Mapping the Territory
The first book of nonfiction from the author Tony Kushner calls “one of the best novelists writing in the world today.”
Mapping the Territory: Selected Nonfiction
Christopher Bram
Novelist Christopher Bram has been writing essays for twenty-five years. Mapping the Territory, his first collection of nonfiction, ranges through such topics as the power of gay fiction, coming out in the 1970s in Virginia, low-budget filmmaking with friends in New York, and the sexual imagination of Henry James. He describes the heady experience of seeing his novel Gods and Monsters made into an Oscar-winning movie starring Ian McKellen, Brendan Fraser, and Lynn Redgrave; he discusses why he and his partner of thirty years don't want to get married. Bram looks both into and out of himself in these essays. He revisits the titles he read while finding himself as a gay man, but also shows us Greenwich Village as seen from his front stoop. The book is not simply a collection of short pieces, it's an autobiography of ideas from one of today’s most lively and popular novelists.
Author Christopher Bram
Christopher Bram is the author of nine novels, including The Notorious Dr. August, Lives of the Circus Animals, and Exiles in America. His fifth novel, Gods and Monsters, was made into the Oscar-winning movie. He grew up in Virginia where he was a paperboy and Eagle Scout and attended the College of William and Mary. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and winner of the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement. He lives in New York. Visit him at christopherbram.com.
Fall Appearances
September 9, Wednesday, New York: Barnes and Noble on Broadway and 82nd. 7 pm.September 17, Thursday, New York: KGB, East 4th Street, reading with Drunken Careening Writers, 7 pm.
September 21, Monday, New York: Lesbian and Gay Center, West 13th Street, reading with Sebastian Stuart, author of the novel The Hour Between, 6:30 pm. ($15 admission)
October 8, Thursday, New York: Strand Bookstore, Broadway and 12th Street, 7 pm. (Conversation with Don Weise.)
November 4, Wednesday, Connecticut: Yale Bookstore, 77 Broadway, New Haven, 6 pm.
November 12, Thursday, New York City: Barnes and Noble on Fifth Avenue and 18th Street, 7pm
November 18, Wednesday, Pennsylvania: Barnes and Noble, University of Pennsylania: 6:00, 3601 Walnut Street Philadelphia
Interview with Christopher Bram
- Q. You have published nine novels but this is your first book of nonfiction. Why haven't you written a book-length memoir or autobiography, as many of your peers have done?
- A. Oh, I don't know. Maybe I'm just shy. Maybe my life is too quiet to justify a full autobiography. It's best visited in essays. I mean, I liked both my parents; I get along with my siblings; I've never been addicted to drugs or alcohol, only to books. Draper and I are still together after thirty years, so there are no ugly divorces or kinky affairs I can write about. More important, I prefer making things up. Not only can I have experiences in fiction that I didn't have in life, but I can get closer to the truth in fiction. As the movie director Akira Kurosawa said, "It's impossible to tell the complete truth, but it's harder to lie when one is pretending to be someone else."
- Q. You've never made a secret of the fact that you were a Boy Scout. There's even a picture of you in your uniform on the cover of this collection. Aren't you ashamed of once belonging to such a right-wing, anti-gay organization?
- A. No, I'm actually quite proud of having been a Boy Scout, even now. I reached the rank of Eagle. I worked at summer camp in Virginia for three years. And yes, I have some sexy memories of my time in the woods, even though I didn't do much. But the Scouts are an important piece of who I am. The Scout law is full of good points: A Scout is friendly, courteous, kind--I won't repeat the full list.
But I was a Scout back in the Sixties, when it was a relatively progressive organization. It kept up with the times; it responded to the Civil Rights movement and to women's rights and sex education. But in the late Seventies it was taken over by fundamentalist churches and the Mormons. National headquarters moved from New Jersey to Colorado. The Scouts began to ban gays at the very time when gay teenagers began to come out. They banned atheists, too. It's both infuriating and sad. But the organization still attracts good people. A few years ago, a summer camp in Rhode Island fought to keep a counselor who'd just come out as gay. Kids and adults all came forward to testify what a great guy he was. But it didn't matter to the shits at national headquarters. He was still expelled. - Q. The book includes an essay about gay marriage you wrote five years ago. Have you changed your mind about anything you said?
- A. No, surprisingly enough. I wrote that gay marriage was inevitable--there were no logical reasons against it--but that Draper and I were doing fine without it, thank you very much. And I was right: same-sex marriage continues to snowball, happening in more and more states. But Draper and I are still in no hurry to get hitched. My feeling is: it's worked so far. Why jinx it? Also we're two freelance artists. We're bohemian hippie types who wouldn't get married even if we were straight.
- Q. Of your nine novels, which is your favorite?
- A. Hmm. I like something about each. What's odd is there's not one I'm ashamed of. I'm very proud of my historical novel, The Notorious Dr. August, because the book is so much smarter than I am. But I guess my favorite right now is Exiles in America, mainly because it's the most recent. It's about a longterm gay relationship, which are not often written about. People prefer to write and read about doomed love--it's more romantic. But I was able to explore gay marriage in depth in a way I couldn't in my marriage essay. Let me add that Draper and I are not the couple in the novel. But there are things I know about them only because of what I know about us. I'd love to live in their house and have a garden and a dog. But a fictional garden and dog are much easier to take care of.
- Q. Do you have a new novel in the works?
- A. Not really. Despite my love of fiction, I'm working on a nonfiction book right now, a group biography called Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America. It's far from finished but will be published by Twelve. I argue that the gay revolution began as a literary revolution and the world was changed by a remarkable handful of writers, from Gore Vidal and Christopher Isherwood to Armistead Maupin and Tony Kushner.
The project gives me a great excuse to indulge in my book addiction and reread a lot of wonderful literature. It's good to go back to the books themselves and see what's really there, instead of the rumour of their reputations. I miss being able to make things up, but there's a different kind of truth in following the facts--like stepping from one stone to another over a creek. You can choose any number of routes. You can't invent stones, of course, and sometimes you have to jump over a very wide space. But you're still telling stories. I got some practice for that kind of storytelling in the essays collected in Mapping the Territory.