 David Shankbone understood that an interview with Edmund White, who is professor of creative writing at Princeton University, who wrote the seminal biography of Jean Genet, and who no longer can keep track of how many sex partners he has encountered, meant nothing would be off limits. Nothing was. Late in the interview they were joined by his partner Michael Caroll, who discussed White's enduring feud with influential writer and activist Larry Kramer. On work as a gay writer DS: Does it bother you to be considered a gay writer?EW: Well there is a question I have asked many many times. I think it would be unrealistic to say I’m not a gay writer. I emerged with a gay literary movement—the Violet Quill—which was a group of gay writers who all started publishing in 1978, and I was labeled from the very beginning a gay writer.DS: And you embrace that? EW: Embrace is another thing, but it would be unrealistic to deny it or act like it is some terrible offense, because if I am known at all it is because of the idea of gay literature. Sometimes you wish you could have a wider readership, but every writer wishes that. More women and straight men, but we all wish we had a wider readership. In America, especially, everything is niche marketing and identity politics. That’s not true in England, so much, and it’s certainly not true in France. DS: In England you have kids reading Afro-Caribbean literature because they don’t have a sense that it’s a “black thing”?EW: Yes, that’s right. For instance, most of the well known writers in England under 50 are former colonial people, whether it’s Ishiguro—he’s Japanese and that wasn’t part of the empire, but still—or David Hogue Davies. Caryl Phillips, who is a black man from the islands who lives now in New York but is one of England’s most important writers. Also Salman Rushdie. In other words, the way we categorize people and dismiss them is not true of England because in fact the major winners of the Booker Prize over the last thirty years are people who would not have been allowed in a private men’s club in England fifty years ago. DS: Do you see a generation that can assume the mantle for the Violet Quill or is there not a necessity for it? EW: There’s not a necessity for it now, but there was then. It’s always been hard to get gay books published, and it’s as hard as ever. It’s very hard to get gay books published. DS: Why?EW: The market is very small. Only 3\% of all people are gay and if you take a diminishing dumbed-down reading public to begin with, and say you are only aiming for 3\% of that market, that’s awfully small. So gay novels if they are successful sell 5,000 copies. DS: What is a gay novel? EW: One that is marketed as gay. Usually a picture of a cute boy on the cover. DS: Would Hollinghurst’s Swimming Pool Library be one?EW: Well, he’s a cross-over writer. He’s a little different because he did win the Booker Prize with The Line of Beauty, and he was the editor of The Times Literary Supplement, which is the most prestigious reviewing organism in the English-speaking world. He has a dark brown voice and he went to Oxford and he knows everybody. He’s admired by everybody. London is such a different place because in America writers teach in different universities and they are scattered all across this huge country and they sometimes know each other, but not usually. Whereas in England they are all journalists , they live in London, and they all know each other. It’s a very small world, which is good and bad. One of the good things is that if somebody is really talented like Hollinghurst and has accumulated a bastion of power like the TLS, he’ll have enormous impact, and everybody knows it. Whereas here somebody like David Leavitt is teaching in Gainesville, Florida. That’s pretty far off the beaten path even though he’s a wonderful writer. His last book, The Indian Clerk, was reviewed on the front page of The New York Times book review very glowingly. Nevertheless, it doesn’t sell and nobody cares. It’s very hard.DS: You think that’s because of a lack of a community of writers? EW: I think there’s a number of things. One of the things that is important for gay writers, gay publishers and gay academics is to try and develop a market. You can see that with something like Harry Potter where everybody thought the children’s market had completely vanished and now it’s back in a huge way because of that one book. I have a friend, Claire Robson who is a lesbian writer that lives in Vancouver. Canada, being a semi-welfare state has a lot of money for public things. She’s trying to develop older lesbian audiences, younger gay male audiences. She’s organizing reading groups, study groups, autobiography writing groups. All of this stuff that is paid for by the government. DS: Earlier you were saying what makes a book a certain genre is a marketing function.EW: Yes, but I think that what she is doing is trying to create readers who will then buy gay…I’m not saying all gay and lesbian books are cynically marketed. There were a lot of books when I was young that weren’t marketed as gay books; books by Proust, Thomas Mann and so on. Andre Gilde. They had gay themes but the “gay novel” didn’t exist then. The problem is we have an awfully lot of good gay writers and very few good gay readers. I don’t know why that is, but it’s true. DS: Who are some good gay writers? EW: Vestal McIntyre, Patrick Ryan are just two. On sex DS: You said in an interview that the smartest people are the best sex—EW: [Laughs]DS: —what is sex to you? EW: The most important thing in the world. I had a sex partner who I thought was really great sex but one day he said to me, “I really enjoy playing basketball more than having sex,” and I was so offended. I thought that was like somebody saying, “I’d rather go shopping than go to church.” It seemed to be so trivializing of this sacred thing of sex that it was hard to see him again after that. So what is it for me? Something very transcendent and I turn my life upside down to have it as frequently as possible. No, it’s not frequency, it’s quality that’s important. DS: How can something repeated so often still be considered sacred?EW: What about the mass?DS: Do you only have sex once a week? EW: They have mass every day. DS: People don’t go to mass every day, typically.EW: They can.DS: They could. EW: No, I’m having sex more often than once week. It’s hard to defend the position logically, I just mean to me it’s important. DS: Is that the main criterion for a partner?EW: No. I’ve lived with Michael for twelve years and I don’t think that has ever been the key issue between us. He’s a writer, compatible and he’s one of the most interesting people I know. He’s always unpredictable.DS: You have an open relationship? EW: Yes. DS: Do you think that’s a necessity in order to have a successful relationship?EW: I wouldn’t preach for anybody else; I mean, everybody’s different. But for me, yes.DS: Where do you tend to find your sexual partners? EW: On-line, now. Silverdaddies.com; daddyhunt. That’s where you go if you’re older. Or Manhunt and gay.com. Or slavesformaster. Those are all sites where I’ve met people. DS: Are you a slave or a master?EW: A slave, but I’m not much of one.DS: Why are you a bad slave? EW: I’m not into pain and it has to strike me just right or it starts to seem ridiculous. DS: At what point does it start to seem ridiculous?EW: Too much leather, bad grammar on the part of the master! [Laughs]DS: [Laughs] EW: Like, “Lay down” instead of “Lie down.” DS: Are you always submissive?EW: I have dominated, it’s just not as pleasurable. When I was younger I had slaves, even for a whole year at a time. DS: You had a slave relationship. EW: Yes, for a year. DS: What was that like?EW: One day we were on acid down in Key West and I realized I didn’t even like him, so I broke up with him. I thought it was okay to be doing it if I actually like or love him, but if I really have contempt for him, that’s no good. It has to be an expression of love.DS: What psychological issues come out in a relationship like that? EW: Unrequited feelings for love from your father, often times. Longings for passivity. A lot of people have that. DS: To give up the feeling they always have to be in control in their waking lives?EW: I have a good friend who is a European novelist who was willing to literally hand over all of his belongings to this master, just signed over everything he owned to live in a cage the rest of his life. It turned out to be a fraud to fleece him of his money.DS: That must have been disappointing for him. EW: It’s a good thing he discovered that in time, didn’t lose his money and didn’t live in a cage the rest of his life, because he’s actually a very interesting person with a very full life. DS: What psychological issues did you work through in your slave-master relationships?EW: Different ones. If it’s not an on-going thing then you would get tired of it and drop it all together. It’s not a very major part of my life.DS: Did it used to be more so? EW: Yes. But it was also a fresher scene back then. Now it feels like a very tired scene and I hate people in leather, I think that’s so stupid. DS: Like they are wearing Halloween costumes?EW: Yeah. DS: As if the fashion never changes? It’s always the same chaps, the same harness… EW: Yeah…yeah, that’s right. One of the interesting things about Robert Mapplethorpe—who was a friend of mine and I have quite a few pictures here by him, including two of me—he had leathers made for him in Amsterdam with red and blue piping, fitting in an interesting way with different kinds of leather. A patchwork effect without making it look silly. He was very elegant. They were attractive and sexy. On incest in his family DS: In an interview you said that you are known for the incestuous feelings that were in your family—EW: [Laughs]DS: —what advice would you give to couples pursuing an incestuous relationship? EW: You mean like a father and daughter who want to have a love affair? DS: Or a brother and sister.EW: God, move to a more tolerant country, first of all.DS: Do you think there is a problem with it? EW: I think incest becomes more difficult if it’s intergenerational than if it’s in the same generation. And it becomes more difficult if it crosses the sex barrier. For instance, two brothers who have sex with each other when they are growing up, for instance—they’re fourteen and sixteen —it is never a very big deal. Whereas if a brother and sister have sex and are both teenagers, it is often traumatic, especially for the girl, and it will show up in her psychoanalysis later, and problems with her marriage, with frigidity and so on. If it’s her father she is sleeping with, it becomes a very big problem for her psychological adjustment. DS: Is that because there is an intrinsic problem with it, or because of societal reactions to it?EW: I think that it probably comes to the same thing because in every society it’s a problem. So whether it’s genetic or societal, I don’t know. But it’s universal. Anthropologists try to speculate why that would be. Some people say that it has to do with the divisions of authority and power; for instance, if a daughter is sleeping with her father then her mother has no authority over her because the daughter has in a sense replaced the mother because she’s the ideal partner—she’s younger, prettier, whatever. It screws up the whole family system. It’s a very interesting subject. But I think I’m right: two brothers, no big deal; two sisters, no big deal. Brother-sister becomes a problem, or mother-son it becomes a huge problem.DS: So you’d advise an incestuous couple not to pursue it? EW: Oh, I don’t give advice! [Laughs] DS: You had mentioned particular issues about a father may arise in a slave-master relationship. You were sexually attracted to your father, so do you think you worked through your own issues with him? 350pxEW: Yes.DS: Where do you think that attraction came from? EW: I don’t know; I think it’s very hard to explain attraction. If I’m attracted to you right now, why? I don’t know why. DS: But that’s something people could perhaps explain more readily than attraction to one's father.EW: I don’t know; I wasn’t really raised by my father. I lived apart from him and I would spend every summer with him, but not see him much during the year. My parents were divorced from my age of seven on. I think the incest taboo sets in and turns somebody off sexually with somebody they know very well and lives with. I think with my father he was somebody who every eye in the family was focused on and he was a sort of a tyrant and nice-looking, the source of all power, money, happiness, and he was implacable and difficult. He was always spoken of in sexual terms, in the sense he left our mother for a much younger woman who was very sexy but had nothing else going for her. He was a famous womanizer. And he slept with my sister! DS: What you describe is power; are you still attracted to power? EW: No. I mean, my idea of power, but not everybody’s idea of power. In other words, I wouldn’t want to go to bed with Bush… DS: Would you let him blow you?EW: No. DS: Why not? EW: I find him repulsive. I wouldn’t even let a Republican blow me. That does cut down on a number of people I guess— DS: What did your father’s incestuous relationship with your sister do to you?EW: I was envious of my sister. I wished I had that kind of access to him.DS: Did you try? EW: Yeah. DS: And he spurned you?EW: No, it was so subtle he probably didn’t even know I was longing for him because, I mean, we’re talking about the 1950’s in Cincinnati, Ohio, or Texas. He didn’t know I was gay until later and he would tell me he had just fired a man because he thought he might be gay, or at least he wasn’t married and he wore a ring.DS: How would you respond? EW: You couldn’t say anything. DS: Did he ever know?EW: About me? Yes. Fairly early on, when I was about fifteen. DS: What was his reaction? EW: He was horrified, because he thought it was my mother’s bad influence because I had led an overly sophisticated life with her. He thought I should lead a simpler life and put in hours and hours of yard work and that would make me straight. DS: Your mother was attracted to you, right?EW: Or anybody that was around, I think?DS: [Laughs] The old doorknob adage? [Laughs] EW: [Laughs] Yeah. [Laughs] DS: Do you think that played a role in your being gay?EW: A classical Freudian explanation would be suffocating mother and absent father makes somebody gay. I actually had both of those elements, but I don’t think that’s a universal formula for creating homosexuals. DS: I interviewed an eminent psychoanalyst named Joseph Merlino and he said it’s a mixture of things—nature, nurture, both. EW: You don’t try to explain heterosexuality and yet it’s extremely difficult to explain. DS: How so?EW: If you get beyond the simple biological fact that we want men to fuck women so we’ll have babies, that doesn’t explain the psychological dynamics of how men come to regard women as so attractive. I think the way advertising works in our media and movies I think it would be make more sense if all men are heterosexual and all women are lesbians, because women are held up as being so attractive and so much the focus of sexual desire, that I think that would be more logical. Especially when I was growing up. You never saw a naked man except Indians in cowboy and Indian movies. You never saw a bare-chested man.DS: The courting rituals are similar between gays and straights. EW: The courting rituals are very different, because heterosexual men spend a lot of time courting women before they get them; whereas gay men get them instantly if they are going to get them at all. The most romantic moment with gay men—this is something Michel Foucault said, it’s not an original thought—he said the most romantic moment for a heterosexual man is the build-up to sex, and for gay men the most romantic moment is when you put your trick in a cab and you go back home alone thinking about it all. [Laughs] On his intimate relationshipsDS: What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? EW: I think I felt it about three years ago. I was dropped by a guy I was really in love with, and it took me back to my late twenties when that had last happened. I didn’t even think I was capable of that kind of suffering anymore, but I just cried every day for a month and all the time. I went to a shrink then, and he said, “I can’t even work with you, you’re so depressed.” DS: Why did he drop you?EW: He found a new lover and he discovered he wasn’t really a top, but a bottom.DS: How does having a relationship like that fit in yours and Michael’s? EW: Nobody seems to understand it very well, and I’m not sure we’ve even articulated it. Michael has a full time boyfriend who is a German who is quite a bit younger than he is. He’s a historian, he’s a PhD student in history. And I have a fulltime boyfriend who is a PhD student at Harvard in philosophy. We both like each other’s boyfriends. DS: Do you think not articulating it is what makes it work?EW: Yes. We’re very very affectionate and we’re both bohemian. Neither of us ever had an ideal of getting married and having a white picket fence, adopting a Korean girl or being respectable, or anything like that. When we first met we both realized we are each sluts, so we cheerfully acknowledged that and went our way. We’re in it for the long haul with each other. Most couples, straight of gay—50\% of all straight couples end in divorce—I think it would be even higher if people could afford to get divorced. Partly the people who stay together are limited financially. Anyway, I think that if you’re really in it for the long haul, you have to give each other a tremendously long leash.DS: Do you always practice safe sex? EW: I do. Well, unless it’s somebody who is also positive. If I’m positive, and somebody else is positive and he wants to bareback, that’s fine. DS: But there’s different strains of the virus, correct?EW: Or so they say. I don’t think so. DS: You’ve never known of anyone who has said, “Oh, now I have a different strain and none of the drugs are working.” EW: No. I think that’s something doctors told people because they were trying to scare the ones who are already positive and weren’t responsible towards their partners. They were trying to give them a personal reason for practicing safe sex. “Oh, your own health will deteriorate more if you don’t watch out.” I think that’s bullshit. I don’t always tell my partners I’m positive, but I always practice safe sex with somebody I don’t’ know and I just assume that’s enough. If they ask, I always say the truth. DS: What difficulties have you encountered physically from being HIV positive? Has it been a difficult row to hoe?EW: No. I found out I was positive in 1985, and I was probably positive already for five or six years at that point because I was very active sexually in the late seventies, early eighties. I would go to the St. Mark’s baths, which was very close to where I lived, and get fucked twenty times in an evening, so why would I have not been positive then? The first test became available in 1984, but I moved to Paris in late 1982 and I wasn’t really living near any place. So when I had the test done in 1985 in Zurich, the results had to be sent to America to be analyzed; we had to wait three months to get the results. That’s when I found out I was positive. I only started taking meds a few years ago.DS: Why did you start? EW: My doctor advised me to because my counts had dropped below five hundred , or something. They had always been around 700 for years and years. Suddenly it seemed like they were drifting faster and faster down. I thought if I took meds I would have more energy, and I did. I used to take two naps a day.
Wikinews reporter David Shankbone understood that an interview with Edmund White, who is professor of creative writing at Princeton University, who wrote the seminal biography of Jean Genet, and who no longer can keep track of how many sex partners he has encountered, meant nothing would be off limits. Nothing was. Late in the interview they were joined by his partner Michael Caroll, who discussed White's enduring feud with influential writer and activist Larry Kramer. On work as a gay writer DS: Does it bother you to be considered a gay writer?EW: Well there is a question I have asked many many times. I think it would be unrealistic to say I’m not a gay writer. I emerged with a gay literary movement—the Violet Quill—which was a group of gay writers who all started publishing in 1978, and I was labeled from the very beginning a gay writer.DS: And you embrace that? EW: Embrace is another thing, but it would be unrealistic to deny it or act like it is some terrible offense, because if I am known at all it is because of the idea of gay literature. Sometimes you wish you could have a wider readership, but every writer wishes that. More women and straight men, but we all wish we had a wider readership. In America, especially, everything is niche marketing and identity politics. That’s not true in England, so much, and it’s certainly not true in France. DS: In England you have kids reading Afro-Caribbean literature because they don’t have a sense that it’s a “black thing”?EW: Yes, that’s right. For instance, most of the well known writers in England under 50 are former colonial people, whether it’s Ishiguro—he’s Japanese and that wasn’t part of the empire, but still—or David Hogue Davies. Caryl Phillips, who is a black man from the islands who lives now in New York but is one of England’s most important writers. Also Salman Rushdie. In other words, the way we categorize people and dismiss them is not true of England because in fact the major winners of the Booker Prize over the last thirty years are people who would not have been allowed in a private men’s club in England 50 years ago. DS: Do you see a generation that can assume the mantle for the Violet Quill or is there not a necessity for it? EW: There’s not a necessity for it now, but there was then. It’s always been hard to get gay books published, and it’s as hard as ever. It’s very hard to get gay books published. DS: Why?EW: The market is very small. Only 3\% of all people are gay and if you take a diminishing dumbed-down reading public to begin with, and say you are only aiming for 3\% of that market, that’s awfully small. So gay novels if they are successful sell 5,000 copies. DS: What is a gay novel? EW: One that is marketed as gay. Usually a picture of a cute boy on the cover. DS: Would Hollinghurst’s Swimming Pool Library be one?EW: Well, he’s a cross-over writer. He’s a little different because he did win the Booker Prize with The Line of Beauty, and he was the editor of The Times Literary Supplement, which is the most prestigious reviewing organism in the English-speaking world. He has a dark brown voice and he went to Oxford and he knows everybody. He’s admired by everybody. London is such a different place because in America writers teach in different universities and they are scattered all across this huge country and they sometimes know each other, but not usually. Whereas in England they are all journalists , they live in London, and they all know each other. It’s a very small world, which is good and bad. One of the good things is that if somebody is really talented like Hollinghurst and has accumulated a bastion of power like the TLS, he’ll have enormous impact, and everybody knows it. Whereas here somebody like David Leavitt is teaching in Gainesville, Florida. That’s pretty far off the beaten path even though he’s a wonderful writer. His last book, The Indian Clerk, was reviewed on the front page of The New York Times book review very glowingly. Nevertheless, it doesn’t sell and nobody cares. It’s very hard.DS: You think that’s because of a lack of a community of writers? EW: I think there’s a number of things. One of the things that is important for gay writers, gay publishers and gay academics is to try and develop a market. You can see that with something like Harry Potter where everybody thought the children’s market had completely vanished and now it’s back in a huge way because of that one book. I have a friend, Claire Robson who is a lesbian writer that lives in Vancouver. Canada, being a semi-welfare state has a lot of money for public things. She’s trying to develop older lesbian audiences, younger gay male audiences. She’s organizing reading groups, study groups, autobiography writing groups. All of this stuff that is paid for by the government. DS: Earlier you were saying what makes a book a certain genre is a marketing function.EW: Yes, but I think that what she is doing is trying to create readers who will then buy gay…I’m not saying all gay and lesbian books are cynically marketed. There were a lot of books when I was young that weren’t marketed as gay books; books by Proust, Thomas Mann and so on. Andre Gilde. They had gay themes but the “gay novel” didn’t exist then. The problem is we have an awfully lot of good gay writers and very few good gay readers. I don’t know why that is, but it’s true. DS: Who are some good gay writers? EW: Vestal McIntyre, Patrick Ryan are just two. On sex DS: You said in an interview that the smartest people are the best sex—EW: [Laughs]DS: —what is sex to you? EW: The most important thing in the world. I had a sex partner who I thought was really great sex but one day he said to me, “I really enjoy playing basketball more than having sex,” and I was so offended. I thought that was like somebody saying, “I’d rather go shopping than go to church.” It seemed to be so trivializing of this sacred thing of sex that it was hard to see him again after that. So what is it for me? Something very transcendent and I turn my life upside down to have it as frequently as possible. No, it’s not frequency, it’s quality that’s important. DS: How can something repeated so often still be considered sacred?EW: What about the mass?DS: Do you only have sex once a week? EW: They have mass every day. DS: People don’t go to mass every day, typically.EW: They can.DS: They could. EW: No, I’m having sex more often than once week. It’s hard to defend the position logically, I just mean to me it’s important. DS: Is that the main criterion for a partner?EW: No. I’ve lived with Michael for 12 years and I don’t think that has ever been the key issue between us. He’s a writer, compatible and he’s one of the most interesting people I know. He’s always unpredictable.DS: You have an open relationship? EW: Yes. DS: Do you think that’s a necessity in order to have a successful relationship?EW: I wouldn’t preach for anybody else; I mean, everybody’s different. But for me, yes.DS: Where do you tend to find your sexual partners? EW: On-line, now. Silverdaddies.com; daddyhunt. That’s where you go if you’re older. Or Manhunt and gay.com. Or slavesformaster. Those are all sites where I’ve met people. DS: Are you a slave or a master?EW: A slave, but I’m not much of one.DS: Why are you a bad slave? EW: I’m not into pain and it has to strike me just right or it starts to seem ridiculous. DS: At what point does it start to seem ridiculous?EW: Too much leather, bad grammar on the part of the master! [Laughs]DS: [Laughs] EW: Like, “Lay down” instead of “Lie down.” DS: Are you always submissive?EW: I have dominated, it’s just not as pleasurable. When I was younger I had slaves, even for a whole year at a time. DS: You had a slave relationship. EW: Yes, for a year. DS: What was that like?EW: One day we were on acid down in Key West and I realized I didn’t even like him, so I broke up with him. I thought it was okay to be doing it if I actually like or love him, but if I really have contempt for him, that’s no good. It has to be an expression of love.DS: What psychological issues come out in a relationship like that? EW: Unrequited feelings for love from your father, often times. Longings for passivity. A lot of people have that. DS: To give up the feeling they always have to be in control in their waking lives?EW: I have a good friend who is a European novelist who was willing to literally hand over all of his belongings to this master, just signed over everything he owned to live in a cage the rest of his life. It turned out to be a fraud to fleece him of his money.DS: That must have been disappointing for him. EW: It’s a good thing he discovered that in time, didn’t lose his money and didn’t live in a cage the rest of his life, because he’s actually a very interesting person with a very full life. DS: What psychological issues did you work through in your slave-master relationships?EW: Different ones. If it’s not an on-going thing then you would get tired of it and drop it all together. It’s not a very major part of my life.DS: Did it used to be more so? EW: Yes. But it was also a fresher scene back then. Now it feels like a very tired scene and I hate people in leather, I think that’s so stupid. DS: Like they are wearing Halloween costumes?EW: Yeah. DS: As if the fashion never changes? It’s always the same chaps, the same harness… EW: Yeah…yeah, that’s right. One of the interesting things about Robert Mapplethorpe—who was a friend of mine and I have quite a few pictures here by him, including two of me—he had leathers made for him in Amsterdam with red and blue piping, fitting in an interesting way with different kinds of leather. A patchwork effect without making it look silly. He was very elegant. They were attractive and sexy. On incest in his family DS: In an interview you said that you are known for the incestuous feelings that were in your family—EW: [Laughs]DS: —what advice would you give to couples pursuing an incestuous relationship? EW: You mean like a father and daughter who want to have a love affair? DS: Or a brother and sister.EW: God, move to a more tolerant country, first of all.DS: Do you think there is a problem with it? EW: I think incest becomes more difficult if it’s intergenerational than if it’s in the same generation. And it becomes more difficult if it crosses the sex barrier. For instance, two brothers who have sex with each other when they are growing up, for instance—they’re 14 and 16 —it is never a very big deal. Whereas if a brother and sister have sex and are both teenagers, it is often traumatic, especially for the girl, and it will show up in her psychoanalysis later, and problems with her marriage, with frigidity and so on. If it’s her father she is sleeping with, it becomes a very big problem for her psychological adjustment. DS: Is that because there is an intrinsic problem with it, or because of societal reactions to it?EW: I think that it probably comes to the same thing because in every society it’s a problem. So whether it’s genetic or societal, I don’t know. But it’s universal. Anthropologists try to speculate why that would be. Some people say that it has to do with the divisions of authority and power; for instance, if a daughter is sleeping with her father then her mother has no authority over her because the daughter has in a sense replaced the mother because she’s the ideal partner—she’s younger, prettier, whatever. It screws up the whole family system. It’s a very interesting subject. But I think I’m right: two brothers, no big deal; two sisters, no big deal. Brother-sister becomes a problem, or mother-son it becomes a huge problem.DS: So you’d advise an incestuous couple not to pursue it? EW: Oh, I don’t give advice! [Laughs] DS: You had mentioned particular issues about a father may arise in a slave-master relationship. You were sexually attracted to your father, so do you think you worked through your own issues with him? 350pxEW: Yes.DS: Where do you think that attraction came from? EW: I don’t know; I think it’s very hard to explain attraction. If I’m attracted to you right now, why? I don’t know why. DS: But that’s something people could perhaps explain more readily than attraction to one's father.EW: I don’t know; I wasn’t really raised by my father. I lived apart from him and I would spend every summer with him, but not see him much during the year. My parents were divorced from my age of seven on. I think the incest taboo sets in and turns somebody off sexually with somebody they know very well and lives with. I think with my father he was somebody who every eye in the family was focused on and he was a sort of a tyrant and nice-looking, the source of all power, money, happiness, and he was implacable and difficult. He was always spoken of in sexual terms, in the sense he left our mother for a much younger woman who was very sexy but had nothing else going for her. He was a famous womanizer. And he slept with my sister! DS: What you describe is power; are you still attracted to power? EW: No. I mean, my idea of power, but not everybody’s idea of power. In other words, I wouldn’t want to go to bed with Bush… DS: Would you let him blow you?EW: No. DS: Why not? EW: I find him repulsive. I wouldn’t even let a Republican blow me. That does cut down on a number of people I guess— DS: What did your father’s incestuous relationship with your sister do to you?EW: I was envious of my sister. I wished I had that kind of access to him.DS: Did you try? EW: Yeah. DS: And he spurned you?EW: No, it was so subtle he probably didn’t even know I was longing for him because, I mean, we’re talking about the 1950’s in Cincinnati, Ohio, or Texas. He didn’t know I was gay until later and he would tell me he had just fired a man because he thought he might be gay, or at least he wasn’t married and he wore a ring.DS: How would you respond? EW: You couldn’t say anything. DS: Did he ever know?EW: About me? Yes. Fairly early on, when I was about 15. DS: What was his reaction? EW: He was horrified, because he thought it was my mother’s bad influence because I had led an overly sophisticated life with her. He thought I should lead a simpler life and put in hours and hours of yard work and that would make me straight. DS: Your mother was attracted to you, right?EW: Or anybody that was around, I think?DS: [Laughs] The old doorknob adage? [Laughs] EW: [Laughs] Yeah. [Laughs] DS: Do you think that played a role in your being gay?EW: A classical Freudian explanation would be suffocating mother and absent father makes somebody gay. I actually had both of those elements, but I don’t think that’s a universal formula for creating homosexuals. DS: I interviewed an eminent psychoanalyst named Joseph Merlino and he said it’s a mixture of things—nature, nurture, both. EW: You don’t try to explain heterosexuality and yet it’s extremely difficult to explain. DS: How so?EW: If you get beyond the simple biological fact that we want men to fuck women so we’ll have babies, that doesn’t explain the psychological dynamics of how men come to regard women as so attractive. I think the way advertising works in our media and movies I think it would be make more sense if all men are heterosexual and all women are lesbians, because women are held up as being so attractive and so much the focus of sexual desire, that I think that would be more logical. Especially when I was growing up. You never saw a naked man except Indians in cowboy and Indian movies. You never saw a bare-chested man.DS: The courting rituals are similar between gays and straights. EW: The courting rituals are very different, because heterosexual men spend a lot of time courting women before they get them; whereas gay men get them instantly if they are going to get them at all. The most romantic moment with gay men—this is something Michel Foucault said, it’s not an original thought—he said the most romantic moment for a heterosexual man is the build-up to sex, and for gay men the most romantic moment is when you put your trick in a cab and you go back home alone thinking about it all. [Laughs] On his intimate relationshipsDS: What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? EW: I think I felt it about three years ago. I was dropped by a guy I was really in love with, and it took me back to my late twenties when that had last happened. I didn’t even think I was capable of that kind of suffering anymore, but I just cried every day for a month and all the time. I went to a shrink then, and he said, “I can’t even work with you, you’re so depressed.” DS: Why did he drop you?EW: He found a new lover and he discovered he wasn’t really a top, but a bottom.DS: How does having a relationship like that fit in yours and Michael’s? EW: Nobody seems to understand it very well, and I’m not sure we’ve even articulated it. Michael has a full time boyfriend who is a German who is quite a bit younger than he is. He’s a historian, he’s a PhD student in history. And I have a fulltime boyfriend who is a PhD student at Harvard in philosophy. We both like each other’s boyfriends. DS: Do you think not articulating it is what makes it work?EW: Yes. We’re very very affectionate and we’re both bohemian. Neither of us ever had an ideal of getting married and having a white picket fence, adopting a Korean girl or being respectable, or anything like that. When we first met we both realized we are each sluts, so we cheerfully acknowledged that and went our way. We’re in it for the long haul with each other. Most couples, straight of gay—50\% of all straight couples end in divorce—I think it would be even higher if people could afford to get divorced. Partly the people who stay together are limited financially. Anyway, I think that if you’re really in it for the long haul, you have to give each other a tremendously long leash.DS: Do you always practice safe sex? EW: I do. Well, unless it’s somebody who is also positive. If I’m positive, and somebody else is positive and he wants to bareback, that’s fine. DS: But there’s different strains of the virus, correct?EW: Or so they say. I don’t think so. DS: You’ve never known of anyone who has said, “Oh, now I have a different strain and none of the drugs are working.” EW: No. I think that’s something doctors told people because they were trying to scare the ones who are already positive and weren’t responsible towards their partners. They were trying to give them a personal reason for practicing safe sex. “Oh, your own health will deteriorate more if you don’t watch out.” I think that’s bullshit. I don’t always tell my partners I’m positive, but I always practice safe sex with somebody I don’t’ know and I just assume that’s enough. If they ask, I always say the truth. DS: What difficulties have you encountered physically from being HIV positive? Has it been a difficult row to hoe?EW: No. I found out I was positive in 1985, and I was probably positive already for five or six years at that point because I was very active sexually in the late seventies, early eighties. I would go to the St. Mark’s baths, which was very close to where I lived, and get fucked 20 times in an evening, so why would I have not been positive then? The first test became available in 1984, but I moved to Paris in late 1982 and I wasn’t really living near any place. So when I had the test done in 1985 in Zurich, the results had to be sent to America to be analyzed; we had to wait three months to get the results. That’s when I found out I was positive. I only started taking meds a few years ago.DS: Why did you start? EW: My doctor advised me to because my counts had dropped below 500 , or something. They had always been around 700 for years and years. Suddenly it seemed like they were drifting faster and faster down. I thought if I took meds I would have more energy, and I did. I used to take two naps a day.
A
Wikinews reporter
R
fifty
50
R
twelve
12
R
fourteen and sixteen
14 and 16
R
fifteen.
15.
R
twenty
20
R
five hundred
500