Prix de Flore-winning novelist Bruce Benderson is my writing mentor and one of my best friends. We started working together after my literary agent commissioned him to help me revamp my first novel, White, Christian. He had me read each sentence out loud, and then we’d analyze it. It was a grueling, nine-month-long process, one that often involved us screaming at each other. Somewhere amidst the creative chaos, we developed a strong friendship.

Bruce is well known for writing about the underbelly of gay culture, most notably in User, Pretending to Say No and The Romanian, and he does so using such elegant language you can’t help but find his stories beautiful. In his perversely hilarious new novel, Pacific Agony, Bruce chronicles the escapades of a depressed, cynical East-Coaster who’s writing a travel guide about the Pacific Northwest. Some who know Bruce might describe him similarly to the book’s protagonist, but they wouldn’t be exactly right. Bruce just has a gift for seeing our society in a more vivid way than most can.

Bruce Benderson photographed for EVB by Steven Chu

Christopher Stoddard: In your new book, you’re writing about a sarcastic, cynical, manic East-Coaster. How much of you is in it?

Bruce Benderson: I just took lots of my favorite resentments and magnified them. And I also built a philosophy around it about hating modernity. I have a quarrel with my time, and I think what came before it was much more genuine.

CS: What do you think of the current state of the Obama administration?

BB: What irks me the most is when a politician or a cultural spokesman is close to what I want things to be but is missing the boat on them and, in my mind, betraying them. It’s even worse for me than having a clear-cut right-wing enemy. So I’m one of the people who’s been bad-mouthing Obama; I think he’s a wuss!

CS: I see.

BB: I could quote the words of Ralph Nader, who said that Obama was an Uncle Tom to the corporations. And now Nader has been exiled from American society as a result. I guess I’ll be following him.

CS: I think more and more people are starting to agree with you. At first I thought you were…

BB: A nut!

CS: Yeah, but now I think I myself am starting to believe you. A little bit. Getting back to your novel, Pacific Agony, you seem to have a very negative outlook on the region.

BB: Yes and no. I actually love it there, especially Portland… At the same time, I have a problem with the general culture, which is extremely white and WASPY. They are all claiming to be so “laid-back,” yet it’s more as if they’re Maine pretending to be California. What everyone calls “laid-back” I realized is really Protestant discretion.

CS: Wow, well, maybe just replace the people on that beautiful terrain with East-Coasters, because the Pacific Northwest is such a lovely place.

BB: It really is, and in my book the character comes to the conclusion that he doesn’t hate the place, that it’s this amazing confrontation between wild, untamed nature and humans’ attempts to create little boxes of order, and the humans are actually losing. Out there I suddenly saw nature in all its monstrous glory, and a new respect for the region was born.

CS: OK, don’t you have something you like without reservations? What’s your new favorite toy, or should I say, “Who is”?

BB: I did have a favorite, uh, boy, but we broke up… and in my opinion, certain friends had a lot to do with it. They disapproved and felt he was too young for me and they kind of poisoned my mind, so that when little things went wrong, their mean words would come rushing into my head. But he wasn’t a bad sort at all.

CS: Really?

BB: So now my favorite toy happens to be electronics. I have this futuristic video system that I myself have invented and set up. A way of piping video files right into my flat screen television.

CS: [a little sarcastically] Well, anyone who comes over to your house gets the treat of being introduced to whatever new electronic toy you’ve bought.

BB: They’re also subject to Turner Classic Movies, which are on for 16 hours a day in the background, though I will lower the sound.

CS: It helps you work.

BB: For me TCM is kind of like my parents sitting in the corner, because it’s from my childhood and when they were healthy and young, and it’s comforting for me to see all those images of decades passed.
CS: I know that you also have a history of offering mentorship to aspiring writers and artists, but why do you do it?

BB: I think before I became an old cotter, it was all mixed up with sexual desire. Then I got a job teaching literature at an all-male college, and it was also an isolated campus where the boys have to do ranch work.

CS: Wow.

BB: And there I learned the possibility of sublimating those feelings into an intellectual rapport, which for me has become almost as exciting.

CS: I remember that we had another conversation recently in which you said that your close friends seem to be getting younger.

BB: True. I think I inherited my mother’s ability to keep up with the times. She learned to surf the Internet at 94 and had friends of all ages.

CS: So you like young people, but what about the gay world. Can you say anything good about it?

BB: No.

[laughter]

BB: There are a couple of complaints.

CS: Such as?

BB: I have a kind of old-fashioned idea about what a homosexual is, and I think it’s somebody who is made to live outside the social norm. And the reason he was made to live outside the social norm is because one of the main functions of the structure of a social norm is to perpetuate the species, but I don’t think that’s a natural thing for male homosexuals. Not just homosexuals, but men in general are naturally too promiscuous. It’s their relationship with women that makes them more stable so that they can channel it into building a family. These gay couples are going around saying, “Oh, we’re just like you straight couples, really! We just happen to be two men.” I don’t believe that. I think they’re different.

CS: You think that today, that’s what gay people are trying to do: become like the norm?

BB: Yes, in order to get acceptance and security, and I think that they believe they’ve found it and I’m worried and frightened about it, ’cause I believe that at any minute the world could turn on them, because buried down deep in every straight person is an unspoken thought that is saying, “They’re not really like us.”
CS: Okay, so you think that gay men are essentially subject to “vice”?

BB: If you want to make that moral judgment… Suppose a bomb dropped and there were only 100 women and 1 man left. Well, theoretically, that man could repopulate the species by impregnating 100 women a year. Now, take 100 men and 1 woman after the bomb drops; we could only make 1 baby a year, okay? To perpetuate the species, men have been programmed by evolution to be promiscuous. Marriage is the social taming of a man’s sexual energies by a woman, which is necessary to build a social structure. Because a man is made to screw more than one person, there’s nobody to stop him if he’s with just another man.

CS: You sound like the proverbial Republican who believes that marriage should be between a man and a woman.

BB: I think that marriage should be illegal! Just like pledging to God should be illegal. Marriage is a sacrament that has absolutely nothing to do with the State, and it should have no legal status whatsoever. A domestic partnership should be recognized by the State, and it should hinge on things like wills, joint tax filing, inheritance, things like that. And any two people should be able to do it. A marriage is just this left-over sacrament that somehow wiggled its way into legal status.

CS: You don’t believe that two men can be devoted to each other in a monogamous way and not cheat because of these carnal needs?

BB: Correct. I believe two men can be totally devoted to each other, but it probably won’t be in the same way that a man and a woman can be totally devoted to each other. I know several gay male couples who’ve been together a long time and go to the baths together, or they both go to one of those, you know, orgy places.

CS: I think I know who you mean. [chuckles]

BB: Yet they’re totally close, and they totally trust each other, and it’s a wonderful pairing.

CS: Do you have anything you’re positive about that you’d like to share?

BB: I’m finding out in this interview what you really think of me… That I’m this constant negative naysayer.

CS: Well, honestly, I agree with you on many levels.

BB: I do have a lot of positive feelings.

CS: Of course you do.