Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, this is Bookworm, and I'm Michael Silverblatt.

This is novelist Alice Walker.

I think the world has become entirely too masculine, and that that's the problem.

You know, I think until the world can balance itself, you know, by affirming

its feminine nature, we will never get out of this mess because the masculine, which is unchecked,

loves, you know, aggression and war and conflict. And you can just, you know, see this happening in the world, and it has been happening.

And that is why I really call on the grandmother, the grandmother spirit, the grand

feminine, to rise and to be affirmed and the inner motherhood, the universal motherhood of men and women, to rise and assert the feminine

before we are just all men and all, you know, headed in the same, you know, camouflaged clothes

to the next war.

That was Alice Walker.

We continue our special series, Escaping the Cage, Identity, Multiculturalism, and Writing.

Today, my guests are James McCourt, Edmund White, Alan Hollinghurst, and Camille Pahlia.

We'll be talking about gay writing and literary theory.

James McCourt is most recently the author of Queer Street, now out in paper from Norton.

His novel, Mardugorgias, was published in 1971.

People have been talking about your work from the very beginning.

...