DS: There's a television show called Loft Story, based on a Dutch television show, Big Brother. They take 12 impossibly good-looking young people, and they put them in a loft, and they don't let them watch TV or anything. Every week they vote somebody off. And not unsurprisingly, at first they voted off this girl who was like two pounds overweight. And next they voted off a guy with a pimple on his chin. It's huge. It's on the cover of every magazine. French people we talk to are just mortified that young people are so caught up in this thing. They're afraid they've become voyeurs. I mean, they invented the word. How surprised should they be? [Laughs]
PB: Why do Americans think French people are so rude?
DS: I think basically, Americans are just paranoid. They don't speak French, and they think that the French people are sitting there saying, "I hate Americans, don't you? Look at them. I think there's one over there. Let's get him!" And actually, they're saying, "I'm thinking about buying the shoes, but I don't know.... They might be a little too young for me."
PB: You're not a controversial figure. Does it bother you that you don't inspire protests or angry letters to the editor?
DS: No, I don't feel like there's anything that I'm holding back on. I'm not mad. I'm not angry. I was angry when I was younger. Now I get angry when they take 45 minutes to bring me my coffee at the Ritz-Carlton. [Laughs]
PB: Do you consciously avoid positioning yourself as a gay writer, because that's not how audiences identify you, even though you're explicit about your homosexuality in many stories?
DS: There were a lot of stories in Barrel Fever with gay characters. Little, Brown didn't know who the audience was. For a while they thought that the audience would be gay. But I didn't want my book to be in that section of the bookstore. I mean, I'll take all the readers I can get. That book included "SantaLand Diaries," that was on the radio, and I've never written anything that went over so well. I kinda liked the idea of writing a story about a gay teenager who was writing a porno novel, and putting that in the same book as "SantaLand." You got this audience that was buying it for "SantaLand," and in order to get there they'd have to read what I thought were much better stories along the way. I don't feel like I've been ghettoized. I think the audience is actually incredibly accepting and fine with it. It would be different if I got up there and if I said, "Hal's balls bobbed against my chin." But I'm not inclined to write that way, anyway.
PB: Did you ever get a backlash about your sexuality?
