INTERVIEWER
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your life as a gay man.
CARSON
It’s been a somewhat checkered career as a gay man. I was never
totally successful. I think it started in high school, when in grade ten
or eleven I developed a fascination with Oscar Wilde. Some of my
friends shared this fascination so we used to dress like Oscar Wilde and
memorize his aphorisms and construct conversations in the lunchroom, as
if we were Oscar Wilde and his friends.But I don’t know how it developed. I can’t exactly remember why I fixated on Oscar Wilde, but I did feel that it gave me an education in aesthetic sensibility, and also a kind of irony towards oneself that was useful in later life, an ongoing carapace of irony that I think lots of gay men develop in order to get through their social and personal lives, and which I found useful for myself, too.
INTERVIEWER
There are two places in your books where the persona is a gay man or a gay boy. There’s Autobiography of Red where Geryon falls in love with Heracles and the little ménage á trois in Peru and all that, but also “The Anthropology of Water” in Plainwater.
CARSON
Oh, you think that’s a man?
INTERVIEWER
You identify yourself as a man at one point.
CARSON
That’s the other thing about being a gay man. Model yourself on Oscar Wilde and you just lie all the time.- Anne Carson