Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)

Why Isn't He Budging?

"I [Andrew Sullivan] was born in 1963 in a small, actually very small town in southern England, grew up in another small town not far away in southern England, got a scholarship to Oxford, then I went and got another scholarship to go to grad school in Harvard in 84, and did a public administration degree at the Kennedy School and then realized that I couldn't cope with the sort of regression analysis of welfare reform and moved into philosophy, mainly political philosophy, and then did a Ph.D. in political science, mainly political theory, in the next few years, and while I was doing that I sort of moonlighted by going down to Washington and interning at the New Republic, and then going back and being a junior editor and then becoming editor of the New Republic, I guess, in 1991, and doing that through 96, and then putting an end to that and sort of getting my life together."

"I had a… I hated my family life. I hated it. I had a very visceral hostility to the circumstances in which I found myself growing up, and I think I detached quite early… I didn't enjoy it when my parents were fighting at all. I was horrified and traumatized by it… To some extent you get used to it. My mother was incredibly frank and direct about everything, and it was all very-raw. My father was always slamming doors and yelling and screaming and getting drunk and playing rugby, and my mother was always complaining and yelling. I mean, this was on and on and on, and I think a part of me just sort of withdrew from all of that and saw it as a spectator sport, but part of me was also extremely traumatized by it. But whether you're traumatized or not, it's where you're at home. Even if it's a horrible trauma, this is what the therapists tell you, and I think it makes a lot of sense. Even if it's deep unhappiness, it's your unhappiness."

"Well, maybe that does follow that one seeks out relationships that replicate that…"

"I was confirmed in Arundel Cathedral in Sussex. I come from Sussex. My family doesn't. They come from some bog in Ireland somewhere. But Sussex was a very English Catholic county and many English martyrs came from there and that was part of my identity as a kid."

"My confirmation saint was Saint Thomas More… I was an English Catholic boy, and I guess it was a way of affirming a particular kind of identity and resistance to England, to all of its anti-Catholic trappings, and also More has always completely fascinated me. He's an intensely fascinating man for all the obvious reasons, the attempt to be in the world/not be in the world. Be knee-deep in politics. Be even deeper into his spiritual life. He brings together all sorts of questions about what integrity is, loyalty."

"The one area that really interests me is sanctity. I'm interested in what saints are. Because it's… I don't know what they are, and I should, really. I think we all should have a better grip on what that's all about, what a human being who is a human being and yet somehow holy, somehow in touch with something else more profoundly than anybody else… And there are several saints that sort of fascinate me, and I would love to figure out some more about. Saint Francis is one. Saint John the Beloved is another…"

"There's something appealing about the figure who-and I'm sure I sort of project onto this on some level-who's standing by himself. Who's just there and won't budge. You ask yourself, 'Why isn't he budging? What's going on? Why? Why? Why?»

"I used to be envious of people who were positive [for HIV]. Because I felt like they were living in some enhanced way that I had not yet been able to achieve. This is where sanctity comes in. The whole definition of a saint is somebody who lives as if they're going to die tonight. A saint is so in touch with reality, which is of course our mortality, that he's able to live at a different level of intensity… I found myself falling in love with people who were positive… A couple people I'm thinking of, I think they really were quite remarkable in how they tackled their disease and lived with it and overcame it and shone with it even as they died. There is something particularly attractive about it, just as we're attracted to martyrs, and we're fascinated by suicide bombers… None of those people wanted to be in the situation they were in, but they had a certain impatience with stupidity and ephemera."

"Without getting into any details, I've just had this very very very tempestuous and short-lived relationship that I bumped into in San Francisco. I just bumped into him on Saturday night… Our last contact was just sort of a very peremptory and vicious email, and I saw him and talked to him and we didn't raise our voices or anything. We were talking, and my friends pointed out that they noticed two things. One, they noticed that obviously we were angry but that there was an incredible intensity about the relationship.

"There was something between the two of us that just crackled when we were together. And I guess I do like that. It keeps me from being bored."

"Being married doesn't mean you're less alone. I think a relationship can be the most intense form of being alone if you're not careful… Friendship is what really resolves and mitigates loneliness while not compromising the self in the way that love does, romantic love does. And More was not completely alone. He had his daughter, who was very close to him, and he had some wonderful friends."

"That's a big question: 'Why are you alone? I mean, we're all alone. Aloneness is… that's life. It's the quality of our aloneness that matters. Whether it's quality solitude. I am a solitary person. I always have been, ever since I was a kid. I guess it's hard… it takes a lot for me to let somebody in."

"Someone once pointed out: 'Among straight people, you're a gay guy. Among English people, you're a Catholic. An Irish Catholic. Among Americans, you're sort of English. Among the academia establishment, you're a hack. Among the hacks, you're a sort of academic. You keep displacing yourself out of any particular team.»

"It might be a defensive response. I mean, the Republicans don't want anything to do with me. Neither do the Democrats. People on the right are very suspicious of me. So are people on the left… I like to think that I try to think and write for myself, and sometimes that means that you do piss off people, on a regular basis. Solitude is a natural place for a writer to be. And, again, it's not like my models… like Orwell was the hero of any group of people, I mean, he was very much on his own. I'm very leery of attachment."

"It's terrible, the minute I feel like everybody agrees with me, I want to change my mind. I'm such a sort of-and this is probably why I was not very good at the management side of being an editor-because I was literally more comfortable in opposition to my entire staff than sort of gently uniting them. Or even our readership [of the New Republic], I always kept people, I tried to keep everybody on edge.

"Obviously I've thought about this to some extent. I don't want to problemitize it in some ways. I think it's how you are, but… it's what makes me feel secure, I think, that lack of security."

"I'm not interested in being well received or not well received. When you start thinking like that, you're finished, I think. The only interesting question for me is whether I can convey certain things I'm trying to convey more effectively through the medium of fictional narrative than through trying to write stuff that is argumentative. You know, right now, out there there's either factual stuff, biographical, historical stuff, or there's fiction. The genre of political or moral writing for anybody to read is really slim, which isn't purely sort of temporary political I'm-right/they're-wrong kind of Jim Carville stuff."

"Virtually Normal was a weird book in the sense that-I don't think of it as a weird book-but it was an attempt to say that an issue like this, which is so mired in emotion and psychology, could be written about in a classical rationalist fashion. Its model, that book, was the sort of nineteenth-century polemicists and pamphleteers I sort of admired-not too long, and anybody could read it and generate a discussion, and those sort of pamphlets in the late nineteenth century were wonderful things."

"[Virtually Normal] came out in 95, so I wrote it in 94 while I was still editor, and I did a sort of prototype of the argument in an essay in the New Republic in 93 ['The Politics of Homosexuality']. And meanwhile I wrote about a lot of other things and kept writing a kind of American commentary for British papers, which eventually I got a good deal with, and write for the Times, and sort of carved out a way of paying the rent that way. But subsequent to leaving the New Republic, I've sort of moved out of editing and I'm concentrating more on writing."

"It wasn't quite drama, but it was energy. I don't think it was manufactured drama. It was energy. And I had that sort of interaction with my fellow editors, too… It was just a tempestuous place. A lot of big people with strong ideas butting heads. I mean, that's the nature of those sort of places. They attract people like me, and people like me don't get along with people like me."

"… To begin with, that's what I wanted to be when I was a kid. It's where I thought I was going to go, elective politics… I think that I do do that in part. I think that politics is what you make it… I go around the country and I speak. I go from high schools to political rallies. I'll speak at big fund raisers, and I do all that stuff all the time… It's interesting, but I think that what I'm trying to do is both a forensic thing-to simply dissect and point out the inadequacy of the argument on the other side, whether you're against Jerry Falwell or Pat Buchanan or whoever-and, secondly, you're doing, you're performing an exemplary role, you're saying, 'I'm also a gay person and I'm here. That very fact changes the debate we're talking about, precisely because part of what we're talking about is shame, and the capacity to resist shame and overcome it. And that is something that cannot be argued. It has to be shown. It has to be felt by people who see it for them to absorb it, and grow from it, and do it themselves. And I feel that half the time that's also what I'm doing. That I achieve ninety-five percent of what I'm doing merely by showing up. You look at them straight in the eyes… It's funny, but I was on Politically Incorrect with Lou Sheldon last week, and he said, 'I don't think it's a disease. It's a dysfunction'-talking about homosexuality-and all I did was say, 'Hey, I'm here. Stop talking about me as if I don't exist'… You can't talk about us in the same way anymore, because we're here. You have to take us seriously."

"I don't know what my role should be. I've struggled with it. You'd be amazed, the hostility I still get thrown at me… I think as soon as I held a position I'd be completely demolished by the people I'm supposed to represent… It's a very tough world out there… There is extreme resistance to that sort of leadership in the gay and lesbian world. It's a very fractious place… I hate to sound so vague and confused, but I don't know. I think we're feeling our way. I'm feeling my way."

"I'm scared of a relapse into not believing in ourselves, a relapse into thinking of ourselves as irrelevancies or shallow things, people that don't need full emotional lives, don't need full political lives-that this could return. I'm not a Whig. I don't think these things are inevitable. I think they're choices, which is why I was so keen to see marriage at least as a residue, some sort of tangible legacy of AIDS, and we haven't got it. The Hawaii result and the Alaska result show that we have so much more work to do in talking to straight people to persuade them that this is reality and that we need it and that we deserve it. And so much more to do in telling ourselves that we deserve it. And believing that we deserve it. But it's hard. It's extremely hard."

"In many ways I do feel like this book [Love Undetected] is a real attempt to draw a line under a certain part of my life and try and move on. And I didn't feel I could do that without writing it, so it had a sort of purgative effect. It probably comes across like that, too. It came up like puke. Even the abstract stuff came out like puke. It got to the point where I realized I wasn't going to finish it because I had nothing to say about friendship, for example, then I just [makes puking noise], in two weeks wrote that last thing. Just three to four hours per day just speed-writing."

"You get to a point on these things where I just need to sleep for a long time and wake up and get my life back together again before I can figure out what you write next."

"I feel like I'm saying things here that I shouldn't say. I guess it doesn't matter."