Arts & Entertainment
Mark of the ‘Beast’
Novelist Louis Bayard explores Brazil circa 1914 in new adventure
In Louis Bayard’s new novel, Col. Theodore Roosevelt and his son, Kermit, are kidnapped by a mysterious Amazonian tribe in Brazil circa 1914 and must find and kill a ravenous beast to survive. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)
‘Roosevelt’s Beast’
By Louis Bayard
Henry Holt and Company
Available March 18
320 pages
Hardcover
$27
Appearances:
Politics & Prose
5015 Connecticut Ave., N.W.
March 23
5 p.m.
One More Page Books
2200 N. Westmoreland St. No. 101
Arlington, VA
March 27
7 p.m.
Listen for Bayard on the “Diane Rehm Show” (WAMU 88.5)
On March 24 at 11 a.m.
Details at louisbayard.com
Washington novelist Louis Bayard, whose new work “Roosevelt’s Beast” will be released Tuesday, spent a whirlwind hour with the Blade two weeks ago touching on everything from how he got started and how his career developed to what he tells young writers in his classes at George Washington University and how he wrestled the “Beast” that is his latest novel.
Bayard, 50, and his partner of 26 years, Don Montuori, are married and have two sons, ages 13 and 11. They live in Capitol Hill. Bayard, born in Albuquerque but raised mostly in Springfield, Va., moved to Washington in 1988, worked on the Hill and later did PR for various environmental groups through the ‘90s. His first novel, the gay-themed “Fool’s Errand,” was published by gay press Alyson Books in 1999. “Roosevelt’s Beast” is his sixth book. He’s not sure how many books he’s sold total, but upon consulting with his publisher, estimates the number to be about 100,000.
His comments have been slightly edited for length.
WASHINGTON BLADE: You went to Princeton and Joyce Carol Oates is quoted on the back of your new book. Did you take her creative writing course?
LOUIS BAYARD: Yes. She was also my adviser.
BLADE: What did you learn from her?
BAYARD: She was a very exacting reader, so it forced me to think about every word I write and I really do sweat every word. You do sometimes start to think over the course of a book, “Does this really matter,” but I revise and review and I think it’s because I had that kind of very hard eye that sniffs out deceit and flabbiness and all the stuff that can go wrong in prose. I don’t recall any specific lesson. I just recall how nice it was to feel understood by somebody of her caliber.
BLADE: Was it a big leap from Alyson to HarperCollins, which published your third book “Mr. Timothy”? How did that play out?
BAYARD: Alyson was one of the few places that would take an un-agented manuscript. The first book was gay-themed and they were a gay publisher so I just thought, “Why not take it straight to them?” It was a good fit for what I was doing. … But then when I had an idea for this book about Tiny Tim (2003’s “Mr. Timothy”), I thought, “I don’t just want this to be plunked on the gay shelf at Borders.” There was that sense of being ghettoized by virtue of being with a gay press. You go on that one shelf in the back of the store. I wanted this out in the front, so I found an agent, finally, after several tries, and he pitched it to the big houses and one of them bit.
BLADE: Would you call that your big break?
BAYARD: I guess you’d call it a break. It seemed like a break at the time. It was a break toward the mainstream, I guess, but I never felt like I’ve left the gay sensibility entirely behind.
BLADE: Do you enjoy teaching?
BAYARD: I do. I wish it paid a little more honestly. I’m there as an adjunct where you’re paid some ridiculous pittance for a lot of work, but I have other income sources. I just teach one fiction writing class.
BLADE: What do you tell your students?
BAYARD: To me, every student is a little different and they all bring something a little different so I just try to create a space where they can experiment and find their own voices. … It’s a workshop, so I’m basically like Socrates there in the midst, throwing out questions and making them think about things.
BLADE: About how many would you say have been good enough to get published?
BAYARD: Of the three years I’ve been doing it, I would say, maybe there were about that many who had the potential to do it. It would really be about desire. Actually the best writer I know of, and I can’t even remember her name offhand, but she was exceptional but actually was the least interested in pursuing it. I kept saying, “You really need to try this,” but she kept saying, “Well, I’m going to Europe” and she had all these plans. She just didn’t seem excited about it. That’s where perseverance pays off as much as anything.
BLADE: You went from gay contemporary fiction into several novels of historical fiction. How did that creative decision come about?
BAYARD: I thought it was an accident when I had this idea to see what became of Tiny Tim, but it achieved a certain amount of success so they kind of wanted me to keep doing that and I’ve come to believe it was a fortuitous accident because it really is the genre that’s most suited to me. I kind of fought it for a while, but now I’ve accepted that I stumbled into the right place.
BLADE: Does writing fiction about people who really lived, like Theodore Roosevelt in your new book, make it seem more real? What is the appeal?
BAYARD: I think there’s both a promise and a challenge that comes with that. People will recognize then name … and perhaps be intrigued as a result, but the challenge is that then you have to make this very well-known character come alive in your own way. It has to be convincing and plausible. You kind of have to work with people’s expectations but also make it a character that lives on the page.
BLADE: Do you have history geeks call you out on minutiae?
BAYARD: Oh yes.
BLADE: What do you say?
BAYARD: Sorry! Old ladies will e-mail me and say something like, “But there were no poinsettias in English drawing rooms in 1842” or “mockingbirds hadn’t migrated as far north as the Hudson Valley by 1830,” and you just go, “Sorry — that’s why I’m a novelist. I get to make things up or change things around if they don’t work.” I try to be as historically accurate as possible, but I think the story’s more important than the history.
BLADE: Is the line between contemporary literature and popular fiction sometimes arbitrary? Where do you feel your books fall on the continuum?
BAYARD: I think of them as sort of a hybrid between literary and genre. I have genre elements, like a mystery or thriller plot, but — what can I say without sounding self regarding? — I do take care with the language and use literary devices. I’m fine with people who just consider them entertainments. I don’t think of them as literature with a capitol L, but I do write to entertain. That’s my first aim. I want it to be a good book, but want you to feel good about yourself the next morning.
BLADE: What’s the gulf like between the two worlds? In music, for instance, there seems to be a pretty sizable gulf between classical and pop.
BAYARD: I think the gulf is narrowing because we’re seeing people like Michael Chabon and Colson Whitehead who are literary figures but who are also very deliberately writing in genre and I love the idea of breaking down that wall because I think it’s a silly distinction. I’m thinking of Richard Price who has written these great crime novels set in New York like “Clockers” and “Lush Life.” They’re police procedurals, they’re genre, but they’re such brilliant dissections of our society and they’re so ambitious, so beautifully crafted. The dialogue is extraordinary and I think he should be considered a literary artist.
BLADE: You wrote two gay-themed contemporary novels set in Washington. What kind of reactions did you get? Did people assume they were roman a clefs?
BAYARD: I guess there was a little bit of that assumption.
BLADE: But you had a sense that people outside of your acquaintance circle were reading and enjoying them?
BAYARD: I think so. Periodically I hear from them. “Fool’s Errand” seems to have a very small but enthusiastic cult. There may only be 12 of them but I hear from them on the order of once a year or so. They were conceived as entertainments so I didn’t expect them to be embraced as the next coming of Edmund White or something. I did worry that when I moved onto other things, that it would be seen as turning my back on gay readers and gay bookstores.
BLADE: Did anybody float that theory to you?
BAYARD: No, I probably projected it onto them. I maintain that my books since then still have a gay vibe and I’ve had gay characters in other books. Kermit Roosevelt in this new book isn’t gay, but he’s not really about heteronormative ideals. I don’t write about he-men.
BLADE: Was there a sense that you started out writing what you knew, then graduated onto tougher projects?
BAYARD: Oh, that’s interesting. “Fool’s Errand” required zero research. I just drew from my own life and my friends’ lives. “Mr. Timothy” was really the first book where I had to come up with a whole other world, but it was a challenge I wanted to embrace. There’s only so much you can squeeze out of your own life and I’m pretty quiet honestly. Not a lot of drama.
BLADE: How do you deem success for these various projects? Is there a sales threshold you like to hit?
BAYARD: To me, success is earning back the advance they give me.
BLADE: Now that you have several under your belt, do you feel freer to experiment? The book world seems like a jungle these days. Do you have any sense that if you wrote something that bombed, they would give you another shot?
BAYARD: No, I don’t think they would. This was the second of a two-book deal so after this I’m a free agent.
BLADE: So do you feel a lot of pressure?
BAYARD: The pressure is that I want to keep doing this indefinitely so I feel obliged to get a certain number of nice critical reviews and sell a certain amount. But there are plenty of mid-list writers who earn back their advances and are doing everything they need to do but are being dropped from publishing houses. It’s a little scary. The whole business is contracting. They seem to want more high concept stories — you know, werewolves and vampires and what not. Zombies. So you do sort of feel you’re dancing as fast as you can most of the time.
BLADE: Sounds nerve wracking.
BAYARD: It is, but it’s the business too, not just authors. Publishers are shit scared and nobody knows anything. Which can be freeing in a way. You think, “Well, I may not know anything, but I know as much as they do.” What’s commercial? Nobody expected “The Da Vinci Code” to become the monster hit that it became, so I don’t know. It’s a weird time.
BLADE: Where does the drive come from? Did you always want to do this?
BAYARD: Oh, I’ve known since I was 10 on some level.
BLADE: What was the appeal?
BAYARD: Well, every writer starts as a reader. I loved reading from an early age, though my kids don’t. I always have and it’s the thing I love more than anything. So you start as a reader then you realize you want to create the same effect on someone else that these writers did on you. It was really in high school that I first started finding a voice of some kind. … My first credits were in gay magazine called Genre. Are they still around?
BLADE: Well, it’s funny you should mention that. (Editor’s note:Genre and Washington Blade previously had the same owners.)
BAYARD: Eventually my first novel came out and kind of went nowhere and there were a couple years where I wasn’t writing much at all, but there was always part of me that kept coming back to this. I think the surest test of a vocation is that you keep going forward even in the face of rejection. Even if it’s not clear that anybody in the world wants to read what you write.
BLADE: How tedious is the actual process? Are there points along the way you want to rip your hair out or is there joy in the problem solving?
BAYARD: Both. It’s an unstable compound of all those things. I wish it got easier. I used to think it would, but it really doesn’t.
BLADE: What’s the most common mistake you see in your students?
BAYARD? A lot of them are very entranced with words. They’re just discovering word power so they write these amazing, gorgeous, beautiful sentences. … A young writer throws everything at you because they want to impress and stun and overwhelm but. As I get older, I’m realizing you need less and less. Oddly enough, they neglect story. It’s amazing how many of them don’t know what their story is.
BLADE: Lots of authors might have one or two good books in them, but to keep doing this over many years is quite a feat. Yet it seems you’re heading down that path. Was there a point you felt you’d turned a corner?
BAYARD: Oh, I never feel I’ve made it. Yes, there are things that might look like success, but for me, it’s a constantly moving goalpost. I used to say all I wanted was to get reviewed in the New York Times. My second book was, but then I ended up in a depressive tailspin the week after. It’s a hard thing to chase because you never feel completely successful.
BLADE: What’s next?
BAYARD: Probably a young-adult novel set in the Great Depression. That’s about all I can say. It would be another jump, but it’s the only growth sector in publishing. I’m reading a lot of young-adult stuff and I’ve been very impressed by the quality. Some of it’s really excellent.
Rob Reiner, most known for directing untouchable classics like “The Princess Bride,” “Misery,” “When Harry Met Sally…,” and “Stand by Me,” died Dec. 14 alongside his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, in their Los Angeles residence. While investigations are actively underway, sources have told PEOPLE Magazine that the pair’s son, Nick Reiner, killed his parents and has been taken into custody.
Reiner was a master of every genre, from the romantic comedy to the psychological thriller to the coming-of-age buddy movie. But in addition to his renowned work that made him a household name, Reiner is also remembered as a true advocate for the LGBTQ community. In 2009, Reiner and his wife co-founded the American Foundation for Equal Rights, helping fight against California’s Prop 8 same-sex marriage ban. They were honored at the 2015 Human Rights Campaign Las Vegas Gala.
In a statement, HRC President Kelley Robinson said: “The entire HRC family is devastated by the loss of Rob and Michele Reiner. Rob is nothing short of a legend — his television shows and films are a part of our American history and will continue to bring joy to millions of people across the world. Yet for all his accomplishments in Hollywood, Rob and Michele will most be remembered for their gigantic hearts, and their fierce support for the causes they believed in — including LGBTQ+ equality. So many in our movement remember how Rob and Michele organized their peers, brought strategists and lawyers together, and helped power landmark Supreme Court decisions that made marriage equality the law of the land — and they remained committed to the cause until their final days. The world is a darker place this morning without Rob and Michele — may they rest in power.”
Reiner’s frequent collaborators have also spoken out as the industry is in mourning, including figures like Ron Howard and John Cusack.
A joint statement from Jamie Lee Curtis and Christopher Guest (who starred in Reiner’s “This is Spinal Tap”) reads: “Christopher and I are numb and sad and shocked about the violent, tragic deaths of our dear friends Rob and Michele Singer Reiner and our ONLY focus and care right now is for their children and immediate families and we will offer all support possible to help them. There will be plenty of time later to discuss the creative lives we shared and the great political and social impact they both had on the entertainment industry, early childhood development, the fight for gay marriage, and their global care for a world in crisis. We have lost great friends. Please give us time to grieve.”
While attending the 2019 HRC Los Angeles Dinner, Reiner spoke out about the need for equality: “We have to move past singling out transgender, LGBTQ, black, white, Jewish, Muslim, Latino. We have to get way past that and start accepting the idea that we’re all human beings. We’re all human beings, we all share the same planet, and we should all have the same rights, period. It’s no more complicated than that.”
The Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington perform “The Holiday Show” at Lincoln Theatre (1215 U St., N.W.). Visit gmcw.org for tickets and showtimes.
(Washington Blade photos by Michael Key)
Santa will be very relieved.
You’ve taken most of the burden off him by making a list and checking it twice on his behalf. The gift-buying in your house is almost done – except for those few people who are just so darn hard to buy for. So what do you give to the person who has (almost) everything? You give them a good book, like maybe one of these.
Memoir and biography
The person who loves digging into a multi-level memoir will be happy unwrapping “Blessings and Disasters: A Story of Alabama” by Alexis Okeowo (Henry Holt). It’s a memoir about growing up Black in what was once practically ground zero for the Confederacy. It’s about inequality, it busts stereotypes, and yet it still oozes love of place. You can’t go wrong if you wrap it up with “Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore” by Ashley D. Farmer (Pantheon). It’s a chunky book with a memoir with meaning and plenty of thought.
For the giftee on your list who loves to laugh, wrap up “In My Remaining Years” by Jean Grae (Flatiron Books). It’s part memoir, part comedy, a look back at the late-last-century, part how-did-you-get-to-middle-age-already? and all fun. Wrap it up with “Here We Go: Lessons for Living Fearlessly from Two Traveling Nanas” by Eleanor Hamby and Dr. Sandra Hazellip with Elisa Petrini (Viking). It’s about the adventures of two 80-something best friends who seize life by the horns – something your giftee should do, too.
If there’ll be someone at your holiday table who’s finally coming home this year, wrap up “How I Found Myself in the Midwest” by Steve Grove (Simon & Schuster). It’s the story of a Silicon Valley worker who gives up his job and moves with his family to Minnesota, which was once home to him. That was around the time the pandemic hit, George Floyd was murdered, and life in general had been thrown into chaos. How does someone reconcile what was with what is now? Pair it with “Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America” by Will Bardenwerper (Doubleday). It’s set in New York and but isn’t that small-town feel universal, no matter where it comes from?
Won’t the adventurer on your list be happy when they unwrap “I Live Underwater” by Max Gene Nohl (University of Wisconsin Press)? They will, when they realize that this book is by a former deep-sea diver, treasure hunter, and all-around daredevil who changed the way we look for things under water. Nohl died more than 60 years ago, but his never-before-published memoir is fresh and relevant and will be a fun read for the right person.
If celeb bios are your giftee’s thing, then look for “The Luckiest” by Kelly Cervantes (BenBella Books). It’s the Midwest-to-New-York-City story of an actress and her life, her marriage, and what she did when tragedy hit. Filled with grace, it’s a winner.
Your music lover won’t want to open any other gifts if you give “Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur” by Jeff Pearlman (Mariner Books). It’s the story of the life, death, and everything in-between about this iconic performer, including the mythology that he left behind. Has it been three decades since Tupac died? It has, but your music lover never forgets. Wrap it up with “Point Blank (Quick Studies)” by Bob Dylan, text by Eddie Gorodetsky, Lucy Sante, and Jackie Hamilton (Simon & Schuster), a book of Dylan’s drawings and artwork. This is a very nice coffee-table size book that will be absolutely perfect for fans of the great singer and for folks who love art.
For the giftee who’s concerned with their fellow man, “The Lost and the Found: A True Story of Homelessness, Found Family and Second Chances” by Kevin Fagan (One Signal / Atria) may be the book to give. It’s a story of two “unhoused” people in San Francisco, one of the country’s wealthiest cities, and their struggles. There’s hope in this book, but also trouble and your giftee will love it.
For the person on your list who suffered loss this year, give “Pine Melody” by Stacey Meadows (Independently Published), a memoir of loss, grief, and healing while remembering the person gone.
LGBTQ fiction
For the mystery lover who wants something different, try “Crime Ink: Iconic,” edited by John Copenhaver and Salem West (Bywater Books), a collection of short stories inspired by “queer legends” and allies you know. Psychological thrillers, creepy crime, cozies, they’re here.
Novel lovers will want to curl up this winter with “Middle Spoon” by Alejandro Varela (Viking), a book about a man who appears to have it all, until his heart is broken and the fix for it is one he doesn’t quite understand and neither does anyone he loves.
LGBTQ studies – nonfiction
For the young man who’s struggling with issues of gender, “Before They Were Men” by Jacob Tobia (Harmony Books) might be a good gift this year. These essays on manhood in today’s world works to widen our conversations on the role politics and feminism play in understanding masculinity and how it’s time we open our minds.
If there’s someone on your gift list who had a tough growing-up (didn’t we all?), then wrap up “I’m Prancing as Fast as I Can” by Jon Kinnally (Permuted Press / Simon & Schuster). Kinnally was once an awkward kid but he grew up to be a writer for TV shows you’ll recognize. You can’t go wrong gifting a story like that. Better idea: wrap it up with “So Gay for You: Friendship, Found Family, & The Show That Started It All” by Leisha Hailey & Kate Moennig (St. Martin’s Press), a book about a little TV show that launched a BFF-ship.
Who doesn’t have a giftee who loves music? You sure do, so wrap up “The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture from the Margins to the Mainstream” by Jon Savage (Liveright). Nobody has to tell your giftee that queer folk left their mark on music, but they’ll love reading the stories in this book and knowing what they didn’t know.
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