Robert Glück

Danny: Do you inject aspects of your real life into your fiction?
Robert: Well, it’s all autobiography. Even if the story’s not about me on the surface, it’s
some version of autobiography.
So you make nothing up.
That’s accurate. A lot of my plots are simply borrowed. I’m often trying to find a story that can operate as the story for my own feelings. For instance, the father of a friend of mine was murdered in a very violent murder that took place all over the father’s house. From room to room, there were bits of his father. He was really murdered, not just like shot, but really banged up and dismantled. However, his family life had been very nailed down. The whole family took their cue from their father and lived a very tamped-down life without much story. They didn’t get excited. They were calm, somewhat depressed. But after his death, it came out that the father had several other lives – not one, but many. He had been acquainted with other people my friend’s age, who he was better friends with than he was with his own son, and who he saw all the time and had affairs with – male and female affairs. And all this from a father who didn’t seem to have much of a life. So, I have the idea to use the story of my friend’s father. It’s not my dad, but the events might mirror a kind of emotional state, or emotional tangle, that I had with my own dad.
What story would you borrow to describe your recent breakup?
Oh that’s easy – ‘Alien’. At the end of that movie, where the alien is hanging on by its toenails as the ship hurtles through total nothingness: that describes my terror and reluctance to move. My boyfriend had an unbelievably hard time getting rid of me. It ended about sixteen times already over the last two or three years, but now it really is over. Yes, I’m now single, eligible. What a great boyfriend I am too. I used to cook him two meals a day.
You used to cook him two meals a day?
Yeah, can you beat that?
Nobody’s cooking me two meals a day. He was also younger than you?
19 years younger than me.
Are younger men your fetish?
The people I’m attracted to seem to be getting older and older. I certainly would never want to be with somebody who wasn’t old enough to comprehend my experience. But on the other hand, I am an extremely lively character and sometimes somebody who is younger seems better able to keep up with me. Even when I was younger, I wanted guys who were a bit younger than myself. My first boyfriend was maybe two or three years younger, but when you’re twenty-two and your boyfriend is nineteen that seems like eons. Also, young people’s problems are interesting to me because they’re bigger problems. The world is a bigger place to them. That creates a kind of vulnerability that attracts me and that’s what compels me in the first place. It’s something that I felt very acutely when I was younger.
How old are you?
57.
How did you feel vulnerable when you were younger?
When I was young I was a hippie, and there was such a thing as an age gap. I t was inconceivable to me not only to be with a person over thirty, but to be a person over thirty myself, because there were no models in my life of people over thirty who lived in a way that I wanted to live. I didn’t realize why people over thirty even bothered to buy new clothes; I thought that life after thirty was so over. Like why kid yourself? So, I can easily put myself in a younger person’s shoes. Still, there’s cuteness, and that’s very compelling too. Thank heavens that, as Proust said, there’s a bee for every flower, that there have been guys who found me – someone older than themselves – good looking and attractive, somebody they wanted to pursue.
Are you a daddy?
Could I be a dizzy daddy?
What’s a dizzy daddy?
One that needs to be looked after. The thing that I object to in the term “daddy” is the idea that
the daddy is the one with the power. I feel the opposite. The one who is older really – has to give the power up – it’s like being an anarchist – otherwise they’re not going to have a real relationship but just a cliché, a structure that won’t last more than a few months because it’s so threadbare. Anyway, it’s not so much about power relations, since once you’ve been with somebody for any length of time, that dynamic sort of fades and the basic fabric of people’s personalities take over. Usually, whoever wants it more – and that is often the younger person – simply wants things to be a certain way, more than older people usually do. In fact, I will give a tip to the daddies who are reading this: The only way to be with someone who is younger is to relinquish power. You say, ‘Okay, have it your way,’ and what you get out of it is access to a certain kind of experience you’re interested in and that, hopefully, both of you want. Maybe it’s true of any situation that really works. But anyway, that’s a tip to the daddies, or to their admirers, so they’ll know what to demand.

You lived in a hippie commune?
I was a very dedicated hippie. I didn’t buy the ideology, but I did like the elbow-room. I actually went back to the land – if you could say that a Jew was ever from the land in the first place, a Jew from Cleveland. I went to the Sierras where we raised our own food and everything. I started learning how to be a writer, started learning how to have sex. I couldn’t figure out how to come out, how to be a gay man in the context I’d been given, and being a hippie gave me elbowroom – enough elbowroom to come out and to be in a society where there was some acceptance of different kinds of sexualities – or even of everyone sleeping together in every combination. I know being a hippie isn’t in style now. Everybody denigrates it, and there’s lots bad to say about hippies too. There was certainly no analysis of power. You just thought that all you had. to do was have a good heart and that everything was going to be fine.
And have a good time…
Yeah, but it wasn’t purely hedonistic. There could not have been a gay movement without hippies. A tremendous amount of work was done in the 70s, just sheer organizing. Hippie stuff… You can make jokes about it, and I do too. For Halloween a few years ago, I went as a dead hippie. I got my old hippie clothes out and I put a bullet hole in the middle of my forehead.
It’s strange that Halloween is such a major holiday in San Francisco.
Really? Why is that strange? Last year, my ex-boyfriend and I wore high 18th-century Costumes with wigs that were three feet over our heads. You can’t imagine how rich these outfits were. Embroidered, damask silk. Kind of like 18th-century ball gowns, yet they seem to be made for men because they were huge. We must have stood eight feet tall. When we went down to the Castro, I felt like I knew what it was to be a celebrity. There were so many flashbulbs going off it was like pop-pop-pop-pop-pop… All around us. People stood in line to have their pictures taken with us – mostly Japanese tourists, and also tourists from the Slavic countries for some reason. It felt like health, all the flash from the light bulbs…
It felt like health?
Yeah, like we were being given this radiance. After two hours, I realized how completely dreadful it would be to be a celebrity because the attention wouldn’t go away. And then suddenly you wanted it to go away, but it wouldn’t go away on its own. You had to disappear for it to go away. That’s the downside, I guess. I could see if that were happening all day long, every day of your life, you would be a different person.
You don’t assume celebrity it seems, but I wonder if the notoriety that comes with being a writer of erotic gay fiction has ever gotten you laid?
I’m an extremely shy person. If somebody says they’ve read my work, my first response is to be somewhat shocked and to wonder if they’d gone through my desk or something.
Okay, but have you ever used your knack for sexy prose to get to someone into the sack?
Well, I don’t have cards that I give out at the end of my readings to attractive men. Once, I had the experience of somebody coming up to me after a reading wanting to get to know me. We slept together, and then we lived together for four years. He’d never been t o a reading before, and he had little interest in going back, so it wasn’t quite me, “the writer”, that he was interested in, which was a relief. I’ve been mated-up in life for perhaps the last 20 years, and it’s not that that hasn’t included some adventures and some sprees, but as I’m going through the files right now, mentally, opening them up, looking, I don’t think that many came from me being a writer per se.
There are better ways of meeting guys, I guess.
Like the internet, and the amount of time promiscuity takes… Maybe some people have it, but I don’t. My days of real promiscuity were mostly spent at the baths, and it’s not something that I would rule out now – although the internet seems more accurate. Guys went to the baths because they knew what they wanted, and that seemed like an extremely good idea to me – with the added plus that often they had taken a shower.
Didn’t you once compare bathhouses to churches?
Yeah I think they can serve the same function for their respective communities. To experience the “sacred” is to experience loss of self and to open oneself up to emptiness. Churches do that. It’s an experience for some reason that people need to have in groups. The dismantling of self or nothingness can be very restorative. That experience seems to be one that awes. It’s awesome! It’s awesome to watch somebody be penetrated and have an orgasm. At a mass, you’re watching a human sacrifice, a sacrifice that involves cannibalism. At a bathhouse, you’re watching someone have sex or whatever, and it’s like watching a kind of sacrifice where somebody’s emptying out, somebody’s doing something shameful in public – or even not shameful – just becoming an animal, becoming physical, becoming matter, becoming meat, for a minute anyway. That can be experienced in a group very wonderfully.
You mentioned meeting guys online…
It puts you in so many different, wild situations where you meet all these different sexualities. I started seeing someone I’ll refer to as my “bisexual pussy boy”. He was basically straight, but his relation to his asshole was more intense than anybody’s I’ve ever met in my life. As a sexual organ, that is; his butthole a s a sexual organ. He wanted an older man – that was his thing – to admire, penetrate, look at his butt hole while he was having an affair with a woman. Not at the exact same time, but you know. And once he stopped having an affair with his woman friend, he couldn’t go on with me, because… It was like a mobile; his sexuality was like a mobile that needed both things at the same time. Lord knows…a lot of the self-descriptions how they arrived at them, I can’t even imagine. People will describe themselves as being willowy, and their stomachs will be sitting on their laps.
Whatever happened to the good old-fashioned meet-someone-in-a-bar types?
Well, as a shy person, I just don’t function very well in a bar. Maybe I just don’t drink enough to function well in a bar. As a Jew, certainly, we didn’t have much drinking in my family when I was growing up. When I was coming out, the only place gay culture was occurring, practically, was in bars. I thought, you go into a bar and the next day you’re selling pencils on the street. Initially, going into a bar was a very shameful and hard experience for me.
You never struck me as the kind of man that likes to go out…
No, not really. Writers are really no fun. We don’t do anything. I don’t ski. I don’t, like, hike.
Did you ever run into Foucault in San Francisco?
I exchanged letters with him. I used to see him on the street every once in a while, but I was always too shy to approach him. When my first prose book came out, I sent it to him and we had an exchange of letters. I had been reading him especially around that time, and based some of my work on having read him, some of my understanding of how power works. He could appreciate what I was doing, and it was thrilling to please him, lord knows. Foucault didn’t exactly go out onto the Champs Élysées with a trumpet and herald me, but he was very gracious.
But never, like, bending over a barrel?
No. We were bending over different barrels, I guess. Maybe one of us should have looked up.