Things seem to be happening in twos for writer Stephen Elliott. He is finishing up the second year of a two-year Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University in San Francisco and his second novel, What It Means To Love You ( MacAdam/Cage ) , which is about male strippers on the Halsted Street strip in Chicago, is being published this month. His first novel, A Life Without Consequences, published in 2001, was well-received and has taken on a life of its own, which is one of the many things that I spoke to Elliott about in a recent phone interview.
Gregg Shapiro: How are things going with your Stegner Fellowship?
Stephen Elliott: It's great. It's like finding a pile of cash on the sidewalk. They give you a bunch of money. San Francisco is an expensive place to live, but you get $25,000 a year just to do your writing. So you're really just funded, so you can write whatever you want.
GS: Have you been especially prolific throughout the duration of the fellowship?
SE: Yeah, I would say that initially I was really, really blocked, because I felt this pressure. I just felt a lot of pressure at first. I just felt the Stegner Fellowship is so competitive to get once you have it, it's like you have to live up to the expectations of having the fellowship. I was totally blocked. I was reading what the other fellows were writing and I just thought, "I can't write like this" ( laughs ) . So, for probably about two months, I didn't write anything, but once I broke through, I've been prolific.
GS: Has your life changed since the publication of your first novel?
SE: Yeah. People take my writing a little more seriously now. I've gotten a lot of comments back from that book. A lot of groups that work with child abuse are using it. A lot of schools that teach social work have it in their classrooms. People mail me all the time, asking me questions. Because of that book, they invite to come and speak to groups of welfare workers, or, soon I'm speaking at the juvenile detention hall in San Francisco, so I'm working with the kids. It's definitely been a changing experience.
GS: You continue to write a fine line between fiction and autobiography, with the first book as an example. In the case of the new book, you were a male stripper at one point in your life.
SE: Right, but I think that What It Means To Love You is significantly more fictional than A Life Without Consequences. For example, you have three characters that all essentially share the spotlight. One of them, the character of Anthony, is based on me, a reasonable amount, but he's only a third of the book. Certainly my knowledge of Halsted Street. and the male strip clubs there that I used to work in—Lucky Horseshoe, Berlin, Bijou down in Old Town, the Manhole, what was the Vortex—my knowledge of these clubs heavily influenced the book. I know what it's like to be a stripper in these places. Of course, at the same time, in the same breath, it's different for every dancer and everybody has their own reasons ( for dancing ) .
GS: It's interesting because in Chapter 15 there's the mantra woven throughout the opening paragraph that "Stripping is boring." It's really kind of funny, because I think that there might be some people that think there's a level of glamour to that life. How boring is it?
SE: It's weird. It's one of those things, it's kind of like waiting tables, you look back and you think, "Wow, that was really a wild time. There were a lot of things going on." But when you're actually doing it in the day to day, you just show up to work and you do your dancing and not that much always happens. The thrill definitely wears off as you're dancing day in, day out. After a while you just know what to expect. Some of the things also for me as a dancer that I hoped to get from dancing, some kind of vindication, verification. I really definitely wanted to believe that I was attractive and I somehow felt that if I was a stripper, then that meant that I was attractive. Ultimately, it doesn't do that for you. It doesn't do those things that you want it to do. Really, it's unfulfilling that way and you really don't make that much money at all.
GS: Do you think there's a difference between the guys, gay and straight, who strip in gay bars as opposed to those that strip in the women's clubs?
SE: This book is all set in the gay bars, and the overwhelming majority of male strippers are stripping in gay bars. There's a subset that strip for women. I stripped for women occasionally when I stripped, too. Overall, that's a really small, small group. I think it is probably different. I think there's so little work stripping for women. I forget the name of the review, but there was a premier male review that stripped for women in Chicago. I don't remember the name of it, but they were at Shadows and these other places and those guys still danced at Berlin and the Bijou, because there weren't enough shows. You pretty much had to strip for men—that's where the work all is.
GS: On page 75, Anthony says he can't make sense of the business people he sees in the bar—do you feel the same way when you see someone in a suit?
SE: I don't know if I hate everybody that wears a business suit. You know, it's these owners that come in and they just take what's theirs. This is definitely true of larger nightclubs, places like the Crobar in Chicago. They just ring everything they can from the kids that come into these clubs. They push it as hard and fast as they can and then they shut down. They just take whatever they can from the kids that come in and do drugs in their clubs and the people that spend $8 for a Jack Daniels. Places like the China Club, back in the day. The owners make all this money. They pay the door guys nothing. Bartenders make a bunch of money because they get tips, but everyone else is making a really, very small amount of money. They're just reaping the profits and then, boom, the place closes out. Almost nobody in the service industry, and it's kind of true of restaurants, strips clubs, and bars across the board, nobody has insurance. Which is absurd. At least in California, it's state law that you have to pay your bartenders and waiters minimum wage, but in Chicago, you don't even have to pay them minimum wage. You pay them like $2 an hour, which is ridiculous. It's blatant exploitation. So, it's not that I hate every person that wears a suit, but there's a lot of exploitative business practices, especially in Chicago.
GS: Anthony remarks about not having been ( dancing ) in two days and his veins are itching for eyeballs and fingers. Is there a physical withdrawal?
SE: I think for the character of Anthony, and his motives really kind of mimic my own, he needed the attention really, really bad. He didn't feel he had the necessary love in his life. He's a loner. He goes on the stage to try to get his fix of people paying attention to him, people looking at him, because he feels that outside of that no one does. At that point in the novel, he's really missing that. He's questioning his existence. Can he exist without the attention?
GS: As in A Life Without Consequences, the city of Chicago is, once again, a character in your work. On page 160, there is this section that begins "What is this place?" and Anthony proceeds to run down a list of the names of the neighborhoods. Do you find that you still have same affinity for the city?
SE: It's so a part of me. I was in Chicago recently and I just can't shake it. I've been living in San Francisco now for four and half years, and when people ask me where I'm from, I always say I'm from Chicago. I can't say I'm from San Francisco. I know I'm going to leave San Francisco at some point. Chicago is where I grew up. I was always in the inner city. I was a homeless teenager. I know the streets like the back of my hand. I felt like, in Chicago, when I was in my young 20s, I could go to almost any club. I never had to pay a cover. I knew everybody. I'd gone to high school with them, or I'd been locked up with them, or I'd shot drugs with them or I'd walk the streets or something. It's just an amazing city. It's really the second biggest city in country, because you can't look at Los Angeles or Houston and think that these are cities. They're just sprawling suburbs. It's really, except for New York, Chicago is the city. Even New York doesn't have the wide streets, and this kind of muscular definition that Chicago has.
GS: Right in New York, everybody is sort of piled up on top of each other. Whereas here they're all living next to each other.
SE: Also, they come and go a lot more. In Chicago, people really stay in Chicago all their lives. It's beautiful, the neighborhoods that form, and the people just sitting on their stoops. ... To me, there's so much drama. Even now, when I write about San Francisco and the stories are written with the characters set San Francisco, they're characters that are making a transition from Chicago. I can't get away from the architecture and these manmade mountains in Chicago. It's just amazing to me.
GS: Is your next book set in San Francisco or Chicago?
SE: Mostly Chicago and towards the end San Francisco.
GS: A Life Without Consequences has the qualities of a young adult novel. What It Means To Love You is much more adult. What was the transition like for you?
SE: When I was writing A Life Without Consequences I wanted to write a book about what it meant to be a homeless teenager. I wanted to reach out to other kids that might be in my shoes. I wanted to indict the system and talk about how the child welfare system worked. It would be self-defeating for it to be overly sexual, because people would misconstrue the message. There was a fair amount of sex in A Life Without Consequences, but it was adolescent sex. Whereas in What It Means To Love You, I'm starting to talk about what it means to be a stripper in your young 20s, to be lost as an adult, and also to start talking about sexuality, which is an issue I really want to talk about in my writing. I think it's a really complex issue that just gets brushed under the table. You're gay or you're straight and that's it. It's not like that. There are more adult themes, which is what I'm doing a lot in What It Means To Love You.
See www.stephenelliott.com
