"On Knitting," "On Teaching Aerobics," "On Musical Theater"—are all great chapter titles. Are there chapters, though, that you didn’t write?
Twelve inches! Um, make it nine—I don’t want to be unrealistic. What were you asking?
Chapter titles.
Right! Well, the criteria for the book were it was either something I was doing or something I was interested in doing. I could do an exegesis of "Dynasty" and that would be a lot of fun, but it would be less interesting since I’m not a diehard "Dynasty" fan. I came up with seven or eight ideas, then I was stuck. I thought I could do a chapter about drag—I’d done drag a few times—but it’s not a particular interest of mine. I did an afternoon class at Miss Vera’s Finishing School for Boys Who Want to Be Girls, a cross-dressing academy. They gave me a ballet class and I was in a tutu.
I’d have loved to have read about that.
They had a Hasidic man come in once and they were like, he has a beard he can’t shave off, what are we going to do? So they gave him a veil. I also thought about becoming a flight attendant, but [then] I'd have to deal with people’s babies. I wasn’t sure whether I could train, do it once and quit or not.
So you turned to being go-go boy. Was the experience validating?
The end of the go-go chapter was about how, when you’re naked on a bar, there’s nothing to hide behind. It felt like there was no way I could protect myself from being approved of or not approved of. For once, I wasn’t being manipulated by me.
You write that whenever you’d go to a gay bar, you’d be ‘immobilized.’ So how could you be a go-go boy?
Oh, because people aren’t actually interested in the go-go boy—they’re interested in the idea of him. If you have a decent body, you become in people’s eyes a completely different creature. They’re interested in the fantasy they project. Walking into a bar and having to talk to people—that’s terrifying. But as a go-go boy, ironically, your character isn’t at stake. It’s not you they’re interacting with. You can be thinking about the Muppets or chocolate or whatever.
Do you have any regrets about going to Exodus International?
The whole time I was there, I thought, I don’t know if I should be doing this. There’s a scene in the chapter when I burst into tears—that was basically how I spent my time there. For storytelling, that wouldn’t make sense, but there was a lot of that. I didn’t mean them ill. But still, I’d lied; I’d practiced a deception upon them.
Do you really think it’s possible to be an ex-gay?
I think sexuality is immutable—and I now do believe there can be bisexual men. I was reading about a study that talked about how psychological bisexuality is more common that physical bisexuality. Men can be bi and have their attraction to women come more from a psychological than a physical-pheromone place. I don’t think it’s common. And through genetic or molecular manipulation, they will probably be able to change it. But I don’t think you can change it by force of will.
Heavy stuff for a funny gay writer.
Pain and humor are two sides of the same coin, right? The world can be such an awful place, so either you laugh or you kill yourself—so why not laugh? There’s something about the gay sensibility that lends itself to a particular humor. I think there’s a template there. You walked down the hall in school and someone called you a name and you didn’t really know how to understand or relate to it in an emotionally honest way. But eventually you can learn to, with lots and lots and lots of therapy. Humor’s a defense mechanism and not always a bad one. We need to be funny.
