The Decade of Blind Dates

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INSTINCT Magazine

by Mark Schulte

Mark Schulte:

How much of you and your life is in Peter? How many of his blind dates have you met in your life?

Richard Alther:

Peter is all me, but I’m a lot more. He’s a distillation of my first acting like a jerk, coming out in midlife—a kid in a candy shop cutting loose. His 10 years of dates—total fabrications—are an amalgam of my 20 years between my straight and gay marriages. And the wild times of my friends.

MS:

It takes place when the Internet hadn’t fully emerged as a way to hook-up. Why not set it in more current times? How different would the story (and Peter) have been?

RA:

Peter is dad to teenagers plus being a professional. Pre-Internet he has to sandwich “the hunt” into an otherwise responsible life. Today, with instant online intimacy, he’d have been obsessed, more one-dimensional.

MS:

Your main character is in his 40s and 50s during this story. How will a 20-something year old gay man relate?

RA:

Dating at any age can be crazy. Sure, today professional gay men on the coasts, in cities, are liberated. But 20-somethings living in conservative America—a huge leap back, thanks to Bush—are facing the same hurdles as generations before them. Hiding behind marriage to a woman, for example. Not coming out in a Wall Street law firm.

MS:

Another difference is that he isn’t in a major metropolis where so many gay people seem to group. Instead he’s in a very rural, remote setting. Was this just because it’s what you know or were you trying to show a different type of gay life?

RA:

Personally, I’ve lived in Manhattan, Palm Springs, London; grew up in New York suburbs, went to Cornell. I plunked Peter down in the sticks to better isolate his ultimate self-discovery.

MS:

Because of when it takes place, the AIDS crisis looms larger than it seems to today. Any comments on how people seem to view it differently now?

RA:

One reviewer said my novel is a social as well as personal history of the 1980s and 90s. So, yes, I was shaped by the fear, confusion, death of best friends, the indifference of straights.

MS:

What’s next for you?

RA:

My next novel is attempting to make an entertaining read of the pre-Biblical, seemingly DNA-encoded roots of homophobia that still exists in the form of Fred Phelps, the killers of Matthew Shepard.

MS:

And, of course, I’d like to hear anything else that you might want to add.

RA:

I’m surprised that my straight women friends love this book delving into relationships, regardless of who puts what where. By the way, I met my partner Ray Repp online, egged on by my daughter “to get with it.” The dating game, after the first but often not last major love, will always be part of life.

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