Becoming a Man: Talks with the Wonderful Paul Monette
I first met Paul Monette when he came to the bookstore where I was working and when I hosted a paperback signing for Borrowed Time. He was extremely charming and nice and I ended up going to his hotel with him after the signing. It was an interesting evening to say the least. He talked about the writing life, and as the evening and the drinking progressed he aired his fears of his current lover (Stephen) losing his eyesight and the difficulties of dealing with that and the other things in his life. We ended up getting quite drunk and for some reason throwing his flower arrangements (petal by petal) out the windows of his hotel and watching them float the 20-some floors to the ground. I wasn’t doing interviews at that time but the evening was definitely a formative one. We kept in loose contact over the next few years with periodic phone calls and cards. He was a genuine mentor of mine along with the late John Preston.
When I was sent an advance copy of Becoming a Man I was floored. I knew Paul had reached his stride as a writer. It was so strong and visceral and wise. I called him right away and told him how I thought his skills and the topic all came perfectly together. It was his masterpiece. The book went on to become the first gay/lesbian studies book to win the National Book Award. It was an amazing feat . . . and it was equally astounding that the same year out lesbian Dorothy Allison was short-listed for Bastard Out of Carolina as well.
The first time I interviewed Paul was when Becoming a Man was just being released. By the time I interviewed him a second time, when his next book Last Watch of the Night came out, his career was at an entirely different level. Life had become hectic . . . this happened and that happened and I knew his health was deteriorating. Our contact dwindled to holiday cards . . . and then in February of 1995 he was dead. What an amazing man. I’ll never forget him.
The texts which follow are the two interviews reprinted in their entirety.
Becoming a Man:
Talking With Paul Monette About his Latest Book
[This interview originally appeared in September 1992 in Chicago Outlines and thereafter in the San Francisco Sentinel, Out in Albuquerque, Gayly Oklahoma, The Wisconsin Light, Out in Pittsburgh, Southern Exposure (Key West), and the Rock River News (Rockford, IL.]
Author Paul Monette is at the forefront of almost everyone’s list of influential contemporary gay writers. His groundbreaking AIDS memoir, Borrowed Time, is unsurpassed in the genre and since its publication Mr. Monette has produced a volume of poetry, Love Alone, as well as two novels, Halfway Home and Afterlife. This past month Harcourt Brace Jovanovich publishers released his eleventh book – an honest, painful, and ultimately triumphant coming-out memoir entitled Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story. Recently I had a chance to chat with Paul Monette about writing, the closet, his recent AIDS diagnosis, writing AIDS for TV, and what it means to become a man.
Owen Keehnen: Becoming a Man talks about your coming out in a very specific way, and yet the emotional core of all that hetero-programming and the devastating influence that can have on a gay or lesbian kid seems universal. What was the trick to making your specific experience expand?
Paul Monette: I hoped the book would have a large resonance for the gay and lesbian people and not just be the story of my life. I’m startled by the sense of having struck a chord in people whose outward journey has been so different from mine. Part of that connection may be that when I begin to write, I really tried to confront all the pain that was there. It’s a totally unnecessary story. People shouldn’t have to go through this coming out. In many cases, after a certain point growing up gay you don’t even need the comments of the homophobes anymore, self-hatred takes over. The hetero conditioning you spoke of bleeds the self out of you when you’re at that vulnerable 9–15 stage.
What effect did writing about your early years and the coming-out process have upon you at this point in your life?
With Becoming a Man I wrote the first 50–75 pages with great excitement, when I was writing about my childhood sexuality. I thought, "Oh, everyone should do this, it’s a great thing." Then I got another 50–75 pages into it and thought, "Nobody should do this." There’s a reason for keeping all that down, it’s too painful. That pain was with me for months and months during the writing of the book.
What are you working on now?
I don’t know if Becoming a Man will be my last book. I’m not quite sure what to write now as I struggle with AIDS and all the issues surrounding AIDS. I don’t know if I made this as a final statement, but I feel like I did the right thing in writing it.
What’s the key to becoming a man and does that experience vary for gay men?
First of all, it’s a matter of challenging that hetero conditioning even if only quietly in one’s heart, and accepting the "different-ness" we feel as a positive and not a negative thing in a culture that wants everyone to be the same . . . and look like Dan Quayle. My friend, Betty Berzon, the psychologist who wrote Permanent Partners and has been dealing with gay and lesbian patients for thirty years, said she used to think it was enough to come out. Now she feels there’s another step, which is getting involved with the community, that somehow you can’t be a healthy gay or lesbian person without giving back something. I agree, I think part of becoming a man is reaching out to others and breaking one’s own isolation. Finally, I certainly think becoming a man involves becoming a woman as well and understanding how profound a debt we owe to feminism and to our lesbian sisters, especially in the last decade, as we come together like grown-ups and make a co-sexual community.
How do you think coming out has changed in the last few years?
There are gay and lesbian groups in so many places now. It’s remarkable. I think coming out is easier. But that only means we who are older bear more responsibility to be honest and forthright and political and clear-headed as we can, because we need to be their aunts and uncles. I expect in any family there’s still an amount of chaos and pain before parents can accept a child as lesbian or gay. But we know sexuality is a genetic business without very much to do with family, but the family has a HUGE effect on the closet and the amount of doors and the darkness of the closet. I feel an enormous amount of empathy for those in a coming-out situation, but it’s SO worth it. Not to be morally judgmental or anything, but being in the closet becomes such a twisted matter that you end up fighting against yourself.
It’s so all-consuming. You search for self-worth everywhere else and look frantically for something to be because the one thing you can’t really be is yourself.
Maintaining the facade becomes a full-time job and once you come out you spend one-tenth of the energy finding out who you are for real.
And once you come out it’s so empowering because usually people have gone through quite a bit to progress to that point.
It’s important for us as gays and lesbians not to exclude our allies from whatever outreach we do. We’re lucky to have allies. There are people who have struggled with us and been close to us, evolved people who are straight and who we need. It’s not a simple black and white or gay vs. straight in the fight that we have with the patriarchy and all the stupid know-nothings. Our diversity as a community has helped a lot of straight people who didn’t understand or were too shy to ask. One of the most important organizations is P-FLAG [Parents and Friends of Lesbians And Gays]; think back on what most families were like fifteen or twenty years ago. In lots of those families the gay person knew he was gay and the family knew he was gay, but no one talked about it and everyone suffered from this sort of melancholy heartache or disappointment. That isn’t necessary anymore; there are resources for the family as well. Frankly anyone who wants to understand his or her gay and lesbian friends and family can. These people are allies and they are as offended as we are by the frightening sickness of homophobes.
Do you still feel that organized religion is ‘The School of Hate’?
Yeah I do. The Vatican supported that contention once again by supporting discrimination against gay and lesbian people. I take a lot of pride in groups like Dignity and Integrity to fight for their rights from the church. Personally, I just don’t think I could handle the uphill-ness of that fight. The Catholic Church is SO evil, what they put out from that Nazi office in the Vatican is just so evil and anti-human. It’s very difficult to work out a spiritual life, especially for gays and lesbians, when so many religions are like political action committees. Judgmental is the first and last thing that they are.
How would you describe the evolution of gay literature and where do you think it is headed?
In a way I am perhaps too close to give a clear answer. I can scarcely believe the explosion of gay and lesbian literature in the past decade. When I wrote Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll fifteen years ago I had no idea it would be part of such a vast movement. I think we need to read about ourselves more than anybody because we never had any models. What I find especially exciting is the reclaiming of the past with the number of gay and lesbian history books coming out.
Your Borrowed Time and Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On are frequently cited as THE books of AIDS literature. Are there others you would add to that list?
That’s a difficult question. There’s a book by Alyson Wonderland called Losing Uncle Tim, which is a great children’s book . . . John Preston’s Personal Dispatches, Andrew Holleran’s Ground Zero. There are a few I’m probably forgetting. Whenever I read a gay or lesbian novel with a contemporary setting that doesn’t even mention AIDS it feels very strange to me.
What were your concerns when working on last year’s ‘Thirtysomething’ HIV script?
When I got hired to do it I was first of all very grateful because I got my insurance back, but there’s scarcely a line of that script as it was shot that was mine. They needed a foreclosure on Michael having lost his friend. They needed a grief show. They felt I gave much more space than they could give to Peter’s HIV status. But I do think they did a good job. I’m glad my name was on it; it was probably more wrenching than anything else on television that talked about seropositivity that year.
How would you feel to have one of your novels, Afterlife or Halfway Home for example, made into a movie?
People are always saying, "Wouldn’t it be wonderful if this or that were a movie." Maybe, but I don’t quite care that much because by the time I finish working on a book I usually feel that it gets it right.
Which of your works are you the most pleased with and do you see your work progressing towards something?
I feel a sort of delirious pride in the body of work I have produced since Roger died. But probably Borrowed Time, the sense of mission in steering the love story through my own outrage was the most remarkable time I have ever had as a writer.
The quality and volume of your work since then has been incredible. It’s been one a year!
Yeah. It’s sort of tricky, sitting around trying to keep the whine out of my voice thinking, "What am I going to write now?" Over the past five years I’ve just worked and worked and worked, but AIDS changes that.
Yeah, I heard you were diagnosed in December, sorry to hear that.
I’m feeling well, but it’s just scary. I’m scared this toxoplasmosis will make me lose my mind. I’m in the middle of so much uncertainty and I’m just not ready to write right now. Not to be overly somber or melodramatic or negative, but it’s hard for me to imagine being here a year or two from now unless by sheer luck. I have about 10 T-cells left and I feel more on a tightrope than I used to feel. I mean, I was the queen of seropositivity and pretty comfortable with that position. AIDS is a different business. But the excitement and energy around the publication of Becoming a Man has been a wonderful distraction.
What message do you want your ongoing body of work to present?
That self-love is a very difficult thing to achieve and intimacy is a lifelong job, but the cost is worth it. I feel a sense of joy and triumph about my relationships. They have been the depth of my feeling of what it means to be a man. I sure hope my books are on a shelf for a long long time, but I’d rather be remembered for loving well than writing well.
You’ve said you have been very lucky in having found great love three times – with Roger, Stephen, and now Winston. What’s the trick or secret to that?
A lot is luck. I was alone the first twenty-five years of my life and it got me nowhere in terms of reaching my heart. I made it a top priority in my life to connect with someone else. For me, the relationships I’ve had have proven to me that I can get outside myself and my own petty neurosis and such. For me, it works. It wasn’t until I met Roger and had experienced that sense of connection and completion that I was able to write. Before that I wrote ten years of hermetic tedious poems and if I never met him I’d probably still be writing them.
Is your writing process different for poetry and prose and for fiction and memoir?
When I work on fiction I work on half a page to a page a day and go over and over and over it, the way one would go over lines of poetry. In that way being a poet has made my prose style denser. Poetry is a rare thing for me now. I need to be at an unusual pitch of intensity. The fact that I could write non-fiction at all came as a big surprise to me.
Who’s someone you truly admire?
Larry Kramer. I learned courage from him. He made me understand that a writer could do more than just write.
Does Liz Taylor know you kept a white leatherette scrapbook of her?
No! Not that I know of anyway. It’s so ironic that I kept that as a teenager because I have this immense pride for the Liz Taylor of the AIDS years . . . for the speech she recently gave in Amsterdam and for her utter commitment to stand with us in this calamity. What an ally!
In Becoming a Man what do you mean when you write that it’s all about "saying love and fuck in the same breath, even if it’s your last"?
That there’s a way for the passion we feel about someone to be both carnal and spiritual. It’s a rare thing. The great challenge has been to channel this explosive atom bath of hormones into the spiritual growth that love can be. For me there’s just nothing like it.
Thanks so much Paul.
Literary Hero:
Talking with Paul Monette
[This interview originally appeared in the July 1994 issue of Chicago Outlines and subsequently in the Baltimore Alternative and Wisconsin In Step.]
Paul Monette stands at the forefront of influential gay writers. His groundbreaking AIDS memoir, Borrowed Time, is unsurpassed in the genre, and since its publication Mr. Monette has produced a volume of poetry, Love Alone, as well as two novels, Afterlife and Halfway Home. In 1993 he was awarded the National Book Award for his honest, painful, and ultimately triumphant coming-out memoir Becoming a Man. Last month Harcourt Brace released his twelfth book, a wonderful and necessary new volume of diverse essays called Last Watch of the Night. Recently I had a chance to catch up a bit with Paul about his new book, the Newsweek fiasco, AIDS phobia, and life in the trenches as a PWA.
Owen Keehnen: Hi Paul, how are you feeling today?
Paul Monette: A little bit better. I was in bed for two months. What laid me low was a bronchial infection. They tried one antibiotic after another and after thirty-one days I’d lost 25 pounds and was still coughing like crazy. They finally tried an IV and it conquered the infection. Since then I’ve gained back five pounds. I’m still on thirteen hours a day IV, but I hope to drop that to three by next week.
I’m glad to hear you’re feeling better. It’s good to hear your voice. We haven’t talked since the week when you won the National Book Award, congratulations.
Oh thanks. It was a great surprise, like an out-of-the-body experience.
Last Watch of the Night is a great collection of essays. Do you have a favorite?
I think probably the last one ‘Mortal Things’. It was an essay I never would have been able to write until I wrote the rest of the book. Last Watch of the Night was, after Borrowed Time and Becoming a Man anyway, such a breeze to write, so pleasurable. Doing these essays was like being paid to eat cake and sandwiches.
Is there a reason why you chose the short essay format this time out?
In a way my readers have convinced me that what is most important for me to write is non-fiction prose. I had thought about writing a novel, and then I got sick in the spring. I thought – I don’t want to be in the middle of a novel and get sick. The nice thing about the essays is I could put them down and come back to them in a few days.
Going back to reader input, do you get a great deal of fan mail?
I do. It’s gratifying to know I’m touching people’s lives. Some of the mail is bothersome because some people feel after reading those books that they’re closer to me than they are or that I am my books. But don’t expect me to be as wise as Becoming a Man.
Over the course of writing the essays was there an unexpected element that arose which you didn’t plan on when you began the collection?
Well, I wanted to keep having AIDS as the subtext. I wanted the main text to be about what filled me with life and what mattered. In some ways the subtext made a deeper rut as it goes along than I realized.
But the notion of great love is still predominant, not only for community but on a lover level with Roger, Stephen, and now Winston. Love is so rare to find and you’ve found it three times. Is there a reason?
I was in the closet 27 years! I never dreamed that I could ever find someone to love. I assumed that was such a closed issue, such a closed world. Perhaps because of that, in the twenty years since, I’ve been more willing to risk, to let down my guard. It’s really been other people loving me that have allowed me to love myself. Clearly trying to become involved with someone after twelve years with Roger and after the assault of that grief was not easy. But, when you’re dying what you are going to care about is how much you’ve loved and how much you’ve given back to your community. That’s what will matter. As they say in Hollywood, nobody ever wanted to read one more script on their deathbed.
You’ve referred to yourself as an AIDS monument or AIDS poster boy. Do you really feel that way, and if so what insights have you gleaned from that position?
I think I was more a poster boy in my seropositive years. I’m not so aware of being taken that way in my full-blown years. The reason I took on the position was there was so much ignorance about AIDS and mostly it involved not understanding how people with AIDS want to live as much of our lives as we can. AIDS is separating enough. I felt an urgency to explain to people that I had this disease and that I was still alive.
Did the somewhat backseat status of AIDS during last year’s March on Washington offend you?
It did. I have avoided thinking that there’s a kind of AIDS apartheid within the gay and lesbian community. It may not be as strong, but there’s a sense of some younger people declaring that there are many more issues besides AIDS, and it’s such a downer. There’s a tendency to turn everything over to the dwindling band of AIDS activists and the people who are sick. I think it’s just thoughtlessness on the part of people running things like the March. I was told when Torie Osborne dragged Larry Kramer on the stage she was threatened with arrest! They did not want him to speak or to be part of the ceremony, period. So many people who are dying now have been kept going the last three or four years . . . Michael Callan, Randy Shilts, John Preston . . . they’re all examples of what I think is going to be another tidal wave of death in our community.
Last year Newsweek insinuated some slanderous things about you concerning the validity of an eleven-year-old PWA named Tony, author of A Rock and a Hard Place. They repeatedly hinted that Tony didn’t exist and that you were the ghostwriter using the boy as a ploy to increase AIDS awareness and sympathy in the mainstream. What do you think was their motivation for tossing all those lies around?
I don’t understand it any more now than I did then. I certainly understand that the reporter and the magazine were being deeply AIDS-phobic. I think there’s a terrible truth there also about not wanting to hear a child talk about being sexually and physically abused. What astonished me was the thought that I’d write under a pseudonym. I’ve got too much to write under my own name! And I think my work reaches the public just fine. The rumor was started by a crazy Christian fundamentalist who was convinced this lie was being perpetrated on the American people. Tony is still alive, sometimes barely, he’s become very adept at e-mail and does a weekly column for an AIDS newsletter in Hawaii. Every now and then I feel like sending a batch of those articles to the woman at Newsweek and saying, "Do you think I wrote all these too?" I watched Newsweek start the story acting like they had broken the next Watergate and I watched their case crumble over a period of weeks. Finally, one of the editors said in the Washington Post that they no longer believed I wrote the book, but they never printed a formal retraction. I wanted to make sure one of the essays told the story right.
Speaking of being busy, I’ve also heard you are coming out with a new poetry collection this fall.
Yes, from St. Martin’s Press. It’s called West of Yesterday, East of Summer: New and Selected Poems. I worked on it for a couple of months after finishing the essays in January. It proved to be just the right thing to do.
Is your self-perception as a writer more artist, activist, or chronicler?
Well, I got a very big arty education, so I have a big artistic overview of it all, but I also believe that ivory tower art is not a reasonable response to a world that is disintegrating like ours is.
What do you think is the greatest threat to the future of the gay and lesbian community?
The biggest threat to the world is fundamentalism in all forms – Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim. It wants to kill off anyone’s who’s different and create a world run by a theocracy and not a democracy. Our country is very naïve in not understanding that the killing of a doctor in Florida outside an abortion clinic, the World Trade Center bombing, and the Waco incident are all parts of the same fundamentalist thing. Independent thinking and freedom are what’s at risk in the fundamentalist nightmare. They would love for all of us to be the first casualties.
Since Borrowed Time you’ve written two poetry collections, two novels, and two books in essay format. All have received astounding praise. Did AIDS push you to a new level of emotional honesty in your writing?
That’s probably true. It’s also pushed me to a sense of urgency about capturing what it meant to be a gay man at this time. There are so many lies and misconceptions that even nice people have about who we are. We have to tell the truth and we have to tell it straight. I’ve had the drive to do that in several forms over the past several years. It’s so unbelievable to me that Roger died seven and a half years ago. It’s like an eternity and yet like yesterday.
In Last Watch of the Night you mention that as a novice writer you wanted to emulate Noel Coward, do you have a current object of emulation?
No question. Primo Levi is my greatest hero.
Thanks Paul, nice talking to you as always.
Thank you Owen. Be well.
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