Published in Australia (pb) and US (hb/pb) and translated into German as Verbotene Jugend (pb)
(Interviewer) Do you think Glove Puppet is a dangerous book?
(Neal) Dangerous to whom? The reader, or to me as a writer?
Well ... either?
There is no doubt the issues surrounding teenage sex, and inter-generational sex particularly, are sticky ones and polite society definitely would rather not discuss them at all. But I don't see how their discussion could be dangerous. These things happen. It's like all those right wingers who think including any sort of sexual diversity into sex education curriculums is suddenly going to turn everyone queer. I don't think so somehow.
So in Glove Puppet are you trying to say we should allow kids to be rampantly sexual?
It doesn't matter what I say, teenagers will do as they please sexually. Some will be real good, popular, study hard and settle down—credits to their parents. Others will be trawling the streets for liquour, sex and drugs. I don't make the rules about these things but I know which group I'd rather write about. This book is essentially about one character who is learning to play with sex and its power. He just happens to be unseasonably precocious and bites off rather more than he can chew.
Why is he so precocious and why choose such a volatile issue?
Because sexual precociousness and promiscuity always throw respectability into question and because God's wisdom—or the gene pool lottery—deigns that there be such people. It's the "damned whores and God's police" scenario. Sometimes it's hard to work out who is the victim and who is the perpetrator of a sexual misdemeanour. But there is that Gothic notion that somewhere in the world lurks one special person for each of us, and should we ever meet him or her, we will be completely undone.
Have you ever met that person?
I've met several around the world. There's something to be said for not traveling too widely.
So what's the solution?
Don't ask me, I've written a story that hopefully forces readers to examine some uncomfortable questions. I've chosen the most loathsome genre of crime in the current scheme of moral reckoning but in fifty years who's to say what transgression will be considered globally appalling. In Salem they summarily burnt women as witches for the most minor eccentricities. In the 1950s the slightest sympathy shown towards communists would have rendered a writer an exile, and books of great social impact like Silent Spring were seen as "un-American". It's up to society to contextualise and punish crime; moral reckoning is for the reader's dabbling not the writer's, thank heavens. This is a problematic love story in which there are real and plausible dynamics. Crimes of this nature are constantly leaping out from the tabloids but who knows what goes on behind the superlative adjectives used to describe "the monsters who perpetrate such crimes"?
But it's more than the morality; this book is rather explicit in its descriptions of some of the sex.
I guess half the challenge is in trying to arouse people with forbidden scenarios and my protagonist is an explicitly indecent young man. The girls and boys he hangs out with all seem to suffer from similar dearths of decency in one regard or another
Do people find the characters in Glove Puppet bleak?
A few, but there is a lot of humour in the story as well as some sense of awakening spirituality. Vaslav, the central character, is only twenty when he tells the story. He's been through a lot of shit but at twenty it's pretty cool to be hip and miserable about stuff. He’s seen a lot of moral double standards at work so he's understandably cynical about the media and its “morality” (chuckle).
So how do people deal with being on trial by media for personal matters like sex?
Maybe you should ask Monica Lewinski? I don't know, but Vaslav realises his involvement in a sex crime is part of a bigger nasty picture, as much about selling papers and titillating the public as it is about any earnest moral agenda. He also learns that being a “victim” offers no indemnity. He too is fair game and the process that sets to work to incarcerate his abuser has no consideration for his own fragile emotional state.
You write in the first person. To what extent is the Vaslav character based on personal experience?
Certainly some of his early experiences and his adult adventures are things that have happened to me, or things I have witnessed and I'm not going to be any more specific than that (blush). But I grew up in a different environment to him. Having said that, had I found my life following a similar destiny to his, I'm sure I would have fallen into all the same traps. The sexual currency of youth is a powerful thing and perhaps one of the crueller aspects of our gay male culture, or even just male culture in general, is that as men we often consume beauty and youth as if it were loose change. Men have a tendency to think with their dicks—fuck first, ask questions later. The smartest man can be perilously foolish for lust.
So do you think you'll be seen as some sort of apologist for paedophiles?
That question really annoys me. No one could read Glove Puppet and say that. First of all you've got to ask, where does childhood innocence end and sexuality begin? Then you've got to address the issue that as gay men we are always considered sexual suspects around kids, despite all statistical evidence to the contrary. In part, I wanted to bite that bullet in a metaphorical sense by writing this. I've said, "imagine if something did happen then what would the consequences be?". Then you have to ask whether as a society we can forgive certain transgressions, and the only road to healing for victims—especially in family situations—is forgiveness. And finally one has to question oneself by seeing this story from each character's point of view. At the end of the day I would admit that as a fourteen-year-old I thought constantly about having sex with older men. As an adult the thought of sex with teenagers barely crosses my mind. Thankfully my tastes have become too sophisticated and I really think teen-sex should be left to teenagers. I'm glad I haven't come across Vaslav and equally glad that as a teenager, I never met a Shamash. The question that tends to linger uncomfortably with readers is, “should society have thrown the baby out with the bath water?”