Novelist Larry Duplechan Is Basically Done Writing But Certainly Not Done Singing
The lifelong L.A.er's "Blackbird" (1986) is often called the first major post-Baldwin gay Black novel. It got drubbed, then was enshrined. But he was happier crooning all along.
Hi, Caftaners. I hope you had a good weekend and I hope you have a good week as we head into fall. I’m sorry there was no Caftan last week. Not only did a few guys I have lined up push up our chat date, but I’ve also started a very intense fulltime gig editing and writing for my alumni mag, which I’ve long written and edited for. (Reach out to me at timmurphynycwriter@gmail.com if ever you know about Brown University alums—especially those 60 and over—doing cool things.)
I love my alma mater (despite the deal with Trump it recently signed that you could argue it either had to sign, infuriatingly, or bleed out over the next few years) and I love this gig, but it’s definitely cut into my Caftan time, so there might be weeks ahead without an interview (even though I have a bunch lined up) or they might be a bit shorter or less photo-filled (which might not be a bad thing!) Please stick with Caftan! I’ve worked on it for four years now and I have no intention of drifting away from it no matter how busy I am! (Oh, and because of this new taking-up of time, I’m going to be postponing for now running that Caftan Chronicles book club with Allstora that I mentioned last week.)
In this new brisk spirit, I’ll just say that I love this week’s interview, in part because it got me to reread a novel I read long ago, 1986’s Blackbird, which was made into a movie in 2014…
…as well as two more novels plus a nonfiction book. And it gave me the chance to get to know a gay Black writer who came very much post-James Baldwin but pre- a whole slew of other names, from Melvin Dixon, Essex Hemphill, Marlon Riggs and Joseph Beam to James Earl Hardy, E. Lynn Harris, Brandon Taylor and Brontez Purnell.
Larry Duplechan, 68, on the phone is very much of a piece with Larry Duplechan on the page—exuberant, witty, tale-telling, unpretentious, highly allusive of music and film, just the right amount of shady and often quite moving. And he’s also a lovely singer, as you can learn for yourself on his YouTube page. And I’m grateful to him for providing the photos below. Larry was a hottie—still is! And he also shares in this interview one of the most moving conversations I’ve ever heard between a father and his adult gay son.
So here we go and *hopefully* I will see you next week. Thank you for sticking with me. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber if you haven’t yet but have long enjoyed these interviews. And if you already are, especially you new folks, thank you. I’ve said it before: You allow me to keep doing this!
Larry, thank you so much for doing a Caftan chat with me. Can you tell me what your life looks like right now? Where do you live and with whom, if anyone?
My “with whom” is my husband, Greg Harvey. I’m 68 and he’s 71.
With whom you’ve been since 1976, right?
Right. And we live in the San Fernando Valley in a rather large, sprawling suburban house. I’m talking to you from our guest room so I’m out of the way of my husband and our cat, Max. When we got him, Greg took one look at him and said, “Max.” He’s the third of three male neutered cats we’ve had over the past 30 years and mostly they all end up getting called “Mr. Kitty.”
Anyway, Greg and I met in 1975 and fell in love in 1976. We were both at UCLA. My freshman year, I was in the UCLA Men’s Glee Club, and I sang a solo, which was “Morning Glow” from Pippin. And Greg was in the audience and he fell in love with me from the stage. So he decided he was going to get into the group the following year and pursue me, which is exactly what he did. I’m a first tenor and he’s a second tenor. Unfortunately, he wasn’t very good at the wooing thing and I didn’t know that’s what he was doing. Also, he’s pretty much always been unclockable, so I thought he was a straight boy. So he was my “straight friend” for about six months. Then finally it occurred to him that he’d have to pounce, and so he did. And then when he was on top of me, I thought, “Okay, I guess he’s not my straight friend anymore.” We count our anniversary as a couple from that first kiss because we’ve belonged to each other ever since.
Awwww! I’m gonna cry.
I told you it was a good story!
And you’ve never had a period apart?
No.
Wow. And I’ll boldly go there: Have you always been or are you monogamous?
Never. We cheated and we lied and then we were open and we’ve had secondary relationships and we’ve had a shared boyfriend for a few years. We’re big sluts.
You guys have done all the variations.
We really did. A few weeks ago, I said to him that we really could’ve handled that a lot better, skipped the whole lying and cheating part if we’d been mature enough to say, “I love you and you’re the person I want to grow old with, but there’s a lot of cute guys out there and I’d really like to fuck them.” Which we didn’t do. It would’ve been so much simpler. But we got through it.
So many relationships have foundered on the rocks of, if only they were open, they wouldn’t be having all that angst and breaking up. Probably more commonly in straight relationships than gay ones.
But being open really brings its own flavor of angst. It’s not an easy river to traverse at all. Human relationships are never easy no matter how you decide to conduct them. When you’re in your fiftieth year with someone, people want to know how you do it. And all I can think of is stubbornness. We were just too stubborn to break up! Now we’re a couple of little old men and I’m glad we were stubborn.
Well, what I’m hearing is that despite all the angst over the terms of the relationship, you couldn’t live without each other.
So it seems! And we talked a couple of times over years, we said, “Maybe we should put the house up for sale and see what the rest of the world looks like.”
You mean break up?
Yeah. We came really close a couple of times.
Did you talk about it during a calm phase or amid some sort of upheaval, like, related to another person?
it was definitely in the upheaval category. When you get together at 19 and 22, you’re not the same person as the one sitting down with that person 20 years later. Usually there’s a series of events that make you both go, “Is this worth continuing or is this a good time to— there’s a line from Beaches that goes, ‘Let’s get rid of us before us gets bad.’”
Haha, I know movie lines have guided much of your life, which we will definitely be talking about. Can I ask what it feels like to have been with the same person since you were 18 or 19? I didn’t have a so-called serious relationship until I was 33.
Well…you don’t go through life thinking, “Gee, I’m awfully young to be in a relationship.” You’re in it. I was still in school. We got together the summer after my sophomore year. When I moved in with Greg, my parents disowned me and cut off financial support. So I was both working and going to school full-time. And he had just graduated and was in his first job as a bank teller. And we were too busy creating gay marriage from scratch to think about the fact that we were too young to be doing it.
But I was cognizant of the fact that it was the mid-seventies and that pairing up and, as John Rechy once put it, “raising ferns” was not in style at that time. But I remember saying to someone, “What are my chances of finding somebody else who wants to have a life with me whom I’m attracted to who’s attracted to me? Why would I say no because I’m 19?” I’m a marrier. I knew I wanted to be in a relationship. I knew that when I was 14 and discovered what being gay was. I knew I wanted to find a man and spend my life with him and grow up to be a couple of little old faggots. And not be alone. Especially back then, the myth was, “You’ll end up alone.” Once you were no longer young and pretty, nobody would love you and you’d grow old alone. I thought, “No, I really don’t want that to be my life.” And despite his faults and foibles, which were legion, he did seem to want to have a life with me for the long haul. And that was unusual for a really good-looking 22-year-old white boy in 1976, because he did not sign on for having to support me for the rest of college.
You became each other’s family at a very early age.
Yep! Real fast.
I just read in your last (and nonfiction) book, 2023’s Movies That Made Me Gay…
…your true-life version of the parental disownment that comes up in a lot of your novels. Did your parents ever un-disown you? Are they both passed now?
My father died in 2013 and my mother is still alive, about to turn 90, but she has Alzheimer’s and doesn’t know who she is, let alone who I am. As for un-disowning, there was a long and sort of vague re-entry into my nuclear family over years. And nobody ever said, “Okay, come on back, all is forgiven,” or “Oh, by the way, sorry about treating you like shit.” It was just kind of, “Why don’t you come to Thanksgiving and you can bring your—”
Friend?
“—boyfriend.”
They actually said “boyfriend?”
Yeah.
That’s better than “friend,” right?
Yeah. I think they got away with “friend” once. Once your mother has called you a pervert and said she wished she’d never had you, and takes away the family money, very little can hurt you at that point. So I was always very quick to correct people who would try to diminish Greg’s position in my life.
That weird in-between parental landing place is really beautifully explicated in your novels. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t read your Tangled up in Blue…
…but that final beat on the last page or so destroyed me because it felt so real.
I have to admit I have no idea what you’re talking about! I just don’t remember.
Oh, ok. It’s the [redacted so as not to spoil for anyone who hasn’t read the book], and it so beautifully caught that sort of not-quite-an-apology. It’s very ambivalent, and now as you tell me how it played out with your parents, I understand where that ambivalence that you portray comes from.
Oh, hm, yeah. Well, I’m particularly pleased that you seem to have enjoyed Tangled Up In Blue because it was a bomb of mythic proportions. No one liked that book. I almost never wrote again because of it. It was a critical and commercial Hindenburg.
That’s funny, because of the three I read, that plus Blackbird and Captain Swing…
…I thought it worked the best novelistically.
Both I and [legendary and now late gay publishing legend] Michael Denneny, who was my editor at St. Martin’s at the time, thought that book was going to be a success. He actually called me on the phone after his first read and said, “I think this book is going to cross over.” But the only mainstream reviews that book got were in the Los Angeles Times. Carolyn See called it a novel for people who don’t know how to think.
What?
It was an evil, evil review. For whatever reason, I seem to have struck some kind of a nerve. I think it bothered her that in 1989, I suggested that straight people might get AIDS. And then Charles Solomon in the L.A. Times trashed the trade paperback version six months later. I remember the term “sludge” being used. They were both just vicious. And what bothered me most was that I was a virtual unknown. If it were that bad, why would you review it, let alone twice? It was devvvvastating. I went into a huge depression and didn’t write for a year. But by the same token, I got letters from people with AIDS in the hospital saying, “Thank you so much for this book, it got me through this hospital stay.” But it bombed and St. Martin’s never published me again.
Whoa. But to go back a few steps, I thought that, to the point that with a commercial novel you usually want to kind of feel okay at the end, Tangled Up in Blue did that well. But I was thinking: It comes out in the eighties, the same decade as the movie Making Love and the novels A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham and The Object of My Affection by Stephen McCauley, two semi-crossover, fairly successful gay novels. And all these stories including yours include a love triangle between a gay man, a straight or bi or closeted man and a straight woman—and in most of them, pregnancy and a baby. I think at that time, gay writers felt on some level that, even if you were writing it for a gay imprint like Stonewall [at St. Martin’s], as you did, it had to have those elements to be viable. We’re not yet in the period where you can write an all-gay, super-queer book if you want to do well. Like our current era of Brontez Purnell. Then, there had to be a woman, a love triangle. So, when you wrote that book, was that a conscious thought for you?
Oh, that’s an easy one. With Tangled up in Blue, I’d just done two books with Johnnie Ray Rousseau as the narrator, and I simply wanted to do something different. And then I was talking to a gal I was working with at the time, and she said, and this is about 1986, “I wonder what would happen if the guy was bisexual and he’d had sex with men but he was married to a woman and one of the guys he’d slept with tested positive.” She literally handed me the plot. I just went, “Ooh!” It was really that simple. I thought, “I’ll write about straight white people—as an exercise.”
And then as it turned out, not only were straight white people pissed off that I had the nerve to write about them, but a certain number of gay literati were upset with me because—and I remember this in a review—I used AIDS as a MacGuffin, a plot device. And so they took it as disrespectful of AIDS and of people with AIDS and blah blah blah. This was when if you were writing about AIDS it was because you had AIDS. And it was usually a memoir and usually heartrending and serious.
Right. Like Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time.
Right. I knew Paul. We were in a little writing salon together at that time. But I didn’t have HIV. I was writing from the perspective of, at that time, my best friend, the guy I based Crockett upon, who was dying of AIDS. And with his permission, I used him as a model and a source of information, and he was happy to do it. Similarly, that gal I worked with, I’d ask her for help with Maggie, my straight female character. “So you’re going on a date with the guy you’re in love with—what underwear are you wearing? What shoes?” I didn’t know from that shit! So I used my friends as resources. But in no way did I mean to trivialize by not making it the serious subject. But it upset a lot of people. Christopher Bram thrashed it! To the extent that, several years later, when I was asked to write a review of one of his books—which of course was wonderful because he only writes wonderful books—it never once occurred to me to try to wreak vengeance on him. He actually wrote me a postcard saying “Thank you so much for that review.” Basically saying, “Thank you so much for—”
“—Sparing me? Showing me mercy?”
Right. And now his blurb is on the front of Movies That Made Me Gay, saying how much he loved it—which I think was guilt!
Right! Well, you were just touching on an issue that never seems to go away, which is basically who gets to write about what or whom, even if it waxes and wanes. Right now, we’re in this Trump-y counter-woke backlash, so the energy in the literary world around the idea of “stay in your lane” has subdued a little bit.
I didn’t even start talking about how the Afrocentric gay literati came for me.
Well! Since you bring it up, and I was getting there, but when I was telling a really good gay Black friend that I was going to interview you, he said, “He’s very much associated with the first wave of gay Black writers who felt they had to write for the white gaze, the white reader,” and that we’ve evolved past that into the, well, the Brontez Purnell age where a gay Black writer can be entirely himself or themself, is not beholden to any audience.
That’s the kind of mistake that one makes when one is a generation younger. Because that’s just not how that went down. I basically was, by the Black writers of my generation, perceived as writing for a white audience, because [his multibook avatar] Johnnie Ray Rousseau was very much based on me, and the white milieu I usually had him in reflected my upbringing. But I would defy him to name another one. But I’d say that you have to have Julia…
before you could have—
Dominique Devereaux? [I laugh]
—before you could have Sounder. [Tim: Just to be clear, 1972’s Sounder starred Cicely Tyson, not Diahann Carroll.] Dominique was still white.
But anyway, after St. Martin’s published Blackbird and people said, “Oh look, it’s a Black gay coming-out novel” in 1986, then the second wave arrived. And Steven Corbin and Melvin Dixon weren’t writing for a white audience. They were writing from their perspective. Also, I was in L.A. and everything happening in New York might as well have been in Oz. But that’s why Essex Hemphill and Joseph Beam came for me, because they perceived me as trying to write for a white audience. Also, I was being published by St. Martin’s Press while they were being published by Podunk Press. [Tim: Podunk Press doesn’t really exist. Hemphill was published by New Directions and Beam by the legendary, defunct gay press Alyson.] They clearly felt like their work was more important than mine because it was Afrocentric. But that was their experience. So there really was no “first wave” of Oreo authors. it was just me. And then it was another smattering of people, and then James Earl Hardy.
Everyone says that he made it okay for Black authors to be Black, but that was his experience. It probably took 30 years, but fortunately because other Black gay authors did come in my wake, certain people were able to go, “Well, what [Larry] did, he did rather well.” And they got off my back.
But among the many evil things people said about Tangled Up in Blue, the ugliest thing, other than Carolyn See, came from Black people. One person actually said, “It’s time for Larry Duplechan to stop being ashamed of being of African descent.” In fucking print! So it was a tough experience all around, to have Black people say, “You can’t write about white people because that means you’re ashamed of being Black.” Oh-kay.