Sketch of John Preston
by Jameson Currier
ink on paper
2025013009
This article was part of an interview conducted with Mr. Preston on October 3, 1993 while he was on tour to promote his anthology Flesh and the Word 2.
JOHN PRESTON ON AIDS
Interview by Jameson Currier
John Preston, one of the most prolific and influential men in publishing today, has produced more than forty books and edited a series of highly acclaimed anthologies which include Hometowns: Gay Men Write About Where They Belong, Member of the Family: Gay Men Write About Their Families, and Personal Dispatches: Writers Confront AIDS. He is the founder and director of the first lesbian and gay counseling center in the country (in Minneapolis), currently writes an ongoing publishing column for Lambda Book Report, and has served as the president of the board of AIDS Project/Southern Maine. He is also a member of the PEN Lesbian and Gay Committee, which was established by PEN to combat the censorship of gay and lesbian writing, as well as ensure readers access to such writing. Yet in spite of his critical literary, political and personal successes, Mr. Preston has refused to abandon his erotic writing, much of which first propelled him into the limelight.
In his essays and fiction he continues to remind a new generation of readers and writers that gay male erotica is an original and vital expression of gay life. In 1992, he edited an overwhelmingly successful collection of erotic writing which was published by Plume, Flesh and the Word. Another publisher, Bad Boy Books, has reissued many of Mr. Preston’s earlier erotic classics, including the cult favorite Mr. Benson, as well as the new Preston erotic titles, which includes the recent bestseller The Arena. Among his latest books, published in the fall of 1993, are: Flesh and the Word 2 (Plume), a sequel to last season’s best-selling erotica anthology, and My Life as a Pornographer & Other Indecent Acts (Richard Kazak Books), an astonishing collection of Mr. Preston’s own essays on the nature of pornography and sexuality, and which includes the Jon Pearson Perry lecture he delivered in 1993 at Harvard University. What makes this collection so impressive and important are the glimpses the reader can find of Mr. Preston’s own personal journey–from one of the early editors of The Advocate, to a pornographer, to an activist, to a man diagnosed as HIV-positive and still defiantly defining his sexuality, to a person now struggling with AIDS.
When Preston was diagnosed as HIV-positive in 1986, he found himself in a crisis. “What it did was stop me from writing,” he mentioned to me while he was on a visit to Manhattan. “I stopped writing for over a year. The clear analogy is that I stopped living.”
“I’m very different than most other writers in that I love to write. I don’t have writers block. Writing is right up there with food and sex for me, and so it became a very basic and essential coming back to life for me to reclaim all of them. I was denying myself all those things. I had a very strongly metaphorical experience–I had a massive prostrate infection, which had nothing to do with the HIV, but I was extremely ill.
At that time I had a woman doctor who said very bluntly to me, ‘How often do you masturbate and how often are you having sex?’ I was barely masturbating and she sort of looked at me and said, ‘I’d have a hard time if that was all the sex I had in my life.’ And then she explained that the prostrate infection had at least been promoted by the fact that I wasn’t cleansing myself. I took it very, very powerfully. I went out and rented a whole bunch of porn videos and sort of forced myself back into masturbation.”
“I had also been collecting articles by writers about AIDS that had particularly affected me and I had a file of them which I could barely bring myself to read, because they were the ones that made me cry and they upset me. But I saved them–which is intriguing. And as I came back to life I went back to that file and recognized that it could be a book. And so all of this moved together, my sexuality, literally my sex, being willing to confront AIDS through this writing and creating a book from it. And so the publication of Personal Dispatches was my great victory, my personal victory, and the way I had to go on with life.”
That is perhaps one of the most important messages that a person diagnosed as HIV-positive can pass along to someone else–the message that life must go on. Mr. Preston has been on both AZT and ddI, both of which caused allergic reactions. “I just went through a very frightening bout of neuropathy from ddI,” he said. “I take Bactrim as a prophylaxis for pneumocystis and that’s it for right now.”
“I never expected to end up with a routine,” Preston explained. “I have a dog. His name is Vlad the Impaler and he was a gift from Anne Rice. I had pneumonia a couple of years ago and when I came out of the hospital I had a desperate need to have a dog, which I had never had. Who knows where it came from, but it felt very positive and I went with it. I knew I had just dodged a bullet; I had nearly died. And my response was to get a dog. So Anne was very concerned about what sort of dog I was to get, and she made me go to dog shows to make sure I was getting the right breed. I came across a Hungarian Vizsla, and I mentioned that to her and she said that’s perfect. So Vlad the Impale needs to be walked no later than 7 AM in the morning. So I take him to a park where he can run off leash and I pick up newspapers and my mail on the way and that takes up most of my morning. I’m sometimes able to write in the afternoon, but basically I write after dinner, which is just murder on my social life. That’s pretty much it and that’s seven days a week. I write every day. I’m such a compulsive writer that the Bad Boy publisher is buying me a laptop so that I can write when I’m on the road.”
Right now Mr. Preston is also preparing even more books: 1994 will see the release of more Preston titles, both as editor and writer. “I’m doing a collection of essays called Winter’s Light: Reflections of a Yankee Queer which is going to be published by University Press of New England, and that will probably be next November. I’ve also got Flesh and the Word 3, Sisters and Brothers which I co edited with Joan Nestle, and Friends and Lovers coming out. They’ll all be delivered to Dutton at the same time, but how they schedule them for release is never in my hands. I’m getting it all out now. It’s not something publishers want to have four books come out so quickly so close together but I’m not convinced that I have enough time to fool around with a carefully plotted literary career.”
__________
Versions of this interview were published in Body Positive and The Washington Blade in 1994. Mr. Preston died of AIDS related complications on April 28, 1994 at his home in Portland, Maine. His manuscripts and correspondence are part of the Katzoff Collection of The John Hay Library at Brown University.
