SLANT FROM THE PAST: Founding Editor of Ms. Magazine, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, on Her Iconic Magazine.

In 2012, the Slant spoke to the feminist writer about how Ms. forever changed news coverage on women.

Accepting an award from the Jewish Women’s Archive earlier this year, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, a longtime activist, pointed to the Statue of Liberty, just visible in the foggy distance, and quipped, “I love her, even though she’s not Jewish.” Over murmurs of laughter, she spoke of her love for Lady Liberty’s “grace and beauty,” and defined what the monument represents to her: “welcome, freedom, hope.” The same could be said of Pogrebin herself.

With an unflappable belief in the possibility of a freer, fairer world, Pogrebin has spent the last 42 years of her life combating anti-Semitism, promoting peace in the Middle East and tirelessly fighting for women’s rights in the U.S. and abroad.

To date, she’s written ten books, including her forthcoming How To Be A Friend To A Friend Who’s Sick, which arrives in bookstores next April. She’s also penned numerous think pieces for The New York Times, The Nation, The Huffington Post and many others.

But mostly she’s known for founding Ms. magazine, alongside Gloria Steinem and four other brave feminists, in the early ‘70s — a time when mainstream magazines roundly ignored women’s issues. It’s often forgotten, but during the tumult of Vietnam, Watergate and free love, readers were hard-pressed to find stories about “rape, domestic violence, the economic value of housework, and pregnancy discrimination in the workplace,” Pogrebin remembers. Not only did the shared struggles that women faced go unreported, they lacked the basic nomenclature to define them.

To commemorate Pogrebin’s crowning achievement — the establishment of Ms. 40 years ago this year — The Slant reached out to the 73-year-old social justice seeker about the iconic pub’s anniversary and legacy, and how it has influenced contemporary coverage of women’s issues. She also gave us her slant on D.C.’s female brain-trust: Michelle Obama, Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

There’s been lot of coverage of Ms.’s 40th anniversary this year. Much of it has been celebratory, especially when compared to the coverage from the 70s, when the magazine first launched. What kind of progress does that shift represent? What was left out? Has there been any coverage of the anniversary that you didn’t quite like?

Media attention to the 40th anniversary has been celebratory indeed — respectful, occasionally adoring, with an undertone of retrospective incredulousness, in a “Gee, I remember when they said it wouldn’t last” or “Wow, how amazing that you’re still around” sort of way. I haven’t seen anything negative about the anniversary. There’s a huge shift between then and now. In 1972, the women’s movement was young and rebellion was in the air. When Ms. first appeared on the scene there were so few national magazines that the advent of a new one, especially one that aimed to revolutionize the coverage of women’s reality, was Very Big News. There were only three networks then, no cable stations, and a limited number of radio stations and therefore whatever was on the air was more likely to be noticed and to become part of the conversation. Several of us founders appeared all over the media to discuss why we felt it was time for a woman-owned magazine and what we felt was lacking in conventional women’s publications. Pundits felt they had to take a position and a few ridiculed us. But women all over the country loved the magazine. Our first issue was supposed to stay on the newsstands for eight weeks; it sold out in eight days.

What lasting legacy did your work (and the collective work at Ms.) leave on how women learned to look at and talk about themselves?

Ms. was the first mass circulation magazine to report the truth about what was happening in women’s lives. We covered issues that other magazines ignored — rape, domestic violence, incest, the economic value of housework, pregnancy discrimination in the workplace, sexism in schools, inequality of funding for women’s sports, anorexia and bulimia. At the same time as we revealed and reported on women’s reality we helped change women’s reality by connecting feminist activists with one another, publicizing the work of advocacy groups, monitoring litigation that affected women, and reporting on legislative initiatives that advanced women’s status. Ms. articles and cover images helped to define issues and give problems a name. We helped establish feminists “uppity women” as admirable change-makers, and gave millions of non-movement women permission to make demands on their husbands, partners, bosses, teachers, and all the institutions affecting their daily lives.

Though Ms. has never been widely read by the American public, its impact was always far beyond its circulation and it left a journalistic blueprint for how to seriously report, analyze, and discuss the myriad non-parity issues that women face today. Open any of the big glossies (i.e. Elle, Glamour, Marie Claire, Cosmo), and, at the very least, readers will find modest coverage on issues such as income inequity, unequal distribution of household chores, domestic violence, etc. But in the absence of a “Ms.,” or as The New York Times described it in 1974, a ” journalistic clearing-house in the current phase of the feminist revolt,” how good of a job are women’s glossies doing in covering those issues? I can’t comment on women’s glossies because I haven’t looked at them in a serious way for years. But based on an occasional glance at issues lying around in my doctor’s office or at the hairdresser’s, my sense is that while they still focus on the traditional areas of fashion, food, and relationships, they also contain at least one article per issue on matters such as you cite in your question. Still this coverage is rarely comparable in depth of analysis or courage in reporting to articles Ms. published from the start, such as pieces on the misogyny of right wing zealots, or carcinogens in hair coloring, or the real American way of childbirth, or what it’s like to be a domestic worker, a prostitute, a woman on welfare. That cutting edge role is now largely filled by thousands, if not millions, of bloggers and online publications. As a result, no single source functions as a “clearinghouse” or authoritative voice in the way that Ms. did in the 70s and 80s. Today’s alternative media have drastically changed the landscape both for good and for ill. For good, because it’s healthy to have many different points of view in the mix. For ill, because most of us are suffering from information overload and the impact of an important story can get lost in the online noise. These days, it’s rare for an event affecting women to enter the collective consciousness and to engage millions in a shared, simultaneous national conversation. But when it does happen, it makes a difference — witness how the rape remarks of two Republican candidates’ comments outraged women all over the country and lost the men their election.

In that same New York Times article referenced above (“Two Faces of the Same Eve” by Stephanie Harrington, August, 11, 1974), Gloria Steinem notes “that there’s still the assumption that a woman is not a complete human being by herself.” Is that assumption still true today?

Depends on ethnicity, socioeconomic class, and culture. In the African-American community, for instance, many strong, independent women function without men and don’t behave or view themselves as if they are amputated or incomplete beings. However in the Jewish-American community, single women have less status, sometimes are made to feel incomplete without a man, and often internalize that inadequacy in a way that diminishes their self-esteem. In social groups of every demographic, it’s still the case that a 40-year-old single woman is viewed less favorably than a 40-year-old single man; and in heterosexual settings, an extra man is still seen as more desirable at the average dinner party than an extra woman.

We’d love to get one or two words from you on the following women:

Michelle Obama: Dazzling. Smart. Hope she will take on more cutting edge issues in the second term. Childhood obesity, healthy eating, and the needs of veterans and their families are worthy causes but they’re not really controversial. I wish Michelle would use the bully pulpit of the White House to champion reproductive choice and get up-close and personal about it. She has nothing to lose, and women have everything to gain.

Hillary Rodham Clinton: The best of the best. I hope she runs for president in 2016. But first I hope she takes some time for herself. Once she steps down from State, she deserves to have some fun.

Elizabeth Warren: She’s the next Hillary Clinton. Actually, it’s a toss-up between Elizabeth and NY Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. Both of them are the real deal. Can’t wait to watch them work together in the Senate!

Any other young woman in politics or media we ought to watch?

Now that the U.S. Senate is going to be 20 percent female, you should watch every one of these women and help keep them and their work visible long after the hoopla of the election season dies down. You should also hold their feet to the fire when it comes to tough votes, or when they need to break ranks with the men in their party in order to stay true to their values. Please make them — and every male legislator — accountable to the people who elected them.

Which feminists today do you think are doing the most cutting edge and exciting work?

Too many to name. I would rather name cutting edge issue areas than to single out a few individuals. Great work is being done by feminists all over the country on street harassment, on body image problems, on feminism and faith, on inter-generational dialogue and cooperation, on women in poverty. It’s unfortunate that conventional media pay little heed to such issues unless they’re espoused by a leader or spokesperson with pizzazz, glamour or sex appeal.(i.e. Cecile Richards, who is a fabulous spokesman for Planned Parenthood but also happens to be beautiful and gains media attention for reproductive rights as a result.) I’d like to see journalists dig into a problem area without necessarily personifying it. There are great untold stories about how different advocacy groups function in the struggle to advance women’s equality, or what’s at stake for women vis a vis certain pieces of legislation. The public needs to understand these issues and journalists could help them do it, but unfortunately, many groups have a hard time getting media attention without a “personality” to embody the struggle. (Recent example: The contraception story was there all along but it took Sandra Fluke to put it on the map. That’s understandable but the media owes it to us to do better.)

What women’s magazines (print or online) do you read?

I only read Ms. You knew I would say. I’m a founder and a loyalist! Happy 40th anniversary, Ms.!

THE METHOD: Inside the Celebrity Interview with Kevin Sessums

In 2013, the Slant had a juicy exchange with the Mississippi Sissy author and former Vanity Fair profiler.

Kevin Sessums, the celebrity journalist, has smoked a joint with Heath Ledger in Prague; he’s sparred with Barry Diller; he’s even been scolded by Barbra Streisand for not mentioning how “fuckable” she is in a story he once wrote for Vanity Fair. But nothing rivals his tête-à-tête with Courtney Love:

She kept me waiting for hours. Hours! She was upstairs at her house—that’s when they used to let you come to their houses—and I was downstairs looking around the living room. There was a little Buddhist altar with a little box on it. I opened it up and there was coarse, thread-like stuff in it. I was like, What the fuck is this? I started sniffing it and all of a sudden I heard, “What the fuck are you doing?” I looked around and it was Courtney. I said, “Well, what is this?” “Those are Kurt’s [Cobain’s] pubes,” she said, “Will you please put them back.”

Before all the Hollywood madness, Sessums was a self-confessed “Mississippi sissy,” who preferred to gab with the girls than roughhouse with the boys in his youth. “My love of language comes from sitting inside the house with the women,” he told The Slant during a Skype chat in March, “listening to them talk, while all the other kids were outside playing.”

Those formative coffee klatches taught Sessums the art of conversation and imparted an Oscar Wildean sense of comic timing—“knowing how and when to make a joke,” he says—skills that enabled him to confidently roll with Hollywood heavyweights, like Tom Cruise, Madonna, Johnny Depp, Jennifer Lopez, Hugh Jackman and many others, when he became a celebrity writer for Interview magazine, Vanity Fair and more recently, The Daily Beast.

Yet no matter how beautifully written, smartly executed or thought-provoking his celebrity coverage has been, he has always felt like “a poor stepchild,” in the home of respectable journalism.

In Sessums’s view, celebrity occupies a paradoxical position in the magazine world. On the one hand, the public’s insatiable appetite for stories about the rich and famous is the engine motoring newsstand sales and revving up online traffic. On the other, the literati deride it as a necessary evil to fund journalism of serious consequence. No one knows this contradiction better than he does.

From his cottage in Provincetown, MA, Sessums, the editorial director of the new LGBT magazine, 429, gave The Slant an inside look at working the underappreciated celebrity beat for legendary editors Tina Brown and Graydon Carter at Vanity Fair. He also reminisced about the good ol’ days when PR people had less power, magazines gave you more space (6,000 to 10,000 words) and celebrities offered you weeks of their time instead of hours.

In honor of long-form and Sessums’s heyday, this post runs more than 5,500 words. But it’s full of so many revelatory anecdotes about Hollywood stars and surprising insights that it’s a quick and exhilarating read. Promise.

You started your life in New York City as a Juilliard School of Drama student.

I didn’t graduate. And I never graduated from college. I’m not smart, just clever. I ain’t got no book smarts. But I can carry on a conversation and keep up. Juilliard wouldn’t let you work and go to school at the same time. So I decided to go to work. I don’t think I finished the first year. I was there in ‘78 so Robin Williams and Christopher Reeve were still roaming the halls. Juilliard was really just an excuse to get to New York.

Why’d you give up acting?

I had been out as a gay guy since I was 15 in Mississippi. It was ‘71 or ‘72. And I looked at the lay of the land and thought, I want to be a star. I want to be famous. I want to be successful, but I’ll have to go back in the closet. I couldn’t reconcile living a lie to enable myself to pretend. That was a falsehood that I couldn’t quite wrap my head around. So I stopped being an actor to work in the movie business.

Doing what?

Well, first I got a job as a freelance script reader. A woman named Buffy Shutt was head of production at Time Life Films. She needed an assistant and she liked the way I read scripts. So I gave up my agent and went to work for her. Then, within six weeks of my arrival, they did away with the whole division. I had sort of given up my life and was pissed. I went to the heads of Human Resources like a big shot, breaking through doors, going, “Fuck you! I’m going to take you to court! I’m going to sue your asses!” I was scared to do it, but I thought, “Don’t fuck me.” I worked for six more weeks and got a year of my salary when I left. Anyway, Buffy went back to Paramount and took me with her. I worked there for five years. She’d let me sit at my desk and write short stories and plays, and every now and then, I’d file. I was a highfalutin factotum. I was the only male secretary. This was the early 80s.

When did you start your gig at Interview magazine?

The whole division I worked for at Paramout moved out to Los Angeles. I didn’t want to live there. So a friend of mine, Mark Martousek, who worked at Interview, told me about a senior editor position there. So I went in and talked to Gael Love, the editor in chief at the time. I had no clips. Nothing. Nothing! So I had to give her some short stories I’d written. I didn’t even know the lingua franca of magazines. When people would talk about things, it was like, What language are you speaking?! I write about the whole experience in my next book, I Left It on the Mountain, in a chapter called “The Factory Worker.”

Did you ever run into Andy Warhol?

I’d met him several times. I knew him through a mutual friend, Henry Geldzahler, one of my first mentors in New York. He was the commissioner of cultural affairs for Ed Koch and a curator of 20th century art at the Met. So, I knew Andy through Henry. I had reservations about working at Interview. I thought it was tacky. I didn’t want to be part of the whole thing.

I was hired on a trial basis and was having a hard time. I was so stressed out I couldn’t sleep. Andy had a little office down on the first floor, near a bathroom I always used. I’d go in there and have panic attacks, thinking, I can’t do this job. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m faking my way through this. I remember looking in the mirror one morning and seeing dark circles under my eyes for the first time because I’d lost so much sleep. I’d think, You’re just working at a factory. That’s all you are—a factory worker. I never thought I’d be working for Andy. It sort of embarrassed me.

One day, I came out of the bathroom and Andy said, “You go in that bathroom a lot.” I said, “You think I’m doing coke? I’m no drug addict.” (I wasn’t yet, anyway.) He was taken aback. I said, “Honestly, I just want to do a good job here, Andy. And I’m still on trial.” He said, “I didn’t know that. I’ll talk to Gael and Fred Hughes.” Fred was the publisher back then. Later, he came back and said, “I told them to go ahead and give you a job. Welcome to the factory!”

You eventually went up the ranks to executive editor before leaving for Vanity Fair. How’d you end up there?

I did two interviews that got Tina Brown’s attention. I did the Playboy interview with Barry Diller back when he was the chief executive officer at Fox. He really wasn’t doing any press at the time. I was able to get an interview with him because I’d worked on the executive floor at Paramount, so he sort of knew me. Playboy had been trying to get an interview with him for years. So I wrote him a letter. I thought, He may remember me when I was a highfalutin flunky! This was ‘88 or ‘87. We went back and forth for weeks, trying to negotiate the terms of the Q&A and how much time I would spend with him. Playboy demanded lots of time.

How much?

In the old days, subjects spent a lot of time with you. Weeks! Now you’re lucky to get an hour between a Botox injection and a bowel movement. It’s all about seduction–you’re seducing them, they’re seducing you. It’s all about understanding the person. Giving a writer more time gets a better story. Anyway, I was getting ready to go to a screening one night. I had shaving cream on half my face when the phone rang. It was Barry, saying, “I have to really mull this over.” And I’d had it. I said, “You know what? There’s a fine line between mulling over this decision and playing with me. You just crossed it. Fuck you, man. I’ll give myself your answer: It’s no. Enough.” And he said, “Well, if you put it that way, I’ll do it.” But, Barry became a friend. A kind and generous one.

Celebrities are like thoroughbreds—I don’t mean to compare them to animals—but they are creatures who are sort of apart, and the minute they sense that you are afraid of them, you can’t ride them. Some of the things I’ve always said about myself are I am not a journalist. I am too lazy to be a journalist. I’m a writer who knows narrative and I’m not intimidated by fame. I don’t find it intimidating at all. I also did a Sam Shepard cover story for Interview. He was another celebrity Tina Brown wanted to get for Vanity Fair, and couldn’t. Suddenly I was this person she had never heard of who was getting interviews she wanted. She started asking around about me and then called me.

When I interviewed with her, I said, “You only need to know a few things about me. I’ve always had a woman boss, so I’m very comfortable with having a woman as my boss. I don’t like bullshit, so don’t bullshit me and I won’t bullshit you. And I don’t do anything unethical in my own mind, which gives me a little leeway.” She said, “OK, the job is yours. I want you here as a contributing editor.”

What year was that?

Eighty-nine or ‘88. Three months into starting, David Kuhn gave up the Fanfare section and Tina asked me to take it over. So within three months, I had two jobs there. One of my proudest moments as the editor of Fanfare was when I got a call from a friend at Harvard. He said, “There’s a guy here who’s really cool. He’s black and he heads the Harvard Law Review. Nobody knows about him, but I think he’s going places. He’d be a good subject for Fanfare.” So, I went to Tina and said, “This one’s a little different for Fanfare, but I’d like to put this guy, Barack Obama, in the column. She said, “It’s your section!” So we shot a big picture of him and put him in the magazine. It was his first national exposure. Boy, did he leave me in the dust. Good God!

Anyway, for my first story she sent me to England with Annie Leiboviz to interview all these women who were married to the Rolling Stones. I handed it in with the title, “The Women Who Still Sleep With The Rolling Stones.” Tina loved that title. She loved it a lot more than the story! She made me go through ten drafts. It was nightmarish. I thought, I’m in over my head. I can’t do this. I don’t know what she wants. I can’t please her. At one point she said, “Give me all of your research. I’ll write this damn thing!” So I brought in a shopping bag full of my back-up and plopped it on her desk. She said, “What’s this?” I said, “It’s my research. Good luck!” Then she called me and said, “Look, I hired you to write this. You have to write it. I don’t have the time.” Finally, after the tenth draft, she really loved it. She was even toying with the idea of putting it on the cover. So that was sort of a hit. The next thing she gave me was a cover story on Madonna. She accepted the first draft I submitted. She just loved it. From that moment on, I was golden. She gave me everything.

You’ve worked with two legendary editors, Tina Brown and then Graydon Carter. Tell us a little bit about their different styles.

They’re both amazing editors and are deservedly legends.

Tina is very much a part of what I call the BWSJ—the Barbara Walters School of Journalism, which means being a part of the world you cover because it’s all about access. It’s all about being in some lane of traffic, at a dinner or a party, and being able to turn to someone and say, “You should do a story.”

Also, Tina made it her mission to make her writers stars. She put our names on the cover. There were always the names of the writers as much as the title of their stories. Vanity Fair was like a marquee. I’ll always be grateful to her for that.

But both Graydon and Tina want respect from the insular world of journalism in New York. They want to be considered serious and thoughtful. When they get criticized, it’s for their celebrity coverage and their covers. So I was often the weapon that they would be attacked with. When they looked at me, they saw a weapon that was used against them. And I sensed it. I once told James Wolcott, whom I adore, “James, I wish I was as cool as you, but I know my place. I’m the trailer park.” That’s been the curse of my life. I’m a little Mississippi sissy, a poor boy from the South. I’m the white trash. I’m what’s used for criticism. It was frustrating and odd, you know. The better I was at what I did, the bigger the criticisms and the curse.

I’m a dinosaur now. I outlived my use. The business—the world—is a very different place now on lots of levels.

Different how?

For one thing, back in the day, they gave you so much more space. When I would write prose in the old days, they gave me 5,000 to 7,000 words. Some of my stories were 8,000 to 10,000 words! They would give you space to really write and explore a subject. Maybe it’s a reflection of the times, but editors today give you 1500 words. They want you in and out. I don’t understand it. It’s the Twitter universe! Magazines just don’t want long-form journalism, especially when it comes to cover stories and celebrity stuff. Long-form is saved for all things serious. Also—I’m going to get in trouble here—there is an abdication of editorial responsibility to publicists. A lot of editors give publicists too much leeway.

In the old days, publicists would never get to approve a writer. Ever. Ever. Ever. Ever. Ever! Now, they get to dictate who gets to write their client’s story. When did writer approval happen? Just as celebrities shouldn’t be able to sense your fear, publicists shouldn’t either, and I think that editors should be willing to say, “You don’t get to approve who I hire as a writer. If you don’t want to do this, fine.” Call their bluff! Go to a second, third or fourth choice.

I was fired off a story for a fashion magazine and took the story to The Daily Beast. It was a real revelation, like “Wow, the world has changed.” That’s when I realized I belong in the Museum of Natural History. I’m just a cranky, old dinosaur.

Wait, you got fired?

I got fired off the story because the star felt that my questions were too personal. The magazine sided with the celebrity instead of backing up their writer.

What happens is when you interview people there’s an understanding that you’re not supposed to ask certain questions. The PR person will talk to an editor and say, “He’s not going to ask this question.” I’ll agree to let the editor agree to that, but then when I go to talk to the person I’ll say, “OK, so your PR person told my editor that I wouldn’t ask you this question, so I’m not going to ask you this question. But I am going to write about it. We can talk about it, or we cannot talk about it. But I want to be honorable and upfront with you by letting you know that I didn’t agree not to write about it. I only agreed not to ask you about it. Now it’s up to you.” Eighty-five to 90 percent of the time they say we can talk about it. It’s interesting.

Speaking of off-limits topics, you often ask subjects who are presumed gay, but are not out, about their sexuality. Why ask that question?

In the past I was like, Never out anybody. I was very adamant about that and at some point I sort of switched. I thought, You know what? I’m not going to buy into somebody else’s shame. They can deny it. I don’t give a shit. That’s fine. But I’m not going to be denied the question like it’s something shameful. Also, I’m not asking them what they do in their bedroom. I’m not asking them if they are a top or a bottom or what their sexual proclivities are. If someone is straight, that part of their life infuses all aspects of who they are. They talk about it all the time, and it’s not about being private. I understand if you’re a movie star, you’re selling an image and people have to be able to project things onto you, especially if you are a romantic lead. I understand all of that in the abstract. But I’m not an adjunct to their career completely. I’m there as someone who’s got a job to do. I’m there to have a conversation. I’m not their agent. I’m not their PR person. That’s not my job. My job is to have conversations with them as people.

So your problem is with celebrity handlers?

It’s not even a problem, but you know what? I’ve got a job so respect my job as much as I respect yours. Don’t look at me like I work for you. I don’t work for you. You work for the celebrity. I work for the editor. Those should be two separate things. In the recent past, they’ve sort of become blurred. But I like publicists. I even thought about being a publicist because I get it. Because I’ve seen all sides of it, I could be a great publicist. I feel for them. They have to be the bad cop so that their celebrity can be the good one.

Having written in this genre for decades, we wondered why you think celebrity journalism is so important to American culture? Aside from feeding a lust for gossip, why is it relevant?

Well, I don’t know if it’s important. I think it has its place. One hundred years from now, when people look back on this time, they’ll see it as the gray parrot in the cultural mine. If it was done well there’s a cleverness to it. There are amazing writers who write about pop culture. Mark Harris, an Entertainment Weekly columnist, is incredible. The subject matter doesn’t determine the quality of the writing.

I’ve always looked on what I do as a truck-driving job. I drive glamorous cargo. I deliver the goods at deadline and dump it out. I get back behind the wheel, and I drive the truck. It’s a blue-collar job. I realized early on that people read magazines on airplanes and while taking a shit. That’s where your work is read! So I have a very realistic attitude about it all.

If I thought of myself as a journalist, I would really have an inferiority complex. Thinking of myself as a writer is self-protective. If I didn’t think of myself as a journalist when I was at Vanity Fair, then I didn’t feel quite so inferior. It was weird though: You’re writing the cover story and your name is splashed across the cover, and yet the incongruous fact was that you just felt like the poor stepchild. I was Cinderella and it was always midnight. Very seldom was I at the ball.

You’re sometimes criticized for being too soft on your subjects and for being too present in your stories. What’s your response to that?

People say, “Oh you’re never mean enough” and I always tell them that these people are not Nazi scientists. There is nothing evil about them. Sometimes their egos run rampant and they can be a little diva-esque, but they are not evil. I never understood trying to make your name as a writer by being mean to celebrities just because they’re famous.

And yeah a lot of people say, “You put yourself in your stories too much. Remove yourself.” I know this is going to sound egotistical but a lot of times I thought I was more interesting than the person I was interviewing. Not all the time. Don’t get me wrong. Maybe 40 percent of the time, I’ve sat there and thought, Thank God I’m sitting here or this would be really boring! That’s what I take into the room: I’m not lucky to meet you, you’re lucky that I’m the one interviewing you.

What qualities make for a great interview?

A really good interview is a personal, intimate conversation as performance art. You and the interviewee realize it’s going on a page, yet there’s a heightened intimacy that goes on where an interview ceases to be an interview and becomes a conversation. But then you have to be able to translate that onto the page and know how to write. I write it like a short story. I love the Q&A format. It’s like a talk show!

But, I am amazed sometimes when I read Q&As. I think, Did the interviewer even listen to what the person just said? I will always be the Mississippi sissy, who is inside with the women, listening to them talk, while all the other kids are outside playing. I love language and conversation, listening and hearing the stream of conversation, knowing how and when to make a joke. That comes from sitting inside the house with the women. That’s part of my interview technique: I go back to that little kid who loved sitting with the women.

What are some of your other interview techniques?

I do my research the night before the interview so it’s fresh in my mind. Then, I sit down and write out my notes and imagine the conversation. I prepare where I am going to lead this person and decide beforehand where to drop in a reference. And I sort of know and expect what an answer will be so I can then follow up with some unexpected thing that will surprise them.

One of the oldest tricks in the book is to be totally open and honest about yourself. Tell them your deepest, darkest secrets, some nasty awful shit. It never goes in the damn story and totally throws them off. Plus, they love it when you talk dirty. It shocks them.

The impetus for them to talk to you is a new product, a movie, or a book. So on some level it’s a commercial transaction. Use that commercial transaction to find your way into some other area of their life. Your research will often lead you to a bit of knowledge about the person that is far removed from their popular image. It’s always there. You have to follow the breadcrumbs when you’re researching them. Keep following the trail. Sometimes it’ll take an hour or two, but you’ll get to a detail that’s like, Oh my God. From that one detail you never expected, a whole world opens up. You’ll drop that detail into the conversation and they’ll say, “Oh my God. How did you know that?”

Give us an example from one of your past interviews.

Sure, I used to submit stories I’d written to The New Yorker. There was a woman there named Linda Asher, who found my work in the slush pile and began to engage me. I sent her like 12 or 13 stories. Howard Moss, their poetry editor for nearly forty years, found out about me from Linda. He was one of the first people who read my work and became my mentor.

Because I had done my research, when I went to interview actress Michelle Williams, I knew she loved poetry. (And if I were straight, honey, I’d still be chasing her. I fell in love with her!) I went down to her house in Brooklyn. I stopped at a bookstore on Smith Street and saw Selected Poems by Howard Moss. I thought, I’m going to buy her a Howard Moss book of poems because I loved Howard and that’s a good way to connect my life with her. (By the way, sometimes it’s good if you give your subject a gift; they love a thoughtful gift. The one thing celebrities love is free shit! They do, honey, more than any others I’ve met in my life!)

I gave her the book and she gasped.

“Oh my God,” she said, “this man is one of my favorite poets in the world. When Heath died, there was a poem of Moss’s that got me through my grief. I would read it over and over and over. Just the other day I was trying to find it, but I couldn’t remember the name of it.”

Then, she looked at the table of contents and found it. It was called “The Pruned Tree.” I said, ”Will you read it to me—for Howard, for Heath, for me, for yourself?” And she did. So the impulse to give her a gift, to honor her love of poetry, gave me an “in” into an interview that I would have never had if I had just sat down to talk about her movie.

Plus, I had done Heath’s first big story, which was on the cover of Vanity Fair. The photographer Bruce Weber and I flew to Prague. Heath was filming A Knight’s Tale. I snuck over a joint in my sock, which I always did back in the day. I spent a lot of time there, about a week, doing lots of things with him. One night, he asked if I wanted to go to a party with him, but it had to be off the record. I said, “Sure.” We were on the Charles Bridge shootin’ the shit, and I pulled out my joint and shared it with him.

I told Michelle about that. I said, “I’ve always cherished that memory, thinking it was really cool, but I almost feel like I have to make an amends because of the way he died. Before I really talk to you, I need to come clean. It was just pot, but I did drugs with Heath and I feel like I should apologize. You’re being in my life as an interview subject is a way for me to say, ‘I’m sorry.’” Sometimes it’s more than just a job, it becomes your life.

What celebrity profile are you most proud of?

A personal favorite of mine is the one I did on Emma Thompson. I think that was some of my best work. The Courtney Love story was a good one too. Again, I spent a lot of time with her, which was exhausting, but it turned into a really great story. It was complicated, but full of everything. I interviewed her naked in the bathtub! I told her, “You need a bath! I can’t sit here and talk to you unless you get a bath. Why don’t we go to the bathroom and you get in the tub.”

She said, “I’m not doing that!”

I said, “Think about it Courtney. You’ll get attention, so I think it’d be good. Strip down and let me interview you next to the tub.” I watched her bathe.

People thought I was too nice to her, but she was this very tortured person that I found compelling. Journalist Lynn Hirschberg had done a brilliant hatchet job on her. My piece came out as a sort of bookend. It was to say, “This is who she is. You interpret it. I’m not going to color this. This is what I saw. This is everything that happened.”

And I like the Barbra Streisand story I wrote for Vanity Fair. This was ’91 or ’92, before email. She invaded my life—faxes! faxes! phone calls! phone calls!—trying to control the piece. I finally had to tell her to back off.

The night she got the early issue of the magazine she called me at 2:00 a.m. I was sound asleep when the phone rang: “Hi, it’s Barbra. Did I wake you up?” she asked. Then she went through the whole story: What she liked, what she didn’t like, what was a bad quote, on and on.

At the end, she said, “So, I have a question. Why didn’t you say I was sexier?”

I said, “Barbra I got Jon Peters saying that when he first met you, you walked up some stairs in front of him and he saw how sexy your ass was.”

She said, “I know. That was nice, but you as the writer should have said I was sexier.”

So I said, “Barbra let me tell you something. When people asked me what is Barbra Streisand really like, I give them a one word answer: Fuckable.”

And she said, “Oh my God, I love that! Why didn’t you put that in the story?”

Ha! Why didn’t you?

People would have thought I was a sexist pig!

So who are you dying to interview?

When people say who’s the most interesting person you’ve interviewed I always say, “The next one!” So I’ll say that to you, the next one.

Can you tell us a little more about your forthcoming book?

It’s sort of a sequel to Mississippi Sissy, my first book. The title, I Left It on the Mountain, comes from having climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. I made the summit. I sold it to St. Martin’s Press as a glamour pus, life in the fast lane of New York City type of book. Each chapter is sort of self-contained, yet they all connect.

The chapter called “The Climber” is about my climb up Mount Kilimanjaro, which a note from Tom Cruise inspired me to do. I had just told his girlfriend at the time, Penélope Cruz, about my HIV status. I’ve interviewed her twice. I love, love, love her! And if I were straight, I’d still be chasing her too. She told Tom that I was HIV positive, so he sent me a note, saying how sorry he was to hear of my illness. But I hadn’t thought of myself as ill.

Tom and I had become friendly at one point after I interviewed him years ago. I’m sure someone said, “Stop seeing him. He’s an out queer writer. What are you doing hanging with him? People gossip.” I found out that people were gossiping, which shocked me because I didn’t look at him as a sexual creature at all. I didn’t. He was just a nice guy to hang out with.

Anyway, I saw the word illness in the note that he had sent me. While it was a thoughtful, sweet note, it felt like a statement about my life. Getting that letter made me climb that mountain. So when I saw him at the Vanity Fair Oscar party later that year, I had just climbed it. He came through the back door. He’d ridden his motorcycle to the event. He was wearing a black motorcycle helmet and black leather pants. I said, “I made the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. I climbed it because of you motherfucker. I loved your note and it touched my heart, but I had to prove to you and to me that I wasn’t ill so I climbed that damn mountain.”

The last chapter is called “The Addict.” During all that time of interviewing all these high-profile people, I became a meth addict. For the last year and a half, I’ve gotten sober. The book covers my spiritual journey to getting sober in this heightened world of celebrity.

I just hope St. Martin’s likes it because it’s not exactly the book they bought! There are parts in it that will make Shirley MacLaine’s eyes roll.

Andrew Sullivan once said: “Kevin is a one-off. So at home and canny in the world of celebrity journalism and yet the reason he is so good at understanding character is because he’s lived it. Underneath the urbane exterior is Flannery O’Connor on acid.”

You know, it’s Flannery O’Connor’s birthday today. That’s not a coincidence. That’s God. God just spoke through you. On Facebook, I posted some excerpts from her lecture, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction” and an audio of her reading from her most famous short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

I think part of what I do and the reason I don’t write hatchet jobs is because I look on it as my mission to find the good man or the good woman in each of these celebrities. They’re in there somewhere.

THE METHOD: The Advocate’s Editor-in-Chief on Jodie Foster’s “Coming Out” Speech and Gay Marriage

In 2013, the Slant spoke with the lovely now-former EIC of the Advocate about queer politics and journalism.

When Matthew Breen, the editor-in-chief of the 45-year-old LGBT magazine, The Advocate, came out to his parents in 1995, Ellen DeGeneres was still in the closet, Clinton’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) policy was in full swing and “gay marriage” was laughably unforeseeable. Despite the unwelcoming climate, the handsome 21-year-old mustered up just enough courage to confess his sexuality to his parents in what he calls “a clumsy letter.”

“Then I sort of ducked and covered,” he remembers, “waiting to see what would happen.” Despite the social pressures of growing up in conservative Salt Lake City, Utah, Breen’s progressive parents handled the news pretty well. But it wasn’t easy for them. “Their whole notion of what my life would be was suddenly upended,” he recalls, “and they were afraid I’d get beaten up or become HIV positive.”

A decade into his tenure at Here Media, the parent company of gay glossies, Out and The Advocate, where he’s held editorial posts since 2003, he’s no longer a novice in matters of coming out. In fact, Breen has edited and published so many stories on the topic one could say he’s mastered the form. So when The Slant reached Breen at his L.A. office, we had to get his take on Jodie Foster’s surprising–and puzzling–Golden Globes’ “outing” this past awards season.

He also shared his musings on the most influential out celebrities, why subscriptions to The Advocate still come (closeted) in opaque white wrappers, and how the Supreme Court might rule on the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and Proposition 8.

Let’s start with your early life in Utah. How did you make it out of there to become the editor-in-chief of The Advocate?

I knew I was not going to be in Utah forever, but I grew up there and went to the University of Utah for college. Afterwards, I went to work for the Utah Film Commission and the Sundance Film Festival in low paying, but cool jobs. I left Salt Lake City in ’99 and got a job through a contact I made at Sundance working in public relations. But when I couldn’t bear PR anymore, I started writing freelance and doing film reviews for Out. But, you know, a 100-word piece a month does not pay the bills. So I started doing music reviews and other stuff for them. And eventually, I became the film reviewer for The Orange County Register‘s website, which is a very conservative paper in southern California. So that’s a little ironic. But soon a job as the associate editor for Out opened up: It took a dog’s age, but I finally got that job. In April, I will have worked between Out and The Advocate for ten years.

You look pretty young to be an editor-in-chief!

I’m now 38. At 36, I was tied for youngest-ever editor of The Advocate.

We read your provocative editor’s letter on Jodie Foster’s coming out speech at the Golden Globe Awards. In your view, her speech was shrouded in shame, animosity and self-defensiveness. A lot of your readers came to her defense, basically arguing that privacy is sacred and her orientation is not our business. We wondered what you thought of that?

My frustration is different from a reader’s frustration. So when all of these readers read my editor’s letter about Jodie Foster and said, “Leave her alone. It’s her business,” on the one hand, I totally agree. It’s her business entirely. But what I wrote about was the way in which she said she was not coming out by coming out, how tortured it was and the pall of shame about it. My frustration is partially with the people around celebrities who keep them in a tortured bubble. I hate that. It does horrible things to them and not just gay people, but also people like Michael Jackson or Tom Cruise (who knows if he’s gay or straight!). These bubbles do terrible things to people by instilling this sense of shame. So that’s what I see a lot of in my profession that readers don’t necessarily see all the time. Had she said nothing we would have said, “Oh no, a missed opportunity to come out,” but we would not have been surprised and we would not have raked her over the coals for it. But she didn’t. She had this weird rambling speech.

Some speculated that she was just nervous...or drunk.

I have no idea if she was drunk. I have no idea if she drinks at all. But I do know that they don’t serve you dinner at those things and they put a giant bottle of champagne on the table. So if you only had the tiny bits of finger food they provide and you’ve been having a couple of glasses of champagne, it’s highly possible that you could have over served yourself. Mel Gibson looked drunk! I don’t mind saying that.

Every time the camera panned to him, he seemed a little...struck...

He seemed like he’d been electrocuted.

Ha! So, which out celebrities have had the biggest impact on cultural perceptions of LGBT people?

I think Chaz Bono’s coming out as transgender has been really transformative. My first issue as editor of The Advocate had Chaz on the cover. I was excited for that. I think he’s the most prominent trans person in the country.

Also, George Michael’s coming out in the 90s was hugely important. Actually, there are a few musicians I think were very important: KD Lang, Melissa Etheridge, Elton John.

Ellen is extremely significant in that she’s in everyone’s living room every day! For the first couple years of her talk show, she didn’t really talk about gay stuff. The gay theme in her old sitcom was thought to be the thing that tanked her show, rightly or wrongly. So I can understand the reticence in keeping LGBT issues off her talk show. She’s just so charming and endearing. I don’t mean this in a negative way, but she’s inoffensive. Being so smart and funny and putting together a great talk show, has made her very influential.

The most influential?

I would be hesitant to put “the most” on anybody. But she’s extremely important. Also Neil Patrick Harris’s coming out was very important because he’s upended the idea that you can’t play straight after you’ve come out. Matt Bomer too. Bomer doesn’t talk about his sexuality so much. But it’s known that he’s gay and partnered with kids. Celebrities who are confounding expectations of masculinity and femininity have a big effect.

Speaking of coming out of the closet, does The Advocate still show up in subscribers’ mailboxes in that opaque white wrapper, which seems to suggest naughty–shameful–content?

Many, many, many of us here have always had a very complicated relationship with that opaque wrapper. It’s been optional for a long time. People complain about it, not knowing that they can opt out of it when subscribing. Maybe the print allowing you to opt out isn’t large enough. The idea has always been–and I’m not claiming to subscribe to this philosophy–but the idea was if you live in Mississippi, and your letter carrier knows everybody in town by name, and you get The Advocate, but you’re closeted, who’s to say that your letter carrier is not going to talk to your entire neighborhood about what kind of mail you receive? So it wasn’t designed to be shameful–there’s that word again–but to protect people and to make sure that people who wanted The Advocate could get it without alerting the entire world to it. But there is that sort of, “Well, what’s inside? Is it porn? Is it something else?” It’s a little strange. Nobody loves it. We think of it as a necessity in some instances.

What was your coming out experience like?

I came out to my parents when I was 21, when I was still living in Salt Lake City. It was just such a miasma of strange emotions. I felt the pressure of a secret burning away at me. I didn’t know what to do with it, but thought I should come out. Like a lot of people, I did it in spurts, like “I’ll tell these people, then these,” and once I started that, I had to tell everybody all at once. Then I sort of ducked and covered, waiting to see what would happen.

I wish I hadn’t written it down because I’m sure it was clumsy and I know my parents have kept it. I would be able to articulate it better now after years of having thought about it. For the same reason, I don’t keep a journal very frequently because I hate reading what I wrote about in the past. I’m like, “Edit! Edit! Edit! Edit! God, I wrote that so poorly,” which is probably the wrong way to approach a journal.

Anyway, I grew up in Salt Lake City in a non-Mormon family. We were transplants to Utah when I was little. I didn’t know very many gay people and felt very isolated. Being in the closet kept me from having a closer relationship with my family than I could have had at the time. They’re great people. They are so supportive, very invested in my life, interested in my work and community. But my coming out wasn’t easy for them in the beginning. I think I had a fairly typical frustrations with them: “Why aren’t you getting this faster?” I wondered. But I obviously had years to think about it and they hadn’t.

Sounds like you’re sympathetic to parents’ experience of a child’s coming out.

Yeah, they have to suddenly change their minds about who their kids are. It’s just sad that there are these presumptions about what our kids’ lives are going to or should be like. And it’s tough in a conservative community. My parents were not conservative like those surrounding us, but no one lives in a vacuum. The social norms and pressures of our surroundings had an impact on them. Even progressive folks have to still deal with the new notion of what their child’s life is going to be like. My parents were afraid for me too. They were worried that I was going to get beaten up or become HIV positive. They had all sorts of concerns that are completely reasonable when you’re not in LGBT culture yourself. But they’ve come to understand a lot more about what my life really is.

Are you in a relationship?

Yes, my boyfriend is Austrian. He’s from Vienna. He lives in Los Angeles now, and he’s here legally. But there is finite time period to that. Just looking at the various options for him to stay past the end of that visa–to get a new visa or a work visa–it’s just really complicated. Meanwhile, if he were female, and we were married, she could easily apply for a Green Card or Permanent Alien Status or find a path to citizenship. We’re not married. But even if we were, there’s no federal recognition for our relationship. I think about all these bi-national couples that have been together for a very long time, who have kids, businesses or properties together, the foreign national could literally be deported at any time. It’s just one factor among many that goes with our rights and relationships not being recognized by the federal government.

What do you think is going to happen with the DOMA and Proposition 8?

Well, you know, the Supreme Court is totally opaque. They are going to be hearing oral arguments on some of these cases at the end of March and nobody knows what questions they’ll decide to address, whether it’s California specific–the Proposition 8 case, specifically–or Edie Windsor’s case. [When Windsor’s partner passed away in 2009, it cost her $600,000 in combined federal and state income tax because DOMA prevents the Internal Revenue Service from recognizing her as a surviving spouse.] We don’t know what question they are going to take up or how narrowly or broadly they are going to rule. They could strike down DOMA, or they could just let the Prop 8 decision by Judge Vaughn Walker stand, meaning marriages would resume in California. They could decide to allow this to be a state-by-state thing or go federal.

I’m an optimist, though. I look at Chief Justice John Roberts, who is a young and will likely be on the Supreme Court for a few more decades, and I tend to think that he is aware of the fact that he will have a long legacy, and that this will be a very important case in his legacy. I think his decision to uphold the constitutionality of most of The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (known as Obamacare), which was not the decision that conservatives expected him to make, is a tiny hint on how he views his legacy. I’m not a court prognosticator. I’m not a legal scholar. I don’t know all that much about the Supreme Court to be honest, but a lot of the attention is focused on Anthony Kennedy’s swing vote. But I think Roberts is our key to this somehow. My optimism leads me to believe that he won’t be as draconian as Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas.

There are some camps within the LGBT community who think making the right to marry a central cause of the movement was short-sighted. They see marriage as a normalizing apparatus that stigmatizes relationship outside matrimony. The better fight, in their view, would have been to divorce all the privileges and benefits that accompany the right to marry from marital status, so that all those social securities and advantages are available to everyone. What’s your response to them?

You know, I think that the federal government as far as marriage goes shouldn’t determine what rights and responsibilities you want to assign to somebody else. I don’t see why you shouldn’t be able to assign those rights and responsibilities to any adult that you like. I don’t know why it has to be called marriage. I don’t know why the government is involved in marriage in the first place. I don’t know why that word “marriage” can’t be associated with the kind of relationships that we have. Civil Unions are not the same as marriage in this country so it stands to reason that people are fighting for marriage, but if marriage has this religious context to it, which it does, I don’t know why the government is in the business of marriage at all. There’s nothing wrong in my opinion–and this would be preferable–if the government were involved in the contract of unions, leaving marriage to whatever spiritual religious organization couples choose to engage in. So I am fully in favor of the government getting out of the marriage business.

How do you think same-sex marriage has effected or changed the institution of marriage in and of itself? Has it redefined the institution for the mainstream in any way?

What we’ve seen so far is that there’s a positive economic impact. Jurisdictions within cities, countries in Europe and other places who have legalized same-sex marriage, have seen a boost to their economy because more people are engaging in an activity that has a lot of upfront costs and then a lot of social economic benefits down the road. But apart from that there is zero effect. There’s neither a positive, nor negative effect. We have lots of evidence throughout Europe and in New England, and soon we’ll have proof in Washington State, that there is no affect on straight people.

Gay marriage has been a central part of the LGBT agenda for a while now. Once DOMA is repealed, what is the next big challenge for the LGBT community?

DADT, although technically repealed, is not a done deal until DOMA is outlawed because it prevents partners from receiving death benefits and spousal and child support, among many other rights that straight married couples receive automatically. And transgender people are not allowed to serve in the military. There are still 29 states where you can be fired for being gay, or having a gender identity that your employer doesn’t like. There are enormous hurdles that remain for transgender populations and enormous health disparities for people who are LGBT. Lesbians and transgender people have a whole range of issues they have to deal with in terms of access to health care and discrimination in health care.

It sounds like the struggles of transgender people are the next big challenge the LGBT community needs to grapple with.

Yeah, it’s certainly a section of our community that is still widely misunderstood, maligned and often the target of a lot of violence. We have a real war to wage on behalf of transgender people.

Can you foresee a time when LGBT people will be so integrated into the mainstream that it will render The Advocate obsolete? Or is there something different about the experience of being gay that will make The Advocate always relevant and beneficial to gay populations?

Let me answer that by saying that I think there will always be some kind of queer culture. As equal as we strive to be in a legal and a social aspect, we will always still be a minority in terms of the proportion of the population that’s LGBT. Like minorities, we have a characteristic that makes us distinct from the majority. I think LGBT people will seek each other out and continue to create distinct communities and cultures. How that is going to continue to manifest, who knows? I hope that we won’t always be writing stories about discrimination against LGBT people, but I think we will always have stories to tell about our culture.

Last year was the 45th anniversary of The Advocate. How do you think The Advocate has influenced the way LGBT issues are covered in the mainstream press?

Over the years, we’ve had a really important influence on the way the mainstream media looks at LGBT issues. We were the first LGBT publication to have a reporter in the White House Briefing Room. We were asking questions about DADT, marriage equality. Those sorts of things. When those questions are asked by our reporter, the mainstream media goes, “Yeah, we need to know about that stuff!” And they pick up the response.

We’ve gotten important celebrities’ coming out stories and political figures to comment on fairness and equality when it come to LGBT rights. Over the years, we have put politicians’ feet to the fire, which has been instrumental in forcing all of us to draw a bright line between those who think that all people are equal and those who really don’t. You cannot be an elected official these days without having your stance on LGBT issues. There is no such thing as a politician who’s completely neutral and uninformed about our concerns. It doesn’t exist any longer. And I think we’ve been instrumental in making that happen.

Today, there are same sex marriage announcements in papers across the country–you wouldn’t have seen that a few years ago. Obituaries mention partners. Gay news isn’t specific to gay publications anymore, and I think that’s partly to do with The Advocate’s longevity. We’re not the first gay publication, but we’ve been the longest running and it’s due to the dedication of the people who have run this publication over 45 years. It’s not because The Advocate was a goldmine. But it’s always been a priority for the people who’ve worked here to make the issues that are important to this community central to the publication. And by not going away, we’ve effectively made it clear that these are enduring issues and questions.