 I wrote down some questions that I thought I could get some good answers from you, Michael, but I didn't realize you were quoting from your previous interview, so I don't want to hear that again. So I'll try to keep them fresh. But I wanted to point out for our audience that when you read the book, Lay Your Sleeping Head, you know, it was an extensive renovation of a book written in the 70s, no, the 80s. So you published 30 years ago, this year. And halfway through the new book I'm like, our hero Henry is torn between these two men, you and Grant, and he's like, wow, he keeps stumbling on these sentences about you and Grant. But maybe you, Grant, was on your mind at the time. Michael said he wrote it before you, Grant, was like a thing. And sure enough, you go to IMDB, there was no you, Grant, then. So I congratulate you on predicting a great star. The detective novel is usually considered a distinctly urban literary movement, presumably because its practitioners are all based in large cities. Most, however, arrived in a place like San Francisco or New York or London after leaving their provincial or suburban hometowns. Are you a suburban writer? Can you tell us of your progress into city life and something about why you're now in Palm Springs instead? Well, I grew up in Sacramento, which I think counts as provincial. But I, and I went to school, I went to undergraduate school in a small city in Colorado, and I went to law school at Stanford. So I had no real experience of cities until I moved to Los Angeles when I was 25. And I love Los Angeles, really. And then I moved here in 1996. So, and I live, and we live part-time in Palm Springs because having experienced cities that they're full throttle, I'm tired of them. Yeah, in the way you're sleeping head is very distinctive the way it moves back and forth, maybe to show something about Henry's journey towards selfhood again, or getting out of addiction between the suburbs, which are hellish places, and the cities which at least, they're awful in ways, but they have hope going for them, between San Francisco and, say, Palo Alto. Well, Palo Alto, when I was at law school there in the late 70s, was a very pleasant place to be. This was before it became the capital of Silicon Valley. It was just a sleepy university town. And part of the reason that in the book, Rios remains in that town is exactly that. He has not been able to get on with his adult life. He joined the public defender's office in what would be Santa Clara County. He's trying cases in San Jose, but he continues to live in this little suburban town in the style of an undergraduate because, yeah, he's sort of stumped by adult life outside of work. And then when the work is taken away from him, he has to adjust. Edmund White, the novelist, wrote that being gay is a bit like being a writer. In that both gays and writers are likely to be urban, drawn to the city where they are better able to seek out those of fellow feeling. Do you think a close or interesting relationship between metropolitan living and sexually explicit writing still operates? Or is White rather describing a particular historical moment or even a phase of life? It may be that being gay isn't transgressive anymore. Well, that depends on where you are, I think. I mean, certainly, I think we would have to ask, I'd say the 20-year-olds in the room, but I only know of one and he's straight. But I don't think that young gay men come to the cities anymore to be gay. You know, for someone who grew up in a place like Sacramento, staying in Sacramento is now an option. So I think to that extent, White really is describing a particular period of time that I think ended not that far, ended only recently with kind of the normalization of homosexuality in the culture. But I think that's only true in the blue states. I don't think it's much fun to be gay in East Jesus, Alabama. I'm going to look at your career as a whole and ask you, what are the advantages to having established establishing a brand like you did back with your first novel and you had hit after hit featuring that same lovable dick, Henry Rios. And I also wonder what were the disadvantages of having that writing career? Well, you know, I never I had I didn't think about it with any premeditation. I didn't say that to be a mystery writer. The first novel I published 30 years ago from a small gay press in paper was reviewed in the New York Times, which startled everyone. And so my then publisher asked me if I would write another one. And I said, OK, sure. And so he published that and then an agent from New York called me and said, do you have an agent? And I said, no. He said, well, I'll be your agent. And I said, OK. And then and then the next five books were published by Big New York Houses. So I didn't set out to do that. It just sort of happened. And the as a writer, the advantage of writing a series with a recurrent character is you get to know the character inside out and sort of the the other characters who surround him. And so it's it's I think easier than starting a novel from scratch. The disadvantages are you get to know the character really well and you get tired of him, which is why I initially ended the series in 2000 after the seventh book and then spent the next 14 years writing The City of Palaces because it was something new and different that challenged me as a writer. For your readers, the advantages I think in this in this particular case of Rios is that we can see this one fellow going through a particularly extraordinary historical period living in San Francisco during the 80s and 90s, that is through the height of the AIDS epidemic and on until it's aftermath. And that that seems to me to raise it in a different level from, you know, the story of. Kinsey Milhohn or somebody like someone like that. And well, as you know, Kevin, gay male writers of our generation, we got caught up in the AIDS and the challenge was, you know, you could not write about it. It was how you're going to write about it. And I think it gave our work a particular intensity, which is one reason I'm going back to the series because, you know, enough time has now passed that that period of time is becoming history. And so I see an opportunity to go back and to rewrite these novels, which were initially reports from the trenches as historical novels with the hindsight of what's happened since, you know, 1995 and also to fill in some blanks that I didn't because, as you know, I mean, you're sitting there on the battlefield and, you know, your fellow soldiers are getting shot and then bombs are exploding and you're scribbling madly, but you can't see past that. But now we can and we know what happened. And it's possible to go back and to recast all that with a broader perspective, which is what I hope to do because, you know, for better or worse, these books are my literary legacy. When I read the City of Palaces a few years back, I was struck by how the one way in which it seemed totally different than your previous writing was that a lot of it is told from the point of view of a little boy and that I said that voice of childhood had never appeared in your writing and that made me wonder, is there something intrinsic about the detective novel that prevents children from playing a big part in it? At least you never had children, protagonists. No, I mean, in the last... And I wondered if that brought you something as a writer that you could explore. Yeah, so... Because he's the most interesting character in the book. Most people like the La Nina. No, I mean, that was part of it is writing from the perspective of a nine year old boy who's going to grow up to be gay. And because, you know, that allowed me to explore an entire realm of my own experience. I came out when I was 12 years old and I think I knew when I was five years old. I mean, I had some sense, not that I knew. And I wanted to write about that experience and be a pre-puberty difference. But, you know, the detective novels, they're like sonnets. They have a very rigid form. You can do a lot within that form. But ultimately, you know, it's three quad trains and a couplet. I think people like that. That sense of life and the life as we live it is too complicated and too messy. But if you put it inside a detective novel, well, some hero is gonna get the answers and then life will return to a previous sphere of utopia. Right. Now that I have read the rewrite, Lay Your Sleeping Head, I was shocked and disgusted by the amount of raw sex that you have put into the novel. And I'm just wondering, are you, you know, are you ready for all the fans? You were going to lose. What did your publishers have to say? What did you, what did you, what did your family say? Donald Trump's America has a schizophrenic relation to sexuality. And your book might be a shock to some of your fellow Americans. Yeah, well, screw them. I mean, you know, I, when I wrote this book, when I first wrote the book in the mid 80s, I intentionally did not put sex in because I knew if I did, given the culture, cultural atmosphere at that time, any hint of sex would have condemned my book to be labeled pornography. But the sexual, the erotic charge between Rios and Hugh Parris is really what drives the book. And so I wanted to make that more explicit and also who you have sex with and how you have sex is deeply revealing about character. And in the, in the explicit scenes I wrote, I'm not just writing about it. So, you know, it's not just one-handed writing. It's supposed to shed some light on the character of the two men and also on the dynamic of their relationship when, for example, Hugh asks Henry to bottom. You know, Henry is the top. But he understands that the request has something to do with Hugh's need to feel like he's an equal in the relationship, that Henry will take the other role. So, now I go on and describe in some detail what that is, but that's... Yeah, I mean, I'm being ironic. I hope that you hope to figure that out. I love this tendency in the work and I think it does really expand the meaning and the power of the story. And it just changes it in some very, very basic way. I hope it goes on every time you write a new book, you tell us what it was like. Well, I don't know. I mean, the next book, the book I'm working on now. So the first book, this book is set in 1982 and then the second published book was set in 1986. So there's a period of four years during which the tsunami of AIDS hit the shore that I didn't cover because again, you know, at the time I was living my life and doing other things and not thinking this way. But now I'm writing a book set in 1984 in San Francisco which falls chronologically between those books and it's all about the first wave of AIDS. You know, I'm handling sex in a different way then because sex was radioactive. You know, in 1984 we didn't even have a test to determine who was infected or not. That didn't happen until 85. So Rios, who's three months out of rehab just assumes he's positive. In part because his last boyfriend was, you know, a junkie prostitute. I wondered also if you had, when you buy the copy of this book, Lay Your Sleeping Head, there's a lot of supplemental material and one of them is a long memoir that you have about how you became a writer. And I really enjoyed the parts where you talk about meeting the senior novelist, Joseph Hansen, who was a gay writer who wrote, I guess he wrote the first gay private eye or openly gay private eye. Well, not the first, but his was the most famous. He published his first book in 1971 called FEDAT and there were a couple of books before then but he actually then published 12 others and he was quite acclaimed in his time and he was a brilliant, wonderful, wonderful writer. If you haven't read him, you should read him. So the arc of his career is very different than yours but I saw that some of similarities in that Hansen himself wrote novels that were marketed in his day as foreign by houses published them because they were so sexually explicit and he too was known for rewriting his books and varying the amounts of sexuality he infused them with to speak to different audiences. Yeah, he made his, before, so Joe, he published his first poem in 1941 in the Atlantic and then he was not published again by sort of respectable press until 1971. So the way he survived those 30 years was by publishing pulp novels, paperbacks, so I'm sure there are examples in the Hormel collection, these pulp gay novels. So he would, and some of them actually, and some of them are not very good because he was teaching himself how to write fiction, some of them are pretty good. He also wrote even a Civil War romance under the name of some woman's name, Rosalind White or something. I mean, it was a desperate struggle. It was very long and arid period. And you met him at the beginning of your career at the end of his, right? Yeah, yeah, at that point I met him in the late 80s and yeah, he was coming toward the end of his career and he was always lovely to me, but he was a very difficult man. Can you tell us more about your use of modern and contemporary poetry in your novels about Henry Rios? Your new book, Lay Your Sleeping Head, takes its title from the opening words of W. H. Auden's poem, Lullaby. Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love, a human on my faithless arm, time and fevers, burn away individual beauty from thoughtful children, and the grave proves the child ephemeral, but in my arms till break of day, let the living creature lie, mortal guilty but to me, the entirely beautiful. I see Auden wrote his poem in 1940 at the beginning of World War II and it's sometimes thought of as the poet's response to the growing tide of fascism and horror beginning to engulf all of human civilization. Do you feel that happening again at the beginning of this era that we're in now? And perhaps that might be why it comes up here? Well, no, I mean this was before the troll and all of that happened. I chose it because Auden, who was sort of openly homosexual, the poem is addressed to a male lover. You, he addressed, says you, not he, not she. He avoids pronouns but is addressed to a male lover and those lines for me captured sort of the relationship between Rios and Paris. As for my use of poetry, I started writing when I was 12 years old in a self-conscious way meaning that I thought of myself as a writer but I was going to be a poet. So until I was in my mid-20s, I only read and wrote poetry. And it turns out that writing poetry is great training for writing prose because it teaches you how to be concise and how to find the precise words and a certain lyricism. And so poetry is and remains my first love. You know, Joe Hansen gave me Antoine Chekhov's short stories and he said, read these, these are great. And I read them and I thought, I don't really get fiction. When I want to read something literary and profound, I read Wallace Stevens or Elizabeth Bishop. In the way you're sleeping, you, the man who's under arrest at the beginning of the story, has a very convoluted family, but one woman and it is an actual poet. And Michael does the daring thing of quoting from her poems and making them sound like, wow, that really is great. Don't you know who those poems are? Now I was going to ask if you wrote them. They're Joan Larkin's. Joan, oh, Joan Larkin's poems. So there's a wonderful lesbian poet in New York named Joan Larkin. So Hugh's mother in the book is a poet and I wanted to quote some of her poetry and I didn't want to write it myself. So I asked Joan if I could use some of her poetry and attribute it to Hugh's mother. And she said, of course you can. So she's, I acknowledged her in the beginning. So the poetry in the book is Joan's poetry. I love Joan and I love her poetry. I didn't know she was so neurotic and crazy. Yeah, well I warned her that the character was completely unlike her. She seemed okay with it. She was my suspect number one. The borrowing from poetry also allowed you to come up with so many catchy and sometimes surreal titles. And one was called How Town from the E Cummings poem. And I wondered how you got away from using that as the name of a book, How Town. But it was a success. Well, my editor didn't object. Again, I mean, so the E Cummings poem is called Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town which is about this beautiful love story that takes place in the midst of this completely oblivious sort of suburban town where no one notices that these two lovers are having this amazing affair and their names are Anyone and No One. And the book, How Town the Novel is about Henry going back to his hometown and revisiting the first boy he fell in love with who was of course a straight boy. And so I thought that that had some resonance. I also loved that poem. I think E Cummings, he wrote too much and a lot of it's not good but I still think he's underrated. I know that part of your rationale in rewriting these Rio Spokes is that today you are a better writer. But as I go along, as you go along, I predict there might come a time when you stop in the middle of a sentence and you will be saying, shit, this was great. No wonder they gave me all those lambda awards. I'm fantastic. Your books are wonderful from beginning to end and I'm just waiting to see their second growth because I don't know if you're a better writer but the way you're gonna be writing these seems like a significantly different way. Yeah, the Little Death was my first attempt to write a long piece of fiction. And when I got the, so this is how it can be, my books are only available as e-books from a publisher called Open Red which is an international conglomerate. They also held onto the print rights but they weren't gonna do anything with them. So I prevailed upon them to revert the print rights to me because I wanted a print edition because some people still prefer to read books. And so I was just going to read The Little Death and correct some typos. And I started reading it and I thought, oh my God, this is terrible. And I just, and I thought, this, you know, I left a lot of stuff out that's sort of crucial to explaining why this is going on so I ended up rewriting it. And I think the second book, which I wrote in 88, I think I'll probably do extensive revision but by the time I got to the third book, which was How Town, I sort of learned how to write fiction. So I anticipate less revision and more sort of recasting more framing, historical framing. I just have one more question and then we'll open it up to you out there. I probably have tons of them. Oh, where's the bowl? Yeah. Can you tell us something about The Little Brother that Michael's next book has a title taken not from poetry but it's I guess like a gay twist, you might say, on one of the great canonical noir masterpieces of The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler. That was from the late 40s. This isn't a rewrite of an existing book but a completely new adventure for Henry but it takes place in San Francisco that is long gone. Yeah. The 80s. Yeah. So again, I mean, I touched on this earlier. So the first and second published books kind of skipped that whole period when AIDS really began to infiltrate the gay male community, particularly in this town and I wanted to go back and tell that story. So in The Little Brother, Henry, who has a drinking problem, he's three months out of rehab and he's moved from Palo Alto to San Francisco where he's trying to get his life back together and he's desperate for work. So he's offered a job basically as a insurance investigator, investigating death claims which is what Joe Hanson's hero did. So his first case is a gay male couple in the Castro. One of them, the older of the two asphyxiates because there's a gas leak in the apartment and he has an insurance policy that pays $100,000 to the survivor. And so Rios has said, just go verify that this was an accident and we'll pay it out. Of course it turns out not to be an accident and that's as much as I'm going to say. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And surrounding all of that is AIDS. And surrounding all of that is also though the specter of Raymond Chandler, I suppose. Yes. Yes. So this, I started writing this two days after the election and it opens in November 1984, a few weeks after Ronald Reagan's re-election. And I've actually finished the first draft of it. It's the fastest thing I've ever written. And part of the reason I'm writing it I think was my response to what's happened in November which is partly to remind people that there have been other dark times. We'll see. Yeah, my books are not, my books are pretty intense, right? Yeah, a little bit. I'd like to see if any of you have any questions. Oh, do you want to do this first? No, we can do it at the end. Okay. So we're having a little raffle. The ones who got here, what, too late to fill out the raffle cards? Oh, shit. Who wants to fill the raffle card? Okay.