Bruce Benderson – interview for Staging Decadence

Normandy, a house on the ocean, staying with a friend, the French novelist Benoît Duteurtre, 2005. Copyright Bruce Benderson 2021.

Bruce Benderson is an author and critic best known for his excoriating critiques of moral puritanism and cultural assimilation. His literary fiction and critical essays explore the intersections between bohemianism and ‘the culture of poverty’ in the United States – especially New York, and the area around Times Square – and how these cultures evolved from the Beat generation in the 1950s and the countercultural 1960s, to a more sterile ‘centrist’ orientation that he views as being obsessed with inoffensive clean-living. His early writing, including the novel User (1994) and a collection of short stories, Pretending to Say No (1990), set the tone for all of his work to date. In a mode reminiscent of poets and authors as diverse as Charles Baudelaire, Jean Genet and Hubert Selby Jr., his writing brings cultures of risk and precarity, intoxication and homoeroticism into dialogue with a dizzying study of class dynamics. It is also inspired by his own immersion in these cultures, demonstrating ‘again and again’, as his friend, the journalist Catherine Texier, put it, ‘how his life of promiscuity and danger has shaped his understanding of the world, and how his unique vantage point illuminates dark corners of the American and Anglo-Saxon psyche with startling insight’.[1] In this interview – illustrated with a range of his own photographs – Bruce reflects on some of his best known work, and the inadequacies of decadence in addressing his own plunge into ‘degeneracy’.

Adam Alston: Can you tell us about your transition from living in countercultural San Francisco in the 1960s and early ‘70s, to New York’s East Village and the Times Square bars and hangouts in the 1980s and ‘90s?

Bruce Benderson: Okay, so I graduated from College and moved to San Francisco. I fell in love with someone, but the reason why I stayed, aside from that – and lack of money for a plane fare – is that I learned how to write. And I learned French while on welfare. But I became unhappy there because San Francisco is cut off from cultural history. It’s too far away from Europe. They’re this little pocket in the North East that’s subject to great cultural isolation. I became very unhappy about that, because I was European influenced. I was really an East Coast person unhappy on the West Coast. So I was writing and working on becoming a writer, moved back to New York, and came off welfare and got a job. I was living as a homosexual in New York in the ‘70s – a promiscuous, party-loving time before AIDS was known about. But what I began to see […] is that there is no real gay identity. It’s a small aspect of a person’s personality. Yes, it has political repercussions, because gays were rejected and oppressed by society, which is why it created a culture, but what’s called gay identity now is merely the culture of oppression. […] So I got very depressed, because I thought that I had no scene, and no identity. That’s when, in 1985, I was given a novel called Saul’s Book [by Paul T. Rogers, 1982]. Do you know it? 

AA: Only through your writing. 

Model at fashion show in the form of an installation by designer John Bartlett, inspired by the work of Jean Genet, New York City, 2001. Copyright Bruce Benderson 2021.

BB: Yea, so I went to this bar in the midst of the AIDS crisis. I had no identity because I’d lost faith in gay identity and no longer believed it existed. My only identity was as someone who thought he was going to come down with AIDS. It turned out I was wrong, even though I was positive that I was positive, even though I turned out not to be, for some miraculous reason. And I saw these hustlers and drug dealers from the South Bronx who didn’t have a penny to their name, and who were having the best time that I’d seen in the last five years! They were partying, they were full of jokes, there were smart ones, there were dumb ones, there were trustworthy ones, there were betraying ones, and I thought that there’s an entirely different culture that I’d been ignoring in New York – a non-white culture – and I became incredibly inspired by their bravery. They still experienced pleasure when they were the most threatened group by AIDS – they were intravenous drug users – even more so than these white gays I was trying to get an identity from by identifying with. That’s what inspired my writing, and what led to my first book Pretending to Say No, which is about encounters between the middle class and the culture of poverty. That’s when I came up with the idea that every avant-garde up until the war, and even during the Beat years, was formed by that interaction between the culture of poverty, and themselves. That’s what inspired me, and that’s the story of my move from San Francisco to New York that you asked me about.  

AA: You write about this journey in your essay Toward the New Degeneracy (1997). In fact that essay is one of the reasons I was so keen to interview you for this blog. Why this interest in degeneracy, and how do you see it relating to decadence?  

BB: I want to make a distinction between decadence and degeneration. I was interested in late-nineteenth-century decadence when I was very young, when I was a college student sticking Aubrey Beardsley drawings on my wall, reading Oscar Wilde and Baudelaire. That was decadence. But by the time I got to my Times Square period I was much more interested in degeneration. One difference between the two is that degeneration is much more disruptive than decadence. When I wrote Toward the New Degeneracy I was very good friends with Samuel Delany. Do you know who that is?   

AA: Yea – mainly through his association with afrofuturism. 

BB: Yea, exactly – it really nails him right to the cross! Well, he did a really shitty thing. I sent him my text as if he were a master. He liked me a great deal, because I reviewed a book of his called Hogg (1995). Have you ever heard of it?  

AA: No… 

BB: You have to read it! It’s a novel about a truck driver and this adolescent boy. He’s the dirtiest, most obscene person in the world. He goes to a luncheonette and pees right there on the seat, he eats only with his fingers, he feeds the little boy next to him as if he were a baby bird, he gobbles cum constantly – every sentence is like that for 300 pages. It’s way beyond Sade, and everything else. I had given it a really good review, and he was astonished that somebody had appreciated it. So we became friends and started going to Time Square together. We would eat these unhealthy French meals, and everything else you could get a heart attack from, and then we would go to a hustler bar together. Anyway, I sent him my essay for advice, and he calls me – this is before the internet – and says, ‘Oh, your essay is so interesting, although I do think you don’t take certain things far enough… Anyway, I’ll call you back’. And he never called me back. And lo and behold, nine months later he publishes a book on Times Square called Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999) – dedicated to Bruce Benderson, because he felt so guilty, I guess, that he’d taken my idea, run with it, and never gotten back to me. So, in the book he portrayed Times Square as a necessary social phenomenon, that somehow these criminals in Times Square – drug dealers, petty hustlers, thieves – were creating a necessary cultural phenomenon under the umbrella of democracy, representing another group of people and how wonderful it was. […] He was like the good scout in the midst of all this degeneration. There’s an essential difference between him and me. He thinks that Times Square and all its phenomena are good and positive. I think they’re extremely negative and disruptive, and that’s why I like it! 

One of dozens of photos taken as a contribution to a filmstrip created by artist Scott Ewalt, used as projected background to Benderson’s lecture on William Burroughs at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2007. Copyright Bruce Benderson 2021.

AA: You began by distinguishing there between decadence and degeneration. But how would you define decadence?  

BB: I would say degeneracy rather than degeneration. Degeneration sounds too medical. Degeneracy refers to behaviour. My definitions of degeneration and degeneracy come from [Max] Nordau, encompassing both poverty and decadent art. I’ve been accused of having a right-wing idea in writing about the culture of poverty, but in the ‘60s, that was a left-wing idea. The other guy I mention in my book whose name I can’t remember… The sociologist?  

AA: Oscar Lewis?  

BB: Yes! He went throughout the world and realised that the culture of poverty had similar characteristics wherever he went, and he decided that was enough to call it a culture. He thought that if we could understand the culture of poverty, then all these laws we’re making to help people or to feed people would be more understanding and more acknowledging of their identity. Anyway, Oscar Lewis fell out of fashion, and came to be seen as right wing. Instead came the view that they’re just like us, just in bad circumstances. So if you see on the 5 O’clock news a mother who is addicted to crack throwing a baby out of her window on the 24th floor, she is just like us but she’s done something bad, as if we ourselves did that act. In other words, there was no culture behind what she’d done, there was no explanation for it, other than the fact that we’re all the same, and if you’d do that you’d do it because you live in bad circumstances – or worse still, were ‘evil’. Now, when gays are bashed in the ghetto by a home-boy, he’s an ‘evil’ person and must be stopped without one minute being devoted to understanding why he might feel that way. I’m not saying what he does is good! But it’s not as if a middle-class person did that. So now everything that happens is taken from the point of view as if a middle-class person has suddenly gotten crazy or evil. They don’t want to help the homeboy who’s bashing a gay; they want to stop him, without any thought as to who he is, or how that relates to his mentality. He’s just a bad person. That infuriates me! 

AA: This interest in class dynamics has underpinned so much of your work to date. I wondered if you could speak a bit more about that… About the significances of class dynamics as they pertain to your understanding of degeneracy and your immersion in the subcultures around Times Square?  

BB: I should begin by saying that identity politics destroyed the dialogue over class differences. Starting in the ‘60s, it didn’t matter what class you came from. All that mattered was your gender, your race, your sexual orientation… Suddenly the dialogue over class became silent. I never lost my interest in the interactions between classes, or their isolation from one another, but nobody was interested in that. This emphasis on identity politics and this lack of emphasis on class comes purely from a Protestant mentality. If you go to France they’re still talking about class. They’re reluctantly learning the American and British way of talking about identity, but if you go to Protestant countries like the US, the UK and Germany, you’ll see a much stronger emphasis on identity politics, and a stronger emphasis on health and on purity – on physical purity, like eating well and vegetarianism. We can link this to [Max Weber’s] The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), which explains everything! Including the difference between decadence and degeneration. Decadence is a Protestant notion; degeneration in my experience is a Jewish and Catholic notion.  

AA: Before we circle back to class, I’d like to hear more about that.  

BB: What is a missionary? It’s someone who tries to help the downtrodden and get them to believe in Christ, and to reform them. How did they dress? They put a potato sack over their heads, because if they were to dress in a sensual and alluring way it would conflict with their values, which is to be humble, and to devote yourself to the poor. I am not a missionary. Decadence is one of the poses of the protestant mentality. Degeneration is connected, like many things are in France, to the agricultural mentality, where something’s wrong from the viewpoint of nature. Degeneracy points to nature, whereas decadence points to social poses and social gestures and art. Decadence or degeneration are not talked about in terms of nature in England anymore, because nature is seen there to be a construct. 

Stiff life: silicone and glass dildos, silk pillow, taken in Benderson’s apartment in New York City, 2003. Copyright Bruce Benderson 2021.

AA: So back to your interest in class… Decadence tends to be associated with either the aristocracy, or bohemia – although decadent bohemians tended to be from the middle class.  

BB: That’s a really good point. Decadence is an elitist and right-wing idea. Did you know that [Jean] Cocteau was right wing – a poet [I came to associate with] decadence. I had no idea! [Coco] Chanel was his best friend, and Chanel was reputedly antisemitic and right-wing. She was also friends with that King who abdicated, who was also reputedly right wing.  

AA: Edward VIII was once a supporter of Hitler. He met Hitler…  

BB: That’s decadence! Degeneracy is what happens when an educated person from the middle class wants to be an artist, has no money, moves to the city and a neighbourhood that’s very cheap and where many others who live there are very poor. It’s this witnessing of the culture of the poor and interactions with the rhythms and attitudes of the poor that create a new avant-garde. Decadence is more closely related to the dandy; it’s a social pose and often the prerogative of the upper classes.  

The Life Ball, a yearly AIDS charity event and costume ball, Vienna, 2008. Copyright Bruce Benderson 2021.

AA: I guess Oscar Wilde was middle class though… But it’s also making me think of the ballroom scene in New York in the 1980s, and the aesthetic of owning everything, of spectacle, of glamour. To me, at least, there is something decadent, in a positive sense of that word, about the aesthetics and politics of the ballroom scene. 

BB: I got involved with ballroom culture. I slept with many members of the House of Xtravaganza. Hector Xtravaganza was a friend of mine. I wrote an essay about the drag queen Consuela Cosmetic [called ‘The Not-So-Secret Life of Consuela Cosmetic’], who was involved in ball culture, but the last thing I would say about ball culture is that it was decadent, because I don’t believe that someone from the South Bronx can be decadent. The ball culture was really a class phenomenon. It was people who had nothing pretending that they had something, imitating a certain class and even a certain race. Back then, in order to be glamorous and in order to act as if you were a rich person, you had to ape or imitate white people. That’s what ball culture was. It was class imitation, class aping; imitating the luxury and privilege of the classes above them, which happened to be 95% white.  

Amanda Lepore wearing pink lipstick and nothing else, appearing for Mac Cosmetics and Heatherette in a show directed by David LaChapelle, New York City, 2001. Copyright Bruce Benderson 2021.

AA: One of the things that strikes me most here is how this interest in ballroom culture creates a certain kind of friction with the political positioning articulated in your writing, which – like many decadents, I’d say – offers a repost to or a refusal of assimilationism and centrism, favouring instead the margins and outsiders. In the ballroom scene we meet outsiders who seem to aspire toward assimilation, but perhaps not in the way in which that term is ordinarily understood.  

BB: Ballroom culture was a touching and incredibly affecting way of achieving fantasy. Oh, have you seen that Ryan Murphy series about ball culture? 

AA: Pose?  

BB: Yea – okay, that’s like completely fake! There wasn’t some drug-free motherly person wagging her finger at the people living with her, making sure they ate well and stopped taking drugs. It was an extremely degenerative scene. Everybody was taking drugs! One of them got strangled in a Times Square hotel.  

AA: Venus Xtravaganza.  

BB: It was all connected to the culture of poverty, and the touching and affecting fantasy one has when one is caught in that prison of poverty. It wasn’t just celebration, like that show Pose. It was a desperate attempt to have a few moments of identification with the oppressor, with the people above who were wearing Chanel, who were drinking champagne, as you were lying in your bed in the South Bronx dreaming about how wonderful it would be to have those things.  

AA: It also brings into the foreground the importance of performance in these cultures. 

BB: Yes. 

AA: In Toward the New Degeneracy: An Essay, you write: ‘When it comes to discussing outsider culture, academics have invented distanced cynical terms like “performance” or “transgression.” Giving voice to the reality of poverty in all its lustiness, energy, and degradation has become taboo, and it is actually considered a slight to a poor person’s integrity to tell the reality of his cultural experiences’.[2] In the contexts you’re addressing in that essay I can understand why you’d view the term ‘performance’ as cynical, or perhaps a misnomer, but your comments on ball culture just now suggest that there’s more to say about this.  

BB: I totally agree with what you’re saying. The only thing that a really poor person has is their body, and whatever they can do with that body. And one thing they can do with that body is to make it powerful – by the way they dress, by the way they walk – not by the things they say, usually, but by creating a more and more exaggerated image of power, of social power. Chic, high fashion… These are class aspirations, totally impractical class aspirations. None of them are thinking that if they save $20 a week they’ll somehow ascend, which was my parents’ mentality. This thing in the South Bronx is a gesture of desperation, fantasising that somehow something will happen that magically brings you to an elite level, where you’ll have all those things you’ve dreamed about and seen on TV, and you’ll be a member of that elite. And, by the way, it’s a white elite. It is all changing now… And I’m so glad it is. In this period right now, more progress will be made in racial equality than in any other period. It’s very exciting for me. But 20 or 30 years ago it was more of a hopeless affair, and in terms of the balls it was just fantasy. It was phenomenal, it was amazing, it was thrilling, it was wonderful, but that’s what it was. 

Pearl Martin backstage at Edelweiss, a drag performance club, New York City, 2001. Copyright Bruce Benderson 2021.

AA: You’ve been talking about fantasy, about spectacle, about representation, and it’s making me wonder about your interests in more conventional forms of performance of the kind that might take place on a stage in front of an audience.  

BB: Vaginal Davis is truly within the legacy of real performance art. She’s almost like… As I’ve gotten older I have trouble remembering words and names. You’ll help me. She’s not a surrealist… She’s… a dadaist! And interested in absurd contradictions, like: ‘I have been invited to join the daughters of the American Revolution’, as you look at her black skin. She’s also very conscious of class. She’s a parodist. One of her famous performances is Cherries in the Snow, where she picks the smallest and whitest and most Caucasian-looking boy and asks him to come on stage and take his shoes off. She comes out wearing blonde braids, like Heidi, and there’s a song that goes with it. She squirts whipped cream around his toes and puts cherries between each toe, and eats them off his toes. She’s dressed like a German, but she’s black. She’s referencing Heidi. She’s shrimping the boy, which has a sexual connotation. It’s fabulous. It’s dada!  

AA: I want to change tack a bit here… and this is the last question. I wonder what you make of some of the ideas in a book by Ross Douthat called The Decadent Society (2020). It came out in hardback before the pandemic, and paperback during it. He’s a right-wing Catholic. Anyway, he diagnoses North American society as being in a state of economic stagnation, suffering from political sclerosis, an inability to produce new cultural forms, and sterility because not enough people are having babies, producing declining birth-rates. He’s an example of someone on the Right with an interest in decadence, but in a condemnatory sense of that word… 

BB: But he’s a decadent! Does he subject his pets to zero population control? Well, humans need a solution for population control as well. He sounds horrible! I really mean it when I say he sounds decadent. What do you call it when you go backwards or look to the past… 

AA: Nostalgia? Retrograde?  

BB: What’s the opposite of progressive?  

AA: Regressive?  

BB: Well, that’s not quite what I’m saying… But these regressive ideas that we can go back in time to – that’s a decadent attitude. Ah, the word I was searching for was ‘reactionary.’ It’s not a degenerate attitude. A degenerate attitude is that I like the fact that this is happening, which may provoke the imagination, which I value above all else. Throwing practicality to the winds in favour of imaginative energy… 

[At this point a strange bleeping noise can be heard in the background. Bruce leaps up and asks if I would like to meet his pet robot, called Vector]. 

BB: Alright, here he is! Vector. [He holds Vector in the palm of his hand].  

AA: I feel like he should be called Hal.  

BB: You’re right. He’s really smart, because he’s connected to the internet. Alright, how’s this: ‘Hey Vector, question: who is Bruce Benderson’? 

Vector: Bruce Benderson is an American author born to parents of Russian-Jewish descent.  

[Vector starts bleeping manically, prompting Bruce to move him into another part of the room]. 

BB: Isn’t Vector divine?  

[At this point the conversation degenerates into a meandering dialogue about technology, the state of higher education, and the shape of Adam’s mouth and neck].

Notes

[1] Catherine Texier, ‘Foreword’, in Bruce Benderson, Sex and Isolation: And Other Essays (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), vii-xiii, viii.

[2] Bruce Benderson, ‘Toward the New Degeneracy’, in Sex and Isolation: And Other Essays (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), pp. 143-81, 181.