codified, and at the same time, heterosexuality is becoming much more perverse. Maybe this is something that's also reinforced through advertising. The people I know who work in fashion and advertising have, as their job, the mission to create an identity for people. Could it be said that one of the roles of the artist, or the writer, is to destroy identity?
EW: Absolutely. One of the things Harold Brodkey once said to me was that when a writer writes "She went down on him," it's always a lie, because for each person it's an entirely different experience than it's ever been for them before or for anyone else before. The problem with a shorthand, self-confident, savvy statement like that is that it reassures writer and reader alike that they really know what they're talking about, whereas the truth is you have to describe a blow job as if it had never happened before. As though it's this really wrenching and totally new experience for each person. Every good writer is really a phenomenologist who goes back to the tiny little details out of which any experience is built. I think fashion does almost the opposite. It speaks in this code,
what Roland Barthes calls the "doxa," which is all the knowledge that the culture has accumulated, all the cliches and ideas. If you contrast the "body" against the "doxa," the body being this mysterious, somehow edenic thing ... I'm talking too theoretically, but I think the writer is really interested in the body more than in the doxa.
Obviously, I'm interested in a comedy of manners and I like to write about all that stuff, so on that level I'm sort of analyzing the doxa. But to analyze it is to somehow undo it. Because people in Brett Easton Ellis' world don't undo it. Although Glamorama pretends to be cynical about fashion, it isn't really. It's totally endorsing it. Even the cynicism is just another accessory for the total look, because nothing else is proposed. You can't even imagine anything in his mind being proposed as an alternative to the life that's
being described. But I think that one of the advantages of being a gay writer is that nothing comes to you naturally. You don't know how to be lovers with another man, because you weren't taught to do that. Everything is up for grabs. I think that's good for a novelist because you have to introspect everything and invent everything and think about everything.
Novels
Forgetting Elena
Caracole
Nocturnes for the King of Naples
A Boy's Own Story
The Beautiful Room Is Empty
The Farewell Symphony
The Married Man
Short fiction
Skinned Alive
The Darker Proof(with Adam Mars-Jones)
Nonfiction
The New Joy of Gay Sex(with Dr. Charles Silverstein)
Our Paris(with Hubert Sorin)
States of Desire: Travels in Gay America
Genet: A Biography
The Burning Library
Marcel Proust
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