[Fiction]

[Execution Cover]

An Interview with the Author

D. Travers Scott Answers Questions About Execution, Texas: 1987

Q: How would you describe Execution, Texas: 1987?

Scott: I sort of jokingly call it my anti-coming of age novel. The traditional coming of age, and coming out novel, are about a character making choices about their identity or learning some penultimate lesson. My main character is plagued by visions that his parents will die in a car wreck and he doesn't know if he should do something. Each of his parents, including his stepmother, has raised him differently: atheist, Southern Baptist, and pagan. He's not sure what belief system should guide his actions. He loves them all, but can they all be right? DoesnÕt he have to choose one? Likewise, he is romantically and sexually involved with men and women -- does that mean he's gay? Bi? Straight? Doesn't he have to choose a label? I wanted to write a book that worked within the coming out/coming of age genres, but challenged the notion that you have to make a choice, that there's only one answer.

Q: How do you see Execution fitting into gay literature?

Scott: I believe sexuality and identity are very murky, fluid, unpredictable things and this book reflects that. In some ways it's ironic for it to be a considered a "gay book," because there's as much if not more straight than gay sex, and there's no triumphant scene of coming out or proclaiming a gay identity. Hopefully we're expanding the idea of what a "gay book" is, and giving a broader picture of what the "gay experience" is. One of the things I wanted to do was write a queer protagonist who was not another middle-aged, white, East Coast professional. I wanted to reflect a post-Stonewall, AIDS-inundated, non-Yankee and varied-class experience. My family has traveled the class spectrum from homeless welfare to sports-car collecting affluence, so it's given me a real cross-class perspective I wanted to express. In terms of gay lit; I wanted to continue the push away from narratives only about coming out, recovering from abuse, getting/keeping a boyfriend, getting sick, etc. I wanted to tell a good story with a queer character that wasn't specifically about queerness, or if it was, it's about queerness in a much larger sense of the word. Many of the characters in the book are "queer," even if only two of them have sex with someone of the same gender.

Q: Do you consider yourself a queer writer or a writer who happens to be queer?

Scott: I think it's an incredible luxury to even worry about those issues and, personally, a waste of time. It's such a struggle to write a book, and then another battle to get it published, I don't want to waste my energies worrying about those issues. I want to write, and get my writing out there, and I'm not particularly concerned whether people consider me a queer, Texan, Northwest, or twentysomething writer. In art school we were so overloaded with theory and philosophy, I saw how thinking about your work, and thinking about your identity as an artist, could completely paralyze people from making any art! They second- and triple-guessed their every move until they couldn't move at all. So I tell myself, "just write, just make the work; let other people sort that out." I write about what moves me and it comes out in many different ways. I resent the pressure for writers to mold themselves to a market angle. I'm very proud to have appeared in both Harper's and Holy Titclamps.

Q: Were you worried about your erotica writing hurting your chances at becoming a serious novelist?

Scott: I was a serious novelist before I ever wrote porn, and I was equally serious about my porn. I used my own name and held it up to the same standards as my other writing. I think it's really classist and specious to divide up "literary" and "porn" writing. Porn is a genre like mysteries and sci-fi, and there's plenty of great genre writers out there. I mean, look at the amazing stuff Samuel R. Delaney does. I never wanted to be this Merchant/Ivory stuffed shirt crafting "litterchure" with a big feathered quill. I wrote for porn and zines and underground publications because that's what I was reading, not the New Yorker. I figured the people who would like my writing would be people publishing stuff I liked to read. I never worried about my "literary reputation" because I didn't have one! I didn't go to a prestigious graduate writing program or anything like that; I wasn't with a big established literary agency. I wrote what interested me. Besides, in my performances I'd done drag, danced around in bloody underwear and staged erotic electroshock therapy, so it wasn't like I had this pristine past.

Q: Tell us about Texas.

Scott: Texas was an independent nation for several years before it became a state, and tons of Texans still consider it one; or think that it should be. To be raised in a culture so soaked in its own mythology, and then travel anywhere in the world and watch people's eyes light up when they say "Texas! Cowboys! Oswald! JR!" is very strange. It makes you very conscious of how powerful myth and nationalism can be, whether they're on a regional, ethnic, or subcultural level. You wonder how much nationalist myths fuel and influence you, how much of them you take for granted. Execution is very much about those myths, the mythologies of different parts of the country, of popular culture, of religion, of history, of your own family. It's about how you struggle to discover and navigate those myths.

Q: How autobiographical is this book?

Scott: One of the best things I gained from writing porn was, it helped break me from that young writer rut of narrowly focusing on your own life and experiences. Porn helped me see how autobiographical impulses were limiting the writing, and I really grew in my ability to completely fictionalize things. It helped me learn that what's emotionally resonant for you doesn't always make for the best story. In Execution, a lot of detail was taken from actual events, but characters were combined, settings changed, conflicts exaggerated -- everything you need to tell a good story. For example, I have two sisters but my protagonist is an only child. There's also a major plot event which most certainly doesn't parallel my life.

Q: How has your performance work and your writing affected each other?

Scott: The nice thing about performance is you get immediate ego-strokes: the laughter and applause of the audience, people recognizing you on the street, reviews in a week. It's lovely, and it's tempting to compromise your work to make sure you keep getting that. I think I get my fix of ego-strokes through performing, and it allows me to be much harsher and more rigorous with my writing. It's just me alone with the words, no one else to please but myself, and I'm never satisfied. I can get some more juvenile impulses out of my system in performance. It's also a great way to explore ideas not suited to writing. Who wants to read a six-month diary of my partner and my relationship? A list breaking down 24 hours into 486 discreet physical actions? Carpenters' songs analyzed through symbolic logic? In performance I can develop these ideas in much more entertaining ways. There's also wonderful surprises and discoveries that occur when you transport material from one medium to another. Although now I'm using performance to figure out my relationship to words and narrative: the last show I did had none of my own writing in it, and next I want to work on performances without text. I want to learn about language by studying its absence.

Q: What is your inspiration and working process?

Scott: I was trained in the visual arts and very much work with that sensibility. David Eckard, my partner of the last 7 years, is a sculptor, so we're always looking at visual art and talking about things visually. Basically I work very intuitively. I collect things that resonate with me: images, phrases, events, people. I have tons of files of this stuff, and I go through a long process of finding out which things harmonize with each other. I group things that evoke similar feeling in me. I spend a lot of time figuring out what these different things are saying to each other, then build a narrative around them. Execution, for example, integrates the US space program, pivotal childhood memories, King Lear, the Book of Job, Westerns and things like that. My second novel, that's now gestating, is a stew of Deaf and Jewish culture, Russian constructivist art, the stories of Abraham, Ishmael and Hagar in Christianity and Islam; skinheads, sex with straight men, Texas, and some very complicated sexual relations between teenagers and adults in my high school.

Q: Who influenced your writing?

Scott: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald have been my inspiration since high school. Not so much their glamorous Jazz Age incarnation, but the shattering and rebuilding that came later. I think Tender is the Night and Save me the Waltz, read as one book, are really a triumph of American Lit. Who else? Paul Bowles. Denton Welch. Tennessee Williams. Sam Sheppard. I'm also influenced a lot by pop music; I know that sounds silly. Marc Almond, this British diva is all over Execution, he's also a poet. I used to listen to a lot of techno when I wrote, really loud hard stuff. Now I'm on this weird kick of fey, waify British boys: Momus, Frazier Chorus, Pet Shop Boys, Smiths, New Order, Gene. I'm working on a story that's all about music versus language. There's visual and performance artists too: Goat Island, this Chicago performance troupe. I studied with their director in school. And I can't imagine anything more incredible than writing the equivalent of a Mark Rothko painting. Last time I saw his stuff at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, I just sat on the bench and cried my eyes out.

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