Smells Like Teen Terror

First published on The Daily Beast, August 3, 2014. Read the original, with photos, here.

Once, after the midnight premiere of a summer blockbuster, I got trapped on the top floor of a giant multiplex. Three packed showings let out simultaneously, and the theater, in all its infinite parsimony, had shut down everything but the bare minimum required to allow us to exit: one narrow stairwell plunging down four flights, lit mostly by dim emergency lighting.

It didn’t take long for a bottleneck to form at the top of the stairs, which quickly became an impatient crowd, all of us punchy with exhaustion and excitement. Soon people were shouting. Then shoving. The crowd began to lurch violently, as small motions rippled out into panicked attempts to break away. Thankfully, before a full-fledged riot could begin, people pulled down the stanchions and velvet ropes that blocked off the other stairs, and we exploded safely outward in a dozen different directions.

But that visceral experience of the crowd as a capricious-yet-mindless entity has stayed with me ever since. It is this feeling that Dayna Lorentz’s bestselling YA series No Safety in Numbers conjures up in its readers. It’s not just fear or panic, but that sickening moment of inversion where a familiar setting becomes dangerous, and normal people become deadly.

The third book in the series, No Dawn Without Darkness, follows an ensemble of teens quarantined in a mall after a terrorist attack releases a highly contagious, extremely deadly flu virus. The four main protagonists are Ryan, a perfect high school jock hiding a brutal home life; Shay, a beautiful young girl trying to protect her sister and grandmother; Lexi, the computer nerd whose mother, a U.S. senator, is trying to maintain some fragile order; and Marco, the loner struggling to survive in the shadows. With them are thousands of other hapless mall-goers, descending rapidly into deadly anarchy. By book three, not only are they trapped, sick, and terrified, they are starving, cut off from any outside communication, and plunged into pitch-blackness.

Thankfully, in Lorentz’s hands, the books never devolve into terrorism porn or some kind of teen-James Bond spy romp. “It’s much more about these characters,” she says, than the situation. “Terrorism gives me an opportunity to put people through an emotional experience.”

That’s not to say that you won’t find characters turning a wide variety of mall goods into incendiary devices. Indeed, Lorentz jokes that her research for the books has definitely put her on some terrorism watch lists. But the stories she tells from within the mall focus on the most basic job of all teenagers, regardless of their circumstances: surviving and becoming an adult. Lorentz shows us how these particular conditions—lack of supervision, imminent threat of death—merely serve to hasten and distort a process that all young people must go through. This is not a book about a bomb; rather, it is a book about children stumbling toward adulthood through an almost literal minefield.

“A lot of extremity you see in YA is merely attempting to capture the intensity” of being a teen, Lorentz says. “You go to high school and it’s a fight for survival to get through the day. No one is on your side.”

Some adults focus on the terrorism and violence in the series, Lorentz says, and question if it’s too much for teen readers. Teens, on the other hand, read it as a perfect metaphor for what they already experience on a daily basis. And if we’re looking at the question of violence or emotionally disturbing material, No Dawn Without Darkness is not that far removed from YA novels set in World War II, during slavery, or on the frontier.

“I’ve never heard a teenager say ‘This book was too violent for me,’” Lorentz says. Instead, most of the responses she’s gotten are from boys, who are excited to read about “football players who aren’t automatically the bad guy.”

Indeed, one of the most fascinating aspects of the story is watching the male characters struggle with the meaning of manhood. Perhaps because the YA audience is predominantly female, it’s rare to come across a series that so sensitively explores the many fraught routes that the “average” American boy can take to adulthood, and the concurrent violence they both experience and enact along the way. The title No Dawn Without Darkness might refer to the literal dark-and-dawn experienced by the denizens of the mall in this book, but it is also a reminder that light and dark live within all of us, even kids—even “good” kids. Lorentz is not afraid to explore the best and the worst in her protagonists. In an interesting twist in this age of dystopian fiction, her narrators are, in the end, able to go back home, where they face perhaps their hardest challenge yet: to reconcile who they have become with who they were, and who they want to be. It’s a challenge even teens who haven’t been trapped in a terrorist attack will understand very well.

The Power of Queer Books

First published on The Daily Beast, August 1, 2014. Read the original, with photos, here. Written with Sassafras Lowrey.

SASSAFRAS LOWREY: When I was seventeen, the adults I lived with went through my bedroom and found the lesbian books I’d secretly checked out from my county library. I kept them stacked between my high school math and social studies textbooks. Just six months before, I’d run away from my mom’s house and among the items I brought with me were two gay books I’d secretly purchased from the bookstore at the mall. The adults I stayed with found those books, too, and read my journal. They called my school, had me paged to the office, and told me never to come back. I knew then that queer words were powerful.

Three days after I was kicked out, I was crashing on a friend’s couch. I had no idea where to go, or what was going to become of me. I went to my county library looking for answers. I looked at every book shelved under “homosexuality.”  I was searching for answers about what it meant to be young, queer, and on my own.  That day, I didn’t find any books that could help me. Sitting on the floor of that library, I made a promise to myself that if I survived, I would somehow find a way to write the kind of queer books that I was searching for.

Then last summer I got a message on Facebook from a reader and artist named Michelle Brennan. She and I had friends in common but had never met, never spoken. She had heard about my novel Roving Pack and read it after being diagnosed with cancer. While undergoing chemo she began an art project. Taking a shoebox and a little doll, she brought my novel to life, the way that as children in school we did “book in a box” book reports. She mailed it to me as a gift. Opening that box was overwhelming. As an author, I’m living the promise I made to myself as a homeless queer youth that someday I would write the kinds of stories that I needed. That I would write stories that I still need, which bring queer lives to life on the page. Receiving that diorama from Michelle was the ultimate confirmation that I’m doing the work I’m supposed to be doing. Queer books aren’t just important for queer youth. Queer adults need queer books. We need to see our lives, desires, bodies, relationships reflected back at us in books.

When I received Michelle’s diorama in the mail, I was in awe and immediately posted pictures of it online. So many people got excited, and began talking about the power of queer books in their own lives, the books that had inspired them to come out, and the books that inspire them today. They talked about wanting to make art in honor of these books.

* *

HUGH RYAN: When I was nine, a teacher took Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire away from me because it was “inappropriate.” Perhaps so, but it was also the only book I’d ever found with queer characters, even if they were immortal, immoral vampires whose lives bore no resemblance to mine in the suburbs in the early 80s. Without it, I was reduced to looking up “homosexuality” in the card catalog of my small public school library. When all that got me were books on Greco-Roman art, I looked up “sex,” which left me piecing together an understanding of my desires from a book on feline reproduction.

Thankfully, within a few years I started working after school and in the summers, and began to buy, borrow, or steal any queer book I could get my hands on. I was lucky enough to come of age in a time when there were books available. But I’ll never forget that feeling of being alone, not just in my town, but seemingly throughout space and time—so alone that there wasn’t even a book to guide me.

When I founded the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, which is a nonprofit that helps local communities around the country develop art shows to illuminate LGBTQ history, I was primarily concerned with sharing knowledge, spreading those small bits of our history that are hard to find elsewhere. But I quickly came to realize that the act of sharing was, in and of itself, just as important as the information being shared. As adults, we rarely are given the chance to consume, analyze, and give back information on topics we love. That time is relegated (at best) to school, where queer people often don’t feel able to be open and honest. Without having the chance to look at and analyze our own culture, our own history, and the things that matter to us, we are left depending on the analyses of others, which have often portrayed queers and queerness in a negative light.

When Sassafras showed me Michelle’s diorama, I realized this was a powerful way to share important stories that resonated in queer lives, in a format that wouldn’t feel intimidating and was almost endlessly malleable. Together, Sassafras and I wrote a call inviting people to create a diorama based on a book that was meaningful to them in their development of their queer identity. The books could be anything—gay, straight, picture books, math textbooks – so long as the author could explain how it was important to them. After announcing the show, we received nearly 100 proposals from around the world‚—including Canada, South Africa, Ireland, and the Czech Republic—for dioramas that ranged from pocket-sized to life-sized, on everything from picture books to dense philosophy.

Had we not been limited by the space of the gallery, we would have included all of them! In the end, we chose proposals based on a number of criteria: the clarity of the connection between the book and the personal experience; the artistic vision presented (although not the exhibit maker’s artistic training, as we are open to individuals at all levels of skill and experience in art making); and the creation of a well-rounded final show. A few books were proposed so many times that we knew they needed to be included, such as Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, by Audre Lorde (unfortunately, the artist making this diorama had to drop out of the show at the last minute), Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran, and The Beebo Brinker Chronicles by Ann Bannon. The resulting exhibits explode what the form is or could be, and range from classic “book in a box” shoebox dioramas to translucent towers built on a lightbox.

It has been amazing to see the outpouring of inspiration expressed in the proposals we received, as well as the crucial institutional support from the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, the Lambda Literary Foundation, MIX NYC, and the Jefferson Market branch of the New York Public Library! In our own small way, this show is a gift to the community and an offering to all other queers who like us stood before a card catalogue or library shelf looking for belonging.

This wonder of the world has turned off. Are you worried about the climate yet?

First published in The Guardian, July 17, 2014. Read the original here.

Even before I was a travel writer, I approached sights described as "magical" with a good deal of skepticism. Too often, I have been promised miracles and delivered slights-of-hand – the usual bravura and bluff of tourism. The bioluminescent bay in Vieques, Puerto Rico was one of the few places that made good on its promises. Maybe the only one. By day, the warm shallow bay looked unremarkable, even somewhat dingy compared to the crystalline waters of nearby Caribbean beaches. But at night, the flash and spark of the tiny phytoplankton in this Mangrove lagoon filled me with literal awe. It was like living lightning.

Since January, however, the bay has gone dark – and no one knows why.

Theories abound, as a number of articles have explored in the last few months: too much human usage, or strong winds that have disturbed the bay's infinitesimal inhabitants. Like many rare ecosystems, bioluminescent bays are fragile, and the shifting patterns of both weather and tourism can affect them greatly. But it's been hard not to notice what's been missing from these discussions: climate change.

This oversight is particularly glaring given that this isn't the first of Puerto Rico's bioluminescent bays to go dark in the last year. Grand Lagoon – just a ferry ride away from Vieques in the town of Fajardo – went out for most of last November. The same explanations were debated then: unprecedented extreme weather events, or run-off from several nearby construction sites. No doubt either – or both – were contributing factors. But somehow, the conversation (at least in the media) never seemed to connect what was happening in Fajardo with global environmental concerns.

Given the ever-increasingly serious warnings about climate change – which 97% of climate scientists now agree is caused by human activity – it would seem to merit at least a small place in the popular discussion of these back-to-back mysterious ecological collapses.

Scientists who specialize in bioluminescent plankton have – to little fanfare – already warned us that these creatures are endangered. Two years ago, Dr Michael Latz, a researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, told New Scientist magazine that "as global warming changes ocean flows, these micro-organisms are increasingly at risk". Scientists atCanada's Dalhousie University showed that, since 1950, the worldwide population of phytoplankton has declined by 40% due to the rising sea surface temperatures caused by a warming planet.

We also know that the indirect effects of climate change have dangerous ramifications – the likes of which we are only just beginning to comprehend. Those strong winds and extreme weather events that have buffeted the bays? Increased sea surface temperatures – driven by climate change – may contribute to them as well, as we know from studying hurricanes. "The intensity, frequency, and duration of North Atlantic hurricanes ... have all increased since the early 1980s" reports the 2014 Third National Climate Assessment: "The recent increases in activity are linked, in part, to higher sea surface temperatures."

Like a pot being brought to boil, the seas are heating up.

The first time I visited Vieques in 2006, tour operators encouraged me to swim and kayak in the bay, but told me to avoid the motorboats, since their dirty engines created diesel-fuel dead zones. Since then, locals have developed new conservation guidelines: no swimming or touching the water with your skin at all – things I wish I had known not to do. But these and other protections have done nothing to save the bay's famed bioluminescent organisms.

But this isn't just about one or two tourist attractions on small islands in the Caribbean. Bioluminescent bays are rare because they are much more fragile than your average marine ecosystem. Like canaries in the proverbial coal mine, their loss is a warning that hardier creatures and more common shores will be endangered soon.

I was taught in elementary school that we live in a world with five oceans – an idea that feels laughable now. There is only one ocean – the world ocean, a vastness that ignores the political demarcations of maps and men. Its problems cannot be solved piecemeal, and more and more studies suggest that we might not "solve" them at all. Long before we detonated the first nuclear bomb or undertook a Cold War, nature invented the idea of mutually assured destruction – and she might just hold true to her end of the bargain.

If we are to do anything to begin to address the problem we have created, it will require a clear-eyed look at its true magnitude, and an understanding of the interconnectedness of our world – and its waters. Environmental concerns must be integrated into personal, political and commercial decisions on every level. We can no longer pretend that our trash disappears forever when it hits the wastebasket, or that we are not implicated in the environmental degradation of the far-away countries who now supply our ravenous need for consumer goods.

The phrase "think globally, act locally" might be mocked for its utopianism, but it's a mantra we need to heed when it comes to the environment. Otherwise the lights will continue to go out, in Vieques and around the world.

I don't even have a good picture of the Vieques bio bay to remember it by – like all real magic, it looks shoddy in reproduction. Perhaps, like the Grand Lagoon, it will come back, at least this time. But how often must nature flip the switch before we start paying attention?

Colby Keller Is the Marina Abramovic of Gay Porn

First published on VICE.com, July 5, 2014. Read the original here.

Like many gay porn stars, Colby Keller has a knack for versatility—and I’m not talking about how he’s worked as both a pitcher and a catcher. In between working for the top companies in gay porn—including Randy Blue, CockyBoys, and (controversially) Treasure Island Media—Keller has put his anthropology degree to good use, writing about art, barebacking, and capitalism on his blog, Big Shoe Diaries.

For years now, I’ve wondered about what goes on in the dirty mind behind Keller’s goofball grin. When someone told me Keller was giving away all of his possessions—except for a plaque of Lenin—as part of an art project, my curiosity was seriously piqued. With all of his possessions discarded, Keller's now embarking on “Colby Does America… and Canada Too!”—a lengthy road trip to make art, meet people, and get laid. In each state Keller will film himself fucking a guy in the back of a van in the name of art. Wanting to know more about the Marina Abramovic of gay porn, I caught up with Keller at a Pret A Manger in New York to discuss his art projects, capitalism, and why porn is better than his “horrible, evil job” at Neiman Marcus.

VICE: Why did you decide to create your van project? 
Colby Keller: I don't have a house, I don't have a home, I don't have a destination, and I don't—for at least the immediate time period—want to think of one. The van is a way of thinking about home on the road, and also thinking about our future, because we're all probably going to have to set out in vans and move around, and there will be a lot of displaced people, and a lot of people will die. I want to embrace this future we're making for ourselves and that capitalism and this horrible landlord are forcing me into. There’s a porn trope where they're going to fuck the whole country, so I’m gonna fuck America! America has certainly fucked me, and I'm going to fuck back—but in a nice, positive way.

What made you become a porn star?
I was taking courses at the University of Houston in their studio art program, and I really didn't like it. So I dropped out of the program and graduated with a degree in anthropology, but there aren't a lot of lucrative jobs out there in the field, and we were in another recession. I was also curious about porn. My favorite site was Sean Cody, and just on a lark, I was going to send in some nude pictures, totally expecting to be rejected—actually, I kind of wanted to be rejected. I wanted them to tell me I wasn’t worthy! And then they came back and said, “Oh no. We're actually interested.” I was like, “Oh man. God, they're into it! Do I have to do this? I guess I have to.”

I eventually got other jobs while I was in Texas. I worked for Neiman Marcus, a horrible, horrible, evil job. They didn't want to consider me a full-time worker, even though I worked there for two years, 70 hours a week, just cause they didn't want to give me health insurance and they wanted to pay me $10 less than anyone else on staff.

You often discuss capitalism. Capitalism clearly affects our work lives, but how does it affect our porn consumption and sex lives?
I have some guilt when it comes to that, because porn specifically presents a problem. Does porn inform people's sexuality, or does porn simply try to access those things in your sexuality to sell itself to you? Obviously, the product always does this thing where you're never completely fulfilled, so you buy more of it. As a porn performer I feel somewhat responsible for that, because sometimes the images that porn produces aren't healthy ones. It's very formulaic: We're going to give each other mutual blowjobs, maybe the top will eat the bottom's ass, then there are three fucking positions, then they both come. Who in [his] right mind has sex like that?

You’re a porn performer and also an artist. Do you identify as a performance artist or as a visual artist?
I try to think of it as everything. I don’t want to put a limit in terms of what mediums I can use, but to me the main medium is Colby Keller. Art projects for me need laws—creating a law gives you the power to break the law, which is the best part of having one—but I don't want rules to limit the kinds of tools I can appropriate as an artist.

With performers like James Deen pursuing porn and other careers, porn has become more mainstream, like it was in the 70s. Why do you think this is happening? 
Part of that is about the structural and financial problems that the business itself is encountering, and about social media. The late 80s and early 90s were the golden era of gay porn, and models got paid really well. Companies controlled the images of their models under an exclusive contract. They would do all the work of marketing you and making you a star, kind of like the old Hollywood system. Now there's much more pressure for the models themselves to do promotional work—to be on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook. In some ways it’s good to have ownership of that image, but also it's a lot of work you're not getting paid for.

We didn’t queer the institution of marriage. It straightened us.

First published on The Guardian, June 28, 2014. Read the original here.

Wisconsin. Indiana. Utah. Hardly a week goes by that the courts don't rule same-sex marriage street legal in another state in America (the last twenty-two consecutive cases have all come down on the side of marriage equality), making what once seemed impossible now seems unstoppable. Wedding white is the new black – and all the gays are wearing it.

So on this anniversary weekend of the Stonewall Riots, let me be the shrill voice in the back of the church, speaking now instead of forever holding my peace. I think we're losing something. I have no desire to turn back the clock on marriage equality: it provides both real and symbolic benefits to queer communities, families and our country as a whole. But I cannot ignore the coercive (and corrosive) power that marriage holds. In this country, it is not just an option: it is the option. It is the relationship against which all others are defined, both an institution and an expectation – and you cannot have one without the other.

Before marriage was an option of first resort, queer people had been making our own ceremonies and families for (at least) a century. This will never stop, but the new expectations of marriage will curtail this kind of life-building (just ask any single straight woman over thirty how people treat her relationship choices). We will have to justify our reasons for not marrying, and any relationship that survives past a certain sell-by date will be looked at as pre-marriage.

For better or worse, gay kids today will think of their lives and their relationships in terms of marriage – as will their straight families and peers. Same-sex marriage is not going to harm opposite-sex marriages, as opponents so often claim, but its gravitational pull is likely to warp all other kinds of queer relationships. Our community’s pluripotent, mutable ways of loving one another are fast becoming something we need to defend all the more to the straight world – and, now, perhaps to our married gay peers as well.

Stonewall is often cited as the foundational moment of the modern gay rights movement. In the wake of that hot summer night’s anti-cop riot, the group that immediately came together in New York was the Gay Liberation Front, whose statement of purpose read:

We are a revolutionary group of men and women formed with the realization that complete sexual liberation for all people cannot come about unless existing social institutions are abolished.

That bears little relationship to the modern movement for marriage equality, which has effectively become the bulk of what remains of the gay rights movement. Where once we used our place as outsiders to critique the very structures that created "inside" and "outside" in the first place, now we are simply banging on the door, asking to be let in.

(If the revolutionary spirit of Stonewall lingers anywhere today, it is in the growing transgender movement, where activists still embrace a transformative concept of justice that questions social institutions before – or instead of – asking to be included in them.)

I’ll come clean here: I never dreamed about marriage – and not just because, as a gay man, I didn't think I would be allowed. Marriage never meant much to me, though love and family did – and as I now have two long-term partners, it's unlikely to be a part of my future. So I can't pretend that the movement for marriage equality won’t affect me (and my community) in ways I’m unhappy about in addition to all the ones I'm in favor of.

Somewhere along the line, the gay rights movement – and maybe the gay community writ large – separated its short-term goals and some people's immediate needs from the larger ideals of justice and societal change that initially stirred our community to action. This diminution happened by degrees, making it almost impossible to locate the moment when we could have turned around. But I suspect we will one day look back on the contentious 2000 Millennium March on Washington as the point of no return.

Maybe the same-sex marriage wave will begin a broader reconsideration of why our government is in the business of giving benefits to sexual relationships at all – gay or straight. Perhaps we will some day expand these privileges, for which we have fought so hard, to any group of people in a long-lasting relationship of care that keeps them safe, happy, and less dependent on government services – the way France tried (and largely failed) to do with their pacte civil de solidarité. Maybe we canqueer the institution.

But for now, it's straightened us. We have gone from dismantling an inherently flawed system that privileged some people based on their sexual relationships to demanding some of that privilege for ourselves – or, at least for some of us. On some days, I’d call this compromise and, on others, capitulation. Perhaps the only real difference lies in whether this is a first step, or a final one.

Marriage is here, it’s not queer, and we’ve already gotten used to it. I just hope the remaining states pass it quickly, so we can move on to something else.

"Where Were You During the Christopher Street Riots?"

First published on The New York Public Library LGBT @ NYPL Blog, June 27, 2014. Read the original here.

The document above was handed out by members of The Mattachine Society, one of the earliest and longest-running homophile organizations in America, in the days following what would eventually become known as the Stonewall Riots.

If you’re familiar with The Mattachine Society at all, it’s probably from images like this one, which was taken by Kay Tobin Lahusen at the second annual Reminder Day protests in Philadelphia in 1966.

Founded in 1950, the Mattachines took their name from a French Renaissance-era group of masked peasants who performed skits during the Feast of Fools – often ones that poked fun at or protested their treatment at the hands of the local nobility. Along with the Daughters of Bilitis, a lesbian social and political group founded in San Francisco in 1955, they advocated a kind of radical normality in the face of the overwhelming consensus that homosexuals were deviant, pathological, and diseased. Looking at pictures of them now is like looking at gay activists by way of Leave It to Beaver. Yet it’s hard to overstate how radical their actions were at the time, when so few people were out publicly in any way.

Just how wholesome was their public image? This is a recruitment ad they used in the 1960s:

Homosexuals are Different

However, if we are most familiar with the image of The Mattachine Society as a group of clean-scrubbed (mostly) young men, it is because this was a political choice on their part. The early founders of Mattachine, including the legendary Harry Hay, were Communists, and they organized the group in anonymous, independent cells, much like the party itself was organized at the time. It wasn’t until 1953 that they were forced out by a growing membership that wanted to purge “subversive” elements and foster an ethos of non-confrontation.

In this way, the history of The Mattachine Society neatly mirrors the history of America as a whole. One year after they purged their own subversive elements, the McCarthy Communist witch-hunts would begin. By the early ‘60s, the national Mattachine organization would disband, leaving the local branches to radicalize at different rates – much as the country itself was doing. Mattachine New York, the producers of the “Christopher Street Riots” flyer, quickly became particularly militant.

After Stonewall, new organizations like the Gay Activists Alliance and the Gay Liberation Front quickly began to appear, capturing the confrontational, in the streets spirit of the time. Yet branches of The Mattachine Society continued on well into the eighties – indeed, Mattachine New York wasn’t disbanded until 1987.

[Frank Kameny and Mattachine Society of Washington members marching]

The New York Public Library’s Manuscripts & Archives Division is is home to the Mattachine Society of New York's recordsfrom its founding in 1955 all the way up to 1976, and it is a fascinating record of social change told from within one of the very organizations pushing for change.

How to Date a Gay Novelist Who Is Older Than Your Dad

First published on VICE.com, June 21, 2014. Read the original here.

When I was 25, I moved to Berlin with a beat-up copy of Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories tucked in my bag. Like many hobosexuals and fagabonds before me, I considered the book a lodestone, a guide to transmuting aimless searching and polymorphous desire into meaningful experiences. So when I heard that Farrar, Straus, and Giroux was releasing The Animals, a collection of the letters of Isherwood and his longtime lover, artist Don Bachardy, I knew I had to read it.

Bachardy met Isherwood when he was 18 and Isherwood was 48 (a year older than Bachardy’s own father). Despite the age difference, the couple spent the next 33 years together. Though love affairs and artistic exploits frequently sent them ricocheting around the world, they maintained a deep and unbreakable connection. They expressed this affection (and frustration) through “the Animals,” personae the two adopted in their letters. Bachardy acted as Kitty and Isherwood called himself Dobbin, Kitty's faithful horse.

Bachardy, now 80, still lives in the house the couple shared in Santa Monica. Shaking with faggoty fan boy excitement, I called Bachardy to discuss The Animals and what it's like dating a famous old man who was older than his dad.

VICE: How did your letters become a book?
Don Bachardy: It was my idea. I'd saved all of Chris's letters, and after his death, I found that he’d saved all of mine. Reading through them just made me think the material was too good not to share it with others. There's almost nothing, no letter in the book, that is missing, except one, though I can't remember now where in the sequence it is.

Did you ever discuss publishing something like this with Chris before he died?
No, no, no. And the animals at the time would have been horrified at the suggestion that they would ever be revealed and their letters [would be] published in a book. They would have been quite shocked by such an idea.

What changed your thinking?
I came across both sets of letters and it was very strange reading them again, but interesting too. There were even some laughs in the material, our attempts to entertain each other. There were things I would have liked to have changed—would have changed if I could—but then it's always a mistake to tamper with any mementos of the past.

How did you meet Isherwood? Had you read his books?
I'd seen a production of I Am a Camera [the play adaptation of The Berlin Stories which was later turned into the musicalCabaret]. It was the road company, here in LA, at the Biltmore Theater downtown. I'd actually already met Chris on the beach with my brother on summer weekends—he was one of the many people my brother introduced me to—but it wasn't until February of 1953 that Chris and I started seeing a lot of each other. It hadn't occurred to me that the “Herr Issy-voo” of I Am a Camera was actually the man I was getting to know. He had to tell me himself, and of course, I remembered the play, and eventually I got to meet Julie Harris [who played Sally Bowles in I Am a Camera] because he and Julie had become good friends because of the play.

How did people react to the age difference between the two of you when you started your relationship? 
They freaked out about it at the time, all those years ago, because Chris wasn't in the closet. He couldn't very well pretend to be anything but queer. And everybody knew this very young looking friend he was going around with—they knew he wasn't his son. It was considered quite shocking by people who guessed this relationship with a 30-year age difference. That was not at all usual in those days, and certainly not at all usual that neither party was hiding. No beards required! We just brazened it out. Also, we were both artists, so that made it easier. If we had nine-to-five jobs in a clerk's office, it would have been much tougher because different standards apply.

How was your life as an artist affected by dating Isherwood?
I would never have become an artist except for Isherwood. It was he who constantly urged me to consider being an artist. When we met I showed him drawings that I was doing as an 18-year-old. They were copied from magazine pictures, mostly of movie actors. I did them freehand. Chris saw that I had a real flair for drawing and kept after me: “Why don't you go to art school?”

Well, it took me three years before I dared to make the jump. I was frightened of failing, but his continual support and interest in the work I was doing in art school, once I got started, was invaluable to me. I could never believe in myself as an artist without his support at the time. That was essential to me.

Was it difficult to get people to take you seriously as first?
Yes, because I looked so young and presentable, and most of Chris's friends were around his age or older, so it wasn't so easy for me to be taken seriously by anybody—especially since I hadn't established myself yet as an artist. That's why being an artist was so important! I had to have an identity of my own that was more than just Chris's boyfriend.

Did the age difference concern either of you?
No. I naturally gravitated to people older than I was. It was just instinctive. I knew I could learn so much more from them, and for some reason or another, I had few friends my own age in my school years. So I was ripe to meet an older distinguished man who could give me very, very good advice, which Chris always did.

My favorite paintings you’ve done are the portraits you did of Chris in the last six months of his life. 
I was doing close-ups, these close-ups of what Chris was going through at the time. He was lying in bed, and I was hovering over him, just a few feet away. I don't know of any other artist who has ever done close-up drawings of someone dying day after day, week after week. It seemed so appropriate to me because Chris had urged me to be an artist. And here I was with a model who I knew very well, who I'd drawn and painted through our 33 years together. And here he was dying, and it was a way of being with him intensely for much more of the day because I was drawing him. I was with him and looking at him in a way that I only looked at somebody when [I was] drawing or painting that person, so I could be with him intimately. It felt like dying was something he and I were doing together.

The Fiction Writer Shirley Jackson Stars in Her Own Novel

First published on The Daily Beast, June 18, 2014. Read the original here.

German seems to have a word for every screwed-up specific emotion. If I were to pick one to describe the strangely compelling, deeply unsettling fiction of Shirley Jackson, it would be unheimlich. Freud coined the term to describe the uncomfortable feeling of the familiar suddenly turned foreign. Technically, it means un-home-like, but a better English translation might be uncanny, as in the “uncanny valley,” which refers to the sudden sharp jump in creepiness that occurs when computer animation gets too close to looking human. Jackson, best known today for her short story “The Lottery,” in which a sweet, semi-rural town gathers for a harvest festival / ritual stoning, seems to live in the uncanny valley. All throughout the ’40s, ’50s, and early ’60s, as Americans embraced normal like it was our job, Jackson insisted on showing us the cracks at the margins of our communities, our sanity, and our very reality.

Perhaps this accounts for the ebb and flow of her popularity. While often critically acclaimed and considered a “writer’s writer,” Jackson has faded from the public eye over time. She was too strange for the ’50s, and too apolitical and classically domestic (in her own way) for the radicals of the ’60s and ’70s. In the last few decades, the ho-hum short fiction of small epiphanies—MFA stories about cancer and divorce—have reigned supreme, and Jackson’s folkloric tales of the unexplained and unexplainable have been looked at with a jaundiced eye. If I were to compare her to anyone in contemporary American fiction, it would be Joyce Carol Oates, another prolific virtuoso of the strange.

There are signs, however, that the pendulum of public reception has begun to swing the other way for Jackson. In 2007, the Shirley Jackson Awards “for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic” was created. In 2010, a musical version of We Have Always Lived in the Castle premiered at Yale Repertory Theatre. In the last year, Penguin Classics has reissued seven of Jackson’s books in beautiful black-spine editions, while this April saw the publication of a previously unknown Jackson story in The New Yorker.

This week, Blue Rider Press releases Shirley, a novel by Susan Scarf Merrell that imagines its protagonist—a 19-year-old newlywed named Rose Nemser—living in Jackson’s chaotic Bennington, Vermont, home in the last year of Jackson’s life. Although it was just published, Shirley has already been optioned by HBO for a two-hour movie.

As the novel opens, Rose and her husband, Frank, are a young, striving couple, moving to Bennington so Frank can begin his teaching career under the tutelage of Stanley Edgar Hyman, Shirley Jackson’s husband. The couple ends up living in the Hyman-Jackson home, where Rose becomes obsessively involved with Jackson, her family, and her stories. For those new to Jackson’s work, Rose’s exploration of her writing provides a great reading list, adding a bit of extra-textual pleasure toShirley.

Apropos to Jackson herself, Merrell’s novel walks a seemingly contradictory line. It is simultaneously a precisely accurate look at the sexual and intellectual failures that real love must allow for and survive, and a darkly fantastical meditation on magic, revenge, love, and reality. It is at turns dreamlike and hyper-realistic.

“I had this particular interest in domestic fiction, but I wasn’t interested in the fiction of domesticity,” Merrell says of the novel, which she began while at graduate school in Bennington (full disclosure: we were in the same year, though in different disciplines). “I am very much interested in this discomfort in the ways that people try to understand their own domestic lives.” This is the central question that Rose finds herself contemplating throughout Shirley: how to live happily in her own life, despite its problems. Or as Rose puts it while explaining what draws readers to Jackson’s work, how to “understand imperfection and know how to live with it and appreciate it.”

Merrell’s first novel, A Member of the Family, explored a foreign adoption gone disturbing and sad, so this fraught family territory isn’t new to her. But originally, she had started doing serious research toward publishing a Jackson biography. “When I actually went to the Library of Congress to look at her papers I wasn’t even exactly sure why,” she says, except that she was drawn to Jackson’s story. There she started reading the love letters between Jackson and Hyman, her brilliant, philandering, infuriating, and yet much-beloved husband.

Soon Merrell knew she wanted to explore the complicated dynamics of their relationship, which was a partnership-of-equals that stretched back to when they were just college kids, utterly infatuated with each other and their own stellar potential. But somewhere along the line, they’d gotten twisted up. They were often cruel and thoughtless to one another, regardless of their complete commitment to their family. Or as Rose puts it: “Despite the terrible things they did, the ways they hurt each other, they needed one another at the core.”

Shirley, at its core, is about exactly that kind of connection: the one that endures despite all else. From the outside, these relationships can look like duty or desperation or simply two people who have given up on finding real happiness in exchange for certitude. The brilliance of Jackson’s life and Merrell’s writing is that they convey the depth and beauty of this kind of connection, showing that it isn’t an endurance exercise, but rather the scarred-but-surviving tree that grows from a root of unrivaled strength: Love. Like Jackson herself, love endures. In the end, Shirley is a love story, albeit an unexpected and uncomfortable one—perhaps the only kind that could ever be told by or about Shirley Jackson.