CHRISTOPHER BRAM is well known for his novels, especially the one that became the acclaimed film Gods and Monsters (originally published in 1995 as Father of Frankenstein). His new book, Eminent Outlaws, is a history of gay literature in the U.S. beginning soon after World War II with Gore Vidal and The City and the Pillar (1948). Part history, part criticism, part gossip, Eminent Outlaws is a breezy survey of the landscape of gay male literature. The gossip is fun—there’s a charming report of Tennessee Williams, while riding through the London fog in a cab with Christopher Isherwood and Isherwood’s then-boyfriend, Bill Caskey, exclaiming, “We are the dreaded fog queens!”
Gore Vidal appears as a touchstone throughout the book, as do both Williams and Isherwood. Other major figures in Bram’s account include Truman Capote, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, Edward Albee, Edmund White, Larry Kramer, Armistead Maupin, Mart Crowley, and Tony Kushner. Bram’s brief, incisive readings of their works are often provocative: he characterizes Angels in America as “primarily a shaggy dog story or, more appropriately, a shaggy God story.” Other gay writers, such as Charles Ludlam, Thom Gunn, and Stephen McCauley, figure in the story as well, though in smaller roles. If this book were a movie, it would be an ensemble piece overstuffed with players, with some actors (Michael Nava and Peter Cameron, for example) making only cameo appearances.
Bram, who lives in New York City and teaches at NYU, is the author of nine novels. In addition to Father of Frankenstein, they include Gossip (1997), in which an act up member has an affair with a closeted Republican journalist, and Lives of the Circus Animals (2003), a comedy about theatre people in New York. Hold Tight (1988) centers on a gay brothel in Manhattan during World War II; Exiles in America (2006) juxtaposes two marriages, one gay and one ostensibly straight. Almost History (1992) traces the career of a gay American foreign service officer in the Philippines. In Memory of Angel Clare (1989) is a comedy of manners in which the friends of a deceased gay filmmaker try to console his younger boyfriend. The Notorious Dr. August (2000) centers on a clairvoyant pianist in the Victorian era. Bram’s debut novel, Surprising Myself (1987), was a coming-out story.
This interview with Christopher Bram was conducted by telephone last February.
Greg Varner: There’s a sense in which all of the writers you discuss in Eminent Outlaws are heroes of yours, but if you had to choose just one as the hero of your book, who would it be?
Christopher Bram: My favorite is Christopher Isherwood. He’s the sanest. He did terrific work all along, and he took as much abuse as the others, but he stayed on an even keel. His relationship with Don Bachardy was really strong and important. At the same time, there wasn’t anything fairy-tale about it. The two of them argued. This was a real couple—when you read Isherwood’s diaries, you see they were just like everybody else, but they were honest about it and open. They really cared about each other. And Isherwood managed to put that into his books. At the same time, after getting kicked in the teeth a couple of times over including so many gay characters—he wasn’t even writing as a gay writer yet—he said, “OK, I’m going to write a straight book next time,” and he couldn’t! It didn’t work, so he said, “Fuck it, I’m going to write what I need to write,” which was A Single Man. I love that about him.
GV: What, if anything, surprised you as you worked on this book?
CB: I was surprised by the amount of anti-gay literary criticism that was written about these people’s work. I had known about it in a kind of loose way, but to actually just sit down and read it—just page after page of abuse—no wonder some of them went a little crazy! I mean, from the early abuse that Truman Capote and Gore Vidal took for their first novels, right on through. James Baldwin got it; Tennessee Williams would later get it. It was nonstop. It didn’t start to really lighten up until well into the 70’s. I admit that did surprise me. It was one of those things I thought I knew about.
GV: Was it tricky for you to talk about writers that you know personally?
CB: Strangely enough, no, because I found myself writing about them the same way I write about fictional characters. When I’m writing a novel, I don’t think about what other people are going to think. All my attention goes to the characters, to the truth of the moment. And I found myself doing that with the writers, even those I knew. After the fact, I was wondering, “Oh no, do I really want to say that about Ed White or Larry Kramer?” In a couple of places I pared it back a little, but basically, I kept it as I said it.
GV: Were there any writers you significantly upgraded or downgraded, or other opinions you revised in the course of finishing this book?
CB: About the writers as individuals, I don’t think I changed my mind, but about some of the individual works, I did. Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart is a great play. It’s not just of the moment; it really remains successful and strong. And as much as I like Gore Vidal’s later work, I think The City and the Pillar is a bad novel. Reading that again, I thought, “He writes so much better later than he did at this time.” He himself is a big believer in The City and the Pillar, but it’s not nearly as well written [as later works].
GV: You discuss the work of the writers you include, but you also look at their relationships with one another—the Vidal–Capote rivalry, the Vidal–Isherwood friendship, the Violet Quill, and so on. Do you think any of the relationships you describe in the book are central to the history of gay writing?
CB: Not individually, but overall. The feuds are famous. Vidal’s hatred of Truman Capote, for example. But what’s forgotten is his friendship and his support of Christopher Isherwood. And there are these little supports all through. We think of Vidal as tough and ornery and critical of his enemies, but he was very supportive of his friends. His two memoirs of Tennessee Williams [the essays “Some Memories of the Glorious Bird and an Earlier Self” (1976) and “Tennessee Williams: Someone to Laugh at the Squares With” (1985)], I think, are the best things he ever wrote. He was very appreciative of Williams as both a writer and a person, and Williams is not always easy to defend. He could be a difficult person, but Vidal appreciated him. Later on, Christopher Isherwood and Armistead Maupin end up being very supportive of each other, in interviews and giving quotes. So all through these different generations, there are these nice little bonds of support, these little shocks of recognition that are an important part of the story—more important overall than in the individual instances. The sum is bigger than the parts in terms of these supportive friendships.
GV: One of the great literary themes is the conflict between private and public, but for gay men in the future that will probably be a less dramatic fault line. When you peer into your crystal ball, what do you see happening to gay literature and gay writers?
CB: I wonder. To me, the big problem that’s ahead isn’t so much public versus private in gay life, or the acceptance of gay life; it’s what’s happening in the publishing business right now. Gay and lesbian books are by nature mid-list books; they’re not going to reach a huge audience but can reach a small, solid audience. And publishing is going through a transition right now where they’re not that interested in a small audience—and the small audience has gotten smaller because of the recession. So I’m more worried about how that’s going to affect gay writing than I am about the success of gay life. Whether we have to keep our lives a secret or are open about them, it’s a great story.
GV: I like what Vito Russo once said about increasing gay visibility. He said, in effect, that we gay people are going to miss our secret world when it’s not secret any longer.
CB: Yeah, there is an inevitable sense of loss. Vito talked about how we’ll know we’ve really arrived when there’s a gay character in a movie and their being gay is not the central thing about them—just one more aspect of their character.
GV: In Eminent Outlaws, you suggest that Gore Vidal’s insistence that “homo” and “hetero” are prefixes that apply to acts, not people, was a clever strategy that allowed him to hide in plain sight, if you will. Historically, though, many people experienced their sexuality as something more fluid than it seems today. For them, gay sex was something they did, not something they were. So when you say that Vidal is the “fairy godfather” of gay writing—which you admit he would hate—do you mean to disagree with his assertion that he, and basically everyone, is essentially bisexual?
CB: I think many people are bi. The “fairy godfather” line is kind of a silly joke, but I do think Vidal is a kind of godfather to gay literature, in terms of his importance. If everyone was really bi, I don’t think being gay would be a problem. Henry Louis Gates once made the great comment that race is a social construction. And he says yeah, it is, really—there’s nothing inherently real about racial difference—but when somebody hates you for being black, you can’t tell them, “I’m sorry, that’s just a social construction. You’re mistaking me for someone who doesn’t even exist.” The same thing goes for gays and lesbians. We can say it’s this fluid thing that doesn’t really have any solid identity, but it really does—I mean, people live as though it does, whether you’re straight and you’re kind of uncomfortable around gay people, or you’re gay and you realize that you could be bisexual but you really are more attracted to your own sex. So what does that mean? It’s still an issue. Renaming it doesn’t change it. I wrestle with this. There’s the whole kind of recent idea that we’re now “post-gay.” But we’ve always tried to be post-gay—that was one way out of the trap. And Gore Vidal used it with his saying that “homosexual” is an adjective, not a noun. James Baldwin does this in his novels, the way he mixes gay and straight, and often has straight characters having sex with other men. We’ve always kind of played around with this. In fact, the truth is more complicated than the labels, but we can’t entirely wish the labels away.
GV: Two movies about Truman Capote came out a few years ago. I agree with your remark in an endnote that the movie Infamous is a neglected masterpiece and certainly superior to Capote, which came out earlier.
CB: It came out first, and Philip Seymour Hoffman got an Academy Award for a performance in which we just see him sweating and straining against type, whereas Toby Jones [as Capote in Infamous]is just effortless. Infamous is funny and sexy, and it’s an amazing movie.
GV: Of the other works you discuss in Eminent Outlaws, which would you most urge people to read?
CB: I think Paul Russell is a great novelist who deserves to be more widely read. I talk about his work Sea of Tranquility, which I think is terrific. His other books include an amazing one called The Coming Storm, set at a boy’s school, which is kind of a tried and true setting for a gay novel, but he does something entirely new with it. It’s very intense and very dangerous, and actually quite beautiful. His more recent novel, The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov, is amazing. It’s a novel about Vladimir Nabokov’s gay brother, who really existed, and who lived a pampered childhood in Russia before the Revolution, when he and Vladimir both leave. Sergey ends up in France spending time with Jean Cocteau and that circle, and he ends his life in Nazi Germany. It’s an epic of European life and an amazing book. It just came out last year.
GV: Are there writers you regret not discussing in your book?
CB: Not really. I’m beginning to hear from people who say, “But you don’t include so and so.” But from early on, it wasn’t intended to be an inclusive pantheon of gay writers. I wanted to include those writers who best enabled me to tell the story I was telling, limiting it to about a dozen writers, with occasional references to a few others. Looking back on it, I included everyone I wanted to include. Inevitably, there’ll be people that other readers wish I had included, too.
GV: You concisely describe the strengths and relative weaknesses of the writers you discuss—for example, you say that Gore Vidal writes well about politics and history, but not so well about love; and that Edmund White writes well about sex, but not so well about politics. If you had somehow included yourself in this new book, how would you have summarized the novelist known as Christopher Bram?
CB: Maybe somewhere between those two extremes. I like to write about politics and love, and to be honest, I don’t know how well I do it, either. I joke that I’m the low-rent Gore Vidal. But I do love writing about politics and history, and I do feel I’m much better at love than Vidal.
GV: And those interests in politics and history animate Eminent Outlaws as well.
CB: Oh, yeah.
