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L6BT Film Fast
premieres
Oct. 13
Page 41
P o r tla n d , O r e g o n
FREE
Goodbye
gay Ranee
Edmund White leaves his
expatriate life behind and
comes home to New York
by
R ex W ockner
t’s probably safe to say Edmund W hite is the
country’s most respected and widely praised
gay author. His new book, The Married Man,
is getting rave reviews. The Washington Post
called it “beautifully composed.”
I was in the midst of rereading his 1973
novel Forgetting Elena when 1 got word he was
passing through San Diego 12 hours later. We
chatted on a deck behind the gay bookstore
Obelisk in the Hillcrest district.
i
Rex Wockner: The last time I interviewed
you, 12 years ago, I was too young and dumb
to be intimidated. Now I ’m older and I’m
intimidated.
Edmund W hite: Don’t be. My God.
RW: You’ve returned to America after 15
years’ in France. How does the gay world of
Paris differ from the gay world of major U.S.
cities?
EW: Most gay people in Paris d on ’t live in
the ghetto and are not easily identified as gay.
They don’t live in a gay neighborhood, they
don’t dress in a recognizably gay way. You
meet somebody through straight friends of
yours who is young and unattached, and you
see him half a dozen times and then one day
he says, “O h, yes, I’m gay, didn’t you know
that?” It never comes out in a kind of real,
obvious way. It’s much more discreet. A nd I
would say discreet rather than closeted
because I don’t think they’re really closeted; I
just think they have this “don’t ask, don’t
tell” policy in general, and gays are m uch bet
ter integrated into the straight community
and they all have a lot of straight friends. It
would be rare to go to a party in France of all
men. Very rare. It’d be m uch more likely to go
to a party where there were a lot of straight
women and gay men, but everybody is flirting
with everybody.
Juih Watson (left) and errv
Continued on Page 43
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