Fanny Press recently caught up with author Jeffrey Essmann in New York City and asked him a few questions about his new book.
FP: Life on the List is about meeting other gay men for sex via the Casual Encounters section of Craig’s List. Do you think the internet has opened up ways of relating to people that are new in the history of the human race, or are these the same kind of encounters that have always happened?
JE: In one sense, there’s really nothing new going on here: anonymous sex encounters have a long and venerable history in gay culture. Oscar Wilde said that his private-room dinner parties with stablemen and bootblacks were “like feasting with panthers.” But the internet has certainly made it easier to meet—and screen—the panthers. And for those of us who aren’t really into the bar/club scene, it’s a godsend. The lists—or the chatrooms, for that matter—manage to convey all the superficiality of the bar scene (which I mean in the good way) without all the hassle. One of the things I’m no good at in real life—and especially at bars and parties—is just walking up to someone and talking, or, for that matter, if things aren’t working, stopping talking and walking away. But I have no problem at all with shooting someone an email, clicking someone into a private conversation, or, when I need to, clicking out. People aren’t really real on the internet. That’s why it’s so much fun. They can try to be real: they can give their stats, send pics, write profiles, post political links. But they’re still just electricity until you fuck. That’s what’s so great. You do a few emails, a couple chats, exchange some pics, and you’ve got this little e-image of the guy. Then he comes over and there’s not only the regular hookup tension, that sexy awkwardness, but also this terrific element of surprise. It’s like finally meeting your penpal, and after he tells you all about his country, you get to fuck him. Oscar would have loved it.
FP: Tell us about yourself. What have you written prior to writing Life on the List? And how does your writing complement your performance work?
I actually came into writing by way of acting. I’d sort of been doing the Off-Off Broadway Young Actor Thing when I got involved in the downtown performance scene in the 80s. I was performing my own material—character comedy, mostly, and an odd kind of stand-up—and getting far better notice for it than I ever did doing the Off-Off stuff. It was also a lot more fun. So most of my early writing is performance monologues and one-man shows. My one-man show Artificial Reality at New York Theatre Workshop was nominated for a Drama Desk Award, and my show at La MaMa, Comedy for Young Moderns, led them to commission my first full-length play, the cult hit Triplets in Uniform. More recently, a short piece of mine, Johannes, Pyotr & Marge (about Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and my mother) was produced at the Humana Festival, where it also won the Heideman Prize. I still write for the theatre—I’m about eighty pages into a new play—though I also do a lot of essays (I was a regular contributor to the NPR affiliate in Chicago when I lived there), literary journals, creative non-fiction, some op/ed stuff. And while I don’t really perform all that much anymore, your question about how my writing complements my performance is an interesting one, mainly because I think it’s more that my performance complements my writing. At any rate, there’s some kind of symbiosis there. One of the things that I love about performing is that you become very aware of your voice and of your timing. And I find that I automatically apply that awareness to my writing, whatever it is. Friends who really know my work say that even my essays read like performance pieces. And they’re right. I think that on some level everything I write could also be performed. It’s just part of the voice at this point.
FP: We have found Life on the List to be a beautiful, funny book. You infuse the narrative throughout with the energy of stand-up comedy. For example, I loved this passage:
I try not to go too spiritual about sex. The closest I’ve come to Tantric sex was with recreational Viagra, so if there was anything cosmic about it, the cosmos owed a lot to chemistry. But three has a mystical power in various religions and paranormalities, and trios of divine forces ripple through Western culture: the Three Graces, the Three Fates, the Three Stooges. And now us. Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, beginning, middle, and end, we’d become something cosmic, Kama Sutra, something weird. If a plane got near us, it’d disappear.
Yet the book also works as smut. Do you think porn can be funny, and also deliriously beautiful, and still be porn? Is there a precedent for highly intelligent, literary smut, or have you invented a new genre?
While I’d love to say I invented the genre, I’d be doing a huge disservice to my erotica forebears. When I was prepping to write the book, I revisited a few old favorites who reminded me of the textures that can be woven into and around the sex stuff. Petronius, for example, in the Satyricon, is actually parodying Greek romances, the joke being that instead of a heterosexual couple beset by obstacles to their love it’s two Nero-era gay guys fighting over a slave—and the god who saves the day isn’t Aphrodite, the goddess of love, but Priapus, the god of hardons. But Petronius was highly literate, and the text is riddled with riffs on Virgil, Homer, and other ancient writers. He was also very sophisticated (he was a member of Nero’s court till his boss had him commit suicide), and a major portion of the book is a satire on the decadence of mid-first century Roman society, with a special emphasis on the vulgarity of freed slaves who had come into money. Two millennia have taken the edge off the satire, but if you do the homework, it’s fairly vicious—and sometimes very funny. Humor is also very much a part of Victorian smut. The very fact that Autobiography of a Flea is narrated by a flea kind of tips you off that the tone is going to be, to say the least, lighthearted, and Fanny Hill has some very funny parts. And, as in the Satyricon, part of the humor is social satire. When the three priests are having their way with the young heroine of Flea, the more outrageous the sex (and the more overwhelming the member), the more you realize that whoever the anonymous author was, he was clearly a Protestant. So if I have any fresh angle on using humor in porn, it is, as you said, probably in that I’m using stand-up rhythms, which, again, is pretty much just a natural part of my voice at this point. I wasn’t sure if it would work at first—my main concern was that the humor never overrode the sex—but I was actually quite happy with it. I think the humor keeps you lightheaded, a little dizzy, so the next sex rush kind of takes you by surprise—kind of like using jokes as poppers.
I have always found writing to be a process of discovery. Life on the List is very personal—did you learn anything about yourself in writing the book?
Absolutely—though I might be hard pressed to say exactly what. Certainly something about honesty, about putting yourself out there without excuse, without apology. It’s always interesting to see, regardless of the project, what temptations the psyche will present to keep you from truly revealing yourself. With erotica there’s the temptation to create a persona, or to get cute, get coy, somehow distance yourself from the material, somehow say, “It’s not really me doing this.” Instead of “It IS really me doing this, and I’m sucking some major cock here.” So my primary concern was that the book be honest, and I think that’s what give it its intensity. And the process of discovery? Jesus, I went through puberty, all my sex stuff, and coming out all over again—just about every time I sat down to write. And I learned that there’s something very exhilarating about that, very rejuvenating. I actually felt younger when I’d finished the book. And I also learned that if I get hard writing something, it’s probably good.