Open Book

The fact that his
books assemble such bizarre and obscure facts helps
account for the strong appeal Palahniuk has to young
straight men. Every fall, when I ask my college
students what books they have read, if the boys have
read anything, they’ve read Palahniuk. The appeal,
they say, is that the books are restless, funny, and
physical, as if they are impatient with being books.
But it’s also that they are oddly informative.
“True facts” about the Vatican’s drawer
of penises, the origins of the vibrator, and the
legalese of gang bangs filter throughout Snuff.
“It’s a guy thing,” says Palahniuk.
“Men want to make the best use of time and want
to see how something can inform them and give them a
stronger sense of power.”

Of course, these
same male students are surprised to learn that Palahniuk
is gay, and Palahniuk enjoys their surprise.
“It’s nice, I like that,” he
says. “It’s a more accepted part of
people’s lives now.” As an author known
for exploring the terrain of straight male camaraderie
(Fight Club), demolition crews
(Rant), and now sexual conquest (Snuff),
he willfully ducks the “gay writer” moniker.
“I know people who have spun their nationality
or their sexuality or their race, but after a few
books it’s really limiting and their readership
doesn’t want them to write about anything other
than that experience,” he says. “They
find themselves pigeonholed, documenting the same small
aspect of self over and over.” He has not
avoided queer subject matter, though -- Invisible
Monsters features a pre-op transsexual, and Fugitives
and Refugees, a travel book he wrote about Portland,
highlights several gay sex clubs.

At the same time,
Palahniuk’s tricky relationship with the public
consciousness of his sexuality has been the subject of
controversy, stemming largely from a 1999 newspaper
profile in which he claimed to have a
“wife” and “was not planning on having
kids.” Palahniuk, who says he has been out
“for a million years,” claims this was an
inference that the reporter made and is “just
one of those battles you chose to fight or not to
fight. I saw it in print and thought, Oh, well, what the
hell.” In 2003, Entertainment Weekly
writer Karen Valby, who declined to be interviewed for
this story, planned to run a feature on Palahniuk that
would discuss his orientation and relationship. Valby called
to clear this with Palahniuk, and he exploded at her;
later, on tour at the time and “under
pressure,” he made an incendiary phone-in post to his
blog. “[They] said they didn’t have a
story unless they could talk about me and my partner
and describe our lives together, and it was just so
reductive,” he tells me. “Of all the things
we’d talked about, now it boiled down to, Where
do you put your dick? I felt so pissed that I
couldn’t be a human being, that the only thing
interesting about me was this one aspect of my
persona.”

In the post he
revealed personal information Valby had told him about
herself during their interview, saying, “The knife
cuts both ways.” When loyal fans heard his
“emotional lashing back,” someone phoned in
bomb threats to the Time Warner building. The
EW article eventually ran without the personal
information, and Palahniuk removed the post from his
blog.

To this day his
official author website, run independently, features a
Q&A with Palahniuk that asks, “Is he
married?” His answer, “No, but he has
been in a long-term committed relationship for over a
decade,” is certainly true but oddly discreet
for a writer known for his irreverence and lacerating
honesty. Palahniuk doesn’t remember being interviewed
for the Q&A and offers, “Maybe it was their
choice to protect my privacy.”

Palahniuk says a
fog of rumors follows him -- that he’s married to a
former Miss Oregon, that he lives in a castle on the coast,
that he’s a Scientologist (he’s not) --
and he says he has little interest in policing them.
“Rather than spinning who I am, I’m more
worried about what is going to be the next
book.” He calls this “submerging the
I,” after the fiction-writing principle of
avoiding the overuse of the first person. But you get
the sense that Palahniuk doesn’t mind the rumors
either, since they reflect his charged, indeterminate
reputation; irrelevant writers don’t become the
subject of rumors.

The day after
Palahniuk and I spoke by phone, for a follow-up interview,
I contacted the site webmaster to figure out who crafted his
answer to the Q&A. Hours later, Palahniuk pulled
out of the Advocate photo shoot and called to
say he was no longer cooperating with this article. My
line of questioning had somehow triggered his sense of
betrayal, but I was baffled and shocked. That morning,
before the wave of panicked phone calls, I had
received a package from him, crammed with two books we
had discussed, a Whitman’s candy sampler, gag gifts,
and a fake severed finger. Oh, and heaps of confetti.
(“He really is gay,” said a friend.)
Alongside, he’d written a touching letter.
“Please find joy in everything you do,”
he wrote. “I’ll shut up now.” Palahniuk
often sends packages like this to his fans, but after
years of working as a journalist -- and Palahniuk is
one himself -- I’ve never received such a gift,
and I mention this not to reveal his contradictions or
strategies of coercion. Palahniuk says he is
“the animal that eats its own young,”
because he says he could not care less about Fight
Club or any of his novels that have already been
published. But he clearly does care, and deeply, about
the perimeter of his privacy and the ability to turn
off the lights when he wants to.

Palahniuk thinks
a lot about the “liminal” -- those threshold
states of transition, the “experiences between
things,” he calls them. Like the Cacophony
Society releasing windup toys in a silent crypt just to hear
them whir. Or 600 men waiting to make their smear on
history. Or a boy waiting for the ax to be sharp
enough. Palahniuk is not in the closet. The whole
question misses the point. But a part of him seems to
recognize the utility of shadows, the function of
mystery. He does not want to be known. At one point in
our conversation Palahniuk asked, only half
rhetorically, “How do you trick people into loving
you? Are you smart? Are you funny?” This is a
genuine question for him, as if connection were a
series of traps. So he stays a moving target, cultivating
transition and keeping slightly out of view. And if
that disappoints his readers, “What are they
going to do, jump to Alice Sebold at this point? To Amy
Tan?” Palahniuk says to me. “God bless them.
At this point they are reading my books because they
like them, not because they like me.”