— an arresting dictum from Sundance Kidd, in my short story “The interview” (from my XBlog on 3/15/11 — edited from several 1996 drafts); the piece serves as a kind of vertiginous magic-realist summary of my Sundance and Butch saga (Sundance denies that his book is magic realism, but this isn’t that book, although it is in part a story about that book), alluding to many details of the two men’s lives that you will just have to fill in from what Sundance says.
This isn’t exposition, Mr. Bond; this is a 150-foot waterfall.
Tom of Finland — Touko Valio Laaksonen — famously got off enthusiastically on his own homoerotic drawings, and good for him. In turn, I still find parts of this piece achingly funny and am pleased no end at having written them.
Occasionally, Sundance tosses out something that looks like genuine insight. Well, he may be fictional, but he’s no fool.
Then, yippee, I get a cameo appearance, as a Stanford professor named Alex — Alex Adams being my principal pseudonym and Alex Adams a complex alternative identity.
The 2011 version, with only minor editing…
The interview
Sundance, in t-shirt, running shorts and athletic shoes — Butch had dropped him off on campus so he could do the easy six-mile run back home — wandered purposefully through institutional corridors, past any number of closed, unlabeled doors. The Santa Calla University radio station takes up a windowless corner on the ground floor of Redwood Hall (aptly named, though in fact almost all of SCU’s buildings are two-story redwood structures set into the foothills), and the signs in the building are few, poorly placed, and singularly unhelpful. He was treating the building as a maze, trying to traverse the thing systematically.
Nobody could have missed the gaudy orange fish, painted in bold undergraduate strokes on a wall that was bare except for the usual flyers offering student subscriptions to magazines, math tutors, and opportunities for travel abroad. It took some study to see the reddish-brown letters KARP inside the fish and some reflection to realize that the whole creation was meant as a label for the door to its right.
Inside, there was your basic prefabricated office, another maze, this time of bluey-gray partitions (just high enough so that most people would have to stretch a bit to look over them), with a receptionist’s desk right inside the door, a desk so neat and featureless that Sundance supposed it was never actually used. “Anybody home?” he called out.
A harried female face popped up above the nearest partition. “Oh, you must be Mr. Kidd. You get to the studio by going down the main corridor and staying as straight as you can.” She giggled in embarrassment at what she’d said. Vanished back into her cubicle. But her instructions worked.
The woman inside the studio was unmistakably Susan Standish, cool and businesslike in a light wool suit of dark crimson and a cream silk blouse, with small gold hoops in her ears.
She was hoping to work her way from SCU — which was SCC a few years ago and SCJC not long before that, not exactly the major leagues — up to KQED in San Francisco at least, better still to NPR in Washington.
Her fantasy was that Sylvia Poggioli would be gunned down on a hot summer day in Naples and she’d be called in on a few hours’ notice to take over the Mediterranean, Balkan, and Near Eastern beat.
She looked at Sundance and said with disdain, “My God, that’s offensive!”
This was not a good beginning to an afternoon of chatting on the radio. It took him a moment to realize that it was his costume she was objecting to.
“Nice to meet you, Ms. Standish, I’m Sundance Kidd, as you must have guessed. But unless you’ve branched out into television, I can’t see how what I’m wearing makes any difference. What’s the problem?”
“That shirt, of course!” His t-shirt (100% cotton, the only way to go) screamed F.A.G. in big neon lavender letters; his nylon running shorts were in exactly the same color, it had taken Nicky and him forever to find them.
“That’s a club I belong to” — “Good grief, everybody knows you’re a member of that fraternity,” she interposed — “the French And Greek. Well, really it’s called the Gallo-Hellenic Club, but that sounds like a scholarly society. We’re a pretty earthy group.” (“I would imagine,” she said under her breath.)
The club logo depicts a Greek warrior in a short skirt, carrying a spear in one hand and a rooster in the other. Once when Sundance was wearing the logo t-shirt at Land’s End, he tricked in the bushes with this nice gray-haired older man who turned out to be a Stanford professor — Sundance always liked to get to know his partners, sometimes before they got down to it, more often after, though a lot of guys didn’t want any further connection after the physical one was over — and Alex explained the levels of meaning in the names and the logo while Sundance pretended he hadn’t figured it out.
Sundance imagined the Standish woman was picturing a gay sex club; the names and the logo were in fact designed to give that impression. But, as Butch said, the world does not need yet another gay sex club. The trappings were all a front. What the F.A.G. guys did was get together and talk about their lives and their relationships, how they tried to manage intimacy and sex, with one partner or with many, how they handled shit from straight people, how they dealt with differences between them and their lovers, that kind of thing. It wasn’t a therapy group or a support group, there were no big emotional displays, you didn’t expect to get or give advice. You told your stories, as honestly as you could, and tried to be as truthful about how you felt as you could. Had some fine espresso.
You wouldn’t have thought Butch would go for that kind of thing, but it suited Butch. He wouldn’t say a lot, but you could see him thinking.
A nice-looking black man — well, milk chocolate, a very pretty color — with headphones around his neck came out of the engineer’s booth and walked over, his hand stretched out for shaking. He was about Sundance’s age and height, he had that pencil mustache that Sundance had so loved on Wash, plus a gold hoop in one of his ears. And he was giving Sundance That Look, intense and wide-eyed, the look that says Fag to anyone who knows the code. Sundance gave him one back. They shook hands enthusiastically.
“I’m Carl Michaels, the engineer. You’re going to be in my hands for the afternoon.”
“I’m sure I’ll enjoy being in your hands.” (Standish continued looking disdainfully at Sundance, but seemed to be companionable with Carl Michaels, surely she couldn’t have failed to notice the man was gay?)
“It’s a real pleasure to meet you, Sundance — I guess people just naturally call you that, once they get to know you in your book — my lover and I thought the book was just fabulous, Gary and I read big pieces of it out loud to one another.” (Ok, so she’s got to know he’s gay. Maybe it’s acceptable if he’s a faithful married man and doesn’t flaunt his gayness too much. I’m married, but I sure am not “faithful”, at least the way she’d mean it, and I am a first-class flaunter. Maybe the t-shirt was too much of a provocation. But, hell, I am a famous fag.)
“Thanks, Carl. I’m always pleased to hear it when people get pleasure from what I wrote.” (Am I overworking the pleasure theme here? I want to keep it out in front. I’m hoping Carl and Gary are not actually monogamous.)
The three of them negotiated how the rest of the afternoon would go. Signals for cutting off the interview when someone thought it was running off course. Sound checks. How to use the microphones, which were something new for Sundance. Standish was competent, clear, distant. She and Sundance did dispute for a while about what they’d call each other, Sundance refusing to sound like he was friends with her by using her first name, Standish wanting to use his nickname (to be one up on him); they backed off from one another, agreed on Ms. Standish and Mr. Kidd. Carl went back into his booth, set dials and flipped switches, put on his headphones, gave the go signal through the glass. And off they went.
Standish: Hello, this is Susan Standish with another edition of Book Browse. Today’s guest is Charles
Sundance winces
“Sundance” Kidd, the author of the surprise best-seller Los Altiplanos. Billed as the story of his life, the book describes early years in the Lebanon Valley of Pennsylvania, teenage years on the road as a runaway, first alone, then with his homosexual lover
Sundance tries to menace Standish with his eyes, but hers are fixed on her notes
Michael “Butch” Cassady, his partner in a series of vicious robberies
Sundance considers ripping the notes out of her fuckin’ hands, but decides to wait and strike when a better opportunity presents itself
in the South American nation of Bolivia, where the narrator of Mr. Kidd’s book spent a year in the court of the infamous Prince Maximilian II, from which he escaped during a revolution, only to end up as a restaurateur in the Bay Area.
What has made this book so controversial is its preoccupation with perverse sex.
Sundance catches Standish’s glance, sees she is on a big long happy roll, sees he’s been sucker-punched
Normally, we have our authors read from their works on this show, but there isn’t a single piece of this book that we could use; either the content or the vocabulary puts it out of bounds.
This is too much for Sundance. He interrupts
Sundance: That’s just not so! I could read the section about Manuel and Carlos’s marriage, there’s no sex in that. Or the bit about the guy who committed suicide in Harrisburg; that’s grim, but clean. Or the part of “Capybara sage” that’s actually about capybara sage; that has me and Max kissing, but surely no one’s going to object to kissing, are they? Well, for that matter, there are whole pages in the “San Soní” chapter that are unobjectionable — unless there’s a problem with the word “Sodomite” (how could there be?)
Sundance understands that all of this is going to be edited out, and that he’s not going to be allowed to read any of these passages, even though he’s memorized the page numbers. But he wants this woman — and Carl — to hear that he’s given a lot of thought to this interview, wants to do a good job, isn’t going to give up without complaint
Standish: There’s always a problem with the word Sodomite, because there’s a problem with what the word means.
She pauses, making it easy for this exchange to be be spliced out
Mr. Kidd, the thing that strikes most readers is that your book is full of sex, not just sex in general but sex between men, and these homosexual acts are described in street language and in a manner that seems intended to arouse. This is a dirty book, Mr. Kidd.
Sundance: Look, I killed to save my life, or Butch’s, and I’m sorry for all of that, but the sex was incredible, on both sides, and I have no apologies for it. Everyone should get it this good.
Anyway, Ms. Standish, it’s a mistake to rile a gunslinging faggot, and it’s a serious mistake to get one really angry.
She backs off
Standish: Mr. Kidd, critics and reviewers have interpreted your book in so many different ways it’s difficult to believe they have all read the same book. I assume you’ve read much of this —
Kidd: Actually, I will read, and listen to, absolutely anything I can find about my book. I figure I’m never going to write another, so I better see just what kind of splash I made with this one.
Standish: So how do you react?
Kidd: People, or at least the people who write about my book, seem to find three ways to read it, all of them screwy. Some of them talk about its “magic realism”, which means they think I wrote about things that didn’t happen as if they were magic. Some of them label me as a “faux-naif”, which means they think I wrote about things that didn’t happen as if they were true. And some of them say I produced a piece of “miracle literature”, which means they think I wrote about things that really did happen as if they were magic.
The fact is that I wrote about things that really did happen as if they were true, which seems pretty sensible to me.
The miracle-literature people look at the apparently magical events that happened to me or people around me, and they see them as evidence of the Hand of God, or some such nonsense. Yes, there was something miraculous about my tumble through the air in front of Wash, but there was also something miraculous in my starting to fall in the first place; I wasn’t the slightest bit unbalanced. For that matter, a very small miracle, such as the wind blowing me upright on the ledge, would have been enough to save me; I can’t help thinking there was something, well, excessive, about me being taken though an aerobatics exhibition. Not to mention the 150-foot waterfall in Bolivia — pure show — and for goodness sake, Maximilan, Prince of Bolivia, when a simple Indian with a sense of direction would have been enough to get me out of the lowland jungles.
I died twice, that I know of, and I saw Butch die with me one of those times, and I read in the papers about Wash dying, and, sure, there were lots of miracles involved, but not always the ones people think of. It was a miracle that some stableboy thought he recognized Butch and me in Santa Carlita del Norte — all the more a miracle because he thought it was two leaders of the Southern peasant uprising that he saw — and it was a miracle that fifty trigger-happy Bolivian Army men were camped out one telegraph station, and ten miles, away.
It was just ironic, Sundance thought, that the stableboy didn’t know that some factions of the B.A. believed it kept an operation clean to remove all traces of it. He called in the wrong guys, so that instead of a little gold, or at least a good word in his favor with the local commandant, he got a bullet in his gut, a little before Butch and I got turned into bloody Swiss cheese (the two of us standing boldly in the cantina, holding each other and passionately exchanging our last kisses) by those fellows, and he ended up as one of three pieces of dead meat rotting in an old mining pit, with only a foot of so of loose dirt to cover us.
It was a miracle that Wash got shot dead by that crazy Raymond Leopard, the insurance man who thought he was being pursued and persecuted by fornicators and sodomites and determined to wipe them out before they got him.
And, Sundance thought, who did — but more by whim than by plan — manage to take out at least two of them, Wash and the customer he’d just hooked. I never found out about two of the others, but the very first person he whacked turns out to have been a 70-year-old woman, a retired schoolteacher who had trouble sleeping on hot nights and slipped out of her apartment building to sit on one of the benches in front of the Central Hotel and stare up at the cold dark sky, hoping to find some comfort in the inky blue.
As for Wash escaping death, that was so seamless and easy it scarcely seems worth commenting on, much less miraculous.
Standish: Then you don’t find any deeper meaning in the events that you describe?
Kidd: No. Why should I? It’s enough for me that they happened.
Standish: Putting the magic and miracles aside, there are still many aspects of your story that readers find, uh, problematic. The shifts in place and time; it’s often unclear, for instance, what century things are happening in.
Kidd: Things happen together at different times. To tell you the truth, I sometimes find it vexing myself. I was certainly as amazed as anyone to be spending a year — a very happy year, I want to say, but as close as I can calculate it was 1865, which still baffles me — with Max in his court.
Standish: And then there are the places, which you describe in some detail. But people who’ve been to these places find many of these details somewhat, uh, inaccurate.
Kidd: Oh, this is the “Mr. Kidd writes about a Bolivia of the mind” stuff again. Don’t blame me for the capybara.
The fact is that places are different for different people. Now take Alhambra, Ohio, for instance. You grew up there. I got a lot of my, uh, real-world education there, about the same time. (When you think about it, Ms. Standish, that’s a sort of miraculous connection between us, isn’t it?) But I’ll bet if we sat down for a while and compared our recollections of the place and the people there, we’d agree on a lot and disagree on a lot.
Would it surprise you, Ms. Standish, to hear that a lot of people deny that there even is a city of Alhambra, Ohio?
Standish: It would astonish me. I could still tell you what was in every building on Central Avenue opposite the plaza, from Fourth Street West to Fourth Street East. On the east corner of Central and Fourth West there was an ornate red-brick building that had a dance studio on the ground floor; I took ballet lessons there on Tuesday afternoons, and I just hated having that whole wall of windows that any passer-by could look in through at us …
Kidd: No, no, I remember that building, and it had always had a Western-wear store in it. That’s where Wash and I found the, uh, extraordinary cowboy hat, the Fuck Me Hat, I wrote about. The one that some … inept … critic called The Bolivian Foreshadowing.
Standish: Mr. Kidd, when I read that part of your book I racked my mind for days, and I swear Alhambra never had any Western-wear store, on Central or anyplace else.
Kidd: Well, there, you see, Ms. Standish. It was a different place for each of us. Meanwhile, a million or more people would swear we were both making all this stuff up.
You aren’t going to be able to use this piece, are you, Ms. Standish?
Standish: No, it turned into a private conversation. I’ll pick up from right after where you first mentioned Alhambra…
Finally, Mr. Kidd, many readers are enchanted by the way you have fictional characters walking around in your world, interacting with real people, sometimes the real people they were based on. But surely you understand that most readers think this is a fictional conceit?
Kidd: I kind of sympathize with their feeling. When I met Butch and the two of us ended up going to Bolivia and robbing banks and being pursued by the Army, of course I saw the parallels in the names and the events, but I just figured this was another one of those miracles we were talking about. Then when we met Nick Charles and Robbie Roberts and heard their story I have to say I was shaken.
Nicky says he eventually figured out that every fictional character — in a movie or a book or a poem or whatever — has a life of their own. Sometimes people who are already walking around get appropriated, the way Nicky and Robbie were when they were touring the Maximilian Conservatory and Herbarium outside of La Paz and suddenly found that instead of identifying marvelous new plants they were bouncing on horses, not very comfortably, and fleeing across the high plains from a dark rider, in fear for their lives. (A couple of months later, of course, they were back in their hotel in La Paz, with only chafed thighs and some blisters on their hands and heels to mark their adventure.)
Sometimes the characters get created from scratch and then walk away into our world. Nicky says that some actors won’t appropriate people, they even write that into their contracts, which means that if they’re in a lot of plays or movies or tv or radio shows they spin off an awful lot of new people. It sort of tickles me to think that somewhere in the world there are dozens and dozens of women who started out as characters played by Eve Arden; I’m still hoping to meet some of them.
Not everybody who’s stepped out of fiction has a good life. Robbie told Butch about this gorgeous blond fellow who was Dar (the Marc Singer part) in The Beastmaster and never adjusted to this world. He wanders from one busted town to another out in the boonies of Brazil, trying to find animals he can talk to.
Now, in our case there’s the real-life Butch Cassidy and the real-life Sundance Kid — I wonder if they’re still hanging around somewhere, maybe back for another visit — and there’s Robbie and Nicky, who spent a spell as the characters with those names in the movie, and there’s Paul Newman and Robert Redford, who played those characters — oh, yes, Redford and Newman took Nicky and Robbie to lunch at Citrus a couple of years ago, and Nicky said that the food was, as always, fabulous, and that Redford and Newman are really nice guys and much cuter than they look in the movies, really too bad they’re straight — and then there’s my man Butch and me.
Sometimes I get a little shiver from thinking about what I might have done by letting my notebooks be published. I wonder, is there now another gay couple, Michael Cassady and Charles Kidd, say, living a rackety life together somewhere, sometime? And I wonder, if someone writes a book about me and Butch — I keep getting letters from real writers, not amateurs like me, and from professors, people who are taken by our story and want to do their own versions — will that create Mike and Chuck, or Buck and Chick, or whoever, somewhere, sometime?
Just last year a fellow came to do the interior construction work when Butch and I redecorated Los Altiplanos, and he looked just like this fellow Danny Streichleder I knew when I was a kid, the one in my book, except that he’d aged about as much as you’d expect and he was an artist, something my Danny never could have become, with his beautiful tools, and his name was Danny Strickland. He looked real funny at me, because it turned out I looked just like a kid he’d grown up with, a boy he’d treated badly, except that I’d aged a good bit and that boy was named Chuckie Kidd and was ragingly effeminate. This Danny, the Strickland one, had grown up no more than 20 miles away from me; our high schools were traditional rah-rah rivals in sports. Makes you think.
Jesus, Sundance thought, I wish Strickland hadn’t told me about Chuckie. Soon as he did, I saw what had happened, how Strickland had beaten the boy — me, not me — and fucked him bloody, while he struggled and wept and begged to be let go. Worse, I saw how the runaway Chuckie died the next year alongside a road outside of Covington, Kentucky, at the hands of a half-drunken Army boy — a fellow who might have been Strickland but wasn’t — who simply carried this scene on to its natural next stage, and who was never apprehended because he was never really sought. I was filled with rage at Strickland, he was filled with fear of me, we both had our moments of appalling desire for one another, or maybe for the boy each of us thought the other had been, yet somehow we had to work together for what was supposed to be six months but turned out, in the usual way of construction projects, to be twice that. In the end we became a team, like a couple who have said and done all the worst things they know to one another and find themselves bound together by them, just because there’s no one else in the world they could ever expose themselves to that way. Still, for much of that year, I’d lie half-awake beside Butch, or Nicky, at 3 a.m., imagining the pleasure of Danny’s kiss, or his hand on my ass, and recalling the gentle seductive moments when he too imagined that pleasure and longed for forgiveness through love, and knowing that if he touched me I would kill him, and knowing that he knew that. We did real good work, though, everyone said so.
Last week I saw Max, my dear Prince Maximilian, on Castro Street, and I followed him, love in my heart and lust in my body, for several blocks until he got to Market Street and turned to look for traffic and I saw his profile and realized it wasn’t Max. Well, maybe it was an almost-Max, the way Strickland is an almost-Danny and I’m an almost-Chuckie. Maybe it really was Max; people can change a lot in 120 years, after all. Max, if you’re listening to this program, call me at Los Altiplanos; it’s in the book, in Mountain View. I miss you terribly.
Oh, hell, you’re not going to let me say this on the air, are you?
Standish: Actually, it has such a lunatic charm I want to keep it in. But if you’re going to say anything more, please don’t give the telephone number, and don’t mention any specific sexual acts.
Kidd: I’ve been a good boy for a while, Ms. Standish, and you’ve been a good girl. I won’t wreck things now if you don’t.
Standish: The engineer says we’re running short on time, anyway. Do you think you could wrap things up?
Kidd: Ok. Give me a lead-in, will you?
Standish: Mr. Kidd, what do you make of these remarkable events?
Kidd: It all makes me think about time, Ms. Standish, and how we probably don’t appreciate how complicated it is. I think of time like tears running down my face. The streams sometimes join into one, sometimes they split into two or three, they run together, they run apart, they run parallel to one another. Have you ever thought about that? It would explain a lot in my life, and maybe yours too.
Standish: We’ve been talking to Charles “Sundance” Kidd, the author of the extraordinary novel, or possibly memoir, Sundance and Butch. Next week on Book Browse: French author and film m1aker Michel Casse; he has made his own novel My Life as a Capybara into a luminous new movie that has taken the art houses by storm. This is Susan Standish, hoping you’ll be here to browse with us.
August 15, 2026 at 1:11 pm |
Since I am relentlessly analytic, I will now step back and look at my own writing (from 30 years ago, not fresh in my memory): what’s the speaker, Sundance Kidd, like, and where might his character have come from?
Sundance is a true-naïf but also a wise-ass, with some of my simple-diction conversational style, plus a fair amount of ornamental gay extravagance and very little professor-talk. So, more like Alex than like Arnold.
I do want you to be entertained by him, and to like him. He and I have been together for decades, and I’m tremendously fond of him.
Then there’s the mocking burlesque of Susan Stamberg (who, oh alas, died on 10/16/25). I needed a foil for Sundance, so I picked her as the most unlikely real-world candidate for the role that I could think of (I also wanted some gender conflict). But I tried to treat her fairly and show her as highly competent at what she did.
August 16, 2026 at 4:26 am |
F.A.G. fraternity -> ΦAΓ ?
(Should be available as a T shirt somewhere)
August 16, 2026 at 5:38 am |
Lovely. No t-shirt currently exists; I’d have to have one custom-made. (Which I might do; my BIG FAG and FAGGOT shirts are too incendiary for me to wear where I live now.) But the fraternity has been created at least twice, once in a stage performance, once as a fun frat at Iowa State in the wake of Stonewall. I’ll post separately about them. And about the fictional Sigma Epsilon Chi.