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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (Oct. 6, 2000)
October 6.2000 * Just owl 43 Continued from Page 1 RW: You told Qenre you’re having more sex than ever with younger guys these days because either you can buy them or they want to sleep with a famous writer. EW : [Laughs] I think I was bragging. That interviewer kind of wound me up. RW: It reads that way. EW : He was very cute, very impertinent, and 1 think 1 just sort of took the bait. I kind of went crazy in that interview. The whole time 1 was giving that interview I was thinking, "My editor is going to crucify me for this.” RW: You’re back in New York now. How has it changed in the 15 years you were gone? EW : It’s less bohemian. I can remember meeting an awful lot of people in the arts who were gay who were quite serious and kind of nerdy kx)king— which is sort of one of my types, 1 mean 1 like nerds— and now they’re all so buff and so perfect and materialistic, 1 think.... It is amusing. 1 like to go to the Big Cup (in Chelsea] and hang out th ere.... I’m 40 years older than anybody else in there, but still 1 will sometimes meet people who don’t know who I am and we’ll just be sitting at the same table drinking our lattes and we’ll start talking. And of course, the generalizations I’m making are only about the surface look of people. When you dig deeper, you always find that people are quite interesting and very different, one from the other. It’s sort of interesting to be at the red-hot center of the movement even if you feel out of sync with it. My boyfriend... is 35— and he’s a very young-looking 35— and he feels quite alienated from that whole world, too, because he’s a writer and he’d rather spend his time writing than going to the gym, so even though he has a nice, natural body he’s not a brontosaurus. RW: It looks like you still haven’t had to take any H IV drug cocktails. EW : T hat’s right. RW: It’s been, what, 15 years or more? EW : I was diagnosed in 1985. I’m sup posed to be som ething called a long-term nonprogressor. RW: You still have normal C D 4 cell counts? EW : I haven’t even had them tested in a year, but the last time I looked they were like high 600s. RW: That’s great. T hat’s like the lower end of normal. EW: I feel lucky. I don’t take any credit for it at all. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke, and I sleep a lot, but I don’t think that has anything to do with it. I think it’s genetic. I’m awfully happy to have been granted this reprieve because I feel like I’ve been able to write a lot of books. From the time I saw you (in 1988] till now I’ve written God knows how many books. RW: How did America strike you after being gone for so long? EW: A lot of great things. O ne of the advantages of a thriving economy is that every body is moving up, or seems to be, in the world. I mean, the man who drove us down tonight, he’s from Chile, but he’s studying to get his MBA. In France, somebody who’s your chauffeur would probably be a chauffeur for bfe; that is what he would do. Same thing with a waiter. Waiter is a profession in France, and people do it their whole lives. Here, most wait ers, if you tease them a little, they drop their formal manner and are just guys. And if you arts. Here, there’s no tradition of honorable a lot of pain for gay people. talk to them— you can talk to them, first of poverty left. Poverty’s always sort of despicable all— they don’t hide behind a professional now in America. There’s very little of that old RW: I agree with you, yet the experience mask as they do in Europe. Secondly, once you bohemian spirit that would say, “Well, you’re a of being an outsider often bred within one a dig a little bit deeper, you find out that they’re great artist and you have 10 loyal followers and healthy skepticism of all kinds of things that studying art history or are in premed or some that’s enough.” Now, everybody wants to have were handed down from on high as the way thing like that. There’s a tremendous climb the movie version and the house and the sec we were supposed to be and the way things upwards in this society which is very exciting, ond house and the yacht and whatever. T h at’s are supposed to be and what you’re supposed actually. People are very optimistic here, and the only way that people can really measure to do with your life. Once you realize that cheerful, I think. Sometimes they’re stressed excellence now. that which had been handed down to you out because they’re overworking. But there is about sexuality was wrong, it gave you the this kind of optimism which I knew when I RW: I think the gay movement in this skepticism of: Do I want to get married and was a kid in the ’50s and in the early '60s but country has won the war and just has battles have 2 .2 kids and live in the suburbs and which vanished really from America, especially left to fight. 1 think if we stopped formal work for a corporation and ride the subway New York, which went through a period of activism right now, things would keep pro train? A lot of gay people never ask those gressing until we had full equal rights. With bankruptcy and danger and crime in the 70s questions now. assimilation comes a loss of what we had that and then the recession in the ’80s. This is one EW : I agree. I think that’s true. If you look made us special as a subculture, perhaps. of the high points now in American history, at the titles of books like Virtually N orm al or A and 1 think people should be aware of Place at the Table, those are the aspirations it. There’s a down side, which is a kind of a lot of gay people now. I think it’s partly There's a tremendous climb upwards of dumbing-down of America, a kind of because o f what I was talking about— this triumphalism that Americans all feel— old-fashioned bohemianism died because of in [A m erican] society which is very that they are the best and the most— economic reasons; it was hard for people to which brings about a kind of chauvin go on living with a part-time job that exciting, actually. People are very ism, I think, a lack of interest in other would allow them to be artists in the rest optimistic here, and cheerful, I th in k .... cultures. In the gay world, gay culture is of their time. Everybody has to have two jobs now just to pay the rent. The other sort of floundering at the moment, I There's a down side, which is thing that happened is that a lot of the think, in a way. A lot of gay book shops a kind o f dumbing-down o f America, more interesting people in the gay commu are having trouble hanging on. In nity died off, and they didn’t get a chance France, there’s a special law that you a kind o f triumphalism that Americans a ll to transmit their values and their culture to can’t discount books, so the big stores a younger generation. can’t discount books. All they can offer — that they c are the best and the is more books. That means that there most — which brings about a kind o RW: f Maybe the bohemians are still are more bookstores in Paris than in all here, but so many other people have of America. Every little bookstore is chauvinism, I think, a lack o f interest come out of the closet that the bohemians preserved because they can sell books as are a tiny minority now. in other cultures. cheaply as the big store. It’s sad to see EW : T h at’s right. That could be. I can the death of so many gay Kxikstores remember in the ’50s going to a gay bar on which have been something like a com EW : I think that’s true, but I don’t think it’s the outskirts o f Chicago called Louis Gage’s, munity center for gays; in many towns, that is too high of a price to pay for all the good and there you would see the one couple in that the community center. things that will come with it. People should area where the woman was black and the man have the right to get married, to leave their was white, you’d see the people who are physi RW: Is France less materialistic and con- apartment to their lover of 20 years rather than cally challenged, you would see all kinds of odd sumeristic? to their siblings who they haven’t seen for people that didn’t fit in at the bar, because the EW : I think so, especially in the arts. What years. People should have the right to adopt gay bar was a place for odd people. Now, even America used to have and France still has is a kids, to announce frankly and openly that this gays who are slightly odd feel uncomfortable in group of young people who don t make much is my partner. The old culture had tremendous most gay bars, if you’re tix> old or tix> fat or t<x> money and don’t expect to ever make much benefits, but it had bigger problems. It created something. money, and all they desire is excellence in the in >