Wikinews is used as a source in New York magazine

Categorized | Culture, Life, Media

Wikinews is used as a source in New York magazine

Posted on03 January 2010. Tags: Alan Hollinghurst, Creative Commons, David Leavitt, Edmund White, Larry Kramer, New York magazine, Wikinews

Larry Kramer Edmund White David Shankbone photos

In last week’s New York magazine there was a very large feature about literary and political giant Larry Kramer (above, left). In the article, they reference my interview with Edmund White (above, right), another literary giant and a former friend of Kramer’s (in the early 1980′s they were amongst the co-founders of GMHC). The New York story itself made news, and quite a few Wikimedia Creative Commons shots of Kramer were used in the ripple effect (Dallas Observer and the Advocate, for two).

I know Wikinews has been used as a source in reliable sources before, but I’m not sure if there is a running list out there of when it happens.

New York references my Edmund White interview because of some unpleasant things that White and his partner Michael said about Kramer. There is a feud between the two icons, on a William F. Buckley v. Gore Vidal level. White, a professor at Princeton, was candid and unabashed throughout. He was a subject with seemingly no limits in where he allowed me to take him. There was a sense that if I had the guts to ask, he had the guts to answer although White notoriously does not suffer fools. I would occasionally ask a question thinking to myself, Now surely he’s not going to answer this one! and Professor White would. Below are a few of my favorite exchanges from the November 2007 interview, Edmund White on writing, incest, life and Larry Kramer.

DS: What is a gay novel?

EW: One that is marketed as gay. Usually a picture of a cute boy on the cover.

DS: Would Hollinghurst’s Swimming Pool Library be one?

EW: Well, he’s a cross-over writer. He’s a little different because he did win the Booker Prize with The Line of Beauty, and he was the editor of The Times Literary Supplement, which is the most prestigious reviewing organism in the English-speaking world. He has a dark brown voice and he went to Oxford and he knows everybody. He’s admired by everybody. London is such a different place because in America writers teach in different universities and they are scattered all across this huge country and they sometimes know each other, but not usually. Whereas in England they are all journalists , they live in London, and they all know each other. It’s a very small world, which is good and bad. One of the good things is that if somebody is really talented like Hollinghurst and has accumulated a bastion of power like the TLS, he’ll have enormous impact, and everybody knows it. Whereas here somebody like David Leavitt is teaching in Gainesville, Florida. That’s pretty far off the beaten path even though he’s a wonderful writer. His last book, The Indian Clerk, was reviewed on the front page of The New York Times book review very glowingly. Nevertheless, it doesn’t sell and nobody cares. It’s very hard.

————–

DS: You had mentioned particular issues about a father may arise in a slave-master relationship. You were sexually attracted to your father, so do you think you worked through your own issues with him?

EW: Yes.

DS: Where do you think that attraction came from?

EW: I don’t know; I think it’s very hard to explain attraction. If I’m attracted to you right now, why? I don’t know why.

DS: But that’s something people could perhaps explain more readily than attraction to one’s father.

EW: I don’t know; I wasn’t really raised by my father. I lived apart from him and I would spend every summer with him, but not see him much during the year. My parents were divorced from my age of seven on. I think the incest taboo sets in and turns somebody off sexually with somebody they know very well and lives with. I think with my father he was somebody who every eye in the family was focused on and he was a sort of a tyrant and nice-looking, the source of all power, money, happiness, and he was implacable and difficult. He was always spoken of in sexual terms, in the sense he left our mother for a much younger woman who was very sexy but had nothing else going for her. He was a famous womanizer. And he slept with my sister!

DS: What you describe is power; are you still attracted to power?

EW: No. I mean, my idea of power, but not everybody’s idea of power. In other words, I wouldn’t want to go to bed with Bush…

DS: What did your father’s incestuous relationship with your sister do to you?

EW: I was envious of my sister. I wished I had that kind of access to him.

DS: Did you try?

EW: Yeah.

DS: And he spurned you?

EW: No, it was so subtle he probably didn’t even know I was longing for him because, I mean, we’re talking about the 1950’s in Cincinnati, Ohio, or Texas. He didn’t know I was gay until later and he would tell me he had just fired a man because he thought he might be gay, or at least he wasn’t married and he wore a ring.

DS: How would you respond?

EW: You couldn’t say anything.

DS: Did he ever know?

EW: About me? Yes. Fairly early on, when I was about 15.

DS: What was his reaction?

EW: He was horrified, because he thought it was my mother’s bad influence because I had led an overly sophisticated life with her. He thought I should lead a simpler life and put in hours and hours of yard work and that would make me straight.

DS: Your mother was attracted to you, right?

EW: Or anybody that was around, I think?

————–

DS: You have to choose whether to blow up China or India, and if you do not choose then they both go. They are roughly equal in population according to their last censuses; which do you choose?

EW: I think I would blow up China. I majored in Chinese in college and I was a great admirer of traditional China, but I don’t really like modern China very much and I’ve never had a desire to go there. I feel like whatever wisdom or culture or civilization they had they pretty much destroyed through the Cultural Revolution, paradoxically, in the Seventies. I think that will end up being the worst thing that happened in the Twentieth Century, worse than the Holocaust. It killed more people and it destroyed the fabric of their society more than anything. India never really had anything comparable. They had the British, they had the Raj, and that was pretty damn bad, I guess, but it was an ambiguous thing. It preserved a lot of things and it destroyed others, but it consolidated power in India. It had been so many different little kingdoms.

DS: So is China.

EW: Yeah, that’s right, although the Chinese empire is very old. There is nothing comparable in India.

DS: It’s more cohesive now, but China, once the Communist Party loses its grip on power, it’s going to fall apart.

EW: I don’t think so. Maybe Tibet.

DS: You have Muslim provinces, you have Tibet. You have problems in the south with the north. Hong Kong. You don’t think that there will be a domino effect that when one goes, the others will go?

EW: I don’t think so. You know why? China has been one country. Obviously Tibet is a different problem. Manchuria is a different problem. Mongolia is a different problem. But if you forget all those problems, and you just talk about the central provinces—which are immense—that’s always been one country for almost 4,000 years with an emperor ruling it. Starting with the Han Dynasty, which is about the time of Christ, with an elaborate civil service system. That’s what Confucius was about.

DS: So the age of the end of the empire won’t touch China? It won’t be a Soviet Union?

EW: If you look at Russia and all those places, like Georgia and Uzbekistan, those are all different little countries and it was the Soviet Union that dragged them all together and when the Soviet Union croaked they all fell apart. I think China traditionally was unified.