libertarian in terms of “Leave us alone to do
what we do.” I’m perfectly willing to make a
coalition with the Democratic Party, but the
party doesn’t know where it’s going.
Speaking of the cleansing power of rage, is
■ it fair to say that Dell in [the new novel] After
Life represents both the good and the bad
qualities of political rage?
Absolutely.
I’m also thinking of the wild dog that takes
up residence underneath Steve’s house. Is that
Steve's "rage"?
(Laughs.) Nobody’s asked me that!
The animal was animus?
That’s a very smart idea, and maybe that’s
so. He [the dog] was once domesticated and
he isn’t any more, and yet look how much he
longs to be part of that. I don’t know if one
can ever write about a dog without being
sentimental, but before it becomes
sentimental, before the dog has his nose at the
door, there’s a way in which he has been a
kind of figure of such wildness and he prefers
his wildness, and maybe he is an example of
that.
And maybe you could say the dog
represents Steve’s sexual nature. There seems
to be a direct correlation between Steve’s
sexual health and his acceptance of the dog
under the house.
And it’s also true — though I wasn’t aware
of this when I was writing it — that it’s clear
to me now that Steven is looking for that
intimacy with Mark from the minute Mark
walks through the door. Steven doesn’t know
that yet about himself, and his dick certainly
doesn’t know it for quite a while, but — I
have to tell you, the decision to write about
sexual dysfunction was an important one.
This is the scene where Mark and Steve try
to have sex and Steve can’t get it up?
It wasn’t an easy thing to write about —
it’s maybe ten pages long but felt like a
thousand when I was writing it Sexual
dysfunction [temporary impotence] — it isn’t
necessarily the virus that does it at first, but
it’s more die psychological battering of being
in the [AIDS] war that does it. To achieve
intimacy with someone — that just doesn’t
work the way it used to. I mean, go out, have
your dick sucked.
I had a little trouble getting a handle on
I the character of] Sonny —
You don’t have as much New Age here [in
the Midwest] as we do in California.
' I’m not sure how tongue-in-cheek your
portrayal o f Sonny was meant to be. Is he a
sendup of that popularized channeling?
He is. I tried to be as sympathetic for him
as I could be. I don’t mean Sonny to be a bad
guy. It’s bad that he is so lost in sexual
compulsion that he doesn’t see the irony
between his sexual compulsion and his New
Age platitudes, because both of them are
forms of denial of his part in the calamity.
You manage time, you know how to do talk
shows. Crown books sent you to this
glamorous, expensive hotel. Do you think that
if you had not been gay, if you had drown up
straight, would you be a businessman or head
of public relations for a Fortune 500
corporation? Maybe staying in this same
room, traveling on business?
What an interesting thought! I certainly
was sent through an education system that
wanted me to do that [Andover, Yale], I don’t
know if I would have been a writer, anyway. I
really think I decided to become a writer
because I was so unhappy and couldn’t do
anything about being gay. I stubbornly stayed
in the closet — I nailed shut that door.
If I’m doing the math right, you came out
in 1970 —
Yeah. What happened in 1970 was that I
finally couldn’t endure being utterly by
myself for the rest of my life and pretending
there would be no sexuality at all.
[Before Stonewall] The only gay person
would be a kind of renegade outlaw person. It
would basically be bar life and looking for
sexual companionship. The difficult thing is,
how do you find someone to really love unless
you’re just lucky in a place like that. How do
you find someone in China if they’re going to
put the electric prods to you?
I’m personally a little puritanical about
bars. I go to bars, but the idea of passing my
personal life in one just doesn’t click,
somehow.
The bars, yeah. We’ve needed them for
our freedom, but it’s such an oppressor place.
To get certain things done in our society
we have to cooperate with the system to some
degree. I mean, you're staying here at the
Four Seasons, not at the YMCAZ and
donating the rest of the money to CARE.
Absolutely. And I could have chosen to
have After Life published by a gay press for a
$2,000 advance instead of a $30,000 advance,
which let me stay in my house last year. If I
really felt that all the publishers in New York
City were part of the oppressor class, I would.
I’m not that much of a revolutionary... At
one time a few years ago, the early years with
Roger, I really was in serious danger of going
Hollywood. I doubt you’d have liked me then.
Will you get mad at me if I ask about the
Jaguar?
No, go ahead.
You had this Jaguar you describe in
Borrowed Time that was always giving you
trouble. It seems that whenever you tried to
visit Roger [Horwitz, deceased lover] in the
hospital, it would seize up and wouldn't work.
Do you still have that car?
No, I had to sell it in 1988. I needed the
money.
During that period did you ever say to
yourself,’’Maybe I should leave the Jag in the
garage and rent a Buick?”
You have to understand that I was crazy
then. Roger was dying, but I was the crazy
one.
You are HIV-positive.
True.
You look terrific. How’s your health?
I haven’t really been assulted with an
infection yet. My T-cells have been in the low
normal range over the last few years. I have
been lucky to be able to use the two years of
AZT very well. My numbers are starting to
drift down now; my percentage of T-cells now
is 16 percent and it used to be 37.
Those two years are important, but the
hope is that something new will happen. But I
know how flat the research dollars are, and
that they’re not there. I know that so many of
the compounds that need to be tested are not
being tested, so I can’t be wildly optimistic
about going on and on like this.
Also, the man I’ve been involved with for
the last year and a half has been diagnosed for
the last year, and he’s had a really tough time
— chemotherapy.
Tell me about him.
We met in July of 1988. He’s Stephen
Kolzak, he’s 37 years old, and until he left
Columbia Pictures-Television two years ago,
he was their president of casting. At the time
he left Columbia, he had sixteen shows on
television. He was a very, very powerful
television executive.
Stephen left on disability when he found
out his T-cells had plummeted and he went on
AZT. I met him maybe a year and a half later.
He bacame an AIDS activist, very involved
with ACT-UP, was very involved with
bringing the quilt to Los Angeles.
Yet, it was very very difficult for him to go
from working those 20-hour days to not
having anything to do. And now, his illness is
a full-time job.
It took Stephen and me a few months to
decide to have a relationship. We enjoyed
each other a lot or whether either of us was
capable of intimacy.
This does sound like Steven and Mark [in
After Life].
A lot of it is. We went to the October 1987
March on Washington [D. C.] and were part
of the FDA demonstration,. We went away for
a few days to the Shenandoah Valley of
Virginia and decided then, okay, let’s be in
love. We had some really happy months
together, and then in March of 1989 he was
diagnosed with KS [Kaposi’s Sarcoma]. It
was a pretty aggressive case and he went on
chemotherapy. In July he was diagnosed with
CMV retinitis so he’s had to have a catheter in
his arm and take DHBG. So the maintenance
of his condition is very, very difficuL
Since you're much involved in show
business, are you going to throw caution to
the wind some day and start naming names,
as Armistead Maupin recently did?
I must admit that I find it thrilling that
Armistead has done that. I don’t feel such an
Mf,
erotic toyo\fjor women
Sensual and sexual paraphernalia displayed
in the privacy of your home or mine
Total confidentiality guaranteed.
Holly M.
(503) 235-0362
PO. Box 19730-416
Portland. OR 97219
AIDS
a n tib o d y s c re e n in g
certainly feel immense
rage at who we call the
"dragon sisters" in Los
Angeles. There are four or
five men , probably each
worth several hundred
million dollars , who are gay
and who have no connection
to gay or AIDS causes ."
"/
urgency about ihat, but then — get me in a
certain mood and I might I certainly feel
immense rage at who we call the “dragon
sisters” in Los Angeles. There are four or five
men, probably each worth several hundred
million dollars, who are gay and who have no
connection to gay or AIDS causes.
I don’t feel like I need to “out” people
right now. That doesn’t seem {obe a big
agenda issue. I need to rail about the closet
and what it means and how it makes their
lives small. The people Armistead speaks of
and whom I know in that position are
pathetically lonely in their little castles in
Beverly Hills, and they tend to see their
community solely through the filter of the
young men they want to vampirize.
Being Rock Hudson, watching the Gay
Pride Parade on TV apd ridiculing it and only
wanting for three young hustlers to come fuch
his butt — that is not a gay consciousness.
And being lost in substance abuse — that is
not a gay consciousness.
I understand that people need to be
closeted in their work sometimes. I accept
that.
Describe a "typical day," if you have such
days. When this book tour is over and you go
back to Los Angeles, what will happen?
My best typical day is being aboe to write
all day and spend the evening with my friend
Steven. I happen to have had six months of
that in the summer and fall of last year and it
was just blissful. I’m in the middle of a novel,
actually close to the end of it, called Halfway
Home. It’s a novel about a gay brother and a
straight brother. The gay brother has AIDS,
and they haven’t spoken for ten years, and
they’re Catholic — I’m very happy about it
After that. I’m supposed to write a memoir of
growing up gay for Harcourt Brace, which
will talk a lot about gay men and straight men.
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