talk about permeable! There’s a way, oddly enough, that you can be very active in being looked at. Being extremely aware of that. It’s not a position of powerlessness. Women like to look too. PN: The gaze, of flirtation or voyeurism, seems bound up with another major theme of this novel, which is the artificiality of gender. Early on, Grace is warned against promiscuity by her brother: ‘“You did it when you were my age,” she said. “I’m a guy,” he said, “it’s different.” “Fuck difference,” she said’ (H, 37). The novel as a whole seems to ‘fuck difference’ in its play with forms of androgyny, transvestism, and so on. Would that be the right place to put the emphasis? LT: In the sense of a binary division. It’s a very hard thing to discuss. I’m such an anti-essentialist that while I recognize that there is difference, what that means will always be unknown for me. Why hierarchies come into being, how those kinds of differences are arrived at. And while you don’t know, there’s the area you can play. The space in which our ignorance of why things come to be the way they are can also give us the room and energy to fuck around, not to accept things for what they are. PN: The characters are haunted by the seemingly absolute forms of sexual difference then? And the novel seems to gesture toward an opposite idea of gender as fiction. Your references in the novel to Susan Sontag’s essay on Camp reminded me that she had proposed some of these ideas well before Judith Butler and others. Sontag says, for example, that ‘the most refined form of sexual attractiveness…consists in going against the grain of one’s sex’; and she defines Camp as ‘the triumph of the epicene style. (The convertibility of “man” and “woman”, “person” and “thing”).’ How important were these ideas to Haunted Houses? LT: Haunted by difference, yes, and also by the possibility of agency. ‘Camp’ was a revelatory essay for me. Unfortunately Sontag pulled back from those concerns. You would have felt from that essay that in the seventies she could have been a very sophisticated feminist. But she wasn’t, and in fact I think she’s something of an anti-feminist. Those kinds of ideas were important. The first gay male friend I had was when I was eighteen. I thought of feminism and gay liberation as working the same terrain. To me at that point it was all about not accepting what you were being handed on the sexual platter—what roles. PN: There’s a passage from Andy Warhol which you quote in one of your new pieces called ‘Love Sentence’: ‘Once you see emotions from a certain angle, you can never think of them as real again.

DOI link for talk about permeable! There’s a way, oddly enough, that you can be very active in being looked at. Being extremely aware of that. It’s not a position of powerlessness. Women like to look too. PN: The gaze, of flirtation or voyeurism, seems bound up with another major theme of this novel, which is the artificiality of gender. Early on, Grace is warned against promiscuity by her brother: ‘“You did it when you were my age,” she said. “I’m a guy,” he said, “it’s different.” “Fuck difference,” she said’ (H, 37). The novel as a whole seems to ‘fuck difference’ in its play with forms of androgyny, transvestism, and so on. Would that be the right place to put the emphasis? LT: In the sense of a binary division. It’s a very hard thing to discuss. I’m such an anti-essentialist that while I recognize that there is difference, what that means will always be unknown for me. Why hierarchies come into being, how those kinds of differences are arrived at. And while you don’t know, there’s the area you can play. The space in which our ignorance of why things come to be the way they are can also give us the room and energy to fuck around, not to accept things for what they are. PN: The characters are haunted by the seemingly absolute forms of sexual difference then? And the novel seems to gesture toward an opposite idea of gender as fiction. Your references in the novel to Susan Sontag’s essay on Camp reminded me that she had proposed some of these ideas well before Judith Butler and others. Sontag says, for example, that ‘the most refined form of sexual attractiveness…consists in going against the grain of one’s sex’; and she defines Camp as ‘the triumph of the epicene style. (The convertibility of “man” and “woman”, “person” and “thing”).’ How important were these ideas to Haunted Houses? LT: Haunted by difference, yes, and also by the possibility of agency. ‘Camp’ was a revelatory essay for me. Unfortunately Sontag pulled back from those concerns. You would have felt from that essay that in the seventies she could have been a very sophisticated feminist. But she wasn’t, and in fact I think she’s something of an anti-feminist. Those kinds of ideas were important. The first gay male friend I had was when I was eighteen. I thought of feminism and gay liberation as working the same terrain. To me at that point it was all about not accepting what you were being handed on the sexual platter—what roles. PN: There’s a passage from Andy Warhol which you quote in one of your new pieces called ‘Love Sentence’: ‘Once you see emotions from a certain angle, you can never think of them as real again.

talk about permeable! There’s a way, oddly enough, that you can be very active in being looked at. Being extremely aware of that. It’s not a position of powerlessness. Women like to look too. PN: The gaze, of flirtation or voyeurism, seems bound up with another major theme of this novel, which is the artificiality of gender. Early on, Grace is warned against promiscuity by her brother: ‘“You did it when you were my age,” she said. “I’m a guy,” he said, “it’s different.” “Fuck difference,” she said’ (H, 37). The novel as a whole seems to ‘fuck difference’ in its play with forms of androgyny, transvestism, and so on. Would that be the right place to put the emphasis? LT: In the sense of a binary division. It’s a very hard thing to discuss. I’m such an anti-essentialist that while I recognize that there is difference, what that means will always be unknown for me. Why hierarchies come into being, how those kinds of differences are arrived at. And while you don’t know, there’s the area you can play. The space in which our ignorance of why things come to be the way they are can also give us the room and energy to fuck around, not to accept things for what they are. PN: The characters are haunted by the seemingly absolute forms of sexual difference then? And the novel seems to gesture toward an opposite idea of gender as fiction. Your references in the novel to Susan Sontag’s essay on Camp reminded me that she had proposed some of these ideas well before Judith Butler and others. Sontag says, for example, that ‘the most refined form of sexual attractiveness…consists in going against the grain of one’s sex’; and she defines Camp as ‘the triumph of the epicene style. (The convertibility of “man” and “woman”, “person” and “thing”).’ How important were these ideas to Haunted Houses? LT: Haunted by difference, yes, and also by the possibility of agency. ‘Camp’ was a revelatory essay for me. Unfortunately Sontag pulled back from those concerns. You would have felt from that essay that in the seventies she could have been a very sophisticated feminist. But she wasn’t, and in fact I think she’s something of an anti-feminist. Those kinds of ideas were important. The first gay male friend I had was when I was eighteen. I thought of feminism and gay liberation as working the same terrain. To me at that point it was all about not accepting what you were being handed on the sexual platter—what roles. PN: There’s a passage from Andy Warhol which you quote in one of your new pieces called ‘Love Sentence’: ‘Once you see emotions from a certain angle, you can never think of them as real again.