Dale Peck - interview with gay writer - Interview

Interview, Feb, 1999 by Martha McPhee

With his first book, Martin and John, writer Dale Peck proved that his particular voice was one to be reckoned with. By the time his third had been published in May of last year, it was clear that his could be one of contemporary literature's great, original voices as well. Peck doesn't trivialize or exploit his position as a gay writer, nor does he run away from it. Maybe that's why the heat around him just keeps growing, and why Peck isn't afraid of starting a fire

Interview by Martha McPhee

MARTHA MCPHEE: How did you begin as a writer?

DALE PECK: I wrote two stories when I was in fifth grade, and everyone said they were great. So, I decided I would be a writer. But writers never make any money, and I came from a very poor family. I just couldn't be poor. So I thought I'd go into publishing and get rich instead. Then while I was a freshman at Drew University in New Jersey, I had this dream, and when I woke up I wrote it down in the form of a short story. That morning I decided again that I would be a writer.

MM: What writers inspired you and continue to inspire you?

DP: I don't think anyone continues to inspire me, which is really a sad thing to say. But I'm in a phase now where I'm really down on fiction. I was into identity fiction, especially gay writers and black writers. Now I'm completely rebelling against that - it's really limiting when everyone is writing novels for cloistered audiences.

MM: What is your opinion of contemporary fiction?

DP: We don't have a movement or a sense of unification. Writers aren't working on any kind of shared projects, and that's sad. There's a real inferiority complex about fiction: Everyone thinks that it's a cultural by-product, a pre-movie at best, or a recycled life story. The novel isn't the great storytelling art form anymore - it's been superseded by film. In some way movies took off where postmodernism in fiction left off and did some really great and exciting things with narrative and storytelling that novels never got around to doing. We're actually at this place where novels could learn a few things from movies, like how to tell a story that has mass appeal and that's exciting but that also doesn't get in the way of developing characters.

MM: Do you see yourself as a "new leading man"?

DP: Anything I say will come across as vain, but I always think of myself as a leading man in the field of writing. I'm kind of waiting for fame to catch up with me or maybe - more than anything else - I'm just waiting for my book sales to catch up.

MM: What does it mean to be male at the end of the twentieth century, and is it different from your father's generation?

DP: It's a lot different for me not only because I think times have changed, but also because I'm gay, and because I am educated and my father is not. My father is a plumber, and he made sure that the toilets in rich people's houses worked. He's actually making more money than I am right now, but when he was my age, he made no money.

I'm one of those people who can't really distinguish between truth and lies. No matter what people tell me, I always believe it's the truth. So when my father told me when I was growing up to get a good education and that that would enable me to do anything I wanted, he didn't believe it. But I did. And it worked like he said it would work. I think he personally thought that the system would crush people like us. And my father told me when I was very young - he'd say it when he was drunk - that I shouldn't be like him, that I shouldn't be an alcoholic and I shouldn't be violent toward other people the way he was. So I learned very young that the model of masculinity my father represented does not make you happy. I identified so much with my mother and stepmothers that the terrible violence men wreak upon women is something I wanted to avoid at all costs. Depending on your image of homosexuality, you can say this has something to do with me being gay. But for me, being a man has always been associated with the choice of whether to be violent, specifically toward women, or not.

There was a line in my book Now It's Time to Say Goodbye that I cut because I thought it was too pointed and direct, in which one of the characters says that in this country no boy becomes a man until he hits a woman. Which I think is true, and I learned that myself the one time I ever hit a woman. It was my stepmother, who was hitting me, and I hit her back. When you do that, you worry what that means: You're physically stronger than another person and you realize for the first time that the only reason you're hitting them is because you know you're stronger and that there's not much they can do about it. It's the core of manhood, whether you accept or renounce or denounce how you deal with that particular possibility of violence associated with being a man.

MM: What do you think creates that sense of violence in men? Is it in all men?

DP: It's in all men in the Western world. I don't know enough about Eastern countries to talk about there, but it's embedded in Western culture. The earliest Judeo-Christian myths are all about blaming the woman for everything that went wrong. The woman has to be disciplined, and if you don't discipline her, she will bring you down. The simplest translation of that is physical discipline. Do you know where the expression "rule of thumb" comes from? Under British common law, if a man disciplined his wife with a stick no bigger than his thumb, he was not abusive, And it's things like that that have come down through the ages.