Interview with Christopher Rice

Interview with Christopher Rice

June 30, 2009

At 30, Christopher Rice is the author of three New York Times bestselling novels and a regular columnist for the Advocate magazine. His first novel, A Density of Souls, was published when he was 22 years old, and to a landslide of media attention, most of it due to the fact that Christopher is the son of bestselling vampire novelist Anne Rice. Christopher followed up with a second New York Times bestselling thriller, The Snow Garden, a dark tale of infidelity and art history set on a New England college campus, which received a Lambda Literary Award. His third New York Times bestseller, Light Before Day, was selected as the first annual summer reading book by Frontiers magazine and hailed as a “book of the year” by bestselling, critically acclaimed thriller writer Lee Child. Christopher was recently a visiting faculty member in the graduate writing program at Otis College of Art and Design. A native of California but a Southerner by blood, Christopher returned to the West Coast four years ago. He lives in West Hollywood.

MP: Thank you so much for taking some time to chat with us today.

CR: Absolutely.

MP: Our conversation today is going to go on the Foundation’s website called MatthewsPlace.com, which is a site that was created to be a resource for LGBT and allied young people; really to help them gather tools and resources to lead healthy, productive, hate-free lives. So that’s sort of the framework for what we’re going to be chatting about today.

CR:  Great.

MP: You grew up in quite a culturally and historically diverse city in Louisiana: how would you say that growing up in New Orleans influenced you and the work that you’re doing?

CR: Well, the good thing about New Orleans is that, overall, it’s an accepting place. It’s accepting of eccentricity, it’s accepting of excess, it’s accepting of color, in the sense of culture, not necessarily in the sense of race.

MP: Right.

CR: It’s a place where people can kind of be as much of all three of those things as they would like. However, it is still in the Deep South. You only have to go an hour’s drive north to really be in the Bible Belt; I would argue that Baton Rouge, the state capital, is in the Bible Belt. And it does not have, in my opinion, the opportunities and resources for LGBT people that San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, or Chicago would offer them. So in that sense—I certainly have many fond memories of growing up there, but … like so many young LGBT kids, I had a desire to get out. And that may be odd for some people to hear because my mother was obviously not, you know, a televangelist; she was Anne Rice. She was very accepting and she was pretty eccentric herself. But at the same time I felt the need to connect to a larger community than was on offer there. I identify with the journey and I identify with the struggle that so many of our youth go through.

MP: Can you tell us a little bit about your process—your coming out process, and how that realization materialized for you?

CR: Honestly, in retrospect, I would wish for future generations to have the ability to have a coming out process that was less alcohol-soaked than mine was. My experience of coming out was very much centered around the bar scene. And what happened for me is that when I turned 18 and was old enough to get into certain gay bars in the French Quarter, I became a regular customer. And I met a boy that I really fell for, so my decision to come out was a result of meeting that young man. What, of course, happened was that I came out to everyone I knew in order to promote this relationship with him, or further this relationship with him, and then he, of course, broke up with me. So, I was standing out of the closet all by my lonesome, as a manner of speaking. My process also included a very extended period in which I believed myself to be bisexual, and I hung on to that belief for as long as I possibly could, until I had to simply admit that my desires for other men were so much stronger than my sexual desires for women—as to render those other desires obsolete, or just simply inadequate. I do believe in the Kinsey scale, I think many of us fall in different places on the scale and I think it’s for each one of us to decide where we are on the scale, it’s not for someone else to decide for us.

MP: Right.

CR: And I also made the decision that, to be happy and to be content, I needed to live the life of an exclusive homosexual. I don’t mean an elitist homosexual, but I mean someone who is exclusively pursuing partners of the same gender.

MP: Well, it’s very interesting because—you know Judy Shepard spends a lot of time traveling around, and I spend a lot of time traveling around talking to high school and college kids across the country—there’s very much this sense that if I’m going to be “an LGBT person,” then there’s a certain stereotype that I have to fit. We spend a lot of time talking to young people: we’re your doctors, we’re your lawyers, we’re your politicians, we’re not necessarily Jack from Will & Grace and The Village People. Do you see that pressure, or did you see that pressure in your process, to be something other than who you were?

CR: It makes a lot of sense; I know exactly what you’re talking about. Ultimately, I felt fortunate, because in many ways I did identify with aspects of being gay that were very stereotypical. I was a big theatre kid in high school, I was creative, I was very emotionally sensitive, even hypersensitive. I loved female divas. I had all of that to relate to right away, as soon as I came out of the closet, so I didn’t have that problem. I think what has been the ultimate challenge for me is being willing to be honest with myself about what works for me in terms of relationships and sexual relations. In that sense, I was pretty traditional and pretty buttoned down. I sampled a lot of different things and I experimented as I came of age. Ultimately, the sort of public sex aspects of gay male sexuality did not appeal to me. And it wasn’t just a matter of being afraid of them or being too nervous to try them. I did try them and they didn’t work for me, they didn’t feed me spiritually, they didn’t leave me gratified. So, being able to admit that and being able to respond to that pressure, which can sometimes exist in the community—I’m a gay man who will stand by my beliefs that if he’s the one, then he’ll be able to be monogamous for me.

MP: Right, right.

CR: And that’s fine if that doesn’t work for you, it’s fine if you have a different arrangement, but don’t lecture me on what’s available to me, based on the limits of your own experience. So those kinds of pressures I think gay people deal with as they come of age. You address, more specifically, that sense of ‘I don’t want to come out of the closet because I don’t want to be pigeonholed as being a certain type of homosexual.’ And what I’ve seen happen—and I play with this a lot in my fiction—is that as social acceptance of homosexuality has increased, the boundaries of that stereotype, the boundaries of the gay male stereotype, have begun to expand. Because we now have gay football players, and we have lots of gay marines, whether anyone wants to admit it or not.

MP: Very much so.

CR: We have gays and lesbians all throughout various branches of the military, and as they step out into the light, our previously held assumptions about what gay people were are called into serious question.

MP: In your work and in your writing, which I have read since the beginning, your ability to write and create such vivid and various gay themes in your novels: how did it affect your process, or how has it affected your sexuality?

CR: Well, I think that I am profoundly influenced by writers who have explored loss, and longing, and fear. Those influences have turned me into a thriller writer, essentially. I am comfortable calling myself a writer of suspense, or a writer of thrillers; both terms are sort of interchangeable to me. I think that came from a sense of being at conflict with my true nature throughout my youth, and being afraid of discovery, and feeling as if I didn’t belong. I think outsiders sometimes produce the best fictional perspectives on reality because they’re set apart from it, so they have a unique view from the border. I felt that was an aspect of my upbringing that influenced me as a writer and an artist. To be very frank with you, it never occurred to me to write anything that didn’t include gay characters in it. It never seemed—certainly not at 21 when I was writing A Density of Souls—like an option to me, it didn’t seem to be on the table. People later asked me if I ever looked at it from a purely business perspective and said, “Well, if [you] write a book that doesn’t have anything gay in it, I mean Anne Rice’s son is likely to sell three times as many copies based on the name factor alone.” But that decision at the time, it was like somebody proposing that I grow wings and fly. It wasn’t a part of who I was and it wasn’t a part of my nature. I wrote what I felt. I’m not a literary writer who is wedded to notions of realism and fiction. I believe that you can write anything if you can feel it convincingly.

MP: I think, at least for me and my process in reading your first book, times are changing. When you come across a gem or you come across something in popular culture or media that represents someone that feels like you in a “normal” and “positive” light – as opposed to in a manner, or stereotypical manner, that you’ve heard people say that people who feel like you act like – it’s profound. Do you see that changing? Do you see that there are more positive representations in fiction, and it’s not just something that you come across occasionally?

CR: I do. I’ll never forget the moment when, and this was before I became really a devoted reader of crime novels, when I picked up a novel by Jonathan Kellerman—and Jonathan Kellerman is a giant in the mystery field, he’s a perennial best-seller. I picked him up on a whim, and I picked him up largely because at the time I wanted to read something that was set in Los Angeles, where I had lived for a year, and I was stunned to discover that the hero’s right-hand man was an openly gay homicide detective. And this series was about, at the time it was thirteen books in, so this character had been included in the series since 1988, I think, which was when the first novel was published. And moments like that, they fed my soul, they opened my eyes, they encouraged me. You know Jonathan Kellerman was the first of many writers to make that leap. Patricia Cornwell, who has since come out officially, was including lesbian characters in her books along the way. That sense of inclusion, even when it comes from a straight writer, is very powerful. In fact, when it comes from a straight writer I think it’s an indicator of our progress as a community. But that was really what I wanted to do—I was setting out, and I continued to set out to write suspenseful, dark novels that include gay characters and gay story lines. I had seen the gay social chronicle done abundantly and done very well. And I didn’t want to do any more of that myself, I wanted us to be included in the popular mainstream of entertainment fiction.

MP: Do you imagine, or really do you hope, that your writing is going to change perceptions on a personal, and even perhaps political level?

CR: I certainly hope so. I think every writer hopes for that, or something along those lines. I think if that becomes your ambition, or your primary ambition, then it can shut you down creatively. I think that some of the most impactful things I have written, the things I have gotten the most feedback about, were written with another goal in mind. Usually when I put my focus on the pacing, the plot, the specific characterizations, —it’s ironic—but then I actually increase my chances of writing something that moves people because I haven’t become too self-conscious of the goal. I think the number of letters that I continue to get in response to A Density of Souls is staggering; the number of readers who identify with the pain of Stephen Conlin’s character and his sense of isolation and identify with that character even though it was not an impeccably realistic novel—I mean it’s a very over-the-top, adrenaline-fueled tale—but somehow through that use of metaphor and that use of heightened reality those feelings came through for a lot of readers. I believe in that; I believe that’s a worthwhile connection for readers to have. I think we need to always mimic reality in our fiction. I think that we can stir things up and reveal a truth beneath the surface in that way as well.

MP: What role or responsibility do you think that LGBT persons in the public arena have to be out and open about who they are?

CR: Well, I think that the most important reason to come out is your own sanity; that’s above everything else. I think that applies whether you’re a public figure or not. The closet is a terrible place to be for the person who’s in it. Yes, I think the gay community, as a whole, is slighted by high-profile figures who remain in the closet. But I think that a lot of times we need to ask ourselves what that person’s role in our community would be if they were out of the closet. I think dragging someone out of the closet who isn’t necessarily engaged in anti-gay activities can have a destructive effect on them and on us. I don’t want unwilling gay people advocating on my behalf; I think that’s a challenge. I think the role that we can have is that we need to live our lives and we need to be honest with our community about the lives we’re leading. I think it can be very tempting to stick to a certain set of talking points and I think there are points we do want to hit again and again if we feel them to be true. I personally would like to see every year the suicide rate among gay youth go down in this country and I absolutely get behind that point: I can bring it up every time I’m asked to speak. But what’s become more important to me over time is to not try to sell myself as someone that I’m not, and that begins with coming out of the closet and gradually it’s a challenge to expand that into other areas of my life. I think for gay people to see gay people living honestly about everything they do is really a contribution.

MP: That just brought up an interesting point in my mind. The thing that strikes me the most when I talk to high school kids in particular is this sense of complacency; this sense that in their world, LGBT folks and being gay isn’t a big deal. But you let them know that you can still be fired in thirty states because of your sexual orientation and they look you and go, “No that can’t happen in today’s world.” How do you think we can fight that complacency, that idea that it’s really not a big deal any more.

CR: Well, I have to tell you I don’t know how necessary it is for us to fight that complacency because one of the most exciting things that could happen for our community is for those young people to enter the world with that presumption, learn that that presumption is incorrect, and then react to that.

MP: OK.

CR: That’s how you breed an activist. I think that most of our most talented gay activists have fought on behalf of a reality that they have envisioned, that they feel should be. I think, even if it seems like complacency now among them because they haven’t run up against the iron front of anti-gay forces in their own communities, let them run up against those forces, and let them learn. It’s not about punishing them or teaching them a lesson, it’s about allowing them to experience first-hand what’s out there and allowing them to react with outrage and fortitude.

MP: How important do you think history is, particularly to young LGBT people, not necessarily allied people, but for young LGBT people to understand what has happened in the past that has allowed them to be at this point in history?

CR: I think history is very important. I think it’s one of the reasons I’m involved with the Lambda Literary Foundation; I’m actually the President of their Board of Trustees. We are ultimately the only organization in the world that is promoting LGBT writers and their work. A big reason behind our mission is that we are our own historians, and when we launch our website in a couple weeks it is going to contain really the only complete archive, that I know of, of all living and dead widely accomplished LGBT writers. And that is a job that has fallen to us, because often we have been expunged from the history books and our books have been burned, and we have been erased through a sort of constant campaign of insidious dismissal. So I think for us, I’d say the older gays, the adults or the grown-ups, we are charged with keeping that history for the next generation. I also think it’s absolutely important to allow the next generation to rise up, to allow them to take a role, an active role in what we’re doing, to consult them and make opportunities for them in our bigger advocacy organizations. We don’t want a gay movement that is monopolized by a cadre of seniors. By seniors, I don’t mean simply individuals over 50 years old, I mean people who are senior in the movement itself.

MP: That’s interesting, what would you say to young people who might have this passion inside of them but are concerned that being out is going to inhibit their chances of having a successful career?

CR: Well, I think that the question is: what is your career? Which career are you pursuing? Why are you pursuing a career that is so utterly incompatible with your true nature? I would ask the same question of someone who spends most of his or her free time writing short stories, but who is trying to be an accountant. Why aren’t you following your bliss? Why is there such a gulf between what you believe and what you want for yourself, and what you’re trying to do to make money? And that’s a big spiritual question that many of us wrestle with even people who aren’t gay, but I defer to Joseph Campbell on this matter: if you aren’t following your bliss, there is a discrepancy in your psychology that needs to be healed, it needs to be mended. I think of the actor who wants to be famous and so they choose to remain in the closet, but that’s because I live out here in LA and that’s where my head goes.

MP: Right.

CR: Yes, there is discrimination in the work place and I think it becomes specific to what career you’re in. again. But my number one question is if you’re doing something, if you’re following something that is directly at odds with who you are, you’ve got to slow down and ask yourself why you’re following that dream.

MP: Well, that actually just brought up a story that Judy tells. She was speaking not too long ago and a gentleman, 70 years old, came up to Judy and told her that he had been going to the same Catholic church for 25 years and consistently he had heard his pastor or members of the church spout homophobic rhetoric. Judy looks at him and says, “Why don’t you try to find a place that’s affirming?” And he looked at her and said, “How will they learn? How will they learn if I leave?” But what a heavy burden for someone to take on as well.

CR: Right.

MP: I know your time is precious, so just a few more questions then I’ll let you go.

CR: Oh that’s fine; I’m in no hurry.

MP: For your last book Blind Fall, you received some not-so-positive responses from people, and in some cases some violent responses if I understand and read correctly. Did it surprise you to get that reaction when many in our society are touting that we are an accepting society?

CR: No, it didn’t surprise me to get that reaction. Let me be clear that that reaction was primarily in the form of anonymous Internet postings.

MP: OK.

CR: While those can be very frightening and very offensive, they’re often very offensive; it’s not quite the same thing as having a very explicit death threat sent to your home.

MP: Very much so.

CR: I do want to be clear about that. At the same time, I was writing about an issue that I knew was going to be a hot button for a lot of groups, which was that I was writing a novel that basically took as fact, the fact that the marine corps has a great many gay men in it. And I wrote about one character in particular: a masculine gay marine who had been semi-closeted in his life but had lived a full gay life upon leaving the marine corps, and that was sure to piss a lot of people off, to be frank.

MP: Right, right.

CR: I wrote the book because I knew that this world was out there; I had been friends with and had been involved with multiple gay marines. I had witnessed the challenging netherworld they were forced to inhabit—they had one foot in reality and the other foot in the world of the military and didn’t feel comfortable in either location really. So I knew the book would make people angry and I think overall, though, if you put the ‘blogeria’ aside, as I call it, what I had was a very passionate and welcoming response from gay readers certainly, but from a lot of straight readers as well. One of the first reviews I saw posted on the internet by just a reader was from a straight man who said he had had the book handed to him because he was a devoted mystery reader and Blind Fall was marketed and sold as a mainstream mystery, and that he felt educated after having read it. That’s exactly the kind of review that I had hoped for with that book.

MP: Well, you know the whole “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” thing is very baffling in that you’re sort of sweeping something under the rug and ignoring that it’s there. Where do you see the next evolution in that process, the process of repealing “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”?

CR: I’m devastated that President Obama has not called a halt to expulsions. I was stunned. I was just stunned. I am one of the many that has just been baffled by his behavior on this issue. I think if I were president, what I would do immediately is put a stop to this, right now, particularly given the war footing that we continue to be on, even if we have withdrawn from Iraqi cities [as of] yesterday. We are still essentially engaged on two fronts, I don’t care what the media spin is. So I think honestly that the reason this is such an issue of value to our community, the reason that this isn’t just about allowing certain men and women to choose to serve in the military and be gay at the same time – which is how this issue often gets framed, and dismissed, by the gay community – is we need to look at the experience of African Americans in this country. I think there are profound differences between the civil rights struggle for African Americans and the civil rights struggle for gay Americans, but that’s a topic for a whole ‘nother interview.

MP: Right.

CR: Where we can see a striking similarity and a very important potential for gay people is that we know when African Americans were allowed to serve in the military alongside white Americans, it forever altered the national perception of African Americans in this country. If [he is] fighting side by side with me, then I could call him a friend and I could call them a brother. If we allow gay people to do that, if we allow them to serve openly for the nation’s single largest employer—because that’s what the military is—then we’re going to see a national shift in the perception of gay people and we’re going to see it among population groups in this country that are not frequently exposed to openly gay people. It’s a huge deal, and it’ll be a huge leap forward. I think it’s absolutely crucial that we see it happen within the next few years. If we don’t, I think the community needs to get as up in arms about it as we’ve gotten about marriage equality, which I think is absolutely the cause we need to be addressing right now. I don’t mean to short-ship marriage equality at all, but acceptance of gays in the military is important for the entire gay community and I can’t stress that enough.

MP: I agree with you. I think sometimes we might put the cart before the horse in some situations, because even if you look at employment discrimination law, it’s sort of a no brainer that when you tell someone that you could be employed somewhere for 25 years, walk into work one day, your boss looks at you and say, “I think you’re gay, you’re fired.” There’s no way to rationalize that that’s OK. I think it’s interesting with the military situation—because I have [gay] friends who are in the Armed Services and it’s not a big deal to the men that they’re directly serving with. It’s not a big deal. And if you think we don’t have LGBT people serving in our military right now, then there are no gay people in Iran either.

CR: Right, absolutely.

MP: So, I do hope that there’s progress sooner rather than later on those issues. Well, just to wrap up with two more thoughts, how would you encourage young people, especially LGBT youth, to be creative and form their own outlets and venues for representing themselves and telling their stories?

CR: Well, I think it’s important that they begin to do something on the Internet besides hook up for sex, to be very blunt. I understand that even gay youth have those needs, but I think that we need to harness the power of the Internet for something besides Manhunt, and I hope that that can be done. But at the same time, I think we need to temper our use of the Internet. One of the reasons why I am so saddened by the loss of gay and lesbian bookstores across the country is because they weren’t just places to sell books. They were communal gathering places that were not dominated by the sale of alcohol or the pursuit of a quick hook up. I’m sure that happened at many a gay bookstore, but the idea of building community centers that are divorced from the night life scene to some degree, is one that I think we need to undertake on behalf of the youth of our community. As I said, I am one of those people, and I may be personally biased, who wishes that I had some place to come out of the closet besides a bar.

MP: I think we in Denver are fortunate enough to have the Tattered Cover, which is a bookstore that is not exclusively LGBT, but it’s providing safe spaces for young people to be able to be themselves.

CR: Absolutely. Here in LA, we have the Center, which is a wonderful resource. There are a lot of activities at the LA Gay & Lesbian Center, which I think is one of the biggest in the country, if not the biggest, so people are doing that work and it’s good work and I’m glad they’re doing it. But I encourage young people to refrain from putting themselves in dangerous situations in the name of validating themselves sexually. I think it’s fine to have partners and to meet and—you know I don’t want to judge anyone’s sex life—but I worry that those are the only options we are giving to our young people. I think a lot of the problems we’ve had communicating between generations, older and younger, is that the older generation has spent too much time trying to get in bed with the younger generation. I think we need to do more mentoring and less seduction.

MP: How do you see that mentoring taking place? What role do you see older LGBT people—older meaning 30 and older—

CR: I’m older now too, right?

MP: There you go —older LGBT people playing in the lives of young LGBT people? For me, I get very irritated with our homeless youth situation and members of our community not being at the forefront and fighting that travesty.

CR: Right, well I think it’s a challenging issue, and I don’t want it to fall to the usual position, but I think it’s about personal responsibility. I think it’s about the grown ups acting like grown ups. I think it’s about the grown ups checking what their motives are in reaching out to gay youth in bars or on the Internet. We have to continue to develop, let me put it that way; we have to continue to develop a way of communicating with one another that is not always bound by an exchange of sex. You know, and I don’t mean to come off like a priest or a nun, again, I think anything two consenting adults want to do with one another is fine, and it’s up to them, and it’s none of my business. But when it comes to us stepping back and taking a look at how our community is actually operating and what it’s doing, and what it’s not delivering for us—we need to assess some of these issues, and I think this is a major issue. You know I think that the commodification of absolutely every individual based on their sex appeal is something that prevents us from unifying around common political goals.

MP: I completely agree with you. Well, to wrap up, are there any exciting LGBT writers or authors that we should be reading?

CR: You know there are so many that I can’t mention them all, but they’re all going to be featured on the new LambdaLiterary.org, which should be launching a couple weeks from this interview. It’s going to be an amazing, centralized website that sort of is a one-stop shop for gay literature. We’ll have multiple bloggers from the gay literary community, we’ll have information about all the writers that were nominated for and won Lambda literary awards, really the only award of its kind in the country. So if you need any recommendations, you’re finally going to have a resource to go to online.

MP: That’s great. I really want to thank you for taking some time to chat with us, and I hope that at some level we can keep you involved in what we’re doing at the Foundation; I know you’re someone we respect a great deal here, and Judy respects as well: I spoke to her earlier today and she was excited that I was chatting with you.

CR: Well, send her my admiration and respect for all that she’s done. And yes, please do keep me informed, and if there is anything else I can do, we can absolutely talk about it.

MP: Well, thank you so much Christopher and have a great afternoon.

CR: You too.