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.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm. Today my guest is

Wayne Kestenbaum, the author most recently of the Queen's Throat, subtitled Opera Homosexuality

and the Mystery of Desire from Poseidon Press. He's the author as well of a book of poetry called Ode to Anna Mofo.

Well, we're going to talk about a lot of things that, first of all, I want to say that,

you know, to whatever embarrassment this may bring to me, that this is a delicious,

sissy book. And, you know, very fluttery and inventive and tickling is the way I found

myself describing it to friends. It seems to want to elicit by whatever means possible a response,

usually a helpless response from the reader. And I wonder how the style for it evolved.

The style evolved from trying, I think,

first to write a more serious book about opera and homosexuality,

a serious cultural history of the connections

between gay subculture and opera,

and discovering at the very end of this serious kind of academic project

that really what I wanted to do was send my voice out into the world and experiment with my voice,

and it became, I guess, a performative work rather than a work about something.

It happened technically when I decided that I would break the book up into fragments.

And the Opera Queen's chapter with which the book begins was actually the last written.

And I just started numbering the sections, and that freed me from narrative argument.

...