GenQ Book Club

photo courtsey of Brian Orter

1. Can you tell us a little about "Light Before Day"?

CR: It's a detective thriller inspired in part by my great love for American mystery writers like Raymond Chandler and Ross McDonald.It's set here in Los Angeles, specifically the "gay ghetto" of West Hollywood, where I have lived for two years.It centers on a young, gay and newly sober magazine writer who gets fired from his job and ends up working as an assistant to a cranky and straight, best selling mystery novelist. When the young man's former love interest, a former marine who was
kicked out of the corps for being gay, vanishes without a trace, the duo are lead to believe that a string of mysterious missing persons cases in West Hollywood might actually be the work of a previously unknown serial killer.

2. Have you taken any or many elements from your own life and used them in your novels? Are any of your characters Christopher Rice?

CR:In my writing, I always start with a foundation of what I know and what I've experienced and I let imagination and passion take me to the end of the road. I don't believe you can only write what you know. I believe you can only write what you feel, if you feel it passionately enough.Im not a realist or a minimalist writer. Even though my first novel "Destiny of Souls" was positioned as a sort of coming-out tale about the high school experience, I considered it to be a thriller and a murder mystery at its core. On some levels, all of my characters are Christopher Rice.If they don't bear a physical resemblance to me, or if they don't share my day to day temperament, they are an embodiment of some nagging suspicion, character defect or wild dream of mine.Often times I find myself writing characters that face the same obstacles I have faced, only they make a different choice in how to respond to them: that's where imagination comes in again.

3. Did you always write? Was it something you did from a very young age or did you start later?

CR: When I was five years old, I wrote what my mother very generously referred to as a "novella". Actually, I dictated it to my Aunt, who typed it for me on an old Apricot computer. It was about a horrible fire that broke out on San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. When it was finished, my mother politely informed me that my story wasn't plausible because the Golden Gate Bridge was made of steel and steel doesn't burn. I was crushed. But to answer your question, I started writing at a very young age and usually over-the-top stories inspired by movies I had seen. I was a film junkie as a child, with a special place in my heart for those huge disaster movies from the 1970's like "The Towering Inferno" and "Poseidon Adventure", I was riveted by stories where calamity threw a disparate group of people together under death-defying circumstances.(Unfortunately, after the disaster films of the '70's, this dramatic construct became an almost unbearable cliche.)
I was so involved in acting throughout high school that I didn't pay much attention to my writing. But the writing that I did do, always got high marks from everyone who read it. When I went off to Brown University, I was dead-set on being an actor and when I didn't get called back from my first audition, I was crushed. I returned to writing in a way that I hadn't written since I was a young boy. I was searching for fantasy and escape. I was far from home and the reality of my situation was setting in: I had picked my college for all the wrong reasons, because it was prestigious and elitist and I had been convinced that it was the only Ivy League School I could get accepted to. But it didn't have a practical film program and it was too far from New York City, which seemed like the be-all, end-all to me back then. I ended up churning out shoddy screenplay after shoddy screenplay. Usually action packed thrillers where a hero who bore a striking resemblance to myself shot up a bunch of homophobic villains, slayed everyone with cruel one-liners and ended up living happily ever after with a hunky assassin. Some critics don't think my work has progressed much beyond this storyline. I think I know how to pull it off more convincingly today.

4. Did you have any other passions or interests at school and growing up, like music, art, acting, sport?

CR: I was an avid theatre kid. Theatre wasn't very respected or supported at my high school, which was kind of a blessing because it gave me the chance to do everything, act, assistant direct,help selecting the plays we were going to produce. I even wrote the programs. In the beginning, being the theatre kid was tough. Mine was a very athletics dominated school and I got a lot of flack for being the drama fag. The school required us to put on a performance of each production for the entire school, which in the beginning was a miserable experience because the students were never happy to be there. But by my senior year, I had really found my niche. I ended up playing Sheridan Whiteside in Kaufman and Hart's, "The Man who came to Dinner", which was kind of ridiculous because I weighed about 120 pounds ( 55kgs) and I had to wear a fat suit that stopped at my little chicken neck. But at the end of the performance, I received a standing ovation from the student body. My drama teacher said it was the first time she could remember such a thing in her history with the school. So if this whole writer thing implodes, I'll probably end up on a bar stool somewhere, telling anyone who listens about my moment of glory in a 20 pound fat suit.

5. How was growing up gay where you lived? What was your experience like?

CR: As I said, I grew up in an athletics dominated high school, so my early years as a gay man were very much about the dizzying combination of lusting after and fearing the varsity football team. It left a strange imprint on my psyche which I think a lot of other gay men have as well, that obsession with the unattainable and the idealization of that which kind of despises you. But the fact is, the pain of my high school experience was primarily self inflicted and the events which are visited upon the character of Stephen Conlin in "A Destiny of Souls" are not an accurate reflection of what I went through. It was my own beliefs about homosexuality which kept me imprisoned and because I walked through life feeling like I had a terrible secret, I closed myself off to people who were open and available to me .I had a wonderfully close relationship with both of my parents and this was my foundation throughout my dark periods of self-hating depression.

6. How did your parents take your "coming out"? Did you feel any pressure not to because of who you were and what you did?

CR: When I came out to my parents, they were more surprised than anything else. It's difficult to express that they weren't thrilled about it, without making them sound like bigots, which they certainly were not. the fact is, no parent wants to hear that their child is gay. My parents had worked diligently to ensure that I was safe and protected and when I came out to them, I was basically telling them I was about to lead a life marked by heightened risk. At first my mother just didn't believe it. I even had close friends who didn't believe it: who told me that I was simply surrendering to the taunts that had been thrown at me all my life. (It was an interesting argument but it didn't explain my newfound love of gay porn.)

7. How do you feel now, looking back on that time? Do you think its easier now for young people to be gay and come out?

CR: I feel that strides that have been made just in the last couple of years are quite staggering. On my first book tour, just a few years after I had left high school, I was meeting out 16 year olds who had formed gay-straight alliances in their high schools. I was astonished. In 1996, that was unthinkable to me. I feel that my own coming out process was too centralized around the gay bar and if I ever had to do over again (which I don't) I would spend less time trying to assert my sexuality with Versace and DKNY. The years after high school were strange ones for me, I went from being the awkward theatre fag in high school to the popular pretty boy at the clubs: from zero to hero in no time flat, or more like from zero to whore in no time flat. It was fun for a while, but when it started to wear thin, I came out of that period with no real ideas on how to actually live my life. I'm still learning.

8. What do you do when you're not writing? What does Christopher Rice do for fun?

CR: Writers hate this question. Correction: I hate his question. I'm still learning what I like to do for fun. I have been in a loving and committed relationship for the past two years with an adorable Jewish boy who forces me to shove aside my cigarettes and coffee and go on long hikes through the foothills around L. A. If I had my druthers, I would be a total isolator who sat at home all day reading.

9. Have you ever wanted to visit Australia? Even for a holiday or for Mardi Gras?

CR: I have always wanted to visit Australia.

10. Finally a question every gay guy down under wants to know, are you single?

CR: No, I am not single. Brian and I have been together almost two years. We met while we were both working for "Genre" Magazine, a gay rag here in the States. We didn't stick with the magazine, but we stuck with each other. We were living on opposite coasts when we met and we did the long distance thing for almost a year.There was always a six hour flight between us. It was brutal. Brian moved out here to Los Angeles about a year ago and since then our relationship has progressed to the next level. You know, the one where you argue over which one of you is going to drive to dinner and what temperature the A/C should be set at when you go to sleep at night. Seriously, my relationship with Brian has been a deep and rewarding experience. He's a driven and talented photographer with a fierce intellect and I am continually astonished by his determination and strength.

Thank you so much Christopher for your time. Anything else to add?

CR: Forget space! GenQ brings you another world right here at home!

Tags: christopher rice, thriller