Excerpt:
Caesura:
How helpful is it to look for the political in your fiction or in
fiction in general? Are the differences you mediate between the
characters in your fiction - differences between young people and
older people, differences between black people and white people,
differences between straight people and gay people - a kind of
advocacy?
Cameron:
No, I think in my life I'd rather be an advocate, if that's the
word.
Caesura:
There might be a better word?
Cameron:
No, that's a fine word. I know what you mean. I guess I'd rather
be "political" in the work I do than in the fiction I
write. For me as a reader, political fiction is boring. And as a
writer, I find I'm much more interested in the personal lives of
my characters than in making them into political statements. I
find the personal compelling. I find politics important, but it's
not like I want to write fiction about politics.
Caesura:
So if someone mentioned the "politics" of the family in
"Memorial Day," you wouldn't agree with that application
of the word?
Cameron:
Right. It's not a word I would use, but I'd be interested to hear
somebody else talk about the whole "political" aspect of
that story. That would be interesting to me, but it's not
something I thought about when I was writing the story, or have
thought about since then. This is interesting because there hasn't
been a lot written critically about my work except for reviews.
Somebody sent me a paper he'd written about my work; it caught my
attention because it was all about the lack of AIDS panic in my
fiction. I was writing about a lot of gay characters, but there
was very little focus on AIDS. That's something I've done
deliberately and something I've done not deliberately, but I liked
the paper a lot because he was saying, "I hate the idea that
if you're writing about homosexuals, you have to write about AIDS,
as if . . ."
Caesura:
As if there's no more to life?
Cameron:
Yes, and I just feel like there is, and there are a lot of other
people writing about AIDS a lot better than I could. It's
something that has come into my work when I felt it should come in
but not something that I've ever felt obliged to address. I feel,
actually, pressure from other gay writers, who say, "This is
what you should be writing about."
I'm not interested in anything I have to do out
of any obligation. In that way, my writing is selfish. For a
while, I had a problem with that. I guess I thought my writing was
for myself. I wasn't writing to make the world a better place,
although some people are doing that. I felt bad about that. I
thought I should be doing this, too. Then I realized that I'm a
different kind of writer, that it is a big world. For a while, I
thought being personal equals being decadent. People were making
me feel that. Then I realized that I don't believe that equation.
I think that being personal is being personal. The work I love,
that I've benefited from in terms of making me feel more
comfortable on this planet, has been work that's been very
personal...
The
Weekend 
Leap
Year : A Novel 
