Me and the gay captain of the wrestling team story

By now, John Irving trusts his audience to suspend its recognition of his set pieces—something like a regional stage director presenting a re-purposed backdrop. Both establish Billy as a sympathetic player in the knife-nosed community of First Sister,Vermont.

Billy finds solace in the local library. There he meets the librarian Miss Frost and begins paging his way toward embracing his mutable sexual appetites through well-timed suggested reading. Billy collects some wounds during those early years in First Sister; then escapes into a life of multiple partners, suffers the dawn of the AIDS epidemic, and attempts reconciliation with a much changed community some decades later.

In this interview, we asked the writer what new insights he gained after donning a different set of fictional clothes. And please be aware, if you have not read the novel, there are spoilers ahead. I remember, surely through the s, that no one asked me an autobiographical question about any of my novels.

Nor did anyone ask me, in this country, about the unexplained and repressed sexuality of that first person narrator. But when it was published, not a word. I find that strange. It seems to me that it is symptomatic of a decline in our ability to relate to imaginative writing, to novels, to plays.

Is this sister your sister? Is Johnny Wheelwright you? Is John Berry you? Is Garp you? No plays about gloves. So did you actually have any contact with Julio? Did you meet any witches?

Wrestling Demons

Did you know any ghosts—I mean real ones? I mean, was everyone incestuous? Well, what do you hope these interviews accomplish in terms of you being able to connect with your reading audience? The first person narrator in many American novels is not the main character.

So Billy, when people ask me that question about Billy being extreme or Billy being a radical case of a sexual outsider or misfit, I would argue to the contrary a little bit. There were never the constraints on what you imagined [being] as intimidating as [the] constraints on who you actually had sex with.

I told that story for years about my first girlfriend who was so afraid of getting pregnant that she permitted only anal intercourse, which I liked so much that it only added to my terror that I really must be gay. And there were those unmentionable older boys who attracted me in a more than hero worship way when I was 13, 14, 15 and they were 17, 18, We in America in particular.

Your narrator Billy says a lot about not gaining access to traditional gay or straight circles because he is a practicing bisexual. The mutability of sexuality would be a very charged issue for a lot readers, especially for those readers who, for political reasons, would very much like to believe that their sexuality is a fixed same sex desire.

I remember thinking, naively I guess, when I finished The World According to Garp, that I would never write about that subject again, that the subject of intolerance of sexual differences would never, surely it would go away. Someone with one foot in the closet, which was what everyone said about bisexual men at least in my generation.

It was a great figure of distrust, the bisexual guy.