CREEMEDIA

CREEMEDIA

When I Go Down To Be A Man An Interview With Dotson Rader

Tom McCarthy

BOOKS

by

If Norman Mailer is the heavyweight champion of American writing, an image he is fond of, then Dotson Rader must be rated as one of the top contenders for the title. Both stalk the same turf—the meaning of manhood, the link between sex and violence, an opposition to totalitarianism.

Born in Evanston, Illinois, during the Second World War, Rader came east to New York after graduating from military school. ("I think in a funny way it was the best time in my life because I belonged somewhere. I knew all the rules and by the time I was a junior I could give orders. All my latent fascism came out in full bloom.") After arriving in New York, Racier spent a few years hanging out on the West Side before entering Columbia University. At Columbia, he would discover the two interests that would dominate his life in the Sixties and Seventies—radical politics and writing.

I Ain't Marchin" Anymore, his first book, is an autobiographical account of the 1968 Columbia University uprising by student rebels. His ability to vividly portray his adventures as a manchild in the mother country caused Newsweek to label him "the Eldridge Cleaver of the white New Left."

While becoming increasingly involved in New Left politics, Rader turned to fiction writing. His 1971 novel, Gov't. Inspected Meat, is the story of a young male hustler and his attempt to remain true to his friends. It is written in the tough but sentimental style that has become Rader's trademark.

Rader's most recent book, Blood Dues, records the decline of the New Left and Rader's personal self-destructive tendencies in the early Seventies. Faced with doubts about the value of writing, Rader/watches as SDS dissolves and his friends lose out to cops, drugs, and paranoia. Caught between the penthouses of radical chic and the streets, literary success presented Rader with a moral dilemma as he shuttles back and forth from the world of Norman Mailer and Tennessee Williams to that of his activist friends.

Now residing at the Dakota, the fashionable Cefitral Park West building which is also the hqme of John Lennon, Rader is a contributing editor to Esquire and working on a new novel. Having survived the turmoil of the last few years, Rader talked about manhood, its relation to rock and Jim Morrison of the Doors, one of those who didn't survive.

Since a concern with manhood is a major theme of your books, I thought it might be a good idea to start with a definition of that term.

I think manhood involves the assertion of autonomy over your life, the fact that you control your own life. It also involves a certain willingness to take risk and to an extent sexual,risk.

How would you say this differs from the old tough guy "macho" of Hemingway?

Hemingway was like a boy scout with his code. I personally think he was a latent homosexual.

About a year ago, I was at a small party. Mary Hemingway, his widow was there. Andy Warhol was also there. We were all drinking and she started talking about Mr. Hemingway and she never called him anything but Mr. Hemingway. Andy was taping her and said "Why do you call him Mr. Hemingway?" She said, "We were very respectful of each other." And I said, "Did you call him Mr. Hemingway in bed?" She just gave me sort of a steely look and didn't say anything. Then I said, "I was sorry for that remark. It must have been terrible to lose both your best friend and your lover at the same time." She said, "Oh, we weren't lovers, we were best friends. We were together all the time, but we weren't lovers."

This is going to sound like I'rh namedropping, but Tennessee Williams once remarked that Islands in the Stream, Hemingway's posthumous book, was his greatest work. I asked him why and he said it was because it took Hemingway a lifetime to be able to write a scene where one man tells another man he loves him.

It seems to me that Hemingway's idea came fundamentally out of selfcontempt. I think there was a lot about Hemingway that hated himself and therefore his manhood became involved with death, because the great reality of Hemingway was death. I think manhood to a degree involves, not death, but physical courage, the ability to face violence.

One of the interesting things about rock music is the number of rock figures who coupled a macho sexuality in terms of image with a flirtation with violence. Jagger does. Morrison and Hendrix did.

What kind of effect do you think rock has on people's sexual identity?

The first thing rock did was to legitimatize sexuality. Elvis and other rock singers came along and said if you are sixteen or seventeen you have sexual feelings and you can be open about them.

•Thirty years ago, you had Sinatra . and the big bands. While the dynamic was the same with, young girls giving off sexual energy, sexuality was always understated. It was never stated in the song. The closest anyone came to it was Lena Horne who was very upfront about it; but all the other singers had a kind of polite sexuality.

What rock first did then was legitimize sexual feelings among the young. The second thing rock did was to allow boys to publicly display themselves as sexual objects. When the Beatles first hit, you would go to a concert and 90 per cent of the audience were young girls. Seven years later, ten years later, you go to a Rolling Stones concert and half or more of the ^audience will be boys. And they will be stoned and dancing and as sexually open as the girls. In a funny way, rock liberated young male sexuality in a public arena. Young girls were always able to go to a rock concert for the last twerity years and they would scream, throw their panties on stage, and wet their seats. Boys couldn't do it until the last seven years or so.

Along with rock came this curious kind of narcissistic dancing where you don't touch. The boys are as much sexual objects and objects of display as the girls are. You can also see it in the androgynous and colorful dress.

I think rock was highly liberating to male sexuality. Until that point, the only way men displayed themselves sexually was in a very tight, highly repressed way on the football field or in war.

In Blood Dues, you said Jim Morrison of the Doors misunderstood manhood. In what way?

One scene I didn't write about Morrison occurred the first time I met him. It was at a party downtown. Morrison had come from a concert. He came in with a young man I know who was a homosexual. Morrison was very drunk. He sat on a bunch of pillows on the floor with his legs spread, drinking, rubbing his crotch. Then he unzipped his pants and started to masturbate. Now what interested me abbut that was why he felt the need to do that and the attitude of everyone else in the room which was one of total indifference.

Morrison, in my opinion, misunderstood manhood because he was genitally fixated. .He. saw manhood as dealing strictly with sexual prowess, sexual triumph. I think he was also a man who was highly insecure sexually which is why he protested so much. I don't know if he was impotent or not, but he acted as if he was.

In what way?

Well, he was a cocktease. Concerning that incident in particular, I think the reason he took his penis out and began to play with himself was precisely because the man he was witfe was a homosexual and there were other homosexuals in the room. Assuming he was heterosexual that's a kind of sexual cruelty. It's a way of saying don't you wish you could have it, but you ain't going to get it. Someone who cockteases homosexuals is someone who is afraid of them.

Also referring to Morrison in Blood Dues, you felt he was convinced that the music and culture he represented was finished, just as you felt the radical movement had collapsed. Why do you think these two vital movements, political and cultural, rose and fell during the same era?

The last time I saw Morrison he had gone to the Bitter End to see another performer. I was shocked at how bad he looked, he was fat, his face was bloated, Tie looked like an old mick drunk. He had gotten very interested in poetry and wanted to move out of rock music into writing. I think he realized it was over. It was coming to an end because both rock and the anti-war movement came out of the same ethos, the same pivoting change in history. I agre'e with Paul Goodman that the difference between my father's generation and ours was that our generation grew up with the fact that all life could be annihilated. We grew up in a world Ijiat had limits. For my father's generation there were no limits. Once you know the bomb can go off and the whole thing can end, what you become conscious of is death, the fact that you are going to die and everything will die with you. When consciousness like that "comes to a people, they move into highly decadent and highly hedonistic periods like the Weimar Republic in Germany during the Twenties. As a result, all of us became very egocentric, very interested in our own feelings, because we didn't trust external reality. We didn't believe our parents. Instead, we trusted each other and our feelings. When you become involved in this narcissistic process of self-discovery, you become involved with sex and drugs in a search for your private limits.

TURN TO PAGE 78.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 61.

How do you explain the emergence of rock in the Seventies as sort of a new Hollywood?

Anybody who says Bob Dylan writes poetry is full of shit. He's a multi-millionaire lyricist. Rock was> always a commercial movement. The Beatles started out because they wanted to make money. They wanted to be rich and famous. The essential ambition of anybody who goes into the entertainment business is to make money. One is, lying to oneself if one tries to see some sort of serious political meaning in rock and roll. It's all commercial shit. It's all bourgeois.

If you were fifteen years old today what would you do?

If I was fifteen today, I would drop out of school. If I didn't live in a coastal town, I would get on the first bus and go to New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Key West, or New Orleans. And then I would do whatever it was that I wanted to do with my life.