The story began with a provocative title: “Hero of the Bronx Is Accused of Betraying It.” As Carter read it, she concluded that The New York Times had done a hatchet job on her controversial decision to endorse FreshDirect, the online grocery delivery service that plans to move its headquarters to the South Bronx in 2015. In the story, Carter’s detractors argue that the traffic and pollution generated from the company’s delivery trucks will harm a community already battling disproportionate levels of asthma and other health struggles like obesity and diabetes. Carter counters that the positives—job opportunities, better food options—trump the negatives. She also says that the company is making the necessary changes to its fleet of trucks to reduce its carbon footprint in the area.

The central premise of the piece hinges on the claims of former allies who argue that Carter betrayed the community by capitalizing “on past good deeds in the way that politicians parlay their contacts into a lobbying career, or government regulators are hired by the companies they once covered,” a point which Carter summarily rejects. In chronicling Carter’s spectacular rise from local, grassroots eco-activist to internationally renowned powerhouse, who’s garnered prestigious awards (a Peabody and a MacArthur Genius Fellowship, among others), to established for-profit green consultant, the story suggests that the 46 year-old has positioned herself to earn oodles of money from speaking gigs and lucrative business partnerships at the expense of the South Bronx.

But a crucial nuance the article missed was the inner battle Carter had waged to find her voice and use it in the service of the greater good without neglecting herself–not an easy task for most women, especially women of color. Her husband, James Chase, had even come up with a name for the condition she struggled to overcome: “entitlement deficit disorder.”

Before Carter became famous enough to warrant a bristling Times piece, she was, in fact, a self-described introvert, who diligently followed her mentor, the late community advocate, Yolanda Garcia, from one conference to another. In the South Bronx, the memory of Garcia, a diminutive Latina who passed away in 2005, is remembered with the same reverence as another fierce neighborhood defender Fiorello La Guardia, the New York mayor who fought corruption and racism, and modernized infrastructure in the city during the 1930s and 1940s.

For the young Carter, Garcia was a powerful force, raising the hope of urban revitalization for the poor. “I was so taken by her that I would have carried her bathwater,” Carter told us. At a public meeting one day, where Carter’s mentor was advocating for a better solid waste management system for the community, Garcia turned to her protégée and said, “Why don’t you lead the presentation?” Carter panicked, but her teacher insisted. “She said to me, ‘Majora, this is your community. You have every right to speak on its behalf,’” Carter recalls. “I remember being so afraid that I almost peed on myself.”

Not wanting to disappoint, Carter spoke to the group—albeit with shaky, hesitant words —and in doing so found her voice. Today, that voice, resolute and eloquent, is front-and-center in the environmental debate of the 21^st century. But it seems, that as Carter continues to scale the walls of success and amplify her message, old collaborators want to pull her down and silence her—as does the country’s most esteemed publication.

When The Slant reached Carter by phone, she addressed the accusation that she’s taken credit for others’ eco-work, debunked the notion that she’s an uncritical partner of big business, and spoke eloquently about the racist and sexist impulse in our culture to want to dwarf a black woman’s rise to towering heights.

So, what did you think of the Times story?

I was thrilled when I first discovered that The New York Times was even interested in probing the question of how do we develop relationships with business that promote local economic activities helpful for our community. But I was disappointed because when the Times finally paid any attention to the Bronx and to issues that are important to us, particularly to black women, the only thing they did was write a gossip piece about a person of note from that community..

 How did you deal with your discontent with the story? Did you write a letter to the editor?

No, I spoke to the editorial person who runs the department there, and she stood behind Winnie Hu, the writer, one hundred percent. She thought it was factually accurate.  To which I replied, “Oh, so gossip is considered accurate? Really?…. I didn’t realize you guys were competing with Page Six.” She responded, “Wait, so you’re saying we write gossip?   I think it was very fair and balanced.” Ugh. So it was kind of sad. But life goes on.

Even as far back as 2008, The New York Times subtly questioned your authenticity when it described you tearing up every time at the same part of a stump speech you deliver around the country. How do you think gender and race play into some of the more trivializing observations and criticisms?

I don’t think that I’d be getting any of these criticisms if I weren’t a black woman who was born poor. Those are my cardinal sins. But because I am successful, I must be inauthentic. I find that to be so racist. It’s like, How dare I rise above my rank and actually do the things that I’ve done? How dare I stand next to the big boys of all colors with a smile on my face and get paid? I don’t think that being fairly attractive works in my favor here either, which is really kind of pathetic, but life goes on. I thought the mega-watt smile or whatever the Times called my smile was just hilarious. Yeah, I was born with good teeth. Sorry…

Do I have to be a single mom on welfare who looks like she lives in a food desert to be considered “authentic”? What does that say to young people in our community? I’m working to create the infrastructure that’s going to make you understand that this could become a better place for you to be. I’m saying, “You know, you don’t have to move out of your neighborhood to live in a better one.”  Right now, we are taught that anybody with any wherewithal is gonna get the hell out of Dodge.

So take us back to how this whole story around FreshDirect transpired? How did you and the local environmentalists from your hometown, the South Bronx, end up on opposite sides of the debate about FreshDirect?

It started early last year in 2012 when we kept getting creepy emails and phone calls from a group that was really upset about FreshDirect moving into the South Bronx. At that point, I had been working in the private sector for four years, not doing local grassroots stuff. The people who were calling were kind of bullies and abusive to my team, they would say things to the effect of, stand with the “community” or else. It wasn’t a priority for us because we weren’t engaged in the issue of FreshDirect moving to the South Bronx. The group was really upset that this company was coming, particularly because it is a truck-based business, which consumes diesel. They thought it would add to the South Bronx’s environmental burdens, and there’s some validity to that. But there were advocacy groups working on the ground, and I figured, okay, they’re all allegedly good environmental groups. If there’s something wrong, they’ll bring it up.

But what it did do was make us a little curious about FreshDirect and when I looked into it, I got a different picture from what this protest group was presenting. They claimed FreshDirect made all sorts of labor violations, such as paying people minimum wage to work in freezers overnight, that they were union busting…all this stuff.

Were those claims accurate?

No, none of that stuff was true. About one third of the force is unionized, and at three different times, the part of the workforce that was non-union voted against joining. They claimed workers were being paid very little money, but actually FreshDirect paid on average close to $13 per hour with a significant benefits package. I found out that the company, on its own, had been using bio-diesel instead of diesel for the past seven years, and that their plan was to move to the South Bronx and open a Compressed Natural Gas (CNG)––fueling station, which would power their fleet, and be available to other trucking infrastructures within the community. It’s a lot of work to convert to CNG because right now there isn’t any place to fuel, even if they wanted to use the much less polluting stuff. And so I was like, Oh that’s interesting. Nobody’s ever said anything about that either.

Will you talk a little more about the idea that FreshDirect’s presence in the area would offer locals’ access to better food options?

You know, here we are in the South Bronx. It’s a food desert.  Personally, I usually go downtown to Fairway, because I live right on the 6 line, and it’s 20 minutes on the subway. Fairway’s a decent supermarket, with the best produce and all the good stuff that you could ever possibly want for cheaper and certainly better quality than is available in in the South Bronx – where the quality sucks and the prices are high.. FreshDirect did a cost comparison on a bunch of their products, the same ones that you can buy in the South Bronx, are actually ten to fifteen percent cheaper on FreshDirect. I found out later that FreshDirect, on their own, had tried to do develop an EBT program, so they could bring their service into poor communities, to people on food stamps. And it wasn’t an altruistic thing. They were doing it because it’s a $7 billion dollar market. But from where I sat, it was clear that our communities suffer from a lack of access to good food. And if FreshDirect can tap into that market, provide better produce and food to people who use food stamps, then chances are those people are going to be eating better.

 You argue that FreshDirect would also create more jobs for the community. How many?

They were creating a thousand new jobs in addition to employing about 2400 people now. About 500 of them are working from the Bronx currently. Both New Jersey and Long Island were courting FreshDirect to leave New York City and had a subsidy package available for them. New York City offered them one as well, with a portion of  the subsidies to job creation.   I didn’t think it would be wise for us to lose the jobs we currently had in the City, or lose out on the prospect of gaining more.

The Times describes a scene where a community activist shows up at your door seeking help to prevent FreshDirect from moving to the South Bronx, insinuating that your office was unhelpful because he didn’t have an appointment or represent a corporate interest.

Apparently, last summer, a man came to my office. But I didn’t know about it until I read the Times article. The writer set up this image that my office didn’t want to even open the door to him. First of all, before we moved in, my office was a methadone clinic. The person who opened the door didn’t know this man and wasn’t going to let him inside. And there’s only one exit. So if a strange man comes to the office and there was a lone woman upstairs in the office, then no, she isn’t letting him in. Who would do that? But that’s not the scenario the Times painted..

The article also notes that you requested a $500 fee for a mere consultation.

When our receptionist gave a card to the guy, she also told him to please call for an appointment. They wrote us, and James, my husband, sent an email, which we’re happy to share with you.   It was a standard email we send to everybody. It simply states: “We generally charge $500 for an initial consultation, to provide an assessment, etc. Is this what you were thinking? And we’re happy to help you any way we can.” We never heard anything back from them – so we followed up to make sure they were connected with what they needed, and still never heard back, so we dropped the matter all togeteher. But the Times turned it into us demanding money. Believe me, we do plenty of pro bono work. But of course, we let folks know that I have a business, and part of what we do is help people understand that the environmental world includes entrepreneurship. The letter is one way we help people understand that.

Much of the criticism hurled at you reminded us of how harshly Gloria Steinem was judged by some of her feminist peers. There was a lot of jealousy when she became the face of the movement and gained greater influence. People felt she took credit for the larger community’s work and some have accused you of the same, according to the Times’s piece.

Interestingly, The New York Times didn’t mention anything specific that I was taking credit for. I would like to know.   Believe me, there are plenty of things that I actually could take credit for that I don’t even bother talking about because I know people are really attached to them and don’t want me associated with them. One example, was the Bronx River Watershed Alliance. I was a founding member and worked to get the State and the City to relinquish their hold on a portion of the Sheridan Expressway, which was this under-utilized highway that goes nowhere. Literally. We wanted to push the planning process to transform it because it really doesn’t serve a major use at all in terms of transportation., but it separates people from a beautifully restored riverfront. We worked on it for a number of years and got to the point where it was getting a lot of attention. The idea for the project had precedence around the world in places like Milwaukee and Seoul, Korea, where cities literally tore down pieces of expressways that no longer served a purpose and transformed them into useful pieces of community infrastructure. I got the feeling that folks would prefer if I wasn’t involved, so I was like, you know what, it’s yours. I’m not even going to associate myself with it. It’s kind of sad now because they lost some momentum. And I’m not saying it’s because I wasn’t involved anymore. But I can say they lost a person who was willing and able to talk to potential partners, outside the social justice circle in a way where they didn’t feel like they were being preached to. (Laughter) They lost that “high-wattage smile” The New York Times said I had for the cameras.

Yeah, the reference to your smile implied that you are a phony camera-ready opportunist.

Actually, a lot of people really do like me for a reason: I’m nice. I don’t treat people like hell and they like having me around. I was able to get them into rooms that they were not able to get into before. But man, you should hear some of the things that didn’t make it into the article that this reporter told me I was being accused of. For example, there’s this one guy. I’m sorry, it makes me laugh every time that I think about it! I honestly don’t remember his name, but he accused me of being personally responsible for an organization going out of business because I didn’t personally fund it. Like it’s my fault that the organization was mismanaged or didn’t provide the service that it was supposed to? The reporter also said sources accused me of getting people kicked out of conferences, that I was hiring litigators to squash these poor community groups on the ground who were saying bad things about me. I was like, Oh my god. Really?

The Times mentioned you now live in your husband James’s spacious, rent-stabilized loft in TriBeCa. So let’s clarify. Where do you live?

It’s still his apartment, of course we stay there.   I work in cities all over the country, and my husband had a place that preceded our marriage. What does that have to do with anything?  That was incredibly creepy. But mentioning where my husband lives made it pretty clear that The New York Times was writing a gossip piece. The writer had no interest in the issues at all, and she came right out and said, “You know, I’m really interested in why there are activists in the South Bronx that hate you so much.” Seriously?

The Times quoted Eddie Bautista, the executive director of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, talking about the “breathtaking ironies” between you accusing activists of accepting money from companies who’ve harmfully impacted the community and you receiving a consulting fee from FreshDirect.

I thought his accusation was simplistic. Look, he’s an environmental justice activist. The bulk of their work is about protesting stuff. So in that regard, I guess I was never a very good environmental justice activist because I always focused on developing solutions to problems.   It seemed really silly to separate the environment from the economics of the situation, and I wanted to find ways that meaningfully brought the two of those things together in the service of our community. And when I kicked the tires of FreshDirect what I saw was a company’s willingness to engage with the community. And I thought with the right folks on the ground, they could develop the kind of public-private partnerships with FreshDirect that would ultimately support our community. That’s what I looked at. Look, we live in a capitalist society and I don’t think that we are going to change things with only the power of the people. I’m sorry, but the non-profit industrial complex that supports the groups that have been attacking me is not going to be there to support the economic wellbeing of the people on the ground. It’s not entirely their job, so I looked for ways to create the partnerships that will support people on the ground. That’s what I’m concerned about.

What’s your history with Bautista?

I was a member of citywide alliance that he organized and I had great respect for him. Sometimes I get the feeling  that some of my former colleagues feel as though I have stolen their MacArthur. Like if it weren’t for me,  they’d have all sorts of awards, as well as funding. But I haven’t taken a penny of non-profit funding in five years. Raising money was difficult for me. There was this impression that somehow I opened my mouth and money would just fall on me. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Nothing. I literally had to fill well over a quarter of a million dollars in budget holes because foundations stopped funding my work, assuming that somebody else was going to take care of us. So I got crafty and figured out that people pay money to speakers at conferences. And that’s how I funded my little grass-roots non-profit in the South Bronx. I brought in money in from around the world to do work in the South Bronx. A third of my budget came from those sources by the time I left. And I knew that the second I left Sustainable South Bronx they’d have an easier time getting funding than when I was running it. In fact, they filled the budget gap and then some. It was unbelievable how quickly they were fully funded when a white woman was running it.

But you’d left a solid structure in place before you left.

The structure was strong and the staff was amazing so not even a misguided board of directors and their unqualified  choice for a leader and could destroy it.

How do you remain a leader with a strong voice in the presence of so much criticism?  

I squashed my own voice for so many years. It’s really interesting: My husband diagnosed me with this condition he called EDD: Entitlement Deficit Disorder. It’s true. A lot of women have it. I don’t assume that anybody owes me anything. As a matter of fact, I just assume that nobody is going to be supportive and that it is up to me to make myself an attractive player in whatever game I’m playing. My father was the son of a slave who grew up with Jim Crow in Georgia. So this man witnessed the basest kinds of human behavior, which he was subjected to just because he happened to be a big old black man. I don’t pretend that I’m anything except what I am. Because I happen to be black, female and born poor, I don’t take anything for granted. I absolutely assume that I have to work really hard and find ways to help people see me as valuable. And I do feel that it is my job, through my work, to support communities to feel the same way and recognize when they do have something to contribute. It can be incredibly fun and rewarding, and sometimes it’s hard. Most of the time it’s hard, but the light at the end of the tunnel is that you see change that supports people you love and care about. Those people are my clients. Not the Eddie Bautistas of the world. I could give a crap about them. I never felt like they ever really liked me, and now it’s really clear how much they don’t like me. And you know what? It’s good to know these things.

What is your vision for the South Bronx?

Overall, I want to see happy, healthy people who feel as though they have something to contribute to society. Period. And right now the South Bronx has people who frighten themselves off before they even get in the game. And that has everything to do with the poor environmental conditions they see on a daily basis, you know, the kind of development brought in. There are plenty of people who are comfortable with the South Bronx being this place where there’s a lot of dependency and not a whole lot of power, which has worked to the benefit and profit of others. That makes me really sad.

We see a similar phenomenon in other cities, such as Detroit, around the U.S.

There are South Bronxes all over the country. At this point, I think the South Bronx is a metaphor for what can go wrong when we’re not actively promoting the kinds of economic, social and environmental development that support people’s wellbeing. We’ve got a long history of doing that, and quite frankly, folks in different parts of the social justice world, including affordable housing, haven’t addressed all the needs of people so that they can actually thrive, not just have a roof over their heads, not just have a social service net, but how to provide the kind of situation that engenders dignity.

How does the infighting in the world of environmental activism stymie progress in the South Bronx?

Well, they sit back and bitch about me instead of actually working. They think I’m the problem. It’s like, No, while you’re yakking, I’m working. Sorry guys. That’s what really has been going on all these years.

In the Times article, Chris Norwood, the executive director of Health People, applauded your efforts to forge public-private partnerships to benefit the local economy.  Why are such relationships the way of the future for the South Bronx and communities like it all over the world?

The development of a public-private partnership means that everybody has something to contribute.  I want people to feel that they’re in powerful positions. When you’re in a partnership, you’re bringing something to the table that your partner wants and needs. If you don’t feel you have something to offer, you’re always going to be perceived as something less. Period. Everybody’s got something to give. And I want community groups to behave in a way where they clearly know they have something to offer to local businesses coming here. It’s their job to raise the bar for what’s gonna pass for good corporate behavior.

We scanned groups whose work would see the benefit of a company like FreshDirect and how the company would support the groups’ goals. Not the other way around. But these organizations have to put themselves in a position so that FreshDirect would see them as a powerful partners. Some immediately got that because they see themselves, not just as people with their hands out, but as folks with hands extended with something to offer, which is a very different posture. So people like Chris Norwood, Steve Ritz from Green Bronx Machine, and a bunch of others, who didn’t make it into the article, agree with me. Their thinking is, “We can help companies be better neighbors,” or, “Let’s make sure businesses understand how they need to conduct themselves while they’re here.”

Was there anything crucial you told the reporter that didn’t make it into the story?

She kind of turned the positive things I said about myself into me bragging about my work. She said to me, “I’ve never seen activists hate a regular person–unless that person was a politician–as much as they hate you.” And I said, “Well I’ve never seen that happen to a regular person either, but I’m not a regular person. Listen, I won a MacArthur. I won a Peabody Award. I’ve been on stage with Bill Clinton. I’ve called on the film actress Kerry Washington to come to my neighborhood to support other women in the community, and she came. I have made great projects materialize. I’ve done a bunch of things. So no, I guess I’m not a regular person and I kind of understand why they’re behaving this way and acting so jealous.” But the reporter turned that into me boasting about my accomplishments and the people I knew.

The Times’s main point is that you no longer represent the community’s interest and that you’ve “capitalized on past good deeds in the way that politicians parlay their contacts into a lobbying career….”

I’m not a non-profit. I’m taxed at a ridiculous rate. Because I am a public person, I don’t write off many of the things that I probably could because I’m afraid that somebody’s going to accuse me of doing something wrong. We are so above board in all of our dealings. All the quote-unquote community projects I do are on my own dime. I’ve been researching and doing all sorts of work around redevelopment, taking surveys and asking for community participation. I’ve asked locals for their input about redevelopment goals and projects that we want to work on. So I’ve been out there at my own expense, soliciting input, feedback and support from folks,.

What other projects are you working on now?

A small piece of what I’m doing is some voiceover work for this really interesting documentary that Penn State Public Television is doing about green infrastructure to deal with climate change. They went around the country to places like the South Bronx, Philadelphia and San Antonio, to look at different community-based approaches. I’m really proud to be associated with this.

But the primary bulk of our work now is around real estate development and using it as a tool and a platform for social, environmental and economic development in poor communities.

That’s a hot sector in the green economy….

After speaking and being on the road a lot, I got wonderful insights into real estate development around the country, particularly in poor communities. I noticed there are only two kinds of real estate development that happen in poor neighborhoods. One is the kind that assumes that the neighborhood is going to get better and gentrified and the poor will be displaced. The other kind assumes that a level of poverty will always be maintained there. You see it with highly subsidized affordable housing, which is brought to areas where only the poor will live. So poverty becomes concentrated and there’s little room for those communities to grow and develop. It exacerbates brain drain from the community and all of the other things associated with having a place that only has poor people in it. I want to use real estate development as a way to increase economic diversity by attracting the kind of industries that are on the economic growth trend trajectory. But I also want to prepare people to participate in those shifts. We’re going to see different types of domestic manufacturing and technology in the 21st century. It’s all about figuring out how to prepare the land and get people to participate in this new economic boom and stop keeping people so poor that they can only stay in poor communities. So that’s what we’re working on right now.

Would you say that the environmentalists that are critical of you in this article are missing the economic piece from their ideas?

Let me give you a very sad, horrible example. I wrote the proposal for the South Bronx Greenway that brought $1.25 million dollars worth of planning money into the South Bronx to design this greenway for physical activities, storm water management, etcetera. In my mind, it was all about planning community infrastructure to promote positive economic development in our communities. Building greenways, for instance, will attract a certain kind of economic development that we do not have right now. I also realized the construction in the area would be crazy big. There was about $25 million to start building the first phase of the South Bronx Greenway, but when the economic stimulus package happened, and it was a shovel-ready project,  another $25 million dollars came down the pike, bringing $50 million dollars into the South Bronx. Five-Zero million. Unprecedented.

Although I had reached out to both the Sustainable South Bronx and The Point, asking if there was anything I could do to be helpful as the next phase of the project came up, nobody responded. And I was like, Okay, as long as the two groups that are allegedly working on the Greenway make sure that the people from the local community will be employed as this thing is being built, great. But when construction started I saw pretty much only white people working on it, clearly not from the South Bronx.  They clearly did not  get the connection between economic needs and the environment – it’s not that difficult to get at leaest a few local hires and apprenticeships out of a $50M project, they just didn’t do it.

The mentality seems to be that there aren’t enough resources.

I know! But there is enough. There always is. I stopped fighting for crumbs a long time ago. I’m like, You know what, I’m going shopping and we’re gonna make a really big pie. And then we’re gonna go shopping again and we’re gonna make an even bigger one. I am done with this scrounging around on the floor because there’s always money. And when I see somebody, whether it’s from my community or another community like mine, doing great, I’m like, Oh snap, seriously? Home girl did that? This is powerful! And I think that’s the experience of most people because they’re inspired by the example.

The folks who contributed to that article are a very small minority. There are a whole lot of other people who are just like, You go baby. When you succeed, we all succeed. And there are way more of those supportive voices, than there are of these petty people, who really just need to love themselves.

She kept me waiting for hours. Hours! She was upstairs at her house—that’s when they used to let you come to their houses—and I was downstairs looking around the living room. There was a little Buddhist altar with a little box on it. I opened it up and there was coarse, thread-like stuff in it.
I was like, What the fuck is this?
I started sniffing it and all of a sudden I heard, “What the fuck are you doing?”
I looked around and it was Courtney.
I said, “Well, what is this?”
“Those are Kurt’s [Cobain's] pubes,” she said, “Will you please put them back.”

Before all the Hollywood madness, Sessums was a self-confessed “Mississippi sissy,” who preferred to gab with the girls than roughhouse with the boys in his youth. “My love of language comes from sitting inside the house with the women,” he told The Slant during a Skype chat in March, “listening to them talk, while all the other kids were outside playing.”

Those formative coffee klatches taught Sessums the art of conversation and imparted an Oscar Wildean sense of comic timing—“knowing how and when to make a joke,” he says—skills that enabled him to confidently roll with Hollywood heavyweights, like Tom Cruise, Madonna, Johnny Depp, Jennifer Lopez, Hugh Jackman and many others, when he became a celebrity writer for Interview magazine, Vanity Fair and more recently, The Daily Beast.

Yet no matter how beautifully written, smartly executed or thought-provoking his celebrity coverage has been, he has always felt like “a poor stepchild,” in the home of respectable journalism.

In Sessums’s view, celebrity occupies a paradoxical position in the magazine world. On the one hand, the public’s insatiable appetite for stories about the rich and famous is the engine motoring newsstand sales and revving up online traffic. On the other, the literati deride it as a necessary evil to fund journalism of serious consequence. No one knows this contradiction better than he does.

From his cottage in Provincetown, MA, Sessums, the editorial director of the new LGBT magazine, 429, gave The Slant an inside look at working the underappreciated celebrity beat for legendary editors Tina Brown and Graydon Carter at Vanity Fair. He also reminisced about the good ol’ days when PR people had less power, magazines gave you more space (6,000 to 10,000 words) and celebrities offered you weeks of their time instead of hours.

In honor of long-form and Sessums’s heyday, this post runs more than 5,500 words. But it’s full of so many revelatory anecdotes about Hollywood stars and surprising insights that it’s a quick and exhilarating read. Promise.

You started your life in New York City as a Juilliard School of Drama student.

I didn’t graduate. And I never graduated from college. I’m not smart, just clever. I ain’t got no book smarts. But I can carry on a conversation and keep up. Juilliard wouldn’t let you work and go to school at the same time. So I decided to go to work. I don’t think I finished the first year. I was there in ‘78 so Robin Williams and Christopher Reeve were still roaming the halls. Juilliard was really just an excuse to get to New York.

Why’d you give up acting?

I had been out as a gay guy since I was 15 in Mississippi. It was ‘71 or ‘72. And I looked at the lay of the land and thought, I want to be a star. I want to be famous. I want to be successful, but I’ll have to go back in the closet. I couldn’t reconcile living a lie to enable myself to pretend. That was a falsehood that I couldn’t quite wrap my head around. So I stopped being an actor to work in the movie business.

Doing what?

Well, first I got a job as a freelance script reader. A woman named Buffy Shutt was head of production at Time Life Films. She needed an assistant and she liked the way I read scripts. So I gave up my agent and went to work for her. Then, within six weeks of my arrival, they did away with the whole division. I had sort of given up my life and was pissed. I went to the heads of Human Resources like a big shot, breaking through doors, going, “Fuck you! I’m going to take you to court! I’m going to sue your asses!” I was scared to do it, but I thought, “Don’t fuck me.” I worked for six more weeks and got a year of my salary when I left. Anyway, Buffy went back to Paramount and took me with her. I worked there for five years. She’d let me sit at my desk and write short stories and plays, and every now and then, I’d file. I was a highfalutin factotum. I was the only male secretary. This was the early 80s.

When did you start your gig at Interview magazine?

The whole division I worked for at Paramout moved out to Los Angeles. I didn’t want to live there. So a friend of mine, Mark Martousek, who worked at Interview, told me about a senior editor position there. So I went in and talked to Gael Love, the editor in chief at the time. I had no clips. Nothing. Nothing! So I had to give her some short stories I’d written. I didn’t even know the lingua franca of magazines. When people would talk about things, it was like, What language are you speaking?! I write about the whole experience in my next book, I Left It on the  Mountain, in a chapter called “The Factory Worker.”

Did you ever run into Andy Warhol?

I’d met him several times. I knew him through a mutual friend, Henry Geldzahler, one of my first mentors in New York. He was the commissioner of cultural affairs for Ed Koch and a curator of 20th century art at the Met. So, I knew Andy through Henry. I had reservations about working at Interview. I thought it was tacky. I didn’t want to be part of the whole thing.

I was hired on a trial basis and was having a hard time. I was so stressed out I couldn’t sleep. Andy had a little office down on the first floor, near a bathroom I always used. I’d go in there and have panic attacks, thinking, I can’t do this job. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m faking my way through this. I remember looking in the mirror one morning and seeing dark circles under my eyes for the first time because I’d lost so much sleep. I’d think, You’re just working at a factory. That’s all you are—a factory worker. I never thought I’d be working for Andy. It sort of embarrassed me.

One day, I came out of the bathroom and Andy said, “You go in that bathroom a lot.” I said, “You think I’m doing coke? I’m no drug addict.” (I wasn’t yet, anyway.) He was taken aback. I said, “Honestly, I just want to do a good job here, Andy. And I’m still on trial.” He said, “I didn’t know that. I’ll talk to Gael and Fred Hughes.” Fred was the publisher back then. Later, he came back and said, “I told them to go ahead and give you a job. Welcome to the factory!”

You eventually went up the ranks to executive editor before leaving for Vanity Fair. How’d you end up there?

I did two interviews that got Tina Brown’s attention. I did the Playboy interview with Barry Diller back when he was the chief executive officer at Fox. He really wasn’t doing any press at the time. I was able to get an interview with him because I’d worked on the executive floor at Paramount, so he sort of knew me. Playboy had been trying to get an interview with him for years. So I wrote him a letter. I thought, He may remember me when I was a highfalutin flunky! This was ‘88 or ‘87. We went back and forth for weeks, trying to negotiate the terms of the Q&A and how much time I would spend with him. Playboy demanded lots of time.

How much?

In the old days, subjects spent a lot of time with you. Weeks! Now you’re lucky to get an hour between a Botox injection and a bowel movement. It’s all about seduction–you’re seducing them, they’re seducing you. It’s all about understanding the person. Giving a writer more time gets a better story.

Anyway, I was getting ready to go to a screening one night. I had shaving cream on half my face when the phone rang. It was Barry, saying, “I have to really mull this over.” And I’d had it. I said, “You know what? There’s a fine line between mulling over this decision and playing with me. You just crossed it. Fuck you, man.  I’ll give myself your answer: It’s no.  Enough.” And he said, “Well, if you put it that way, I’ll do it.” But, Barry became a friend.  A kind and generous one.

Celebrities are like thoroughbreds—I don’t mean to compare them to animals—but they are creatures who are sort of apart, and the minute they sense that you are afraid of them, you can’t ride them. Some of the things I’ve always said about myself are I am not a journalist. I am too lazy to be a journalist. I’m a writer who knows narrative and I’m not intimidated by fame. I don’t find it intimidating at all.

I also did a Sam Shepard cover story for Interview. He was another celebrity Tina Brown wanted to get for Vanity Fair, and couldn’t. Suddenly I was this person she had never heard of who was getting interviews she wanted. She started asking around about me and then called me.

When I interviewed with her, I said, “You only need to know a few things about me. I’ve always had a woman boss, so I’m very comfortable with having a woman as my boss. I don’t like bullshit, so don’t bullshit me and I won’t bullshit you. And I don’t do anything unethical in my own mind, which gives me a little leeway.” She said, “OK, the job is yours. I want you here as a contributing editor.”

What year was that?

Eighty-nine or ‘88. Three months into starting, David Kuhn gave up the Fanfare section and Tina asked me to take it over. So within three months, I had two jobs there. One of my proudest moments as the editor of Fanfare was when I got a call from a friend at Harvard. He said, “There’s a guy here who’s really cool. He’s black and he heads the Harvard Law Review. Nobody knows about him, but I think he’s going places. He’d be a good subject for Fanfare.” So, I went to Tina and said, “This one’s a little different for Fanfare, but I’d like to put this guy, Barack Obama, in the column. She said, “It’s your section!” So we shot a big picture of him and put him in the magazine. It was his first national exposure. Boy, did he leave me in the dust. Good God!

Anyway, for my first story she sent me to England with Annie Leiboviz to interview all these women who were married to the Rolling Stones. I handed it in with the title, “The Women Who Still Sleep With The Rolling Stones.” Tina loved that title. She loved it a lot more than the story! She made me go through ten drafts. It was nightmarish. I thought, I’m in over my head. I can’t do this. I don’t know what she wants. I can’t please her. At one point she said, “Give me all of your research. I’ll write this damn thing!” So I brought in a shopping bag full of my back-up and plopped it on her desk. She said, “What’s this?” I said, “It’s my research. Good luck!” Then she called me and said, “Look, I hired you to write this. You have to write it. I don’t have the time.” Finally, after the tenth draft, she really loved it. She was even toying with the idea of putting it on the cover. So that was sort of a hit. The next thing she gave me was a cover story on Madonna. She accepted the first draft I submitted. She just loved it. From that moment on, I was golden. She gave me everything.

You’ve worked with two legendary editors, Tina Brown and then Graydon Carter. Tell us a little bit about their different styles.

They’re both amazing editors and are deservedly legends.

Tina is very much a part of what I call the BWSJ—the Barbara Walters School of Journalism, which means being a part of the world you cover because it’s all about access. It’s all about being in some lane of traffic, at a dinner or a party, and being able to turn to someone and say, “You should do a story.”

Also, Tina made it her mission to make her writers stars. She put our names on the cover. There were always the names of the writers as much as the title of their stories. Vanity Fair was like a marquee. I’ll always be grateful to her for that.

But both Graydon and Tina want respect from the insular world of journalism in New York. They want to be considered serious and thoughtful. When they get criticized, it’s for their celebrity coverage and their covers. So I was often the weapon that they would be attacked with. When they looked at me, they saw a weapon that was used against them. And I sensed it. I once told James Wolcott, whom I adore, “James, I wish I was as cool as you, but I know my place. I’m the trailer park.” That’s been the curse of my life. I’m a little Mississippi sissy, a poor boy from the South. I’m the white trash. I’m what’s used for criticism. It was frustrating and odd, you know. The better I was at what I did, the bigger the criticisms and the curse.

I’m a dinosaur now. I outlived my use. The business—the world—is a very different place now on lots of levels.

Different how?

For one thing, back in the day, they gave you so much more space. When I would write prose in the old days, they gave me 5,000 to 7,000 words. Some of my stories were 8,000 to 10,000 words! They would give you space to really write and explore a subject. Maybe it’s a reflection of the times, but editors today give you 1500 words. They want you in and out. I don’t understand it.

It’s the Twitter universe! Magazines just don’t want long-form journalism, especially when it comes to cover stories and celebrity stuff. Long-form is saved for all things serious.

Also—I’m going to get in trouble here—there is an abdication of editorial responsibility to publicists. A lot of editors give publicists too much leeway.

In the old days, publicists would never get to approve a writer. Ever. Ever. Ever. Ever. Ever! Now, they get to dictate who gets to write their client’s story. When did writer approval happen? Just as celebrities shouldn’t be able to sense your fear, publicists shouldn’t either, and I think that editors should be willing to say, “You don’t get to approve who I hire as a writer. If you don’t want to do this, fine.” Call their bluff! Go to a second, third or fourth choice.

I was fired off a story for a fashion magazine and took the story to The Daily Beast. It was a real revelation, like “Wow, the world has changed.” That’s when I realized I belong in the Museum of Natural History. I’m just a cranky, old dinosaur.

Wait, you got fired?

I got fired off the story because the star felt that my questions were too personal. The magazine sided with the celebrity instead of backing up their writer.

What happens is when you interview people there’s an understanding that you’re not supposed to ask certain questions. The PR person will talk to an editor and say, “He’s not going to ask this question.” I’ll agree to let the editor agree to that, but then when I go to talk to the person I’ll say, “OK, so your PR person told my editor that I wouldn’t ask you this question, so I’m not going to ask you this question. But I am going to write about it. We can talk about it, or we cannot talk about it. But I want to be honorable and upfront with you by letting you know that I didn’t agree not to write about it. I only agreed not to ask you about it. Now it’s up to you.” Eighty-five to 90 percent of the time they say we can talk about it. It’s interesting.

Speaking of off-limits topics, you often ask subjects who are presumed gay, but are not out, about their sexuality. Why ask that question?

In the past I was like, Never out anybody. I was very adamant about that and at some point I sort of switched. I thought, You know what? I’m not going to buy into somebody else’s shame. They can deny it. I don’t give a shit. That’s fine. But I’m not going to be denied the question like it’s something shameful. Also, I’m not asking them what they do in their bedroom. I’m not asking them if they are a top or a bottom or what their sexual proclivities are. If someone is straight, that part of their life infuses all aspects of who they are. They talk about it all the time, and it’s not about being private.

I understand if you’re a movie star, you’re selling an image and people have to be able to project things onto you, especially if you are a romantic lead. I understand all of that in the abstract. But I’m not an adjunct to their career completely. I’m there as someone who’s got a job to do. I’m there to have a conversation. I’m not their agent. I’m not their PR person. That’s not my job. My job is to have conversations with them as people.

So your problem is with celebrity handlers?

It’s not even a problem, but you know what? I’ve got a job so respect my job as much as I respect yours. Don’t look at me like I work for you. I don’t work for you. You work for the celebrity. I work for the editor. Those should be two separate things. In the recent past, they’ve sort of become blurred. But I like publicists. I even thought about being a publicist because I get it. Because I’ve seen all sides of it, I could be a great publicist. I feel for them. They have to be the bad cop so that their celebrity can be the good one.

Having written in this genre for decades, we wondered why you think celebrity journalism is so important to American culture? Aside from feeding a lust for gossip, why is it relevant?

Well, I don’t know if it’s important. I think it has its place. One hundred years from now, when people look back on this time, they’ll see it as the gray parrot in the cultural mine. If it was done well there’s a cleverness to it. There are amazing writers who write about pop culture. Mark Harris, an Entertainment Weekly columnist, is incredible. The subject matter doesn’t determine the quality of the writing.

I’ve always looked on what I do as a truck-driving job. I drive glamorous cargo. I deliver the goods at deadline and dump it out. I get back behind the wheel, and I drive the truck. It’s a blue-collar job. I realized early on that people read magazines on airplanes and while taking a shit. That’s where your work is read! So I have a very realistic attitude about it all.

If I thought of myself as a journalist, I would really have an inferiority complex. Thinking of myself as a writer is self-protective. If I didn’t think of myself as a journalist when I was at Vanity Fair, then I didn’t feel quite so inferior. It was weird though: You’re writing the cover story and your name is splashed across the cover, and yet the incongruous fact was that you just felt like the poor stepchild. I was Cinderella and it was always midnight. Very seldom was I at the ball.

You’re sometimes criticized for being too soft on your subjects and for being too present in your stories. What’s your response to that?

People say, “Oh you’re never mean enough” and I always tell them that these people are not Nazi scientists. There is nothing evil about them. Sometimes their egos run rampant and they can be a little diva-esque, but they are not evil. I never understood trying to make your name as a writer by being mean to celebrities just because they’re famous.

And yeah a lot of people say, “You put yourself in your stories too much. Remove yourself.” I know this is going to sound egotistical but a lot of times I thought I was more interesting than the person I was interviewing. Not all the time. Don’t get me wrong. Maybe 40 percent of the time, I’ve sat there and thought, Thank God I’m sitting here or this would be really boring! That’s what I take into the room: I’m not lucky to meet you, you’re lucky that I’m the one interviewing you.

What qualities make for a great interview?

A really good interview is a personal, intimate conversation as performance art. You and the interviewee realize it’s going on a page, yet there’s a heightened intimacy that goes on where an interview ceases to be an interview and becomes a conversation. But then you have to be able to translate that onto the page and know how to write. I write it like a short story. I love the Q&A format. It’s like a talk show!

But, I am amazed sometimes when I read Q&As. I think, Did the interviewer even listen to what the person just said? I will always be the Mississippi sissy, who is inside with the women, listening to them talk, while all the other kids are outside playing. I love language and conversation, listening and hearing the stream of conversation, knowing how and when to make a joke. That comes from sitting inside the house with the women. That’s part of my interview technique: I go back to that little kid who loved sitting with the women.

What are some of your other interview techniques?

I do my research the night before the interview so it’s fresh in my mind. Then, I sit down and write out my notes and imagine the conversation. I prepare where I am going to lead this person and decide beforehand where to drop in a reference. And I sort of know and expect what an answer will be so I can then follow up with some unexpected thing that will surprise them.

One of the oldest tricks in the book is to be totally open and honest about yourself. Tell them your deepest, darkest secrets, some nasty awful shit. It never goes in the damn story and totally throws them off. Plus, they love it when you talk dirty. It shocks them.

The impetus for them to talk to you is a new product, a movie, or a book. So on some level it’s a commercial transaction. Use that commercial transaction to find your way into some other area of their life. Your research will often lead you to a bit of knowledge about the person that is far removed from their popular image. It’s always there. You have to follow the breadcrumbs when you’re researching them. Keep following the trail. Sometimes it’ll take an hour or two, but you’ll get to a detail that’s like, Oh my God. From that one detail you never expected, a whole world opens up. You’ll drop that detail into the conversation and they’ll say, “Oh my God. How did you know that?”

Give us an example from one of your past interviews.

Sure, I used to submit stories I’d written to The New Yorker. There was a woman there named Linda Asher, who found my work in the slush pile and began to engage me. I sent her like 12 or 13 stories. Howard Moss, their poetry editor for nearly forty years, found out about me from Linda. He was one of the first people who read my work and became my mentor.

Because I had done my research, when I went to interview actress Michelle Williams, I knew she loved poetry. (And if I were straight, honey, I’d still be chasing her. I fell in love with her!) I went down to her house in Brooklyn. I stopped at a bookstore on Smith Street and saw Selected Poems by Howard Moss. I thought, I’m going to buy her a Howard Moss book of poems because I loved Howard and that’s a good way to connect my life with her. (By the way, sometimes it’s good if you give your subject a gift; they love a thoughtful gift. The one thing celebrities love is free shit! They do, honey, more than any others I’ve met in my life!)

I gave her the book and she gasped.

“Oh my God,” she said, “this man is one of my favorite poets in the world. When Heath died, there was a poem of Moss’s that got me through my grief. I would read it over and over and over. Just the other day I was trying to find it, but I couldn’t remember the name of it.”

Then, she looked at the table of contents and found it. It was called “The Pruned Tree.” I said, ”Will you read it to me—for Howard, for Heath, for me, for yourself?” And she did. So the impulse to give her a gift, to honor her love of poetry, gave me an “in” into an interview that I would have never had if I had just sat down to talk about her movie.

Plus, I had done Heath’s first big story, which was on the cover of Vanity Fair. The photographer Bruce Weber and I flew to Prague. Heath was filming A Knight’s Tale. I snuck over a joint in my sock, which I always did back in the day. I spent a lot of time there, about a week, doing lots of things with him. One night, he asked if I wanted to go to a party with him, but it had to be off the record. I said, “Sure.” We were on the Charles Bridge shootin’ the shit, and I pulled out my joint and shared it with him.

I told Michelle about that. I said, “I’ve always cherished that memory, thinking it was really cool, but I almost feel like I have to make an amends because of the way he died. Before I really talk to you, I need to come clean. It was just pot, but I did drugs with Heath and I feel like I should apologize. You’re being in my life as an interview subject is a way for me to say, ‘I’m sorry.’” Sometimes it’s more than just a job, it becomes your life.

What celebrity profile are you most proud of?

A personal favorite of mine is the one I did on Emma Thompson.  I think that was some of my best work. The Courtney Love story was a good one too. Again, I spent a lot of time with her, which was exhausting, but it turned into a really great story. It was complicated, but full of everything.

I interviewed her naked in the bathtub! I told her, “You need a bath! I can’t sit here and talk to you unless you get a bath. Why don’t we go to the bathroom and you get in the tub.”

She said, “I’m not doing that!”

I said, “Think about it Courtney. You’ll get attention, so I think it’d be good. Strip down and let me interview you next to the tub.”

I watched her bathe.

People thought I was too nice to her, but she was this very tortured person that I found compelling. Journalist Lynn Hirschberg had done a brilliant hatchet job on her. My piece came out as a sort of bookend. It was to say, “This is who she is. You interpret it. I’m not going to color this. This is what I saw. This is everything that happened.”

And I like the Barbra Streisand story I wrote for Vanity Fair. This was ’91 or ’92, before email. She invaded my life—faxes! faxes! phone calls! phone calls!—trying to control the piece. I finally had to tell her to back off.

The night she got the early issue of the magazine she called me at 2:00 a.m. I was sound asleep when the phone rang: “Hi, it’s Barbra. Did I wake you up?” she asked. Then she went through the whole story: What she liked, what she didn’t like, what was a bad quote, on and on.

At the end, she said, “So, I have a question. Why didn’t you say I was sexier?”

I said, “Barbra I got Jon Peters saying that when he first met you, you walked up some stairs in front of him and he saw how sexy your ass was.”

She said, “I know. That was nice, but you as the writer should have said I was sexier.”

So I said, “Barbra let me tell you something. When people asked me what is Barbra Streisand really like, I give them a one word answer: Fuckable.”

And she said, “Oh my God, I love that! Why didn’t you put that in the story?”

Ha! Why didn’t you?

People would have thought I was a sexist pig!

So who are you dying to interview?

When people say who’s the most interesting person you’ve interviewed I always say, “The next one!” So I’ll say that to you, the next one.

Can you tell us a little more about your forthcoming book?

It’s sort of a sequel to Mississippi Sissy, my first book. The title, I Left It on the Mountain, comes from having climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. I made the summit. I sold it to St. Martin’s Press as a glamour pus, life in the fast lane of New York City type of book. Each chapter is sort of self-contained, yet they all connect.

The chapter called “The Climber” is about my climb up Mount Kilimanjaro, which a note from Tom Cruise inspired me to do. I had just told his girlfriend at the time, Penélope Cruz, about my HIV status. I’ve interviewed her twice. I love, love, love her! And if I were straight, I’d still be chasing her too. She told Tom that I was HIV positive, so he sent me a note, saying how sorry he was to hear of my illness. But I hadn’t thought of myself as ill.

Tom and I had become friendly at one point after I interviewed him years ago. I’m sure someone said, “Stop seeing him. He’s an out queer writer. What are you doing hanging with him? People gossip.” I found out that people were gossiping, which shocked me because I didn’t look at him as a sexual creature at all. I didn’t. He was just a nice guy to hang out with.

Anyway, I saw the word illness in the note that he had sent me. While it was a thoughtful, sweet note, it felt like a statement about my life. Getting that letter made me climb that mountain. So when I saw him at the Vanity Fair Oscar party later that year, I had just climbed it. He came through the back door. He’d ridden his motorcycle to the event. He was wearing a black motorcycle helmet and black leather pants. I said, “I made the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. I climbed it because of you motherfucker. I loved your note and it touched my heart, but I had to prove to you and to me that I wasn’t ill so I climbed that damn mountain.”

The last chapter is called “The Addict.” During all that time of interviewing all these high-profile people, I became a meth addict. For the last year and a half, I’ve gotten sober. The book covers my spiritual journey to getting sober in this heightened world of celebrity.

I just hope St. Martin’s likes it because it’s not exactly the book they bought! There are parts in it that will make Shirley MacLaine’s eyes roll.

Andrew Sullivan once said: “Kevin is a one-off. So at home and canny in the world of celebrity journalism and yet the reason he is so good at understanding character is because he’s lived it. Underneath the urbane exterior is Flannery O’Connor on acid.”

You know, it’s Flannery O’Connor’s birthday today. That’s not a coincidence. That’s God. God just spoke through you. On Facebook, I posted some excerpts from her lecture, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction” and an audio of her reading from her most famous short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

I think part of what I do and the reason I don’t write hatchet jobs is because I look on it as my mission to find the good man or the good woman in each of these celebrities. They’re in there somewhere.

“Then I sort of ducked and covered,” he remembers, “waiting to see what would happen.” 

Despite the social pressures of growing up in conservative Salt Lake City, Utah, Breen’s progressive parents handled the news pretty well. But it wasn’t easy for them. “Their whole notion of what my life would be was suddenly upended,” he recalls, “and they were afraid I’d get beaten up or become HIV positive.”  

A decade into his tenure at Here Media, the parent company of gay glossies, Out and The Advocate, where he’s held editorial posts since 2003, he’s no longer a novice in matters of coming out. In fact, Breen has edited and published so many stories on the topic one could say he’s mastered the form.

So when The Slant reached Breen at his L.A. office, we had to get his take on Jodie Foster’s surprising–and puzzling–Golden Globes’ “outing” this past awards season.

He also shared his musings on the most influential out celebrities, why subscriptions to The Advocate still come (closeted) in opaque white wrappers, and how the Supreme Court might rule on the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and Proposition 8.

Let’s start with your early life in Utah. How did you make it out of there to become the editor-in-chief of The Advocate?

I knew I was not going to be in Utah forever, but I grew up there and went to the University of Utah for college.  Afterwards, I went to work for the Utah Film Commission and the Sundance Film Festival in low paying, but cool jobs. I left Salt Lake City in ’99 and got a job through a contact I made at Sundance working in public relations. But when I couldn’t bear PR anymore, I started writing freelance and doing film reviews for Out.  But, you know, a 100-word piece a month does not pay the bills. So I started doing music reviews and other stuff for them. And eventually, I became the film reviewer for The Orange County Register‘s website, which is a very conservative paper in southern California. So that’s a little ironic. But soon a job as the associate editor for Out opened up: It took a dog’s age, but I finally got that job. In April, I will have worked between Out and The Advocate for ten years. 

You look pretty young to be an editor-in-chief!

I’m now 38. At 36, I was tied for youngest-ever editor of The Advocate.  

We read your provocative editor’s letter on Jodie Foster’s coming out speech at the Golden Globe Awards. In your view, her speech was shrouded in shame, animosity and self-defensiveness. A lot of your readers came to her defense, basically arguing that privacy is sacred and her orientation is not our business. We wondered what you thought of that?

My frustration is different from a reader’s frustration. So when all of these readers read my editor’s letter about Jodie Foster and said, “Leave her alone. It’s her business,” on the one hand, I totally agree. It’s her business entirely. But what I wrote about was the way in which she said she was not coming out by coming out, how tortured it was and the pall of shame about it.  My frustration is partially with the people around celebrities who keep them in a tortured bubble. I hate that. It does horrible things to them and not just gay people, but also people like Michael Jackson or Tom Cruise (who knows if he’s gay or straight!). These bubbles do terrible things to people by instilling this sense of shame. So that’s what I see a lot of in my profession that readers don’t necessarily see all the time. Had she said nothing we would have said, “Oh no, a missed opportunity to come out,” but we would not have been surprised and we would not have raked her over the coals for it. But she didn’t. She had this weird rambling speech.

Some speculated that she was just nervous…or drunk.

I have no idea if she was drunk. I have no idea if she drinks at all. But I do know that they don’t serve you dinner at those things and they put a giant bottle of champagne on the table.  So if you only had the tiny bits of finger food they provide and you’ve been having a couple of glasses of champagne, it’s highly possible that you could have over served yourself. Mel Gibson looked drunk! I don’t mind saying that.  

Every time the camera panned to him, he seemed a little…struck…

He seemed like he’d been electrocuted.  

Ha! So, which out celebrities have had the biggest impact on cultural perceptions of LGBT people?

I think Chaz Bono’s coming out as transgender has been really transformative. My first issue as editor of The Advocate had Chaz on the cover. I was excited for that. I think he’s the most prominent trans person in the country.  

Also, George Michael’s coming out in the 90s was hugely important. Actually, there are a few musicians I think were very important: KD Lang, Melissa Etheridge, Elton John. 

Ellen is extremely significant in that she’s in everyone’s living room every day! For the first couple years of her talk show, she didn’t really talk about gay stuff.  The gay theme in her old sitcom was thought to be the thing that tanked her show, rightly or wrongly. So I can understand the reticence in keeping LGBT issues off her talk show. She’s just so charming and endearing. I don’t mean this in a negative way, but she’s inoffensive.  Being so smart and funny and putting together a great talk show, has made her very influential.  

The most influential?

I would be hesitant to put “the most” on anybody. But she’s extremely important.  Also Neil Patrick Harris’s coming out was very important because he’s upended the idea that you can’t play straight after you’ve come out. Matt Bomer too. Bomer doesn’t talk about his sexuality so much. But it’s known that he’s gay and partnered with kids. Celebrities who are confounding expectations of masculinity and femininity have a big effect.  

Speaking of coming out of the closet, does The Advocate still show up in subscribers’ mailboxes in that opaque white wrapper, which seems to suggest naughty–shameful–content?

Many, many, many of us here have always had a very complicated relationship with that opaque wrapper. It’s been optional for a long time.  People complain about it, not knowing that they can opt out of it when subscribing.  Maybe the print allowing you to opt out isn’t large enough. The idea has always been–and I’m not claiming to subscribe to this philosophy–but the idea was if you live in Mississippi, and your letter carrier knows everybody in town by name, and you get The Advocate, but you’re closeted, who’s to say that your letter carrier is not going to talk to your entire neighborhood about what kind of mail you receive? So it wasn’t designed to be shameful–there’s that word again–but to protect people and to make sure that people who wanted The Advocate could get it without alerting the entire world to it.  But there is that sort of, “Well, what’s inside? Is it porn? Is it something else?” It’s a little strange. Nobody loves it.  We think of it as a necessity in some instances.   

What was your coming out experience like? 

I came out to my parents when I was 21, when I was still living in Salt Lake City. It was just such a miasma of strange emotions.  I felt the pressure of a secret burning away at me. I didn’t know what to do with it, but thought I should come out. Like a lot of people, I did it in spurts, like “I’ll tell these people, then these,” and once I started that, I had to tell everybody all at once.  Then I sort of ducked and covered, waiting to see what would happen.  

I wish I hadn’t written it down because I’m sure it was clumsy and I know my parents have kept it. I would be able to articulate it better now after years of having thought about it.  For the same reason, I don’t keep a journal very frequently because I hate reading what I wrote about in the past. I’m like, “Edit! Edit! Edit! Edit! God, I wrote that so poorly,” which is probably the wrong way to approach a journal.  

Anyway, I grew up in Salt Lake City in a non-Mormon family. We were transplants to Utah when I was little.  I didn’t know very many gay people and felt very isolated. Being in the closet kept me from having a closer relationship with my family than I could have had at the time.  They’re great people.  They are so supportive, very invested in my life, interested in my work and community.  But my coming out wasn’t easy for them in the beginning. I think I had a fairly typical frustrations with them: “Why aren’t you getting this faster?” I wondered. But I obviously had years to think about it and they hadn’t.   

Sounds like you’re sympathetic to parents’ experience of a child’s coming out.

Yeah, they have to suddenly change their minds about who their kids are. It’s just sad that there are these presumptions about what our kids’ lives are going to or should be like.  And it’s tough in a conservative community. My parents were not conservative like those surrounding us, but no one lives in a vacuum.  The social norms and pressures of our surroundings had an impact on them. Even progressive folks have to still deal with the new notion of what their child’s life is going to be like. My parents were afraid for me too. They were worried that I was going to get beaten up or become HIV positive. They had all sorts of concerns that are completely reasonable when you’re not in LGBT culture yourself. But they’ve come to understand a lot more about what my life really is. 

Are you in a relationship?

Yes, my boyfriend is Austrian. He’s from Vienna. He lives in Los Angeles now, and he’s here legally. But there is finite time period to that. Just looking at the various options for him to stay past the end of that visa–to get a new visa or a work visa–it’s just really complicated. Meanwhile, if he were female, and we were married, she could easily apply for a Green Card or Permanent Alien Status or find a path to citizenship. We’re not married. But even if we were, there’s no federal recognition for our relationship. I think about all these bi-national couples that have been together for a very long time, who have kids, businesses or properties together, the foreign national could literally be deported at any time. It’s just one factor among many that goes with our rights and relationships not being recognized by the federal government.  

What do you think is going to happen with the DOMA and Proposition 8?

Well, you know, the Supreme Court is totally opaque. They are going to be hearing oral arguments on some of these cases at the end of March and nobody knows what questions they’ll decide to address, whether it’s California specific–the Proposition 8 case, specifically–or Edie Windsor’s case.  [When Windsor’s partner passed away in 2009, it cost her $600,000 in combined federal and state income tax because DOMA prevents the Internal Revenue Service from recognizing her as a surviving spouse.] We don’t know what question they are going to take up or how narrowly or broadly they are going to rule.  They could strike down DOMA, or they could just let the Prop 8 decision by Judge Vaughn Walker stand, meaning marriages would resume in California. They could decide to allow this to be a state-by-state thing or go federal.  

I’m an optimist, though.  I look at Chief Justice John Roberts, who is a young and will likely be on the Supreme Court for a few more decades, and I tend to think that he is aware of the fact that he will have a long legacy, and that this will be a very important case in his legacy. I think his decision to uphold the constitutionality of most of The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (known as Obamacare), which was not the decision that conservatives expected him to make, is a tiny hint on how he views his legacy. I’m not a court prognosticator. I’m not a legal scholar. I don’t know all that much about the Supreme Court to be honest, but a lot of the attention is focused on Anthony Kennedy’s swing vote. But I think Roberts is our key to this somehow. My optimism leads me to believe that he won’t be as draconian as Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas.

There are some camps within the LGBT community who think making the right to marry a central cause of the movement was short-sighted. They see marriage as a normalizing apparatus that stigmatizes relationship outside matrimony. The better fight, in their view, would have been to divorce all the privileges and benefits that accompany the right to marry from marital status, so that all those social securities and advantages are available to everyone. What’s your response to them?

You know, I think that the federal government as far as marriage goes shouldn’t determine what rights and responsibilities you want to assign to somebody else. I don’t see why you shouldn’t be able to assign those rights and responsibilities to any adult that you like. I don’t know why it has to be called marriage. I don’t know why the government is involved in marriage in the first place. I don’t know why that word “marriage” can’t be associated with the kind of relationships that we have. Civil Unions are not the same as marriage in this country so it stands to reason that people are fighting for marriage, but if marriage has this religious context to it, which it does, I don’t know why the government is in the business of marriage at all.  There’s nothing wrong in my opinion–and this would be preferable–if the government were involved in the contract of unions, leaving marriage to whatever spiritual religious organization couples choose to engage in. So I am fully in favor of the government getting out of the marriage business.

How do you think same-sex marriage has effected or changed the institution of marriage in and of itself?  Has it redefined the institution for the mainstream in any way?

What we’ve seen so far is that there’s a positive economic impact.  Jurisdictions within cities, countries in Europe and other places who have legalized same-sex marriage, have seen a boost to their economy because more people are engaging in an activity that has a lot of upfront costs and then a lot of social economic benefits down the road.  But apart from that there is zero effect. There’s neither a positive, nor negative effect.  We have lots of evidence throughout Europe and in New England, and soon we’ll have proof in Washington State, that there is no affect on straight people.

Gay marriage has been a central part of the LGBT agenda for a while now.  Once DOMA is repealed, what is the next big challenge for the LGBT community?  

DADT, although technically repealed, is not a done deal until DOMA is outlawed because it prevents partners from receiving death benefits and spousal and child support, among many other rights that straight married couples receive automatically. And transgender people are not allowed to serve in the military. There are still 29 states where you can be fired for being gay, or having a gender identity that your employer doesn’t like. There are enormous hurdles that remain for transgender populations and enormous health disparities for people who are LGBT.  Lesbians and transgender people have a whole range of issues they have to deal with in terms of access to health care and discrimination in health care.

It sounds like the struggles of transgender people are the next big challenge the LGBT community needs to grapple with.

Yeah, it’s certainly a section of our community that is still widely misunderstood, maligned and often the target of a lot of violence. We have a real war to wage on behalf of transgender people.  

Can you foresee a time when LGBT people will be so integrated into the mainstream that it will render The Advocate obsolete?  Or is there something different about the experience of being gay that will make The Advocate always relevant and beneficial to gay populations?

Let me answer that by saying that I think there will always be some kind of queer culture. As equal as we strive to be in a legal and a social aspect, we will always still be a minority in terms of the proportion of the population that’s LGBT.  Like minorities, we have a characteristic that makes us distinct from the majority. I think LGBT people will seek each other out and continue to create distinct communities and cultures. How that is going to continue to manifest, who knows? I hope that we won’t always be writing stories about discrimination against LGBT people, but I think we will always have stories to tell about our culture.

Last year was the 45th anniversary of The Advocate. How do you think The Advocate has influenced the way LGBT issues are covered in the mainstream press?  

Over the years, we’ve had a really important influence on the way the mainstream media looks at LGBT issues.  We were the first LGBT publication to have a reporter in the White House Briefing Room.  We were asking questions about DADT, marriage equality. Those sorts of things.  When those questions are asked by our reporter, the mainstream media goes, “Yeah, we need to know about that stuff!” And they pick up the response.  

We’ve gotten important celebrities’ coming out stories and political figures to comment on fairness and equality when it come to LGBT rights. Over the years, we have put politicians’ feet to the fire, which has been instrumental in forcing all of us to draw a bright line between those who think that all people are equal and those who really don’t.  You cannot be an elected official these days without having your stance on LGBT issues. There is no such thing as a politician who’s completely neutral and uninformed about our concerns. It doesn’t exist any longer.  And I think we’ve been instrumental in making that happen. 

Today, there are same sex marriage announcements in papers across the country–you wouldn’t have seen that a few years ago.  Obituaries mention partners. Gay news isn’t specific to gay publications anymore, and I think that’s partly to do with The Advocate’s longevity. We’re not the first gay publication, but we’ve been the longest running and it’s due to the dedication of the people who have run this publication over 45 years. It’s not because The Advocate was a goldmine. But it’s always been a priority for the people who’ve worked here to make the issues that are important to this community central to the publication.  And by not going away, we’ve effectively made it clear that these are enduring issues and questions.

Back in Schrader’s heyday, the 70s and 80s, the movie theater was the prime venue for showcasing new films and audiences hungered for the originality and grit of character-driven dramas, the kind of pictures that made Schrader famous. But with the advent of cable, Hulu, YouTube, Netflix, iTunes–a plethora of new outlets for making and distributing films–Hollywood studios have grown less inclined toward the riskier fare found in Schrader’s oeuvre. And audiences these days seek their drama-fixes via cable or online. 

None of that, of course, has stopped Schrader from getting his offbeat, nuanced narratives onto celluloid: He’s relied on his own savings account— $350,000 in one instance—and global financing to bring his works to life.  But for The Canyons he sought new school methods–social media and Kickstarter—to materialize his vision.    

So when the Times rang to feature him and the cutting edge ways he’s getting his stories told, he was more than happy to reciprocate their interest.  But the angle changed—and dramatically so—when he cast the infamous Lindsay Lohan in the lead role. The story (Stephen Rodrick’s “Here’s What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan in Your Movie”) devolved into “a celebrity driven beast,” as Schrader put it.  

Rodrick’s delicious page-turner chronicles the highs and (mostly) lows of Schrader’s experience working with the unhinged and unreliable former child star: her inability to be on time, her resistance to fulfilling stated commitments (like a four-way sex scene), her challenges to Schrader’s direction, her emotional outbursts and more.  

When The Slant reached the maverick moviemaker at his home in New York City, he gave us his take on Rodrick’s wild read, and offered refreshing insights on filmmaking today, Lindsay Lohan, TMZ and Taxi Driver.  

Let’s start with your general impression of the Times story. What did you think?

Obviously, it was wonderful to have the Times devote so much attention to a micro-budget film.  I mean, how many micro-budget films get this kind of attention? Zero. It’s a publicity coup. But the article ended up being what it wasn’t meant to be in the first place and that’s the nature of the Lindsay phenomenon.  Rodrick started the piece before she was involved and it was going to be about new methods of putting films together.  And then she got involved, so then it was going to be about the “new Lindsay.”  Well, there wasn’t a new Lindsay. So then it became about the old Lindsay. She hijacks everything she touches.

The best quote about the article was given to The Daily Beast by porn star James Deen, who stars opposite Lindsay in the film. He described the story as “accurate events reflected in the mirror and then retold for dramatic effect.” It’s strange when the most accurate quote comes from the guy who works in the adult film industry. 

So you were or weren’t happy with the article?  

I can’t say I’m terribly upset or surprised with the way it turned out. I mean you would have to be naive to be either one. As much as Rodrick fought it, he couldn’t resist the hurricane nature of her tabloid presence. That was amplified when the magazine’s editorial staff changed the title of the print edition from “The Misfits” to “Here Is What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan in Your Movie” for the online edition. What that change did is make the entire article seem like a tabloid piece, a celebrity driven beast, as opposed to a chronicle of a film. That and, of course, the cover art.  Even The New York Times isn’t immune to the celebrity gale winds which surround Lindsay. One thing did surprise me though.

What’s that?

I spent an hour and a half on the phone with the Times fact-checker and few of my changes were made.  For example, the article notes that Rodrick and I first met when I was trying to set up a Bollywood film staring Leo DiCaprio, but Leo wasn’t involved in that film—it was Shah Rukh Khan–and I mentioned that to the researcher. But it was not changed. I suppose their rationale is, ‘We’re going to keep it as Leo because more people (ie, American people) know who Leo is.”  Most of the other unfixed errors had to do with time sequencing.  I’ve experienced this my whole life, where journalists pull together events for dramatic effect: Something happens on Monday night, then something happens on Tuesday morning, and somehow they both happen at the same time in the finished piece.  So I sort of wonder why they bother to fact-check?  I guess it’s just the appearance of due diligence. 

Now that it’s all said and done, was hiring Lindsay Lohan worth the hell?

The thing that’s aggravating is that people outside the film business equate production difficulties with commercial or artistic failure.  In the history of film, there’s very little correlation between those two things.  Some of the most troubled productions have become huge successes and vice versa.  Our drama-filled ride doesn’t mean much in terms of the final product. Every film is difficult and every film has its horror stories.  In fact, this particular film finished on time and on budget.  It was just an exhausting experience.   Before it’s even been seen, the film is being discredited as a disaster because Lindsay was late and pulled some stunts. That doesn’t make a film a disaster. It’s business as usual with a high profile actress.  Lindsay wasn’t even the most difficult actor I’ve ever worked with. The most difficult was Richard Pryor.

If you had it to do all over, would you cast her again?

I would cast her again.

The article noted that you and Lohan are actually in talks to do another film together. Is that still the case?

Well, I’m willing but I don’t think she can make any kind of commitments. First of all, she doesn’t know whether she’s going to be in jail or not.  She lives in a maelstrom of crisis.  This week she’ll be back in court again.  But who knows if she’ll even appear, or whether a bench warrant will be issued?

Rodrick’s sources surmised that you purposely fired Lohan at one point in order to get her to come back with a greater commitment.  Is that true or were you really done with her at that point?

No, I really was ready to cut to cord.  If she hadn’t come to my hotel and pleaded with me to reconsider, I was moving on. I had called another actress in France to take her part, in fact, and had booked a plane reservation for her.   

What is it about Lohan that makes it worth the struggle?

Well what is it about movie stars, you know? There are probably fifty guys in Hollywood who look just like Tom Cruise, but there is only one Tom Cruise. It’s inexplicable. It’s the same thing they said about Marilyn Monroe. No one ever had a pleasant experience working with her.  When director John Huston was making The Misfits, which she starred in, he said, “I wonder why I am putting myself through this. Then, I go to the dailies and I think, ‘Oh yes, that’s why.’  There’s something you’re just mesmerized by.

In the article, Rodrick said that you don’t think Lindsay is contending with substance abuse problems, but rather with loneliness.  Is that an accurate reflection of your opinion?

Yeah, I’ve been around a lot of druggies and she doesn’t seem like one to me.  I’ve talked to people who were up with her until 4 or 5 a.m.  I’d ask, “How does she do it?” They say it’s not drugs.

What is it then? Self-sabotage?  

Oh, that’s a huge question. Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  Bad brain chemistry added to problematic parenting added to a culture which tolerates misbehavior from an early age. It’s not the ideal situation. Child stars have survived. There’s Jodie Foster and Ron Howard. But the deck is stacked against them.

In what ways is it stacked against them?

It’s a killing system. The killing part of it is that they’re taught as adolescents that they own the world and that everything they want is theirs.  Then all of sudden the child star is around 20 and they realize all of that was false.  Now they have to start over and the public is really mean to them.  Look at Hannah Montana’s Miley Cyrus.  The public is really mean; they’re really pissed off that child stars want to start over, but they have no choice but to start over because they can’t remain children.  I am still quite surprised by the intensity and the volume of the anti-Lindsay rhetoric.  I mean she really makes people angry. It’s like, ‘How dare you not be a child star anymore?  How dare you be pulling all these stunts? Why don’t you just die?!’ And I’m not joking.

Are you referring to the audience or the media?

Well, the relationship between the media and the audience is tricky. The degree to which the media gins up the audience is uncertain. It’s like TMZ. Is TMZ feeding an audience’s needs or is it creating an audience’s needs?  A little bit of both.

Despite all the drama and fanfare surrounding The Canyons are you happy with the way the film turned out?

Oh, I’m more than happy.  We got very lucky given the fact that so many things should have gone wrong, working without permits and insurance, managing temperamental people on a micro-budget.  But virtually everything went right. It was a little miracle, and hopefully that kind of luck will work when the film is finally shown, but it’s hard to tell.

When is it coming out?

Well it takes about three to four months to really effectively set up video-on-demand (VoD).  Starting next week, we’re going to show it to the multi-platform distributors.

What’s that?

It used to be just theatrical distribution, but there are many platforms now.  There’s different levels of cable, internet, and video-on-demand. There are about 8 different on-demand companies now. A group of distributors specialize in multi-platform distribution as opposed to just theatrical. A film like Arbitrage did fine in theatrical, but it made $12 million VoD.  The Canyons, in particular, is perfect for VoD.  You don’t have a rating problem.  People can watch it at home.

Do you think these new avenues for making and distributing films is a good thing?

There are pros and cons. You lose the theatrical experience, that’s a genuine loss, but on the other hand you now have an art house cinema in every living room. Is it better or worse? Doesn’t matter. It’s different. Make the most of it. 

So The Canyons is the future of independent film making?

It was a great experience, but I don’t know how replicable it is. We had a number of elements that just fell into place.  We’re getting a lot of publicity for The Canyons, but basically we are all analog stars. Bret [Easton Ellis, the writer], Lindsay and I made our names in the analog era.  It’s so much harder today for kids in the digital era because there’s so much competition. There’s 10,000 little movies being made as we speak. Everybody is making one!  Back in my day, there were 200 or 300 being made.   How do you get your head above the crowd in this era?  

Speaking of your day, do you think movies like Taxi Driver and Raging Bull could get made today?

For the most part theatrical no longer does straight drama. The idea of the conventional drama has migrated to television or cable.  You couldn’t make those movies now. And don’t blame the studios.  Don’t blame the banks. Blame the audiences and technology.

Why?

Well, audiences are doing 100 other things. They’re playing games. They’re online.  They’re not interested in using their money and time to go to the cinema to see drama. If they want to see drama, they watch it on cable or online. The multiplicity of media has taken away from the theatrical experience, so blame technology too; it has changed people. It has rewired our brains. It’s taught us that it’s not worth our time to go out and see a conventional drama in a movie theater.  This isn’t a passing fad either. It’s just the way it is now. 

Through the years we’ve heard talk of a sequel to Taxi Driver. We know that’s not going to happen, but if it did, what would it look like?

De Niro tried to get me to do one about 15 years ago. But I think that character died about six months after the film.  He was on a short leash.  There is no sequel there. I told De Niro if there’s anyway he survived, he’s Ted Kaczynski up in a cabin in the woods, sending out letter bombs. That didn’t appeal to him much.  

Is Taxi Driver your proudest accomplishment?

No, my best work is probably Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, but I’ve accepted the fact that Taxi Driver will be the first line in my obit even if  it’s not the first line in my life.

*After we posted this interview, Schrader shared an observation he made in an email he sent to Stephen Rodrick on February 1:

I now realize it wasn’t just Lindsay who caused the change in the tone of the article’s title. It’s part of a general NYT attempt to rebrand itself for the Twitter generation. Now news titles have become increasingly flip, snide and condescending. Today’s example comes from the Arts section: “Don’t Call the Cleaning Crew. That Yellow Spill is Art.” There’s clearly been an upper echelon decision made to compete with the Buzzfeed world when it comes to soft news headlines.

The film follows the forging of an unlikely relationship between a bristly octogenarian, Sadie (newcomer Besedka Johnson), who harbors an unfulfilled, girlish dream of visiting Paris, and Jane (the radiant Dree Hemingway – yes, that Hemingway’s great-grand-daughter), a 20-something porn star.  Jane’s sweet, breezy way offers a funny counterpoint to the crabby closed-off Sadie.

Here’s the set up: After purchasing a thermos at Sadie’s yardsale in sun-saturated Los Angeles, Jane finds a whopping wad of cash that amounts to $10,000 inside it.  When she attempts to return the container and its small fortune, Sadie tells her all sales are “final,” rebuffing further conversation. Driven by guilt, curiosity, even loneliness, the long-legged Jane, with her adorable Chihuahua, Starlet, court Sadie’s friendship with insufferable–and yet, endearing–persistence.  What ensues is a beautiful, unexpected, and poignant rendering of their quirky journey together.

Like Baker’s previous films – Prince of Broadway and Take Out – Starlet is a tour de force of cinéma verité. His trademark is turning ordinary situations upside down and inside out, often exploring the social fringe with such sensitivity and nuance that he shatters our expectations and erects new ways of feeling and thinking against convention.

In Prince of Broadway, he introduces us to the intimacies and struggles of Lucky, a sweet natured immigrant from Ghana, who hustles designer knock-offs, and clumsily parents a two-year-old left to his care by an ex.  In Take Out, Baker shows us a day in the life of a Chinese delivery man, who must amass $800 in tips before the day’s end to pay off a life-threatening debt.  With Starlet, which grapples with secrecy, loneliness, and loss, he depicts the porn industry with such refreshing neutrality and non-judgement that it’s a shock.  Playing at select theaters around the country, the offbeat indie drama recently won Special Jury Prize at SXSW and nabbed two Independent Spirit Award nominations.

When The Slant caught up with the award-winning director, who also dexterously dabbles in television (Fox’s Greg the Bunny and MTV’s Warren the Ape), he walked us through his creative process, illuminating his rationale for including the film’s graphic sex scene, cutting a hard-earned shot, and naming his movie after Jane’s canine companion.

We heard that you left NYC for L.A. Did you move there for professional reasons? Tell us about the differences between working as a writer-director on the West Coast and the East Coast?

I lived out here briefly while working on Warren the Ape.  It was during that time that I not only became interested in exploring the adult filmmaking industry (in a narrative film), but also fell in love with the weather.  So when I came back out to shoot Starlet, it was a permanent move. Quite honestly, indie filmmaking is the same no matter where you live.  Right now, I’m simply wrapping things up on the release of Starlet and attempting to find money to make my next film, so I could be doing this from any place on Earth with an Internet connection.  It’s really just my social circle, the weather and the presence of the industry that keeps me here.

In a 2010 Wall Street Journal piece, you said you split your time working as a television writer and filmmaker. Is that still the case?  We’d like to know how the two genres of writing influence each other?

That is no longer the case. The Greg the Bunny incarnations seem to have come to an end. We had a wonderful ride and it supported me for a few years while I was making my last few indies. I would say that the style of directing Greg the Bunny had more of an influence than the writing the features. We had the freedom to experiment with comedic improvisation on Greg the Bunny. The puppeteers and actors were encouraged to riff on the ideas that were presented in the scripts. Often, there were “scriptments” (a half script/half treatment). I used this model while making Prince of Broadway and again in a slightly more structured way with Starlet.

You told Indie Wire that you got the idea for Starlet while working on Warren The Ape.  You said: “MTV was targeting 16 to 20 year old guys…so of course we were casting a lot of porn stars to please our demographic.  The more we worked with these women and glimpsed behind the facade of their XXX personas, we slowly came to see that their personal lives were about as unglamorous as the rest of ours.  I had the idea to shoot a very small vérité type film about a day in the life of a ‘starlet’ focused on a day in which she wasn’t working.”  Will you tell us about your affinity for telling the story on the character’s “day off,” when the drama isn’t high?

I am always impressed with films that can simply be character studies (without any obvious narrative structures) that can still hold your attention. I wanted to attempt to make one of these, but when co-writer Chris Bergoch suggested a more plot driven approach, I recognized the potential to reach a wider audience, plus a subtextual reason for the narrative.  The other version of this film would have been a meandering meditation on a young woman trying to make it in the world. It would have been interesting, but I’m very happy with the direction we took.

We’re curious about the title of the film. What was behind naming the movie after Jane’s dog, Starlet?

It’s about playing with the idea that things aren’t always what they seem to be and also that there is always another way of looking at things.  One can see the title as representing what she does for a living or the name of the dog in the film.  That’s up to the audience.

The scene where Sadie breaks down while searching for Starlet was amazing and excruciating to watch.  Can you talk a bit about the symbolism behind Sadie’s search for a lost Starlet and how it relates to other themes in the movie?

Spoiler alert: If you haven’t seen the film yet, please stop reading. Ha ha! I think that once we find out that Sadie has had tremendous loss in her life, the scene becomes more meaningful. The way that my co-writer and I see it, Sadie is not only afraid that she has lost Jane’s dog, but that this will result in her losing Jane as well. I think this is a revelation for Sadie. Through losing the dog, she realizes what Jane means to her. This is why Sadie continually says to Jane that she can’t handle their friendship when Jane comes to pick up the dog.  What she is actually saying is that she can’t handle losing another person she cares about.

Variety noted that the explicit pornographic scene in the movie could have put you in ratings trouble in the U.S. and some reviewers felt that the scene was gratuitous.  Will you share with us the decision behind including Jane’s explicit sex scene on the set of her latest porn flick?

There are many reasons I decided to make this scene as graphic as it is. What it comes down to is that (besides ratings) I couldn’t come up with a reason why not to include it.  This film was always intended for mature audiences, so I felt mature audiences could handle seeing sex on screen. It always puzzles me that American audiences are so much more comfortable seeing graphic violence than graphic sex.

You mentioned in an interview that while your film didn’t cast the porn industry in a positive light, it was a non-judgmental rendering. But we thought your portrayal was even more subversive, and one might say progressive: It demystified and almost normalized porn as a professional choice as morally neutral as, say, becoming a receptionist. Does your film intentionally challenge the notion that the decision to pursue a career in porn is necessarily a disempowering or morally fraught decision for a young woman?

One of the themes I wanted to explore with Starlet is how we judge others without ever having walked in their shoes.  We are all guilty of it. So the last thing I wanted to do with this film is judge Jane in anyway. Part of being non-judgmental in the writing was to avoid making broad statements about the industry she works in.  I personally don’t think that the choice of working in this industry is in any way morally fraught, and perhaps, by making her career a b-story, I was challenging that notion. That being said, there are some critics who feel that I should show the negative consequences of Jane’s decision to work in this industry. My response to that is that we already know that the social stigma that is imposed on these young women can have long-term negative effects. Why do we need to be presented with that information yet again?

At a post-screening Q&A session, you mentioned having a very small budget, and many volunteers to help you make the film. If you’d had an unlimited budget, what different choices would you have made in making this movie?

Well first off, everyone involved would have been properly paid for his or her efforts. I don’t want to make another film in which people aren’t fairly compensated. And without getting into too many details, there are some scenes that I would have re-shot. Plus, I could have spent more money on post-production: Our coloring was very basic.  Thank god my cinematographer, Radium Cheung, shot the film so beautifully that not much high-end color correction was necessary.

We’re curious about the editing process. Tell us about some beloved scenes that you were sure you’d include, but for some reason you cut?

Editing is very important to me. In my films, so much of the film’s style is found in editing that I consider it fifty percent of direction.  We were already playing on the themes of secrets and revelations. And the editing process allowed me to continue playing with those themes in post-production.  In the sequence where Sadie loses Starlet, the dog, we had planned on ending that scene with Sadie finding Starlet in the L.A. River basin. It was a very difficult shot to pull off. We needed the dog to be by himself several hundred feet away down the basin. We pulled it off with an extra long telephoto lens and were very happy with the shot.  It was one of our proudest moments of the shoot.  Months later, during post-production, we realized that we were revealing too much to the audience and the shot was unnecessary. Keeping the audience in the dark for a bit longer was more in line with the film’s style. So we ended up cutting the most ambitious shot of the production. That said, I’m actually quite happy with the final edit and almost wish I could find another couple of minutes to cut. At this point I feel that every scene is valuable and contributes to the film.

As writers, we’ve both experienced regrets once a piece has gone to print — sentences that could have been better, points we wished we’d made, anecdotes we wish we’d shared–did you experience any regrets after this movie came out?  What might you have done differently on second thought?

There are entire scenes I would have re-shot because as director I will always see flaws.  I try not to dwell on them, but it’s difficult.

So do Sadie and Jane ever make it to Paris?

Oh, well, that’s up to you to answer.  All I can say is that they probably have a very interesting conversation once Jane gets back in that car.

Instead, the Condé Nast powerhouse and its rich milieu of brainy editors made a quick convert of Leive.  Twenty-four years later, with a brief but influential interlude as editor-in-chief of Self, where Leive increased circulation by 11 percent in just two years, Glamour has become her magnum opus.  At 34, she became the iconic magazine’s editor-in-chief, a post she’s prosperously held for the past eleven years (and counting.)  Under her editorship, Glamour‘s circulation has risen to an historical peak at 2.25 million and reaches a staggering 17 million readers each month.  During her tenure, the magazine has garnered nine National Magazine Award nominations and won four, including the top honor, Magazine of the Year in 2010.

But like other publications, Glamour has taken some hits from a slow-to-recover economy, and according to The New York Times, newsstand sales sank 17 percent through June of 2011 and 9.9 percent during the second half of that year, compelling Leive, a former president of ASME, to shake things up.

In March, she revamped the 73-year-old monthly, souping it up with advertiser-loving beauty and fashion pages. And in an effort to attract a younger demographic, the sought-after “Millennials,” Leive amplified visuals and first person narratives.  Glamour’s inaugural self-expression issue–the January issue–is decidedly edgier with personal essays by media mavericks like Jane Pratt of xoJane.com (founder of the exquisite Sassy!), the creator and writer of MTV’s Awkward, Lauren Iungerich and the daring Jennifer Livingston, a Wisconsin TV anchor, who used airtime to address and challenge an email hater who knocked her for her weight.

This week, The Slant nabbed a Q&A with Leive to discuss the machinations behind retooling her well-established brand, the me-me-me centricity of social media (Is it a cultural phase or has our society fundamentally changed?) and the fate of the written word in our visually-obsessed culture.

Who is the new Glamour reader and which celebrities epitomize her?

I don’t think there’s one celeb who epitomizes the Glamour reader. There’s no one ANYTHING—this generation is too diverse and into being their own unique selves. I think Anne Hathaway, our current cover girl, comes close! But our readers are into everyone from Lena Dunham to Lady Gaga to Adele to Kate Middleton. I would say the common denominator is that they like women who are being themselves—women who have done things their way. That’s the new ideal for anyone under 30.

We’ve read that the new iterations of Glamour will spotlight more “everyday-women” alongside models and celebrities. It seems especially zeitgeist-y given the popularity of reality T.V. and social media where every-day-Janes can achieve a measure of fame or popularity, even if it’s only within her own network. Do you think our society will eventually reject our self-obsessing (via Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.)? Or has our society fundamentally changed?

I don’t think the tidal wave of self-expression will roll back—I think we’ve permanently moved from a day when the media was produced by Other People to this day, when it’s personal and produced by YOU, the reader. That said, of course I think how we use it will evolve. I think we’ve already hit a tipping point with the more banal uses of Twitter. No one wants to hear a celeb tweeting that they’re on the toilet. The real action in social media right now is around opinion and point of view. I will also say that I think one thing young women love about Pinterest and Instagram is the relative absence of snark and meanness. You generally feel better, not worse, after spending time there.

The EVP and Publishing Director of Glamour, Bill Wackermann, told Ad Week, “[Millennials] are interested in constant change, constant expression.”  How does a magazine, especially one as iconic and well established as Glamour, accommodate the desire for constant change without diluting or confusing its brand?

A smart magazine has always had to change fast to survive—it’s like Woody Allen’s shark; you have to move forward or you die. We just have to move forward faster now, because the rate of change is faster. Magazines have to be fast-swimming sharks these days. The trick is to change the topics that you cover without changing the fundamental DNA of the brand and its key attributes. No reader wants a magazine that redesigns every month. But you want the conversation to be different. The DNA of Glamour is that we are the conversation women have when guys aren’t around—that stays fundamental, but the topics we’re talking about change.

This past February, Eric Wilson of The New York Times noted that features are now written more often in the first person. He said that you “wanted to drop the idea of a ‘house voice,’ always there to scoop in with big-sisterly advice.” Why did that “big-sisterly” voice become passé? Are first-person stories more compelling?  What’s behind that?

We live in a more first-person culture now. I wanted the magazine to reflect that. And readers have loved it. In our January issue, you can hear from everybody from Kelly Osbourne to Jane Pratt to MTV’s Lauren Iungerich to Jennifer Livingston, the Wisconsin TV anchor who took down her weight haters on air. Even in our cover story, you hear not just from Anne Hathaway, but her interviewer, Eve Ensler. All those voices in one place—who doesn’t want to go to that party?

Traditionally, Glamour has stood apart from the snark, sarcasm and mean-spirited humor found in other popular media outlets with its old-fashioned earnestness.  But we’ve heard that Glamour seeks to appeal to young women like those on the HBO hit, Girls. But the “cooler-than-thou” ethos of Girls seems to go against the magazine’s DNA.  Is the magazine ushering in even more editorial changes that we’ve not seen yet to appeal to an irreverent or edgier audience like Girls?

We’re NOT mean-spirited, but I don’t think we have to be. I actually don’t think Girls is snarky or mean-spirited. Those girls are on a real quest trying to make themselves happy. When Hannah and Marnie are dancing in their apartment at the end of a night, that’s not mean-spirited or sarcastic—that’s an awesome girlfriend moment, and very Glamour.

Glamour.com has become more image and video-based and the new site looks great.  We wonder, though: what’s the cost to the written word? It seems that all forms of media are conforming to our society’s ever-shortening attention spans and the non-reading millennial masses.

Our culture HAS become more visual. On Glamour.com, we’ve never really done super-long stories to begin with, but that doesn’t mean our coverage is fluffy—we get a lot of pickup around political items we do on our Conversation blog. But in print, I think readers do still want long-form stories—something to curl up with. They just want those balanced by amazing visuals. We’ll make sure we have a couple of great reads in every issue, but we’ll also make sure that we have some stories (health pieces, beauty, Dos & Don’ts, etc) that can be told solely through the pictures. That’s what I want in a magazine now personally, and I think readers feel the same.

With an unflappable belief in the possibility of a freer, fairer world, Pogrebin has spent the last 42 years of her life combating anti-Semitism, promoting peace in the Middle East and tirelessly fighting for women’s rights in the U.S. and abroad.

To date, she’s written ten books, including her forthcoming How To Be A Friend To A Friend Who’s Sick, which arrives in bookstores next April. She’s also penned numerous think pieces for The New York Times, The Nation, The Huffington Post and many others.

But mostly she’s known for founding Ms. magazine, alongside Gloria Steinem and four other brave feminists, in the early ‘70s — a time when mainstream magazines roundly ignored women’s issues. It’s often forgotten, but during the tumult of Vietnam, Watergate and free love, readers were hard-pressed to find stories about “rape, domestic violence, the economic value of housework, and pregnancy discrimination in the workplace,” Pogrebin remembers.  Not only did the shared struggles that women faced go unreported, they lacked the basic nomenclature to define them.

To commemorate Pogrebin’s crowning achievement — the establishment of Ms. 40 years ago this year – The Slant reached out to the 73-year-old social justice seeker about the iconic pub’s anniversary and legacy, and how it has influenced contemporary coverage of women’s issues. She also gave us her slant on D.C.’s female brain-trust:  Michelle Obama, Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

There’s been lot of coverage of Ms.’s 40th anniversary this year. Much of it has been celebratory, especially when compared to the coverage from the 70s, when the magazine first launched. What kind of progress does that shift represent? What was left out?  Has there been any coverage of the anniversary that you didn’t quite like?

Media attention to the 40th anniversary has been celebratory indeed — respectful, occasionally adoring, with an undertone of retrospective incredulousness, in a “Gee, I remember when they said it wouldn’t last” or “Wow, how amazing that you’re still around” sort of way.  I haven’t seen anything negative about the anniversary. There’s a huge shift between then and now.  In 1972, the women’s movement was young and rebellion was in the air.  When Ms. first appeared on the scene there were so few national magazines that the advent of a new one, especially one that aimed to revolutionize the coverage of women’s reality, was Very Big News.  There were only three networks then, no cable stations, and a limited number of radio stations and therefore whatever was on the air was more likely to be noticed and to become part of the conversation.  Several of us founders appeared all over the media to discuss why we felt it was time for a woman-owned magazine and what we felt was lacking in conventional women’s publications.   Pundits felt they had to take a position and a few ridiculed us.  But women all over the country loved the magazine. Our first issue was supposed to stay on the newsstands for eight weeks; it sold out in eight days.

What lasting legacy did your work (and the collective work at Ms.) leave on how women learned to look at and talk about themselves?

Ms. was the first mass circulation magazine to report the truth about what was happening in women’s lives. We covered issues that other magazines ignored — rape, domestic violence, incest, the economic value of housework, pregnancy discrimination in the workplace, sexism in schools, inequality of funding for women’s sports, anorexia and bulimia.  At the same time as we revealed and reported on women’s reality we helped change women’s reality by connecting feminist activists with one another, publicizing the work of advocacy groups, monitoring litigation that affected women, and reporting on legislative initiatives that advanced women’s status. Ms. articles and cover images helped to define issues and give problems a name.  We helped establish feminists “uppity women” as admirable change-makers, and gave millions of non-movement women permission to make demands on their husbands, partners, bosses, teachers, and all the institutions affecting their daily lives.

Though Ms. has never been widely read by the American public, its impact was always far beyond its circulation and it left a journalistic blueprint for how to seriously report, analyze, and discuss the myriad non-parity issues that women face today. Open any of the big glossies (i.e. Elle, Glamour, Marie Claire, Cosmo), and, at the very least, readers will find modest coverage on issues such as income inequity, unequal distribution of household chores, domestic violence, etc. But in the absence of a “Ms.,” or as The New York Times described it in 1974, a ” journalistic clearing-house in the current phase of the feminist revolt,” how good of a job are women’s glossies doing in covering those issues?

I can’t comment on women’s glossies because I haven’t looked at them in a serious way for years.  But based on an occasional glance at issues lying around in my doctor’s office or at the hairdresser’s, my sense is that while they still focus on the traditional areas of fashion, food, and relationships, they also contain at least one article per issue on matters such as you cite in your question.  Still this coverage is rarely comparable in depth of analysis or courage in reporting to articles Ms. published from the start, such as pieces on the misogyny of right wing zealots, or carcinogens in hair coloring, or the real American way of childbirth, or what it’s like to be a domestic worker, a prostitute, a woman on welfare. That cutting edge role is now largely filled by thousands, if not millions, of bloggers and online publications. As a result, no single source functions as a “clearinghouse” or authoritative voice in the way that Ms. did in the 70s and 80s.   Today’s alternative media have drastically changed the landscape both for good and for ill.  For good, because it’s healthy to have many different points of view in the mix. For ill, because most of us are suffering from information overload and the impact of an important story can get lost in the online noise.  These days, it’s rare for an event affecting women to enter the collective consciousness and to engage millions in a shared, simultaneous national conversation.  But when it does happen, it makes a difference — witness how the rape remarks of two Republican candidates’ comments outraged women all over the country and lost the men their election.

In that same New York Times article referenced above (“Two Faces of the Same Eve” by Stephanie Harrington, August, 11, 1974), Gloria Steinem notes “that there’s still the assumption that a woman is not a complete human being by herself.” Is that assumption still true today?

Depends on ethnicity, socioeconomic class, and culture.  In the African-American community, for instance, many strong, independent women function without men and don’t behave or view themselves as if they are amputated or incomplete beings. However in the Jewish-American community, single women have less status, sometimes are made to feel incomplete without a man, and often internalize that inadequacy in a way that diminishes their self-esteem.  In social groups of every demographic, it’s still the case that a 40-year-old single woman is viewed less favorably than a 40-year-old single man; and in heterosexual settings, an extra man is still seen as more desirable at the average dinner party than an extra woman.

We’d love to get one or two words from you on the following women:

Michelle Obama:  Dazzling. Smart. Hope she will take on more cutting edge issues in the second term.  Childhood obesity, healthy eating, and the needs of veterans and their families are worthy causes but they’re not really controversial.  I wish Michelle would use the bully pulpit of the White House to champion reproductive choice and get up-close and personal about it.  She has nothing to lose, and women have everything to gain.

Hillary Rodham Clinton:  The best of the best.  I hope she runs for president in 2016.  But first I hope she takes some time for herself. Once she steps down from State, she deserves to have some fun.

Elizabeth Warren: She’s the next Hillary Clinton.  Actually, it’s a toss-up between Elizabeth and NY Senator Kirsten Gillibrand.  Both of them are the real deal.   Can’t wait to watch them work together in the Senate!

Any other young woman in politics or media we 0ught to watch?

Now that the U.S. Senate is going to be 20 percent female, you should watch every one of these women and help keep them and their work visible long after the hoopla of the election season dies down. You should also hold their feet to the fire when it comes to tough votes, or when they need to break ranks with the men in their party in order to stay true to their values.  Please make them — and every male legislator — accountable to the people who elected them.

Which feminists today do you think are doing the most cutting edge and exciting work?

Too many to name. I would rather name cutting edge issue areas than to single out a few individuals. Great work is being done by feminists all over the country on street harassment, on body image problems, on feminism and faith, on inter-generational dialogue and cooperation, on women in poverty.  It’s unfortunate that conventional media pay little heed to such issues unless they’re espoused by a leader or spokesperson with pizzazz, glamour or sex appeal.(i.e. Cecile Richards, who is a fabulous spokesman for Planned Parenthood but also happens to be beautiful and gains media attention for reproductive rights as a result.) I’d like to see journalists dig into a problem area without necessarily personifying it.  There are great untold stories about how different advocacy groups function in the struggle to advance women’s equality, or what’s at stake for women vis a vis certain pieces of legislation. The public needs to understand these issues and journalists could help them do it, but unfortunately, many groups have a hard time getting media attention without a “personality” to embody the struggle. (Recent example: The contraception story was there all along but it took Sandra Fluke to put it on the map.  That’s understandable but the media owes it to us to do better.)

What women’s magazines (print or online) do you read?

I only read Ms. You knew I would say. I’m a founder and a loyalist!  Happy 40th anniversary, Ms.!

Today, Gell is eons away from those drab days.  While continuing to ratchet up an impressive portfolio of work at premier publications (The New York Times, Vanity Fair, New York, Details, Elle), he’s also published Speak of the Devil, a riveting Kindle Single about his former colleague, Peter Braunstein, who, one eerie Halloween night in 2005, chillingly turned from journalist to sex criminal.

And this summer, he struck journalism gold when Jared Kushner, the owner of The New York Observer, tapped him to become the paper’s new editor-in-chief, a position Gell calls “the best job in media.”

In his first full-length interview since snagging the top spot, Gell points to the salmon paper’s strong Hurricane Sandy coverage to challenge critics who argue that the Observer lost its “inimitable voice” and editorial heft when legendary editor Peter Kaplan decamped for Conde Nast in 2009.  (He also responds to Nathan Heller’s fascinating profile of Kaplan in the September 14 issue of The New Republic.) Herewith, his plans for improving the paper and increasing online traffic–plus, the skinny on what it’s like to work for Kushner.

It’s been two months since you were appointed EIC. We’re curious about the changes readers should expect from the print edition and Observer.com.

Some changes should already be evident. In a nutshell, we’re aiming to bring more voice and point of view to our stories: more ambition, more nuance, more energy and more risk.

One thing that’s becoming apparent is that with readers increasingly finding their news through social networks and sites like Reddit, Buzzfeed and Hacker News, original content has a much better shot at breaking through, because if you publish work that’s fresh and surprising, readers will literally distribute it for you, directly to the people who are most eager to consume it.

That’s a good situation for us because the Observer has never really been in the SEO or aggregation game. We made half-hearted attempts at it here and there, but weren’t any good at it, and we hated every minute. Now the value of that stuff is falling because people don’t tend to share a piece of reblogged content with their friends. We’re finding much more success by simply playing to our strengths. I’ve urged our writers to be less anxious about acknowledging every development on their beat and instead focus on the stories where they can really bring something to the table, whether that’s in terms of reporting, analysis, voice or storytelling.

There’s also a growing emphasis on opinion. I’ve brought on a number of freelance columnists who are just naturally provocative and interesting: Kevin Baker, Nina Burleigh, Ryan Holiday, Joshua David Stein, Eddie Huang, Duff McDonald–and I’m looking to add more. What they have in common is that they’re very strong, singular voices; they’re completely fearless and they have a truly unique way of looking at things. We’re finding that when someone is willing to put themselves out there with a fresh, intelligent take, readers really devour it. Actually, Steph, your breastfeeding piece was an excellent example of that.

We can already see the impact. October was our biggest month ever for traffic on Observer.com, and Betabeat has nearly doubled its numbers since I started.

Some journos we know claim to have stopped reading the paper after legendary editor Peter Kaplan left. They cite a perceived shift from long-form to shorter articles, a certain lack of editorial heft, and the absence of a kind of quirky sense of humor or voicey-ness as reasons they stopped reading. Can you explain how the paper changed after Kaplan’s departure in 2009?

The fact that you’re asking about the Kaplan era four editors downstream is a big testament to Peter’s influence. He’s an extraordinary editor, and he put out a great newspaper. There is no one better. Peter set the standard. That said, Tom McGeveran, Kyle Pope and Elizabeth Spiers did really excellent work as well, and I think we’re publishing a very fine paper now.

It’s also worth acknowledging that the changes at the Observer coincided with an explosion of scrappy online outlets working some of the same territory the paper had to itself for a long time, not to mention the most turbulent period in the media business anyone can remember. The whole industry has been challenged by that, and given that the paper was designed in large part, as a throwback to the broadsheets of the 1920s, there was a pretty big psychic shift that had to happen. I think my predecessors have done  pretty well, considering.

What’s an example of a piece you’ve published since beginning work at the Observer that epitomizes the kind of story and sensibility you strive for in the paper as a whole?

I’m probably most proud of our current issue, which closed the day after Sandy hit. Only a few of us were able to make it into the office, but we had reporters all over town doing incredible work.  Everyone rallied and worked around the clock to cover the storm. In addition to a number of hard news scoops and dispatches from some of the hardest hit areas, including Hunter Walker’s reporting on the dangers from the flooding of the Gowanus Canal and Jessica Roy in DUMBO, we published some really smart analysis, like Matt Chaban’s story on how the Mayor’s residential rezoning push in waterfront areas like Williamsburg worsened the disaster.

The paper ran a big headline across the front page, NEW YORK TO SANDY: ‘BLOW ME.’ Was there any hesitation about that?

It was the only thing we really considered. I felt like it channeled a certain sense of defiance that New Yorkers were feeling in that moment. I think that’s occasionally the role of a paper like the Observer—giving voice to a certain cathartic, gut-level response that would seem out of place in the Times or New York or another more established outlet. We’d slept in the office the night before, and we were pretty fried and maybe a bit shaken and worried about our friends and families, so that headline came straight from the heart.

In a recent New Republic feature on Peter Kaplan, journalist Nathan Heller writes: “It’s hard to find a major publication right now, in print or online, that’s not in some way flavored by the old Observer: Subtract Kaplan from the media landscape of the past 20 years and you lose The Awl, much of Gawker, and a good bit of Politico, too. You lose many of the most distinctive reporter-stylists at magazines like New York, favorite bylines in the Sunday Times, and even members of the writing staff of Girls.”  Do you agree with that assessment?

That’s probably a good one for someone else to answer. Peter is a genius. He’s clearly one of the most influential editors of the last few decades. You probably also have to give some props to Graydon Carter, even though he was at the paper for just a year.  Before editing the Observer, he’d created Spy with Kurt Andersen, and you can still detect some faint echoes of that in what we do now as well.

We’re actually celebrating our 25th anniversary this year, and I’ve spent some time poring over the old issues. One thing that has leaped out at me is that the Observer’s institutional voice was never really as monolithic as it has seemed in retrospect. The paper published everyone from Hilton Kramer to Candace Bushnell—and it was the mix that made it really remarkable. Peter was the ringmaster of all that, and maybe more important, he created a culture in which amazingly talented young writers could find a home and make a real mark on the city. Fortunately that hasn’t changed. The talent in our newsroom is just incredible. I cannot imagine a better team.

In the same article, Heller writes that Kaplan held “the belief that writing from your particular experience of a subject was necessary not just for rich reporting and editorial honesty but because it opened up a space for bold intelligence.” Is that your sensibility too?

I guess I have my own sensibility at this point….Harold Bloom had it right about the “anxiety of influence”—creatively speaking, it’s not healthy to dwell too much on what came before. As for my own approach to this, beyond maintaining our long-standing focus on prominent, ambitious, colorful New Yorkers, it probably comes down to having fun. I think there’s a huge fun deficit in the media lately. Everyone’s afraid. We just lost Newsweek, and there have been recent layoffs at Conde Nast, the Times, the Daily, and the Voice, so it’s natural that people would play it safe. But when you’re doing it right, journalism is great fun. I think readers can sense that, and that spirit has always been what I most loved about the paper.

Many are curious about the high turnover rate of the editor-in-chief post: you’re the paper’s fourth editor since Jared Kushner purchased it in 2006. Can you tell us why that is?  What it’s like to work with him?

Jared’s a great publisher. I am floored by the level of editorial freedom we have. That’s a very rare thing. I can’t speak to the past, but from my point of view, there’s a natural and perfectly healthy tension between the owner and the editor of any publication, and it doesn’t seem at all surprising that the kind of financial pressures that newspapers have found themselves in during the last few years would tend to draw out those tensions more than usual.

We’ve heard reports about Kushner’s focused commitment to the paper’s bottom line. Can you give us specific examples of how he’s building anew the various aspects of the business (the paper, the sites, etc)?

Under Arthur Carter, the Observer was never expected to be profitable. Jared has been incredibly smart about finding new revenue streams and creating a thriving business. He launched properties like The Commercial Observer, PolitickerNJ, Scene, and YUE, and that has taken a lot of the pressure off of the Observer itself. My focus is on improving the paper and increasing the readership for Observer.com, Betabeat, Politicker and GalleristNY, as well as figuring out how to create content—whether it’s video series, special sections or events—that advertisers are excited about and want to associate themselves with. We’ve got great momentum, and we just appointed an extremely impressive new president, Mike Albanese, from BuzzMedia, so it feels like we’re on the right track.

Are there plans to develop a national focus on Observer.com? And what do those plans look like?

I don’t think it’s a matter of a big transformation so much as increasingly lifting our gaze beyond the borders of Manhattan and seeing the New York part of our identity more as a sensibility than a geographical limitation. The internet has introduced us to readers all over the world, so it’s a logical evolution to broaden our outlook online, in the same way publications like New York, the Times, The New Yorker, and Gawker have been doing. But the paper itself remains extremely New York-centric, and I expect it always will.

With a significant disparity in paid circulation (51,000 paper readers) and online traffic (2.1 million monthly online visitors for all of the digital properties), can you explain the argument for continuing to publish the paper versus moving the entire operation online?

There are a few reasons. First, the paper fuels everything else we do. It’s central to the identity of the whole enterprise. The idea that we are at heart a newspaper carries tremendous psychological weight—it fuels a certain ambition and sense of purpose that is very difficult to recreate with a purely digital product. It makes us work harder. Second, advertisers love it, because although our readership is not enormous, it happens to be extremely influential and financially secure. That makes it an incredible value for luxury advertisers in that they can speak precisely to the clientele that they’re trying to reach. And third, putting out a newspaper like the Observer is just great fun, so as long as you can figure out how to make the revenue support it, why wouldn’t you?

How does the Observer compete with all the smart gossip-news sites it helped spawn?

There are so many outlets doing great work, but I do think there’s something very special about the Observer. We just try to do it better—to offer readers more insight and to be more thoughtful, more amusing, quicker, smarter and surprising.

Whatever happened to that group you started back in 2008, ASSME (American Society of Shitcanned Media Elites), after losing your job as Radar‘s executive editor? Are you still involved with them, or are you less active in the group now that you’ve rejoined the media elite!?

ASSME was never a real organization. When the industry started falling apart in 2008, I felt like everyone I knew in the business needed to let off some steam and take our minds off of the economic implosion we were living through. So ASSME was really just a party theme, but it hit a very raw nerve. Never underestimate what you can do with an open bar and a cute invite.

The idea to turn it into a group blog for underemployed writers came later, but around the time it really got rolling, I wound up getting a new job. Interestingly, two of the main contributors, Drew Grant and Steve Huff, are now at the Observer, so the spirit lives on. I just donated the last of our “Yes We Canned!” T-Shirts to Hurricane Sandy relief, so maybe we’ll see a few around town in the next few weeks.

Reed, the 43-year-old son of renowned New York City artists David Reed and Judy Rifka, grew up among tall ceilings and long windows in the spacious lofts of 1970s TriBeCa, then a shabby bohemia burning with creativity.  Those early years informed the liberalism and inventiveness in his four novels (A Still Small Voice, Snowball’s Chance, The Whole, All the World’s A Grave) and short story collection (Tales of Woe)–as well as his expert rabble-rousing.

On September 25th, the provocateur invited The Slant to one of his old haunts in TriBeCa, Nha Trang, a Vietnamese eatery. Over oysters, he hammered home the First Commandment of literary criticism:  Thou shall not review work thou hast not read.  He also shared what inspired “Revise & Recant,” who showed up to confess cruel critiques and how criticism often misses the mark:

Photo by Dustin Luke Nelson

So where did you come up with the idea for “Revise & Recant”?

In 2002, when my book, Snowball’s Chance [a parody of George Orwell’s Animal Farm that takes aim at capitalism and politics in a post-911 world] came out, the far right was trying to resurrect a Cold War mentality and direct it at terrorism. You had guys like Christopher Hitchens talking about Orwell and Animal Farm.  His book, Why Orwell Matters, came out around the same time that my novel did.

As the right was trying to create a new Cold War, parody was under attack because copyrights had been extended indefinitely for big corporation in the United States. For a moment, it looked like parody was going to become illegal. In the U.K., parody is not protected.  So when the book came out, the U.K. people were very hostile to it.

Hitchens had made this sharp turn to the right in supporting the Iraq war and was critical of the book. I debated him on the BBC and a few other places. But he hadn’t read the book. He was always very straight about that, though. I wasn’t as creeped out about him as by Kathy Young, a journalist who wrote a review of the book in The Boston Globe that was reprinted in Reason Magazine, that weirdo right wing publication. Young hadn’t even read the book.

Did Hitchens also write a review of Snowball’s Chance?

No, we just talked on the BBC a few times. To talk about something you haven’t read is a little bit different than writing about something you haven’t read. It’s a little less sleezy, I think.

Was Young’s review harsh?

She said Snowball’s Chance was blaming the victims of terrorism and I could see her mounting that argument, even if she had read the book. But I don’t think it’s a cool argument to mount if you haven’t read the text. I mean, where’s the art of critique? You read the book and you say nice things about it, then you lay into it, and say, “but he’s really wrong about so-and-so.”

If you’re going to write about a book, you have to have read it. Step One. First she lays into it and then she says she’s not going to read it because it’s too disgusting. Not only do I blame her, I have to say that I blame the editors at The Boston Globe and Reason Magazine for printing it because that’s the kind of thing, as an editor, you should not run. It does say in the review she hadn’t read it. But still, if you’re going to belittle a book, you have to have read it.

Did you call her on it? Did she apologize?

Yeah, I contacted her and told her that I thought she was a jerk and she said she would read it and correct it. But she was full of shit. She wasn’t going to read it. But Hitchens apologized. He was talking about the book at an event at Cooper Union, which was a block from my house at the time. I was sitting in the audience when he started bad-mouthing me and my book. He said that I was named for John Reed the communist and that we were related.

So when the Q&A part of the event was going on, I talked to him a little bit from the stands. It was a thrilling moment. There was a reporter there, Rachel Donadio, who’s now at The New York Times. She was trying to foment an argument between me and Hitchens, but Hitchens was not going to do it. He was immediately apologetic: He said he shouldn’t have talked about a book he hadn’t read—and that he owed me a steak dinner and a bottle of scotch.

You had steak and scotch with Hitchens?

No, I didn’t get either. I think he did mean to give it to me. He was that kind of man, you know, very nice to you in person. But when you’re on the radio with him, your mic is going off.

In an article written by Susan Shapiro for The Wall Street Journal, “Regrets, Even Critics Have a Few,” you mentioned that you were critical of artist Gideon Bok’s work and that you regretted it. But Bok told the WSJ that he actually benefited from your criticism, that it made him think about his color palette. Have you ever read a critical review of your work that helped you?

By the time the book comes out, as an author, you’ve already heard all that criticism. I haven’t experienced a scathing review that I felt was just about the book. With Snowball’s Chance, it was really political. People who liked the book were radical in some way, and people who didn’t like it were right wing. Anyone trying to maintain the status quo didn’t like the book. As an editor, your job is to find a balance: If someone is being overly critical, you try and bring it back to the middle; if someone is being overly gushing, you have to question it. I think I was right about Gideon’s work, but I over-emphasized the point. I said it in a kind of snide, sarcastic way. I think I said he uses “a country-mouse color palette.”

And now you’re Facebook friends!

Yeah, we’re palsy. We’ve never been quite so palsy after that though I have to say. I mean we act like we’re still friends, but I’m not so sure.

So were you the one who spearheaded this event?

Yeah, with The National Book Critics Circle. I ended up doing events for them when I got elected for the board. I wanted to do punkier, more entertaining events. I thought it would be interesting to have critics recant because they all have something to apologize for; and furthermore, criticism at its very best is the conversation cocktail party. It’s not meant to be the final word on anything. It’s meant to be this kind of cocktail party banter: You have your drink, you start talking to somebody about something and it engages others ideally. I was pursuing that idea.

We didn’t see any coverage of the event and yet you had big name publications participating: The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Beast, Newsweek, Out. How’d it go?

There was one story that was very touching. Alan Jalon confessed to having blasted a young poet 30 years ago. He still felt bad about it, so he decided that he was going to try to correct the review. When he tracked her down, she didn’t want to hear from him. She said, “Why would you revisit the most horrifying experience of my life? I don’t want you to republish this.”

Wow, that’s intense. Any other standouts? Did you recant anything?

For Art Forum, I reviewed an art show exhibiting painter Michel Majerus’s work. I was grumpy about a few of his paintings. They weren’t so hot, but it was a huge show, and I could have easily not mentioned them. But I did. I layed into him for those. He was in a plane crash right after I published that nasty review. I feel like I’ve killed a few people.

Sam Sacks of The Wall Street Journal confessed to having read a very long, boring book where nothing was happening. It was about a woman’s journey home. He skimmed the last two hundred pages because he was so bored. After he published the review, he received a letter from the wife of the author, who informed him that his review overlooked the fact that the protagonist had died two hundred pages previously. If he had read the book more closely, he would have known that.

Embarrassing! Did a lot of people show up to this event?

Yeah, it’s Lit Crawl [a non-profit that fosters interest in literature, novelists and readers alike by hosting big literary events.]

What are some publications that reach the standard of reviewing that you admire?

Well, there are different standards for different venues. Right now, I kind of lean toward the online standard, which is slightly more honest. It can be more forthright because it’s not trying to hide things. In print, you have a lot of competing interests.

Like?

For example, a reviewer might be publishing a book with the same publisher as the book he’s reviewing. Very, very common. Or you have a clearly competitive title. That’s one way an editor will try to manipulate a review. He’ll say, ‘I know Melinda has got a book coming out that’s going to compete with this title, so I’ll have her review it. She’ll blast it!’ Or, alternatively, ‘I know Melinda has a book coming out by the same press, she’s not going to blast it.’ There are some obvious conflicts of interests that happen that nobody talks about. It wouldn’t take very much digging for anyone to connect the dots. But nobody calls them on it. Everyone’s afraid. On the internet, I think people are a little bit more clear about things. I prefer full disclosure.

Are their any high-proifile literary critics you take particular issue with?

[Silence.]

Are there any drawbacks to the internet as far as criticism goes?

The audience the internet brings is not always a particularly informed audience. An uninformed opinion can be very popular with an uninformed audience. But that’s also one of the good things about the internet. It’s kind of this stabilizing, equalizing medium. Also, writers can work with a better word count. On the Rumpus, you can write a 3000 word review. You’re just not going to get that in print.

Is there anything you hope Revise & Recant will engender?

I’d like to see a column on the most unfair review of the week. It would be fun. If you did it weekly, it would be a little bit of a joke like, ‘Who got called out this week?’ Also, taglines are my big complaint now. Who writes them? I’ve seen several pieces ruined by taglines, which often get the pieces exactly wrong.

Tell us the places you go to read reviews that you find that are pretty solid?

If you’re going to look at the normative places—The Washington Post, The New York Times—I think that’s one option, but I would also look at some of the stronger internet sites. I like checking out all the normal places, but I also like the Rumpus and Guernica. The Brooklyn Rail which is my paper, does pretty well at times.

So…is there a review of one of your books that stands out as being particularly good?

I liked Craig Epplin’s review of Snowball’s Chance in Guernica. It’s about the tenth anniversary of the new edition. I’m very grateful to him for putting all that thinking into it.

There was one critical review of Snowball’s Chance that was spot on. Arthur Salm who wrote for the San Diego Union-Tribune, which is a very conservative paper, wrote a typical criticism of the book, but he read, measured and weighed it. If he’s going to go to all the trouble of doing that then he deserves his opinion. He had a line that read: John Reed Good, Orwell, better. You know, chanting like the sheep. But I felt he’d earned his review.

What do you think of the trend of book critics drawing on personal anecdotes and narratives in their reviews?

I’m all for it. I think it’s very humanizing. Ruth Franklin does it quite nicely. There are a lot of reviewers who do that. It’s a good critical structure. The New York Review of Books is a good example of a place that reviews very well, but they can be a little bit fuddy duddy.

Fuddy duddy?

For example, they are inclined toward noir books and they publish a lot of them.  It feels a little antiquated. People don’t talk about this, but in terms of the quality of the prose and material that’s being published now, it is infinitely better than it was 20, 40, or 150 years ago. There are just so many writers. You can do the numbers. How many people were living in London in Shakespeare’s time?  About 250,000. Now we’re looking at a population of 6 million writers (I hear). It’s just a very different equation, even if you’re looking at the 1870s in Russia. You’re talking about a population of a few thousand writers. If you delve into the Strand bookstore and look at all the review copies that come out every year you will see extraordinary books you had no idea existed.

I’m not sure that Dostoyevsky would even get published today. If Crime and Punishment were to come out now, where would it come out? Europa Editions? Even for Europa Editions, it’s kind of shifty. Honestly, I don’t know who would publish it. And, I suggest you go burn your classics.

Huh?

For the most part, classics are there because they’ve already gone through the filter of economic and atavistic cultural values. So they are usually there because in some way they extol the virtues of “the way it is.” If you’re looking at contemporary books, you’re much more likely to find something that speaks to you in the present and has a more original point of view.

Who are some of your favorite contemporary writers?

I think more in presses. I like it when a press has a personality. In terms of the big presses, Farrar Straus & Giroux still has a really defined personality. Riverhead Books (an imprint of Penguin) does as well. Big presses have their benefits.

As far as smaller presses, Europa Editions and Boa have strong lists. Unbridled has a good list as well if your looking for thrillers, as does SoHo Press and Melville House. Melville House has some good literary titles too. If you’re looking for slightly squishier titles, Algonquin Books (an imprint of Workman Publishing) has some. I identify more with presses and I love the idea of people following presses again.

Are you still the literary editor at The Brooklyn Rail?

Yes, I’ve been there 10 years. I’m the books editor. I got sucked into it after Snowball’s Chance. They stuck up for me. The New York papers stuck up for me when the British papers went after me: The New York Press, The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times all came to my defense so that’s how I got involved with The Brooklyn Rail.

Final thoughts?

I love New York and I hope we never have to join the United States.

In 1991, Wolf wrote a searing first book, The Beauty Myth, that reignited feminist consciousness and helped usher in the third wave of feminism. Only 29-years-old at the time, she persuasively argued that the greater political and economic stature women achieve, the more pressure they’re under to meet ever-growing and impossible demands on physical beauty. This thesis, journalist Michelle Goldberg astutely observes in her recent review of Vagina, is even more relevant today given the run-of-the-millness of Brazilian bikini waxes and the freaky upsurge in cosmetic labiaplasty. Since that thunderous beginning, Wolf has written seven more books, including the boldly named Vagina.

While it’s garnered a flurry of reviews from publishing powerhouses—The New York Times Sunday Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The Economist, Slate.com—it’s been brutally and almost universally panned. But Wolf, with tireless fists of might, is not backing down. In an exclusive interview with The Slant, she provocatively challenges Ariel Levy’s biting critique in The New Yorker, Miranda Purves’ critical review in the September issue of Elle and Jemima Lewis’s spin in the U.K.’s Daily Mail:

Photo by Andre Lambertson

The Slant: Let’s start with Ariel Levy. Did you agree with her assessment that Vagina “belongs in the same realm of erotic imagination as the Grey trilogy” [of E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey]? Do you think that your book is tapping into the Zeitgeist (as Levy says), and that it will appeal to the legions of women who responded to Fifty Shades of Grey?

Wolf: I think the comparisons are frankly a bit bizarre, especially coming from a serious literary critic. She is oddly, in my view, conflating two completely different genres. Fifty Shades, whatever you may think of it, is a work of fiction. Vagina is a piece of nonfiction reportage that investigates fact: especially the cutting-edge science of the last couple of decades that should radically update our understanding of women, desire, arousal and female orgasm. Vagina: A New Biography has scores of studies from peer-reviewed journals, including abstracts, and involved my visits to labs for eyewitness accounts of experiments, a summary of the literature reviewed by the top scientists and physicians in the field, and firsthand interviews with scientists on the pioneering edge of this research, so it seems like very fuzzy thinking on Levy’s part to assign such empirical data to the role of the imagination.

My book offers readers the science to account for very real aspects of their sexual lives such as what actually helps women’s heart rates and circulation escalate, boosting arousal; what really happens in the female brain during orgasm—as measurable on MRIs; the neurochemicals and hormones that are really released for women in states of desire and orgasm; the measurable changes in the autonomic nervous system for women who have been raped; and so on. Among other big scientific findings, it reports on a new anatomical discovery: a neural ‘arm’ in the female pelvis such that the clitoris is ‘north’ and the G-spot is ‘south,’ a finding that brought ninety per cent of women, who had both places stimulated at the same time, to orgasm—with strangers in lab conditions. Pretty important new data, I would say. This information is often eye-opening and it was startling for me too when I first studied it, so perhaps this strange critical impulse in some quarters to assign all of this science to the category of the imaginative is a way to deal at first with surprising or paradigm-changing scientific information.

The Slant: As a cultural critic, what is it about E.L. James’s books that speak to so many women and does Vagina fill a similar void?

Wolf: Is there a cultural moment in which women are finally grappling with the behind-the-scenes politics of the vagina? Certainly, and I am sure the popularity of my book is part of that courage that women are showing across the globe. From Pussy Riot [the feminist punk-rock group, three members of whom were jailed for staging an Anti-Kremlin song at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Russia] to Michigan Rep. Lisa Brown [the Democratic representative blasted by conservatives for using the word vagina on the House floor], women are at a kind of turning point at which I think they are interested in how to be sexual subjects, not sexual objects, and are interested in standing up—as the gay and lesbian movement did—to defend themselves against the routine mockery and abuse of their sexualities and even their sex organs. Vagina certainly is part of that discussion. Finally many women readers have found Vagina liberating (and even arousing) because it seeks to investigate female arousal and pleasure on its own terms. If women readers are interested in their own sexual selves and feel empowered to find out about and respect the search for what excites them, on their own terms, then I am happy to be part of that trend and am proud of my place in it.

The Slant: Levy also chronicles the battle between feminists who fought against pornography and those who sought unbridled sexual freedom, concluding that “in returning to the sexual body, the site of radical feminism’s last internal battle, Wolf ends up marshaling the worst arguments from both sides of the porn wars.” What’s your take on this assessment?

Wolf: “Returning to the sexual body”? That is, I must say, a nonexistent conceptual category that reveals a measure of wishful thinking—or, one might say, magical thinking—on the part of some feminist critics. Women outside of this small circle of feminist theorists, whose orthodoxy for thirty years is that the body is completely ‘socially constructed’—didn’t get that memo. They are living in their bodies as well as in their characters every day, dealing with relationships, loneliness, desire, loss of libido, menopause, pregnancy, feeling ‘beauty myth’ pressures, sexual harassment, rape, eating disorders, physical happiness, physical grief.

Can we leave our bodies behind? Is it ‘feminist’ to urge women to do so? I think not. We frankly don’t have a choice about being embodied—I feel that it is important for women to feel as good as possible about their physical selves and drives and experiences—and many women don’t find it helpful for some kinds of feminism to explain away the sexual body as if it is trivial. The reason women are being targeted throughout the world—with female genital mutilation, child marriage, the use of rape in war—has to do with their ‘sexual bodies’ as Levy so Western-ly puts it. They don’t have the luxury of wishing these issues away. The young women I interviewed who are pressured every day by porn—the young men who self-report distress at being addicted to porn—the counselors for young teenagers who say that porn is making kids far more sexually aggressive—don’t deserve to have us turn up our feminist noses at the issue of sexuality today. And finally I find it offensive that some feminists are belittling the simple issue of women’s right to know more about their own sexual response and be more in control of what gives them pleasure. I think women are entitled to take their own pleasure seriously and to have the latest information about their own bodies and about their own arousal—let alone this powerful brain-vagina connection data. I think further that it buys into patriarchal values, frankly, to trivialize women’s interest in their own sexual response and sexual pleasure.

The Slant: The new editor-in-chief of Canada’s Flare, Miranda Purves, wrote a beautifully rendered, although mixed, review of Vagina: A New Biography in the September issue of Elle. Toward the end of her piece, she cites Adrienne Rich’s Of Women Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution to challenge the way she believes you use nature or biology to lock men and women into the very hierarchies your work attempts to dismantle. Here’s the passage that we’d love you to engage: “Like Wolf, Rich reads into history to goddess-centered cultures, which we know only from remnants of art and text. But [Rich] reveals how this history has been used to construct meaning out of nature where none inherently lies, thus separating women and men, with women wielding the private power of fertility and child-rearing, and man the public power of lawmaker. Devout feminist and lefty that she is, Wolf fails to truly grapple with essentialism’s shadow side, thereby bolstering a conservative agenda that would have us barefoot and pregnant.” What do you say to that?

Wolf: Again, I find the many misreadings of this very clear book quite odd. I never said anything like the paragraph above. It is a truly nonsensical conclusion spun out of thin air. What I did do is quote specifically: I looked at the cultural history of the vagina. I did not go to prehistory because that is ambiguous of course—no one knows what all those fertility figurines really mean—but the Sumerian and other early literature is perfectly clear: the vagina used to be considered sacred. The peculiar tendency of some feminist critics to assume I am endorsing something that I am simply reporting on is one of the sloppinesses, in my view, of some feminist approaches to a text. Inanna, a Sumerian goddess, is cited in Sumerian documents, as insisting that her vagina was beautiful and the source of wisdom; those are not my words or my opinion about Inanna’s vagina. Again and again I report on the history of the vagina in this book—Pythagorean sacred geometry saw the vagina shape as symbolically meaningful; go argue with the Pythagoreans. Pre-Christian Celts inscribed Sheela na gig figures, opening their labia, above their sacred structure—go argue with the Celts. Honestly.

Knowing our history does not diminish us but makes us stronger in current conditions. Now I certainly do report on the new science that shows some differences between men and women in terms of their sexual responses—even at the level of the brain. Should I not report on this because a patriarchal society wants to use any new data confirming gender differences against women? Again, this would be intellectually indefensible; patriarchy always wants to use whatever is discovered about women against women. So the proper response from a feminist intellectual is to report the facts—and fight any effort to use new data to diminish women’s role in society. But feminism insists we can’t look at cutting edge data that is being reported in bestsellers from such feminist scientists as Sarah Hrdy and Dr. Louann Brizendine—science that is only going to get more and more fully mapped, which will begin to make feminism seem more and more out of touch and it will look as if it wants to hide its head in the sand. Women are never disempowered by dealing with the truth, even if it’s a new truth; they are disempowered by hiding and letting themselves be defined by patriarchal limits on discourse.

The Slant: In a mostly laudatory review, the writer Jemima Lewis wrote: “I find it hard to believe, as Wolf does, that even mildly insulting jokes about female genitalia can injure women both mentally and physically, creating a tense or unresponsive vagina. And if sexual satisfaction is really so vital to female confidence, and creativity, how does one explain history’s many overachieving spinsters? Where did Jane Austen and Elizabeth I get their cojones?” What’s your response to this point?

Wolf: Again a wild misreading—one that a number of critics are guilty of. I make it very clear that you don’t need a lover to be a sexual person and that you can have a sexual relationship with yourself. Female masturbation releases all of these positive hormones and neurotransmitters as well and one of the women I cite as having had an apparent sexual awakening was probably a virgin her whole life—Christina Rossetti. Honestly, have these people never thought through the issue of self-pleasuring? As for her first point, again, this is not my opinion. I offer important and extensive new data on the role of relaxation and stress in female sexual response, and show a great volume of studies that prove that stressing women out with sexual threats and other forms of ‘bad stress’ can affect their health, their concentration and their own response in turn. There should be nothing surprising about this; the role of stress as a damager of health and mental wellbeing is well documented in the medical literature and I am simply looking at the data on sexualized stressors and offering the important new data to women of the role of stress in inhibiting—and relaxation in supporting—their bodies’ full capacities for pleasure.