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Michael Cunningham and a new generation of writers transcend 'gay literature'

By Dan Zak
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 23, 2010; C01



NEW YORK -- He sneaks a cigarette in the stairwell, through an emergency exit whose alarm does not sound. He sits on the eighth step, places a porcelain ashtray to the side of his bare feet and lights an American Spirit. He watches a curl of smoke creep toward the chicken-wired skylight in the roof of his Chelsea condo building.

If he were writing this passage, he'd start the next sentence with "Here is," his favorite device for centering the reader after a tumble of description. As in: Here is the novelist Michael Cunningham, on a Monday, in shades of gray -- gray of hair, gray of shirt, grayed in by concrete and cigarette ash, and gray of perspective on what, if anything, it means to be a gay novelist who's written a fairly gay book at a very gay time.

The gay thing is incidental, he says. This new novel, his sixth, is really about middle age (he's 57) and the over-ripening of long-term relationships (he smokes here out of respect for Kenny, his boyfriend of 20-plus years) and the yearning for true beauty in a world that's short on it.

Beauty, in "By Nightfall," dogs the protagonist, a middle-aged straight man named Peter Harris who is ambushed by a confounding lust for his wife's much-younger brother, a 23-year-old wanderer radiating a newness and virility that Peter has lost over time. The awakening of this homosexuality is contemplated with a restraint, maturity and matter-of-factness that seems absent from the media and the public sphere, where the military can't easily shake Victorian protocol, where the states form a patchwork quilt of conflicting same-sex marriage laws, where gay teens make headlines when they're beaten or suicidal.

The country as a whole still can't deal with the gay thing. Not so in the pages of Cunningham.

"Peter is very much like my straight friends -- he's not freaked out about it," says Cunningham, now back inside his condo, the skyscrapers of downtown flickering in the twilight. His feet are on the coffee table, near a decapitated stone statuette of the Virgin Mary and books of photography by Robert Mapplethorpe and Cindy Sherman.

"Most of the straight guys I know have had sex with a guy at some point or another -- in college, most likely," he says. "But, yeah, Peter's attitude to his own sexuality is not some wishful attempt on my part to be modern. It's simply what I see around me."

He pauses long enough for a motorcycle engine to trail a greasy roar up Sixth Avenue, nine stories below.

"And you have to hope that's some kind of progress."

Cunningham himself has stood for some kind of progress in modern American literature: a novelist who is gay, who writes for a wide and mainstream audience, who populates his stories with characters who aren't defined by their straightness or gayness but rather by their grappling with sophisticated problems. In 1990's "A Home at the End of the World," a gay male, a straight male and a straight female entangle themselves in a love triangle, but the novel is a vision of family, not a stoking of scandal. A textured, lovingly drawn lesbian couple is the axis of "The Hours," his blockbuster legacy-maker from 1998, but that wasn't the point. The point was: How do you get flowers into a vase when your brain is addled by the burden of existence?

The previous generation of gay writers has bequeathed a freedom to write about being gay in an unfussy, elevated way without worrying about advancing an agenda, says Cunningham contemporary Tony Kushner, who cites Edmund White and Larry Kramer as pioneers in literature.

"Every time a disenfranchised group seizes hold of a new form, there's a generation that has to struggle with it, that has to build the foundation and the house, and then the next generation moves into the house," says Kushner, who is currently reviving his AIDS-era epic "Angels in America" 30 blocks uptown. "With 'By Nightfall,' there's no proving that needs to be done, though sometimes I think, 'Oh God, I can't believe we're still struggling over these prehistoric things in 2010.' In the 1992 GOP convention you had Pat Buchanan's speech about ideological cross-dressing, and you still have people like Carl Paladino."

Kushner and Cunningham belong to this generation, to a stratum of accomplished, middle-aged gay artists who summer in Provincetown, Mass., a creative haven that is both deeply engaged with the world and insulated from its problems. The feeling there, Cunningham says, "ranges from frustration to despair to a kind of desperate optimism that sort of stems from the idea that all those homophobes are digging in because they're scared, because they can tell something is happening and they're sort of putting up their last fight." He wades into this year's strife with the same serene, even tone. "You tell yourself that real progress has been made, and then there's this rash of teen suicides that makes you wonder if anything will ever change really."

Things, of course, have changed for him. He grew up in California, went to Stanford despite his Berkeley mentality, and at age 19 was "knocked out" by reading White's "Nocturnes for the King of Naples" and Andrew Holleran's "Dancer from the Dance," impactful novels that were built around gay characters. By senior year he had taken up writing, and was dating a girl named Janet and branding himself as a bisexual.

"It was the early '70s," he says. "It would just be like, 'Let's work this out.' I'll just marry Janet. I love her and we'll have sex, and I'll have sex with guys and that will be just fine. It didn't work out that way."

He moved to San Francisco with friends and "got a little wild," then fled to Boulder, Colo., in search of someplace clean and new and natural, then wound through Nebraska and Laguna Beach, Calif., bartending and writing along the way, before arriving at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at age 28. A writing fellowship at Provincetown's Fine Arts Work Center delivered him to Cape Cod, where he set down artistic roots while also making a home of Manhattan. When the AIDS crisis began to decimate his circle of friends, he became an ardent foot soldier of ACT UP. (He's not much of an activist nowadays, he says.)

Nearly 20 years ago he moved out of the "squalor" of a Thompson Street apartment to this top-floor, one-bedroom condo, which he admits is kept clean by Kenny, a psychologist. Props of conspicuous knowledge decorate the abode, whose vibe is rebellious in the classiest way possible. A huge Gregory Crewdson photograph projects its staged suburban ennui over an expansive wooden table holding twin Macbooks, a globe and the framed lyric "Love will tear us apart" by the British post-punk band Joy Division. Stacked neatly under end tables are written works by Freud, Henry James, Amy Bloom and the queer performance artist Justin Bond. In the bathroom, a rusted headboard light is clipped on a bookshelf flanking the toilet, so one might skim Frost, Pound or Yeats in a solitary pool of light.

Bisecting the main room is a floor-to-ceiling femur from a prison production of "King Kong" (bought secondhand) which stands against the wall.

And here is Michael Cunningham, barefoot, with his coffee, a streak of dried shaving cream at his right ear. He is a man at ease in the life of a 21st-century aesthete, swaying between glamour and bohemia, the realms of Hollywood (with whose denizens he parties and for which he's written screenplays) and the Cape (where he's a beloved friend to brilliant people who eschew worldly ambition). He's the type of guy who would, with his Provincetown book group, devote one entire night to drinking bourbon and performing aloud the Nighttown chapter of "Ulysses." Because why not?

"Who knows who else was reading Joyce in the world at that moment, but we were, in this little house in Provincetown," he says. "We finished up just as the sun was coming up and sort of walked out into the morning, slightly altered by the experience -- the experience you hope to get from any novel and too rarely get, which is a sense of living in a bigger, more complicated world."

Leopold Bloom's sad search for transcendence yokes many men, including the character of Peter, the married art dealer with the hots for his brother-in-law, and Cunningham himself.

"I think he's exploring these new empty feelings," says Chris Busa, founder and editor of Provincetown Arts Magazine. "If you think of the psychologist Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it's almost like Michael figured out sexuality and has moved to the higher needs, the more difficult, more spiritual and symbolic needs, those small awakenings that are not so much lustful but springing from a deeper source. He teaches me, a straight man, a lot. He opens up my mind to post-gay thought, gets beyond the polarization, and says, 'Let's consider new nuances.' "

And: "A huge challenge for a gay writer is how to be real to yourself and speak to multiple audiences and give them all something meaningful," says novelist and writing professor Paul Lisicky, also a product of workshops in Iowa and Provincetown. "I don't think there's anyone doing that better than he is. 'By Nightfall' respects the unpredictability of sexuality, and sees sexuality as a place of wildness that resists our ability to define it."

And: "Michael has never wanted to be characterized as a gay writer per se, and his work has been instrumental in getting people over that division," says his editor and publisher Jonathan Galassi, the president of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. "Before Michael there was a subcategory of literary fiction that was labeled as gay, and I don't think people do that so much anymore. I think he's part of the reason why."

Cunningham is more circumspect. A gay novelist today, he says, has the same responsibility as a straight novelist: to write the best damn book he can.

"Although I do think one of the great purposes of novels is to act as vehicles of empathy," he says. "There's really no art form that's better suited to help us understand what it's like to be somebody else."

Behind him, dusk veils Manhattan. Time to go to his final stateside reading before he jets to Canada and Europe for the second half of the tour. He slips on a leather jacket and Prada loafers, locks his door, and waits for the clunking elevator next to a large, framed, unsigned charcoal sketch of a man holding his head in anguish. He bought it for $200 years ago in San Francisco and wonders who and where the artist is.

On Sixth Avenue he hails a cab and, en route to 192 Books on 10th Avenue, muses further on how things were and how things are. He supports the Trevor Project, the suicide-prevention hotline for gay teens founded by his friend James Lecesne, and works occasionally with God's Love We Deliver, which serves housebound people with AIDS. He gets out of the cab a couple blocks south of the bookstore and walks the rest of the way.

"If there's a march or rally, I'll go to it, but am I organizing? No," he says. "It's so mysterious to me now. I'm confused as to what to do. Maybe things are just okay enough to keep us quiet enough. Why aren't there gay people marching up 10th Avenue? I don't know."

And then here is Michael Cunningham in a tiny bookstore surrounded by short-haired women in lambswool ponchos, and Chelsea boys in their distressed jeans, and perhaps a Peter or two. Although, regardless of sexual history or proclivity, couldn't everyone here be a Peter -- unsure how to navigate a bewildering world, hopeful for a life unbound by convention, searching for beauty by reading an author who's made it his business to find it?