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Once a grunge rocker, Matthew Stadler decided to find another creative outlet after moving to New York in the early 80s. There was little fun, Stadler decided, playing rock in the Big Apple's heavily commercial scene, and juggling the bandmembers' hectic New York schedules. After a stint as news editor at the New York Native, the now defunct gay weekly, Stadler turned to writing novels in his quest for creative work that wouldn't keep the neighbors up at night. The result so far has been four books-- Landscape: Memory, The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee, The Sex Offender, and now Allan Stein-- that are drolly imagined, sensuously written, and politically on-edge. His books have won Stadler a literary reputation, a Guggenheim fellowship, and some dedicated readers.

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Allan Stein (Grove Press, 256 pages, $22), is told in the voice of a fictional Matthew, a Seattle high school teacher recently suspended for a relationship with a student that began only after allegations were falsely broached. With time on his hands, Matthew pretends to work for his art-curator neighbor, who pretends to give him a job. Soon Matthew is off to Paris, having assumed his friend's identity. With a new persona, Matthew romps through gay Paris in a quest to find Picasso's sketches of Allan Stein, the obscure nephew of Gertrude Stein, who as a boy became the subject of portraits by Picasso and Matisse, and stories by Alice Toklas and Aunt Gertrude herself. While furthering the academic pursuits of an art curator who isn't him, Matthew falls in love with his hosts' basketball-playing son.

Stadler's reviews and essays appear frequently in The Stranger, a Seattle weekly, and the New York Times. In Spin magazine, he recently profiled the boy who fathered two children with Mary Kay Tourneau, his sixth grade teacher, now locked up in a Washington State prison.

Stadler lives in Seattle, and visited Boston recently to read from Allan Stein. He talks with writer and Guide columnist John Mitzel.

John Mitzel: You left the West Coast and went to college at Oberlin, and then you said when you finally got to New York the gay scene was a shock for you, an education. Can you elaborate?

Matthew Stadler: I actually went from Seattle to Washington DC when I was 17 to work for the Quakers. After college, I lived in London for a little while, then back to Seattle to play music, which had become the center of my life. It was when my friend who I played music with got into school in New York that we all decided we all wanted to move, in like 1981.

As a kid growing up, being gay was not an issue for my family. My older sister is a lesbian, and my parents, convincingly, made it seem like it wasn't a problem. So the fairly intense identity politics and culture of gayness in New York City was new for me. Some of it was really off-putting because it made me feel self-conscious in a way I didn't want to-- people thinking you're attractive and hitting on you, which made me nervous. Also being called on to have solidarity, because they were gay, with people I felt alienated from-- say, a rich white man whose politics were totally different from mine. Those were new things for me, not simply difficult, but often thrilling. It was extremely exciting to see a gay bookstore filled with all this writing that I hadn't seen before. The cultural stuff was remarkable and eye-opening.

JM: You said you grew up on the pacifist left.

MS: Yeah, my parents started an antiwar organization.

JM: So it wasn't an ideological or Marxist left, but critical, American-style radicalism. How were sexual issues dealt with? Not just in your family, but in the larger community you lived in?

MS: My dad's a scientist, and my mother shares his faith in rationalism, the idea that every aspect of your being could be harmonious and conscious, and that any conflict was a sign of failure. Concurrently, any mysteries were things to be solved rather than treasured. Those were powerful borders to put on an exploration of sexuality, and ones which I grapple with even now.

I've come to value mystery and secrecy and feel as though what is hidden is sometimes quite enriched by its obscurity. Those were impossible thoughts in the context my parents had given me. I think that was true in the general surrounding for them. This valuing of openness and disclosure certainly was coherent with their greater ideologies about politics, and about how the individual was properly socialized and came to be in community with others, to have a fulfilling life.

JM: And resolving conflicts.

MS: Exactly, and conflict resolution where the only acceptable resolution was the discovery that there had been no conflict in the first place-- that in fact it was a misunderstanding. Conflict resolution was never a matter of bargaining, or recognizing how two conflicting needs could be balanced. It was a matter of digging through the illusion of conflict to find the core of "Oh, we're all after the same thing."

That continues to be the politics of my surroundings in Seattle for sure. That's something that particularly interests and upsets me about Seattle, and maybe the West Coast generally-- this insistence that basically everyone wants the same thing, and that if we just dig deep enough, we will find the commonality.

JM: You radiate a sense of comfortable with yourself. I don't want to reduce this to East Coast versus West Coast, but when you think of New York culture, say, people like Larry Kramer, their whole raison d'etre is to be confrontative, to find every fissure and mine it.

MS: The grass is always greener on the other side, so when I got to New York, I felt this conflict as intimacy and caring-- someone cared enough to disagree with you. I think some people come to Seattle and experience the agreeableness and ease as very cold and impersonal-- it's a way of avoiding having any interaction with another person, by sort of blurring him over as an image of himself. This "understanding" can stem from a really narcissistic world view. The multicultural rainbow of Seattle is made up of seeing middle-class values in every ethnicity. Maybe it's a model for a good working city, but it has its shadow side.

JM: What would you say your work is as a writer?

MS: Part of it has been understanding the mythology of boys that I lived inside of in some dynamic relation to, and achieving the right relation to it. That right relation is not a demystification of it or an undermining of the mythology. Nor is it an analytical account that can trace its roots and debunk it. It's something else that I hope I got to through these books.

My writing also has also explored the narcissistic power relations buried inside a rhetoric about love. I pretty consistently set up situations in my books where people love one another, where the force of connection is affectionate and is called love. I like Dennis Cooper's work a lot, and it informs my own. He's chosen relations that include violence, the violence of pop culture and porn sex fantasies. He excavates the power relations inside that. I'm equally interested in power relations, but I find the ones coded into love more complex for me. So I don't end up with a shovel or an ax in somebody's hand-- I end up with somebody trying to utter a phrase of affection, but it might as well be a weapon. In Allan Stein, the narrator gets to the point where he says if the boy had been a weapon he would have killed me, but he's not a weapon.

I think there's tremendous relevance now to this question of power relations that are inside the rhetoric of love. This is especially so in the sort of politics that I was describing in Seattle-- this multicultural politics of embrace, of trying to find a way in which our differences can be seen as misunderstanding, and that our political negotiations can be acts of love, where we come to a greater understanding of each other. I think you exercise power over other people by saying you understand them.

JM: In the first Clinton term, I remember Mrs. Clinton going around the country talking about "authenticity," which apparently was to be a theme of not only her tenure in Washington but of the administration. I thought, well, this is all at a very high level. With all the characters in Allan Stein, there's the authenticity of falsity, the casualness with which they go into this world of deceit. In the gay world, deceit, doublefacedness, legerdemain have always been-- particularly pre-Stonewall-- pivotal to gay culture.

MS: There's a difference between public life and private life. I would like to think that public life is a place where one thrives and becomes present through presentations of facades and "false" personas. I put "false" in quotes because I think the presumption of a single, authentic self needlessly undermines the robustness and pleasure of our public personas. In order to be with other people, you have to be different things to different people. In the world of the book, I wanted my characters to thrive and be nimble in their costumes. I think that's one great thing about public life, when that can happen.

I don't arrive at this destabilizing of authenticity through any kind of theoretical analysis. I just get there. As much as I'd like to feel attached to a core self, my experience is always sliding back and forth across it. I would hope to become more comfortable with the instability and dynamics of my own experience among others.

I'm very interested in what it means to keep a secret-- an activity that is under siege. When I started thinking about secrets, I thought it was going to be simple, like that means I just don't tell people stuff. But its more complex than that. People know when you have secrets, so there is a way in which it is known but what is known is still obscured. There are conventions in public around secrets.

JM: I'm completely unresolved about the coming-out phenomenon. Should you come out to your mother? Any mother in her right mind will know she has a son who is gay. One of the reasons why Anita Bryant brought herself down was that she kept bringing up aspects of male homosexual behavior that most people really don't want to think about. "They eat the sperm," she said once on national TV. "Homosexuals eat the sperm and babies can't get born!" You know, the money isn't about to come rolling in-- it's like the "gay bowel syndrome." Some people say, "Oh, gay people are so invisible, we have to come out and show that we are everywhere." But if we are so invisible, how do the Matthew Shepards get crucified on the barbed wire fences?

MS: We're not invisible. I think the anomalies that any person presents to their friends and acquaintances are enormous. When they include same-sex love, there is a nest of phobias that get triggered. But I also don't understand the orthodoxy of coming out. I see its political usefulness, and I hope people do it as a political act. But I don't understand its role in helping people have a healthy, robust relation to their own selves. I guess if someone were denying and repressing these potentialities in themselves maybe declaring a sexual identity could help them become articulate and nimble. But I sure know a lot of people whose sexual activity, as well as their intellectual and emotional life around their sexuality, is forwarded by not telling anybody.

JM: Yes, and they're completely functional people.

MS: These are people for whom a declaration of identity would retard that develo pment. Often this is the case with kids in school. I know all sorts of kids who I've worked with as a teacher or know just as friends who I figure are probably into other guys, but the last thing they need to do is to declare themselves to be gay.

There are a lot of gay men my age and older who feel power and self-esteem when they see a kid come out young. It's exciting, you feel a sense of change in the world. But it's rarely good for the kid who came out. Most of the cultural engine behind kids coming out younger is from adults who really need that and want that affirmation.

JM: My distaste comes from the early 70s. I worked on organizing the gay pride in Boston from 70 to 78, and every year we'd have a coming-out workshop, always run by people associated with the therapy world-- not my favorite part of the demographic. But their language has become hegemonic. I don't think it's good to have anything the therapists do driving the discourse. I'd rather have the political radicals doing it, the writers, the money-makers-- anyone but the therapists. Because they want to pigeonhole everyone, nail everyone down, get you in that cul de sac, open the door occasionally, peek in, see how you are doing.

MS: It's a trackable system. It puts you in a place where you can be measured, looked at. Those who want to have loving relationships with all sorts of anomalous other-people, whose lives intersect with ours in strange and untrackable ways, are ill-served making sexual practice part of this trackable grid. So for instance, I feel that my most loving relationships with people a lot younger than me have happened in contexts where either out of confusion or clear thinking-- either one-- there wasn't a declaration of sexuality. It was a relationship whose anomalous nature and fluidity kind of slipped through the grid. Where those relationships have pressured somebody to say, "Oh I guess I must be gay," or "We must be lovers," is where you end up sailing into rough and rocky waters that will wreck what is a pretty fragile vessel.

JM: It's interesting that you've written essays on lying because I find all storytelling is on some level falsity. There was not a Cyclops, there were not Sirens, nor Dido and Aeneas. Storytelling is imagination, and according to Brigid Brophy it's masturbation. I was talking about Monica with a friend, a very sophisticated man, and he was saying, "Well, Clinton did wrong. I don't mind the sex part, but the lying to the grand jury..." Well, I could think of nothing more honorable in this case than to lie to this Congress and to a grand jury. When you're trapped in a society like ours that does not tolerate or understand any nuance or ambiguity, when everything has a strict literal interpretation-- from the Bible to human relationships-- when the system monitors your urine, your spit, and your dna, then lying is the only door that's open. If you can't slip into nuance or an ironic pose-- which for gay men has always been their one way of explaining themselves-- then lying can be a moral imperative.

MS: That's exactly right. This American literalness traps you in an either/or. The thrill of fiction is that it works in a different economy of thought. The question of which parts are true and which false becomes so multiple and varied that your empathetic imagination gets activated in a way that public discourse doesn't allow right now.

In the context of a novel you can often trigger empathy for positions that are unacceptable in public discourse. I would like to think that a novelist's contributions can become part of public discourse. A novelist to me isn't choosing a separate realm of operation-- discouraged by the rigidities of public discourse one retreats into the nuanced world of fiction-- I don't think that at all. These are things you contribute back into public culture. Sometimes the culture doesn't know what to make of them, and convicts a man in Oklahoma City for owning your book, imposes a literal interpretation where the book describes a criminal sex act and so you are then guilty of thoughtcrime. But one hopes that these books float out and they stand as opportunities to activate your empathetic imagination and have a kind of staying power or stubbornness, where they get stuck in your head a little bit, and the next time you look at either a news story or a person whose situation you should have been told is illegal and you should repudiate, you actually have this moment curiosity about their experience. **

Author Profile:  Mitzel
	Mitzel was a founding member of the Fag Rag collective, and has been a Guide columnist since 1986. He manages Calamus Books near Boston's South Station.
	Email:	mitzel@calamusbooks.com
	Website:	calamusbooks.com