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AE: Is there one particular character in Almost Like Being In Love with whom you closely identify?
SK: It’s so funny--it’s all autobiographical to some extent. The two main characters are most definitely two major pieces of me. I identify with Travis more than anything else. That’s the way I grew up. The whole concept of falling in love with your best friend senior year of high school – that happened to me. The being beaten up, being called queer, historically that’s what I went through. The fixation on baseball and American (history)…all of that stuff. The only thing about Craig that is me is that I got very political later on (in life) and I’m trying to forge ahead with a career in politics. He embodies that activist aspect in me from my late thirties, early forties. But other than that, Travis has got to be the character.

AE: The book is filled with wonderful relationships, including the one between Travis and his straight roommate from school, Gordo. The two remain friends after high school and continue their roommate situation. The gay male/straight male friendship isn’t one that is explored much in lit--is that why you chose to highlight it?
SK: I chose to highlight it for a couple of reasons. Gordo is a part from day one--and this goes back to 1988--that I wrote for Bobby (DiCicco). Bobby and I have such a great dynamic and have had from day one. So much of the back and forth and internal support between the characters comes from him and me. It is a real relationship that I transposed back to two eighteen year old kids, as opposed to two adults in their mid-to-late thirties.

I have so many straight male friends that I have that kind of relationship with. My best friend Glenn is as straight as they come, and we would be commiserating over relationship agonies. There were no barriers, there was nothing weird. I don’t see it in literature at all. You see it a lot between gay men and their straight female friends. But there’s still a lot of that stuff makes it difficult. Straight guys are generally not comfortable, but there are many who are, and that’s why it was never a problem for me, because I had them in real life.

AE: Another long-term relationship in the book is the one between lovers Craig and Clayton. As a gay writer, what did it mean to you to create an enduring gay couple?
SK: Yes, yes, absolutely. Because we got the rap for so long that all we are is promiscuous and all that it is is about sex. It’s too critical to make people realize that most of the long-term relationships that I know of are gay relationships. I know two straight relationships that have lasted as long as seven or eight of the gay relationships that I know of. It’s a prevailing thing--that gay people are only interested in sex--that the right would like everybody to believe. I think it’s really significant to see that these things (long-term gay relationships) go on and they’re just not publicized.

AE: We talked about movies earlier in the interview, and in the novel, Gordo is trying to turn Travis and Craig’s story into a screenplay, which provides another perspective to the story in the book. Is there a screenplay of Almost Like Being In Love in the works?
SK: There is such a history with this. This was a screenplay in 1988. It started out as a boy/girl story, based on a high school production of Brigadoon from my senior year. After six years, when nobody wanted to get close to this film, I was writing a piece that I ultimately re-tooled for GLSEN about what it’s like to fall in love with your best friend in high school.

I fell in love with Philip at exactly the same time I was doing Brigadoon, and I realized that it was more than just a column. I really ought to do a piece about this. As I was taking notes, I thought, this is Almost Like Being In Love. I went back to the computer, did a name and gender pronoun search, and within seconds I had a very crude outline for what ultimately evolved into the book. Because you’re restricted to a hundred and twenty pages with a screenplay, it started out very sketchy. When nobody wanted to do the gay (movie) version, I wound up saying that I would do it as a novel. The gay screenplay served as the perfect blueprint.

It’s such a wonderful exercise to go from screenplay to novel format, as opposed to the other way around. Where one requires compressing and leaving out the good stuff, this way you’re allowed to take your time, devote some energy and have some fun with things that you weren’t able to with a script. There is a screenplay, but the problem is that once I finished the book, the screenplay is no longer adequate, because there is so much more invention in the book, so much more expanded stuff--things that are now in the book that were never in the film. Now, you’ve basically got to throw out the screenplay and start that all over again. From the day the book sold, my agent has been getting calls repeatedly about the availability of film rights, but nothing has sold yet, but I would guess within the next few months.

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