An Interview With Author Kevin Esser

The following interview is with Kevin Esser, the gay author of Streetboy Dreams and Mad to Be Saved. The interview was conducted via telephone in 1985 for the New York Native. Esser spoke with me from his home in Plainfield, Illinois.

Charles Michael Smith: What is the origin of the title Mad to Be Saved?
Kevin Esser: It comes from a line from On the Road by [Jack] Kerouac. It had to do with sex. I can't remember the exact quote, but he's always chasing after people that are searching for salvation through religion, through drugs, through sex. That's a very strong theme in my novel. The predominant theme is the search for identity, the creation of images, and the attempt to live up to these self-images that people create for themselves, the self-destruction involved in the deception. The two main books I sort of  had in my head, that I patterned this novel after were On the Road and [Ernest Hemingway's] The Sun Also Rises, the quintessential novel of the Lost Generation 60 years ago. Sort of an '80s version Sun Also Rises.
CMS: Your novel takes place during the early '70s, right after the hippie movement of the '60s.
KE: Yeah, it was right at the tail-end of the whole psychedelic, anti-war, heavy drug use period.
He [Jake] had moved away after graduating from his college and traveled down to Texas to work in the post office which parallels my own experiences and after about a year returns to Illinois to live in Chicago and on his way back to Chicago stopped in his old college town to see old friends.
The name Jacob Smith, I got it from Jake Barnes from The Sun Also Rises and Greg Smith from On the Road. I combined those two names.
A lot of the book was written about 10 or 12 years ago, some of the longer passages. About two years ago, I sat down and typed those together and added about a hundred twenty or a hundred and fifty pages of new material to it. Some of it was written back at a time when I was much more heavier into Kerouac's stuff.
CMS: This book is also autobiographical.
KE: Almost entirely. Even more so than Streetboy Dreams. Mad to Be Saved is really practically a memoir fictionalized enough to make it into a novel. But there's really nothing made up in it. The third novel that I'm working on now is much more highly fictionalized.
Fury of Angels is more or less the sequel to Mad. The same characters with different names. It picks them up about 10 years later but it's set in Sandburg, Illinois again. I'm intending to write a third novel a couple of years down the line, put them all together as a Sandburg Trilogy eventually, hopefully through Sea Horse/Gay Presses of New York, they'll package it, promote it that way.
CMS: Any sequel to Streetboy?
KE: No, I, I don't have any intentions to [do] that.
CMS: The style of Mad is unconventional, it's full of imagery.
KE: That's intentional. In Streetboy, I used deliberately a very conventional, orthodox style because I wanted to tell a very, very simple story, there were really only three characters in the entire novel and in Mad, style was practically another character. The style was very important to the story, how it was told as much as what was being said. There was really no plot to it. It was basically a plotless, episodic narrative and the style reflected the lost and confused lunatic nature of the characters. They were all confused and directionless, not sure what they were going to do, searching for some meaning, some identity. The style reflected that.
CMS: They seemed to be apolitical, unlike many of the '60s generation. their whole lives revolved around drugs  and booze and sex.
KE: It was a very insular type of existence. It was apolitical at one point. There were flashbacks, but the period that it's dealing with in its present tense was right after the Vietnam War. That issue had been resolved. There really was no political focus pulling everybody together at that popint. Around '73, '74.
CMS: I had dificulty with the novel because the characters were totally without any redeeming value.
KE: It's a novel that so far anybody whose read it either is incredibly enthusiastic about it or just leaves them completely cold. They weren't interested in it at all. People either love or hate it.
CMS: There's very little sex in it.
KE: The major theme of it as it evolved over the years was just these images that people create for themselves. The old bohemian image, the beatnik image and the hippie image as you go up through the years. It's the false nonchalance, the hip, cool attitude towards everything, while you're destroying yourself. It's an attitude and a type of behavior there that I grew up with when i was in my teens and early 20s. A deliberately cynical attitude.
The thride novel goes in a mch more highly plotted--there are definite story lines tying together. It 's concerned more overtly with sexuality. The types of jealousy and betrayal, those types of themes. It will probably be more appealiong. It is more restrained, there aren't any long, long poetic passages as in Mad.
One friend of mine said in a complimentary way that the entire novel is like one big long hangover [he laughs]. It's supposed to be very confusing and hallucinatory, impressionistic. It's almost a 200-page poem as much as a novel. It was experimental.  I was concerned, before it was accepted for publication, whether or not it would be,
CMS: It's not a typical gay novel.
KE: Which is fine, which is good as far as I'm concerned. Mad is much bigger, more diffused than Streetboy [about a man/boy love relationship], much harder to pin down.
CMS: I wasn't sure whether the character Jesse was bisexual or flirting with gay men.
KE: I don't know how you would describe him. He's very real, very much alive. He's sort of an ambisexual. He's been involved with men and women and everybody else in between, all ages, whoever happens to appeal to him at the time.
CMS: Jake felt guilty about his treatment of Cody, who he dumped for Robin.
KE: Yeah, there was guilt about how badly he had behaved. There was the desire to experience as much sexually as posssible, too. Cody was just holding him back. He didn't want commitment to one other person. Robin was more into the same sorts of things at that point that Jake was, more compatible.
CMS: Jake is contemptuous of people in the theatre, calling them theatre fags.
KE: That's an example of a passage that was written 10, 12 years ago. If I had just sat down and written that novel a couple of years ago, I wouldn't have remembered that attitude that I had at the time towards the theatre department and all the people in it. But at the time, it was just something that was prevalent from the people who went to college there. Everybody was contemptuous of the theatre department.