AND FURTHERMORE: Sean Baker and the Making of His Indie Hit, Starlet

The Slant interviewed the Florida Project and Tangerine director about his creative choices.

Writer-director Sean Baker may not (yet) be a household name, but his fan base is growing exponentially with his latest effort, Starlet, a cinematic gem.

The film follows the forging of an unlikely relationship between a bristly octogenarian, Sadie (newcomer Besedka Johnson), who harbors an unfulfilled, girlish dream of visiting Paris, and Jane (the radiant Dree Hemingway – yes, that Hemingway’s great-grand-daughter), a 20-something porn star. Jane’s sweet, breezy way offers a funny counterpoint to the crabby closed-off Sadie.

Here’s the set up: After purchasing a thermos at Sadie’s yardsale in sun-saturated Los Angeles, Jane finds a whopping wad of cash that amounts to $10,000 inside it. When she attempts to return the container and its small fortune, Sadie tells her all sales are “final,” rebuffing further conversation. Driven by guilt, curiosity, even loneliness, the long-legged Jane, with her adorable Chihuahua, Starlet, court Sadie’s friendship with insufferable–and yet, endearing–persistence. What ensues is a beautiful, unexpected, and poignant rendering of their quirky journey together.

Like Baker’s previous films – Prince of Broadway and Take Out – Starlet is a tour de force of cinéma verité. His trademark is turning ordinary situations upside down and inside out, often exploring the social fringe with such sensitivity and nuance that he shatters our expectations and erects new ways of feeling and thinking against convention.

In Prince of Broadway, he introduces us to the intimacies and struggles of Lucky, a sweet natured immigrant from Ghana, who hustles designer knock-offs, and clumsily parents a two-year-old left to his care by an ex. In Take Out, Baker shows us a day in the life of a Chinese delivery man, who must amass $800 in tips before the day’s end to pay off a life-threatening debt. With Starlet, which grapples with secrecy, loneliness, and loss, he depicts the porn industry with such refreshing neutrality and non-judgement that it’s a shock. Playing at select theaters around the country, the offbeat indie drama recently won Special Jury Prize at SXSW and nabbed two Independent Spirit Award nominations.

When The Slant caught up with the award-winning director, who also dexterously dabbles in television (Fox’s Greg the Bunny and MTV’s Warren the Ape), he walked us through his creative process, illuminating his rationale for including the film’s graphic sex scene, cutting a hard-earned shot, and naming his movie after Jane’s canine companion.

We heard that you left NYC for L.A. Did you move there for professional reasons? Tell us about the differences between working as a writer-director on the West Coast and the East Coast?

I lived out here briefly while working on Warren the Ape. It was during that time that I not only became interested in exploring the adult filmmaking industry (in a narrative film), but also fell in love with the weather. So when I came back out to shoot Starlet, it was a permanent move. Quite honestly, indie filmmaking is the same no matter where you live. Right now, I’m simply wrapping things up on the release of Starlet and attempting to find money to make my next film, so I could be doing this from any place on Earth with an Internet connection. It’s really just my social circle, the weather and the presence of the industry that keeps me here.

In a 2010 Wall Street Journal piece, you said you split your time working as a television writer and filmmaker. Is that still the case? We’d like to know how the two genres of writing influence each other?

That is no longer the case. The Greg the Bunny incarnations seem to have come to an end. We had a wonderful ride and it supported me for a few years while I was making my last few indies. I would say that the style of directing Greg the Bunny had more of an influence than the writing the features. We had the freedom to experiment with comedic improvisation on Greg the Bunny. The puppeteers and actors were encouraged to riff on the ideas that were presented in the scripts. Often, there were “scriptments” (a half script/half treatment). I used this model while making Prince of Broadway and again in a slightly more structured way with Starlet.

You told Indie Wire that you got the idea for Starlet while working on Warren The Ape. You said: “MTV was targeting 16 to 20 year old guys...so of course we were casting a lot of porn stars to please our demographic. The more we worked with these women and glimpsed behind the facade of their XXX personas, we slowly came to see that their personal lives were about as unglamorous as the rest of ours. I had the idea to shoot a very small vérité type film about a day in the life of a ‘starlet’ focused on a day in which she wasn’t working.” Will you tell us about your affinity for telling the story on the character’s “day off,” when the drama isn’t high?

I am always impressed with films that can simply be character studies (without any obvious narrative structures) that can still hold your attention. I wanted to attempt to make one of these, but when co-writer Chris Bergoch suggested a more plot driven approach, I recognized the potential to reach a wider audience, plus a subtextual reason for the narrative. The other version of this film would have been a meandering meditation on a young woman trying to make it in the world. It would have been interesting, but I’m very happy with the direction we took.

We’re curious about the title of the film. What was behind naming the movie after Jane’s dog, Starlet?

It’s about playing with the idea that things aren’t always what they seem to be and also that there is always another way of looking at things. One can see the title as representing what she does for a living or the name of the dog in the film. That’s up to the audience.

The scene where Sadie breaks down while searching for Starlet was amazing and excruciating to watch. Can you talk a bit about the symbolism behind Sadie’s search for a lost Starlet and how it relates to other themes in the movie?

Spoiler alert: If you haven’t seen the film yet, please stop reading. Ha ha! I think that once we find out that Sadie has had tremendous loss in her life, the scene becomes more meaningful. The way that my co-writer and I see it, Sadie is not only afraid that she has lost Jane’s dog, but that this will result in her losing Jane as well. I think this is a revelation for Sadie. Through losing the dog, she realizes what Jane means to her. This is why Sadie continually says to Jane that she can’t handle their friendship when Jane comes to pick up the dog. What she is actually saying is that she can’t handle losing another person she cares about.

Variety noted that the explicit pornographic scene in the movie could have put you in ratings trouble in the U.S. and some reviewers felt that the scene was gratuitous. Will you share with us the decision behind including Jane’s explicit sex scene on the set of her latest porn flick?

There are many reasons I decided to make this scene as graphic as it is. What it comes down to is that (besides ratings) I couldn’t come up with a reason why not to include it. This film was always intended for mature audiences, so I felt mature audiences could handle seeing sex on screen. It always puzzles me that American audiences are so much more comfortable seeing graphic violence than graphic sex.

You mentioned in an interview that while your film didn’t cast the porn industry in a positive light, it was a non-judgmental rendering. But we thought your portrayal was even more subversive, and one might say progressive: It demystified and almost normalized porn as a professional choice as morally neutral as, say, becoming a receptionist. Does your film intentionally challenge the notion that the decision to pursue a career in porn is necessarily a disempowering or morally fraught decision for a young woman?

One of the themes I wanted to explore with Starlet is how we judge others without ever having walked in their shoes. We are all guilty of it. So the last thing I wanted to do with this film is judge Jane in anyway. Part of being non-judgmental in the writing was to avoid making broad statements about the industry she works in. I personally don’t think that the choice of working in this industry is in any way morally fraught, and perhaps, by making her career a b-story, I was challenging that notion. That being said, there are some critics who feel that I should show the negative consequences of Jane’s decision to work in this industry. My response to that is that we already know that the social stigma that is imposed on these young women can have long-term negative effects. Why do we need to be presented with that information yet again?

At a post-screening Q&A session, you mentioned having a very small budget, and many volunteers to help you make the film. If you’d had an unlimited budget, what different choices would you have made in making this movie?

Well first off, everyone involved would have been properly paid for his or her efforts. I don’t want to make another film in which people aren’t fairly compensated. And without getting into too many details, there are some scenes that I would have re-shot. Plus, I could have spent more money on post-production: Our coloring was very basic. Thank god my cinematographer, Radium Cheung, shot the film so beautifully that not much high-end color correction was necessary.

We’re curious about the editing process. Tell us about some beloved scenes that you were sure you’d include, but for some reason you cut?

Editing is very important to me. In my films, so much of the film’s style is found in editing that I consider it fifty percent of direction. We were already playing on the themes of secrets and revelations. And the editing process allowed me to continue playing with those themes in post-production. In the sequence where Sadie loses Starlet, the dog, we had planned on ending that scene with Sadie finding Starlet in the L.A. River basin. It was a very difficult shot to pull off. We needed the dog to be by himself several hundred feet away down the basin. We pulled it off with an extra long telephoto lens and were very happy with the shot. It was one of our proudest moments of the shoot.

Months later, during post-production, we realized that we were revealing too much to the audience and the shot was unnecessary. Keeping the audience in the dark for a bit longer was more in line with the film’s style. So we ended up cutting the most ambitious shot of the production. That said, I’m actually quite happy with the final edit and almost wish I could find another couple of minutes to cut. At this point I feel that every scene is valuable and contributes to the film.

As writers, we’ve both experienced regrets once a piece has gone to print — sentences that could have been better, points we wished we’d made, anecdotes we wish we’d shared–did you experience any regrets after this movie came out? What might you have done differently on second thought?

There are entire scenes I would have re-shot because as director I will always see flaws. I try not to dwell on them, but it’s difficult.

So do Sadie and Jane ever make it to Paris?

Oh, well, that’s up to you to answer. All I can say is that they probably have a very interesting conversation once Jane gets back in that car.

THE METHOD: Cindi Leive on Glamour– “Move Forward, or Die”

In 2012, via email, the Slant interviewed Glamour's longtime EIC about the state of the industry.

When a 21-year-old Cindi Leive arrived on the scene at Glamour magazine in 1988, she’d just wrapped up an internship at the legendary literary journal, The Paris Review, a publication robust with cultural vitality and consequence. At the time, the newly minted Swarthmore grad was sure that her editorial gig at the woman’s glossy would be a short stop on her way to greater heights. “I admit,” she said at Swarthmore’s annual McCabe Lecture last year, “that I joined women’s magazines with some of the prejudice that one might expect from a graduate fresh out of seminars like Feminist Interpretation of Scripture. I thought the job would be fun and fluffy, and an easy thing to do before I went on to the truly important work of my life.”

Instead, the Condé Nast powerhouse and its rich milieu of brainy editors made a quick convert of Leive. Twenty- four years later, with a brief but influential interlude as editor-in-chief of Self, where Leive increased circulation by 11 percent in just two years, Glamour has become her magnum opus. At 34, she became the iconic magazine’s editor-in-chief, a post she’s prosperously held for the past eleven years (and counting.) Under her editorship, Glamour‘s circulation has risen to an historical peak at 2.25 million and reaches a staggering 17 million readers each month. During her tenure, the magazine has garnered nine National Magazine Award nominations and won four, including the top honor, Magazine of the Year in 2010.

But like other publications, Glamour has taken some hits from a slow-to-recover economy, and according to The New York Times, newsstand sales sank 17 percent through June of 2011 and 9.9 percent during the second half of that year, compelling Leive, a former president of ASME, to shake things up.

In March, she revamped the 73-year-old monthly, souping it up with advertiser-loving beauty and fashion pages. And in an effort to attract a younger demographic, the sought-after “Millennials,” Leive amplified visuals and first person narratives. Glamour’s inaugural self-expression issue–the January issue–is decidedly edgier with personal essays by media mavericks like Jane Pratt of xoJane.com (founder of the exquisite Sassy!), the creator and writer of MTV’s Awkward, Lauren Iungerich and the daring Jennifer Livingston, a Wisconsin TV anchor, who used airtime to address and challenge an email hater who knocked her for her weight.

This week, The Slant nabbed a Q&A with Leive to discuss the machinations behind retooling her well-established brand, the me-me-me centricity of social media (Is it a cultural phase or has our society fundamentally changed?) and the fate of the written word in our visually-obsessed culture.

Who is the new Glamour reader and which celebrities epitomize her?

I don’t think there’s one celeb who epitomizes the Glamour reader. There’s no one ANYTHING—this generation is too diverse and into being their own unique selves. I think Anne Hathaway, our current cover girl, comes close! But our readers are into everyone from Lena Dunham to Lady Gaga to Adele to Kate Middleton. I would say the common denominator is that they like women who are being themselves—women who have done things their way. That’s the new ideal for anyone under 30.

We’ve read that the new iterations of Glamour will spotlight more “everyday-women” alongside models and celebrities. It seems especially zeitgeist-y given the popularity of reality T.V. and social media where every-day- Janes can achieve a measure of fame or popularity, even if it’s only within her own network. Do you think our society will eventually reject our self-obsessing (via Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.)? Or has our society fundamentally changed?

I don’t think the tidal wave of self-expression will roll back—I think we’ve permanently moved from a day when the media was produced by Other People to this day, when it’s personal and produced by YOU, the reader. That said, of course I think how we use it will evolve. I think we’ve already hit a tipping point with the more banal uses of Twitter. No one wants to hear a celeb tweeting that they’re on the toilet. The real action in social media right now is around opinion and point of view. I will also say that I think one thing young women love about Pinterest and Instagram is the relative absence of snark and meanness. You generally feel better, not worse, after spending time there.

The EVP and Publishing Director of Glamour, Bill Wackermann, told Ad Week, “[Millennials] are interested in constant change, constant expression.” How does a magazine, especially one as iconic and well established as Glamour, accommodate the desire for constant change without diluting or confusing its brand?

A smart magazine has always had to change fast to survive—it’s like Woody Allen’s shark; you have to move forward or you die. We just have to move forward faster now, because the rate of change is faster. Magazines have to be fast-swimming sharks these days. The trick is to change the topics that you cover without changing the fundamental DNA of the brand and its key attributes. No reader wants a magazine that redesigns every month. But you want the conversation to be different. The DNA of Glamour is that we are the conversation women have when guys aren’t around—that stays fundamental, but the topics we’re talking about change.

This past February, Eric Wilson of The New York Times noted that features are now written more often in the first person. He said that you “wanted to drop the idea of a ‘house voice,’ always there to scoop in with big-sisterly advice.” Why did that “big-sisterly” voice become passé? Are first-person stories more compelling? What’s behind that?

We live in a more first-person culture now. I wanted the magazine to reflect that. And readers have loved it. In our January issue, you can hear from everybody from Kelly Osbourne to Jane Pratt to MTV’s Lauren Iungerich to Jennifer Livingston, the Wisconsin TV anchor who took down her weight haters on air. Even in our cover story, you hear not just from Anne Hathaway, but her interviewer, Eve Ensler. All those voices in one place—who doesn’t want to go to that party?

Traditionally, Glamour has stood apart from the snark, sarcasm and mean-spirited humor found in other popular media outlets with its old-fashioned earnestness. But we’ve heard that Glamour seeks to appeal to young women like those on the HBO hit, Girls. But the “cooler-than-thou” ethos of Girls seems to go against the magazine’s DNA. Is the magazine ushering in even more editorial changes that we’ve not seen yet to appeal to an irreverent or edgier audience like Girls?

We’re NOT mean-spirited, but I don’t think we have to be. I actually don’t think Girls is snarky or mean-spirited. Those girls are on a real quest trying to make themselves happy. When Hannah and Marnie are dancing in their apartment at the end of a night, that’s not mean-spirited or sarcastic—that’s an awesome girlfriend moment, and very Glamour.

Glamour.com has become more image and video-based and the new site looks great. We wonder, though: what’s the cost to the written word? It seems that all forms of media are conforming to our society’s ever-shortening attention spans and the non-reading millennial masses.

Our culture HAS become more visual. On Glamour.com, we’ve never really done super-long stories to begin with, but that doesn’t mean our coverage is fluffy—we get a lot of pickup around political items we do on our Conversation blog. But in print, I think readers do still want long-form stories—something to curl up with. They just want those balanced by amazing visuals. We’ll make sure we have a couple of great reads in every issue, but we’ll also make sure that we have some stories (health pieces, beauty, Dos & Don’ts, etc) that can be told solely through the pictures. That’s what I want in a magazine now personally, and I think readers feel the same.

Queer Historian Martin Duberman on Stonewall & His New Book

Shirley Velasquez and I visited historian Martin Duberman's Chelsea apartment in 2013 for this wonderful conversation.

By 1969, Martin Duberman, one of the founding fathers of LGBT studies in the academy, had spent nearly two decades in reparative therapy, desperately trying to stamp out his same-sex desires. It took a seminal moment in gay American history—the Stonewall Riots—to compel Duberman, then 39, to defiantly and resolutely reject the psychological establishment’s “cure” for homosexuality. “I don’t remember a sudden revelation,” the 83-year old recalled in a recent interview with The Slant, “but it was close to one.”

From his art-filled, book-stacked apartment in New York City’s gay enclave, Chelsea, Duberman reminisced about those heady days in the 60s and 70s when social movements–Black Power, Women’s Lib, Free Love–rebelled against the status quo and galvanized queers to start their own revolution: “After the rioting, the first gay organizations sprung up: Gay Liberation Front and Alternate You. I quit therapy and started participating in all the activism around gay rights.”

Through that turbulent awakening, Duberman grew into a formidable thinker and activist, advocating on behalf of the disenfranchised at every rung of society, sounding the alarm on the AIDS crisis, and rallying for the institutionalization of queer studies at Yale (he failed), and later at the City University of New York (CUNY), where he succeeded after a five-year battle: In 1991, the prestigious Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) was founded, and he helmed it until 2001.

Despite his enduring commitment to gay rights and lifelong dedication to queer scholarship, Duberman is deeply disappointed in the contemporary LGBT movement, noting that for the past 20 years it has been focused on marriage equality and repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. In Duberman’s view, the gay agenda is grossly myopic and its goals of assimilation counter the spirit of Stonewall and Gay Liberation, which sought to affirm, rather than obscure, queer differences. “That’s what’s happened to every single movement for social change in our country. The women’s movement is no different. Seneca Falls in the 1840s called for a broad gauged denunciation of male control. That turned into the Suffragist Movement, merely calling for the right to vote. Give me a break.”

To commemorate the forty-fourth anniversary of Stonewall this month, and Duberman’s scintillating new work, The Martin Duberman Reader, The Slant sat down with the CUNY professor of history emeritus to hear more of his thoughts on the state of gay politics, the revolutionary potential of trans folks and the crucial difference between liberals and radicals.

Lets go back to your youth. Tell us a bit about how your gay consciousness emerged and how your experience of coming out might compare to the coming out process today?

I suspect it depends on where people are located. There is a huge difference between the large cities and small towns or rural areas. Well, lets see. I’m so old. It’s long story. The gay consciousness has had many decades to evolve.

Start with those early days, when you were first grappling with your sexuality.

Well, when I was growing up the psychiatric profession overwhelmingly believed that homosexuality was pathology: You were sick; you were disturbed; you were ill. The good news was supposed to be that you could be cured by presenting yourself for psychotherapy and cutting off all your escapes hatches. When I first went into therapy, I was told that if I wanted this to work–if I wanted to end up straight–I would have to stop having any kind of sexual contact. If you tell this to somebody in their 20s, when they’re at their horniest, it’s not easy. And yet, I was so brainwashed that I tried. At the time, I had just begun graduate school so I was 21, or 22 and I was in a five-year relationship. It was a good relationship. I was told by the therapist I had to give him up, never see him again, let alone have sex with him.

Then, a later therapist–I’m embarrassed to tell you how old I was at that point because by then I should certainly have known better–blamed my mother. It was the standard psychiatric theory then: If you’re looking at a gay boy, you can be sure he has come out of a family configuration in which the father was either absent or hostile and the mother was overwhelmingly present. The boy ends up identifying with the mother who is a constant presence and being antagonized by the father. I can’t remember all the details of the theory, but God knows most of us believed it.

A lot of people feel that once you come out, everything’s going to be fine. That may well be true of Jason Collins, the basketball player who just came out. My partner and I saw Oprah interview him and he seems like a lovely guy, although an utterly traditional one. Everybody was instantly supportive and all the publicity surrounding his coming out has been glorious. It’s a whole different world today.

I did not ever come out to my parents.

Did they have an inkling that you might be gay?

Yes. My father died when I was 26, but even if he had lived, I wouldn’t have told him. I never told my mother, but through my sister, I kept hearing that my mother kept pestering my sister, saying, “I have a horrible feeling that Martin is homosexual. If you know, you have to tell me. We have to get him into therapy.” My mother was in fact a very good and tolerant person. I don’t mean to demean her. She was simply parroting back what society was telling her at the time.

So you came out to your sister?

Yes, she was a close friend of mine when we were growing up. I told her when I was in my late teens or 20s. There were very few gay bars then, but I’d take her to one of the earliest dance bars–the Grapevine–which was both men and women.

In New York?

Yes, I think it was pre Stonewall. I don’t know for sure. At the time, we all regarded Stonewall as the only place where you could dance, and that was almost exclusively a gay male bar. An occasional woman would appear, but she was probably attached to somebody working there. At the time, Stonewall was my bar of choice because I love to dance. I was there two or three times a week a least.

At what point did you give up on reparative therapy?

I don’t remember a sudden revelation, but it was close to one. It was around the time of the Stonewall Riots. After the rioting, the first gay organizations sprung up: Gay Liberation Front and Alternate You. I immediately knew once I started participating in all the activism around gay rights. I went to a Gay Liberation Front meeting. Then, around 1971, we started the Gay Academic Union. I also got on the first board of The National Task Force and on the advisory board of the Lamda Legal Defense. As soon as all these organizations popped up, I affiliated and resigned from therapy immediately. I had been described by a therapist I had for a decade as the most defiant human being he ever met because, I “would not get on the side of my own health,” he said. I kept giving up sex and then not giving up sex, back and forth, so I was ready to let go. People have said to me, “How in God’s name did you stay that long, and how were you brainwashed by this nut to such a extent?” And I say, “Take it as an index of just how deeply those of us of that generation had internalized homophobia.” And the truth is we’ll never get rid of it.

How do you mean?

Once you declare for gay liberation, you’re not liberated. You’re simply saying, I’m beginning the process of liberation now. If you’re of a certain age, that process is never going to end because there’s just...too much to work through.

Like?

Recently, I had an episode I won’t go into the details, but I got very upset over what had transpired between me and a friend, and I realized my feelings went way back to those years of being put down the whole time I was growing up as a pathologized creature, a second rate life, a deeply disturbed human being.

Interesting, but you’ve also learned to see your position as an outsider as a strength. In the chapter of your latest book, The Martin Duberman Reader, you cite Herbert Marcuse, writing: “Because of our rebellion against the subjugation of sexuality under the order of procreation, ‘homosexuals might one day provide a cutting-edge social critique of vast importance.’” In what ways has that turned out to be true and it what ways has it not?

Oh boy. You’ve pushed the red button because I have very strong feelings about this. That quote from Marcuse has long been my mantra. I really do believe that because of our special experience, we do have a set of perspectives about gender, monogamy, family, friendship, parenting, which the mainstream would deeply profit from if only it would open its ears. It won’t open its ears unless we continue to demand that it does. But instead of demanding it to, we say, “Oh no, we’re not different from you; we’re just like you. All we want are all the rights and privileges that the rest of you have. See, we want to have children. See, we want to settle down into monogamous marriages. Oh and we have Republicans!” It drives me mad.

What do you say to the gay people who say they just want to blend into the mainstream and don’t want to be a subversive radical force in our culture? How do you reconcile the desire to maintain an outsider point of view and the fact that that point of view depends on your oppression or subjugation in some way? It’s a tricky thing, isn’t it? Outsiders provide a vital social/cultural/artistic perspective that benefits the greater good. But the expense is being undermined and mistreated by the dominant culture?

Yeah. That’s a huge question. I don’t really know how to begin to tackle it. I would probably say, for starters, what radical feminists used to say to those women back in the 60s and 70s, who said, “Look, we believe in traditional sex roles. We do think women are more naturally emotional, empathic, etcetera, and that men are inherently more aggressive, competitive, etcetera.” The radical feminists said, “That’s an example of false consciousness. We know you don’t see it and we don’t know how to get you to see it, but we are convinced, that except for the obvious physical differences, there aren’t any differences between males and females.”

What about gays? Do you think they are inherently, or just culturally, different? In other words, if our difference is just a perception based on the social/legal/political/Judeo-Christian lens through which we are situated and seen, will we cease to be different once we’re accepted by all these systems of thought?

There’s long been a parallel discussion in the black community about exactly these issues. Blacks too have a different historical experience and political minded radical blacks don’t want all of that dissolved into some middle class, white version of who they are. James Baldwin put it this way: “Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?” Lets just build our own house. A whole raft of studies demonstrate that gay people tend to have better, more egalitarian relationships, in which both people are of equal importance and make equal contributions to each other’s well being. This is an ongoing struggle that every minority faces: How do we hold on to our different perspective?

You seem to hold a lot of hope for the radicalizing power of transgender people. You write: “...the transgender movements challenge to a binary notion of gender is of potentially huge importance.” But don’t they also reinforce the binaries you claim they challenge? On some level, it seems that they reinforce the idea that biology is destiny by needing to occupy a male or female body in order to express the full range of masculinity or femininity? In the case of Female-to-Males, many identify as “heterosexual men,” as opposed to the more radical “transmen,” which doesn’t seem all that subversive.

Absolutely. That’s a good and troubling question. It gets at Marcuse’s point. The potential in the transgender movement is enormous because what it’s saying essentially is, there isn’t anything essential! These individual configurations are all that we should be concerned about. It’s back to the old androgyny model that all the characteristics and qualities which traditional culture parcels out to one gender or the other should henceforth be combined in everybody. I think that that’s what’s revolutionary about the transgender movement. But I think the parallel is again the same with the gay movement. A lot of gay people just don’t want to accept the potentially revolutionary nature of their personhood and a lot of transgender people don’t want to accept it either. We want to fit in. We want to belong. We want to be just like you. And life is a horrible struggle. It’s understandable that people would want to belong, so they wouldn’t have to fight battles every single day in order to be accepted or appreciated.

Too bad we as a society can’t help people feel the power and beauty of their outsiderness.

That’s where we should be headed. Affirm who you feel you really are. Get rid of all that excess cultural baggage that’s been laid on you, telling you who you are. It’s very difficult.

In the chapter titled “Coda” you write: “Liberals struggle to integrate increasing numbers of people into what’s viewed as a beneficent system. Radicals believe that the system does have beneficent aspects, but also believe that it requires substantial restructuring.” Doesn’t the tension between these two modes of thinking brushing up against each other offer a better chance at forward movement than either one by itself? Also, the word “radical” is a term that has been hijacked by the Right to diminish and discredit progressive agendas, so we thought it was interesting that you choose to identity yourself as a radical. Why not the word “progressive” as opposed to “radical”?

You know, I sometimes use the word progressive instead of radical. In fact, I often do. But the word progressive is fairly recent. It wasn’t always available to me, but I don’t disagree with any of what you observe, but most of our social protest movements have been started by radicals, and they have very quickly been siphoned off, at best, by liberals, who think that basically our institutions are fine. Radicals don’t agree, they know there’s institutionalized racism, sexism, and classism. If you’re going to join the liberal camp and say that our basic institutions are in wonderful shape and that some tinkering around the edges is necessary, that is not going to meet the problems of our society because more than that is needed and things are growing increasingly worse. It’s not just the gap in income, but something like 47 million Americans are surviving on food stamps. I mean how can mere liberalism deal with that? Print up more food stamps? I mean you’ve got to do something about the excesses of capitalism.

Like what?

[Laughs] When confronted with these terrible problems, you can’t have answers in advance. In the process of struggle, partial answers begin to emerge and they’re not all going to be valid. But what’s the alternative? Settling for things as they are? Things as they are stink. So you’ve got to try something, and hopefully you work your way toward a better kind of society, a more equitable, just society. But no blue prints in advance. As much as I admire Karl Marx, a lot of his blue print is simply wrong. I mean, he certainly identified the problems of capitalism. But then he tried to find solutions in the British Museum instead of out in life working with like-minded people struggling toward answers of some kind.

Will you talk a little about the influence of queer culture on mainstream America?

So far, I don’t think the effect on mainstream culture has been significant, and I think that’s the fault of both the gay movement and the mainstream, which is willing to accept and tolerate us to the extent that we act like good middle class white people. They have no tolerance or understanding at all towards, for example, transgender people. I don’t know what else I can say, push me a little.

Do you think same-sex marriage can possibly influence the institution for straight people?

No, I don’t and that’s why I’m against it. Besides, why should married people, gay or straight, get all these special advantages in terms of gift taxes, social security benefits and all the rest of it? It just underlines still further the inequality of the culture.

We wondered what you thought about feminism in relation to men’s liberation. Does feminism’s longstanding assumption that men are always positioned above women make the feminist philosophical framework less effective in addressing the struggles unique to men. Are you at all sympathetic to the struggles some men’s rights activists have identified like a family law system that privileges mothers in child custody cases, the cultural vilification of male sexuality, and social customs that impose an crippling expectation of masculinity on men?

I think that’s a good point. I agree with it. Men have problems. I mean, it isn’t only outsiders who have problems. But I think if their roles were less rigidly defined, they’d benefit. If they weren’t defined as, for example, the breadwinner, the authority figure, etcetera. All of us forget that the privileged don’t have unclouded lives. Hardly. Life is tough, and unfortunately, we’re born with the consciousness that we’re going to die and that alone is enough to prevent us from being constantly joyous.