Called Out of Darkness Page 0,47

I was no more part of this than I had been part of childhood or adolescence. I was working at a fairly high-paying job in a theater box office downtown as I went to school. I showed up for art class in high heels and stockings, no matter who said what, and ignored the pressure of my hippie friends to leave "the establishment" or drop out of school.

I didn't touch LSD. I was too afraid that it would drive me out of my mind. And the new revolutionaries provided me with a whole series of new gender shocks.

In the midst of rampant liberation, the flower children were stridently if not viciously sexist. "Chicks" were supposed to bake bread, clean up, feed their hippie boyfriends, and if at all possible hold a job to support the artist-poets of the group, and perhaps even fork over a bit of financial support received from frantic parents back home. It was no accident that these "chicks" wore long dresses and long hair.

They looked like pioneer women, and they worked just about that hard. There was so much pejorative talk of

"chicks not knowing how to be chicks," and how "chicks" were anti-marijuana, and how "chicks" were middle class, and how if your "old lady" was a real "old lady," she should feed you, and how "chicks" brought you down nagging at you to do chores and things, or make a living, that I withdrew from the company around me in alienation and disgust.

But all this was superficial compared to the real changes in the status of women and gay people that were taking place.

This was nothing. But it was the nothing that surrounded me and threatened me, and the nothing from which I withdrew.

As we rolled into the 1970s, I continued naturally and unconsciously to ignore anyone who ever sought to define me as a woman, because I didn't feel like one, and I made the tragic mistake of saying casually, "I don't like women," which I would never do now. I wanted to separate myself from a class of beings who were being treated essentially like dirt, at the very moment in history that they were gaining unprece-dented freedom and rights.

I couldn't see the larger picture. I didn't understand feminism in a fair or reasonable way. I was fleeing from being a woman; and feminism invited too much pain.

I was in graduate school when my daughter became sick.

Two years later, after her death before her sixth birthday, I became a writer.

It was practically an accident, and yet it was the most deliberate thing I ever did. The book was Interview with the Vampire.

I recognize now that it was distinctly postmodern in its use of nineteenth-century characters, opulent sets, and ornamented, adjective-laden prose. It was distinctly postmodern in its use of old-fashioned plot and straightforward narrative, and in its use of heroic characters. Modernism had supposedly killed the well-plotted novel. It had supposedly killed the hero. Well, not for me. I didn't even really know what modernism was.

The novel was also an obvious lament for my lost faith.

The vampires roam in a world without God; and Louis, the heartbroken hero, searches for a meaningful context in vain.

But for the purposes of this narrative, what is also important is that the book was a flight from gender, a flight from the world of which I couldn't make any sense.

In my fiction, the characters were practically andro-gynes. The vampire heroes, Louis and Lestat, had feminine beauty, luxuriant hair, rich velvet clothes, and preternatural strength. They loved each other or others, with no regard for gender, and they loved the child vampire Claudia in a way that established a polymorphous sensuality for the entire work. The work wasn't about literal sex. The work was about the "marriage of true minds" beyond impediments. The work had nothing to do with domestic struggle, or class struggle, or gender struggle. The work transcended all of this. The work was about my own fierce polymorphous view of the world in which an old woman might be as beautiful as a young male child. My book reflected a fusion of the aesthetic and the moral with some tentative connection to the lost harmony of my Catholic girlhood.

Where did such a view come from? How had it been sustained?

This book established me as a writer. And to a large extent, the sexism I took for granted in the behavior of others dropped away overnight. There were still people around who reminded me "to take