Love Junkie: A Robert Plunket Revival
Photos courtesy Robert Plunkett
This interview was originally published for WUSSY Vol. 13 — order a copy!
Robert Plunket is having a renaissance. Last year, his first book, My Search for Warren Harding, was reissued by New Directions for its fortieth anniversary, receiving a wave of new critical acclaim. The New Yorker called him “one of America’s funniest, gayest writers.” This year, New Directions is reissuing his second novel, Love Junkie, which follows an innocent suburban housewife, Mimi, as she becomes enamored with the gay underworld of early ‘80s New York. Published in 1992, Love Junkie looks back on a scene that, by that point, had been devastated by the HIV/AIDS epidemic; Plunket lovingly preserves that lost world in all its outrageous glory. There’s an orgy on Fire Island, a gay-for-pay porn star, a mail-order underwear business, an S&M club, and more (lots more). Still hilarious and shocking, Love Junkie tracks common human foibles persisting even in extreme circumstances.
These days, Plunket lives in a trailer park with his pug Meatball near Sarasota, Florida, where he was a gossip columnist at the local magazine for decades. I spoke with him on the phone ahead of the reissue.
CR: I have to start with a burning question. You mentioned in an interview that you were in Madonna’s bedroom once. What was that like?
RP: At this point, she was living on Central Park West. I can’t remember the exact address. It was an older building. She had a beautiful apartment. The master bedroom, as I recall, was in the back. It didn’t face the park. There was a big bed. Right over the bed was a Picasso. So I was quite impressed with that. It was her brand new Picasso that she had just bought. We had a ball. We talked about men.
CR: Really? I assume you were there because of the book. But what she really wanted to talk about was men.
RP: Well, that’s kind of what we have in common, our experiences with men. I was very curious to see what her taste in men was. We kind of had the same.
CR: Which was…
RP: Bad boys. We both liked bad boys. And we talked a lot about porn stars we liked and ones we didn’t like.
CR: Do you know how she came across the book? What was the story with her finding it?
RP: We have a mutual friend, a guy named Griffin Dunne. He recommended the book to her and she read it and kind of fell in love with it. She really, really liked it. She identified with the leading character, which is strange, because I didn’t see any similarities. But she said a lot of it reminded her of her own life.
CR: I could talk all day about Madonna, but I don’t want to only talk about Madonna. Love Junkie feels so different from a lot of gay and queer novels today because there’s this really rich and vivid gay world—a very complete underworld—which Mimi falls into. It’s not just a few queer characters figuring things out on their own. How much first-hand experience did you have with that world? Were you going to Fire Island? Were you going to places like the Mineshaft?
RP: I will say that everything in that book happened. I made absolutely nothing up. And most of it happened to me. Now, you never knew that world, because you’re too young, right?
CR: No, but I love reading about it. I read Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance recently. It’s set a little bit before, but it gave me a similar sense of what a world this was, because it had to be a world of its own.
RP: It was an incredible world. It really was. And then it had such an incredibly dramatic ending. Andrew Holleran, how did you discover him?
CR: I’d heard people talking about that book for ages. What do you think of him? Did you ever cross paths with Andrew Holleran?
RP: He’s one of my favorites. In fact, I wrote Love Junkie sort of because of Dancer from the Dance. That’s an incredibly important novel. It was really the first that made [gay novels] respectable, you know. It was so good that actually straight people would read it. I became friends with him. We were pen pals for a while. He’s a wonderful person. I’ve never met him, I’ve just written him a letter, which is weird because we live about a hundred miles from each other in Florida.
CR: Were you reading a lot of other gay or queer writers at the time? Were you connected with them?
RP: Oh, I wanted to be part of that world so badly and they would have nothing to do with me.
CR: Really? Why?
RP: I cannot figure it out. But I knew Ed[mund] White. I don’t think he thought I was a very good writer, to be perfectly honest. Larry Kramer, I knew quite well. He was a nice guy, but Larry Kramer was so totally obsessed with himself that he had no room for other people. He did a lot of good—he was a force for good—but a little egomaniacal.
CR: You’ve said it took seven years to write Love Junkie. From the early eighties to the early nineties, there couldn’t have been a more tumultuous, frightening, tragic time for queer people. This book is so funny and light. Was it hard to keep writing material that was so irreverent? Did you have to wait for something to shift in the culture?
RP: I understand what you’re asking. I think I only saw that there was an absurdity to it. That’s what I do naturally. It’s not like I was trying to do it one way or another way. It’s just the way that I operate.
CR: What were your feelings about how sharp you wanted the satire to be or where it was targeted?
RP: I certainly don’t set out to write satire. It just happens. To a certain degree, I’m surprised people think my books are funny and satiric, because to me they’re just the plain truth. I realize there’s some funny stuff in it. I had to reread it recently to proofread it for the new edition. Even lines that get laughs when you’re reading are things I heard or said. Those were lines I heard and I thought, “Oh, what a funny line,” and jotted them down. All the situations and the lines and the attitudes were true to the period and the people.
CR: When the book first came out, you said in an interview, “My interest in sex is purely intellectual,” which is funny, but also interesting, because you depict sex so frankly. I found it refreshing. Could you say more about what sex means for you, artistically and intellectually?
RP: I’m just astonished at how poorly very good writers write about sex. It’s like they don’t get it. What am I missing that I don’t understand their attitude towards sex? To me, describing sexual behavior is a way of describing character. It’s basically the same thing. The little peculiarities that people have sexually, the things they like and the things they hate about sex, the things they’re compelled to do sexually—that’s so interesting. Most writers, they clam up when they come to sex. I don’t think I do. That comes from a lifetime of having had a very strong sex drive and having to deal with it.
Everybody thinks sex is this wonderful feeling of intimacy between two people. I never saw it that way at all. It’s totally hormone-driven, and it’s incredibly dangerous. This is what people don’t realize. I’ve seen it kill everybody I know. It’s not just getting sick. It gets you in trouble. I mean, how many times have you been arrested for your sexual behavior?
CR: Knock on wood. Never yet. We’ll see.
RP: Wait until you’re my age and then you’ll know. It gets you in trouble. It’s not this gift to humanity. It’s this thing you gotta be revally, really careful about or it will kill you. That’s the way I approach it.
CR: You don’t hear that often.
RP: They have to be very positive about sex and talk about how wonderful it is and how it’s the human connection. My life has not indicated that at all.
CR: When this was published, what was the reception like? Did it freak people out?
RP: The weird thing was that nobody wanted to talk about how I knew all that stuff. I kept thinking, Why doesn’t somebody ask why I know so much about being a hustler? Why do I know so much about the porno business? Nobody ever asked, which led me to believe people were terrified to bring that question up. They were afraid to talk about the book to me. Maybe behind my back they talked about it. People are afraid of sex. It’ll be very interesting to see, now that it’s coming out again, whether there will be that same kind of reaction. The world has become infinitely more sexual, I assume because of the internet.
CR: What’s the status of the Civil War novel?
RP: It’s coming along. It’s actually a lot of fun. I’m reimagining the Civil War from the point of view of parties and entertaining and gay men getting in fights with each other over who didn’t get invited where. Believe it or not, there was a lot of that.
CR: It seems like you’re finding your readers now, or at least a new generation of readers.
RP: I’m absolutely delighted with the way things are turning out, believe me.
Chris Robinson is a writer from North Carolina living in Brooklyn.