Bill Mann on His New 'Object of Desire'

William J. Mann is the acclaimed author of the popular "Boys" trilogy, "The Men from the Boys," "Where the Boys Are," and "Men Who Love Men" (the "boys" grow up in the final installment), as well as the novel "All American Boy."

Mann is also a biographer: his subjects have included William Haines and John Schlesinger, as well as Katharine Hepburn; Mann wrote all about the latter in his scintillating "Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn," a 2006 opus that earned a spot on the New York Times Book Review's list of notable books of the year.

Somewhere in-between the two genres there exists "The Biograph Girl," a historical novel that tells the story of real-life silent film star Florence Lawrence from her own first-person perspective.

And the historian in Mann shines in his overview of GLBT contributions to film, "Behind the Screen: How Gays & Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969."

Even for Mann, whose shelf full of book credits reveals him to be a hard-working and inquisitive writer, this is a banner year. The coming fall will see the release of his next foray into biography, "How to Be A Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood," a bio that combines Mann's meticulous, wide-ranging research skills with a deeply human and affectionate understanding of the woman behind one of film's most indelible legends.

But this summer brings Mann's new novel, Object of Desire, a sizzling cri du coeur straight from the heart of a man many in our community would recognize in the mirror: a man wrestling with the burden of a shattered family, carrying the weight of events from decades before even as he struggles to hold on to the most precious things life has brought him since.

In the case of the novel's first-person narrator, Danny, the events of a long-ago summer day--his fourteenth birthday, just before the onset of high school and its terrors--included the disappearance of his older sister, a mystery that plunged Danny's family into grief, chaos... and profound estrangement. With Danny's mother obsessively following every lead and his father drifting out of his life, the youth is left to fend for himself.

Finally breaking away, Danny heads to West Hollywood in the 1980s, where the gay scene and a sense of freedom and opportunity are nearly too much for him. But it's here that he meets friends who will help guide him into adulthood, including Frank, a beautiful, older man with whom Danny falls in love.

Fast-forward twenty years to Palm Springs, where Danny, now a rising artist, has just hit forty-one, and feels the stirring of something deep and unresolved. It's not just his latest birthday that's triggered him: Frank, now in his mid-fifties, is slowing down, and though he still shares a marriage and a sense of contentment with his husband, Danny needs something more--something like Kelly, the handsome young bartender Danny keeps encountering at parties thrown by his A-list friends.

Mann alternates between the three settings, gradually revealing answers--but, more crucially, exploring the aftermath of the disappearance, and the influence it exerts on Danny even now.

Bill Mann met with EDGE in Provincetown to discuss the his new novel, the changing nature of beauty, the dawn of marriage equality, and his next foray into biography.

EDGE: Your new novel, "Object of Desire," is coming out mere months before your new biography on Elizabeth Taylor. How did you manage both a new novel, as well as quite an ambitious new biography of Elizabeth Taylor, with the both of them coming out in the same year?

Bill Mann: Coming out in the same year. This is the first time that's ever happened. It was kind of a fluke of contracts, I guess--it just worked out that way.

I had two books due at roughly the same time. In truth, I wasn't really working on them exactly at the same time. I wrote "Object of Desire" before I got deep into the Elizabeth Taylor book. But I was deep into writing "Object of Desire" when I started the interviews for the Elizabeth bio, so there was some overlap, which generally doesn't happen.

But I was fortunate in that when [the time came to write] my last book to fulfill my contract with Kensington, I said, "What am I gonna write?" and I was struggling with this story; and I had an unfinished novel from several years ago that I suddenly realized would fit perfectly with the story I was now trying to tell. So even though it was difficult [to complete both books in such a short time], it was made easier by the fact that I was able to draw on a manuscript I had started some time ago and integrate it into the new story.

EDGE: Is that a case of a story on the writer's subconscious back burner and boiling away until eventually it comes back in another form?

Bill Mann: Exactly. I had wanted to tell a story about a girl who went missing ever since seeing a television show about Amy Billig, who disappeared in Florida in 1974. And it struck me: how do people go on when something like that has happened? How do families cope? And what does it do to the children who are left?

In this case, Amy Billig's mother became single-mindedly obsessed with finding her daughter. They never really said it in the documentary, but you could see it in her husband, you could see it in her son; they were kind of sitting there saying, "Hi, we're still here, and you've forgotten us..."

That intrigued me. I had done quote a bit of writing around that, around the day the girl disappeared and what her brother was envisioning, because I was writing from the brother's point of view.

When I started writing "Object of Desire," and I was working on the story of Danny, I needed to do a back story. I was struggling: "What's his story? Where does he come from? What baggage is he carrying?" Suddenly, it clicked that he was the brother of the girl who went missing.

Once I put those two story lines together I had my novel, I had the story that I really wanted to tell.

EDGE: It's not unusual in your novels for there to be more than one time-frame, with one story being told in the present and another part of the story being told in flashback to one or more previous settings. That's the case here, too, with Danny's story unfolding in Connecticut when he's a boy, West Hollywood when he's a young man, and then Palm Springs as he's hitting middle age, and the time-lines of the larger tale are arrayed so that they inform one another.

Bill Mann: There aren't as many of the West Hollywood sections as there are of Danny's boyhood and of his story in the current day. But they are important in that they set up the paradigm for Danny's life in many ways. You see how he can't believe that he's worth someone's love, and he never believes that Frank loves him--that he's number one with Frank.

In the West Hollywood sections, you see the kind of obsessive object of desire Frank becomes for Danny--and then, of course, that's repeated in the modern day, where Danny feels the same way about Kelly.

EDGE: That parallel is deepened when we realize that Kelly reminds Danny of someone from his boyhood, and we understand that's why he's fallen in love with him. In fact, the book, in many ways, is about letting go of things from the past. I think you need three time-frames for this book. I don't think the West Hollywood Danny would be old enough for the kind of story you're telling. It works better with someone hitting his forties than a kid of nineteen or twenty.

Bill Mann: When he's in West Hollywood, Danny's still trying to find that place for himself. He wants to be an actor. He wants to be a big, famous actor with his own television show. I thought it was important as an indication of his character that Danny wanted his own TV show--he didn't really want to be a movie star, he wanted to be a TV star, because that was something he could relate to as a kid sitting there watching television.

EDGE: And what better way for a kid from a fractured family to invent an ideal family for himself than on TV? On top of that, TV characters are part of millions of families who tune in every week.

Bill Mann: Exactly, and his mother would see him on TV. It was all of that. It takes quite a few years for him to say, "Maybe that's not what my place in life is supposed to be."

But at that point, in West Hollywood, he's still kind of a little boy trying to live out his dream to be lovable.

EDGE: In the book's current time period, in Palm Springs, Danny's turning... forty-two? Forty-five?

Bill Mann: He's just turned forty-one in the book, which I think is important, because the book tells the story of the same man at different ages: the forty-one year old and the twenty-one year old and the fourteen year old are so very, very different in may ways, and yet so much the same.

When I was showing early chapters of the book to my husband Tim, he asked if I was having any trouble keeping track of which Danny I was writing about, and I said, "No, they really are all the same to me. They're in such different circumstances, but the forty-one year old, in my mind, is the same character as the twenty-one year old."

EDGE: At the same time as Danny is starting to see that he needs to let go of things he's carried with him from his past, he's also coming to a point where he needs to realize the value of holding on to other things--namely, his ability to honor his commitment to Frank. It's a great idea, bringing what looks like two paradoxical ideas into the same novel where they kind of energize each other--but then, really, they're not paradoxical. The one leads right into the other.

Bill Mann: Yeah. Danny has been denied so much in his life; denied his mother's love, denied the career he had hoped for. Originally, the book was going to end very differently. Without giving anything away, I'll say that I just couldn't keep denying Danny everything. I felt he had to finally get something.

EDGE: Danny's been denied all these tings in his life and doesn't know how to hold on to things, like his relationship to Frank; he's holding on to unhealthy things and having a hard time holding on to the good, healthy things in life. He's having a midlife crisis.

Bill Mann: Oh, I think he definitely is. He's never been very good about that, at seeing the immediate. That's the lesson that Frank teaches him; all these years, Frank has been right there, so steadfast.

But yet, I don't look at Frank as a purely exemplary character, either. He's let the excitement drain out of their marriage and their lives, he's become kind of dull, and I think he sees that. He says, 'Okay, we've got to do something, here.' It's not like Frank is the good guy and Danny is the ungrateful spouse. I think it's a mutual give and take.

I find it interesting when I meet couples who have a large age difference between them, because I wonder, how do you negotiate certain things? Sometimes it might be easier, but other times it must be more difficult. When one guy's 22 and the other is 35, it doesn't feel like the difference is all that great on one level, but ten years later, fifteen or twenty years later, that difference becomes very significant. That's one of the things that Danny and Frank are dealing with.

EDGE: That would be an issue for any relationship, gay or straight, where there's an age gap. One partner starts to get older, have less energy, and I hate to say it, but might start to become less physically attractive. All those things could affect a relationship, especially for men.

Bill Mann: And for Danny the physical is very, very important. Ever since he was a little boy, he idolized the good looking boys in his class. He wanted to be someone beautiful, and never thought of himself as beautiful. [There's a part in the book] where he's dancing in West Hollywood and when guys come up to him, he's thinking, 'Why are these guys coming over to me?' He couldn't see how adorable he was.

And Frank was just spectacular, he was so beautiful when he was young.

And then in the modern section, we see a very different physical description of frank. His eyes are a little bit yellow, and he has age spots on his face. It was important to show what happens to physical beauty, that it's not permanent, that it changes over time. Maybe we can broaden our definition of physical beauty and see that maybe Frank's age spots are just as beautiful as the attributes he had as a younger man, because they're part of him now.

EDGE: Was this novel informed by the fact that now, unlike so many years and decades before, gays can actually get married--in over ten percent of the states of the union, now?

Bill Mann: I think so, because you really understand that through marriage you are making a commitment for the rest of your life. Of course, with gay marriage there comes gay divorce; many straight marriages end in divorce, and I'm sure many gay marriages will, too.

But as we are getting married--and Frank and Danny are married, they got married in Canada; at the time the book is set, marriage isn't yet legal in California--I think one of the things for me for the first sixteen years in my relationship with Tim, you didn't really think too much about that idea of forever. We went on [with life], and we did the work [around relationship issues], but it wasn't as obvious that, okay, this something that we are now committed to doing for the rest of our lives. It was never something we articulated as clearly as when you exchange your vows in front of your family and friends.

Now for the last five years, since we've been legally married, it's been becoming more obvious: this guy, this is it. If I'm serious about this, this is the relationship I'm in for the rest of my life. And it does make you stop and ask, "Did I make the right choice? Is this really what I want now for the rest of my life?" Because it's either this, or I go to divorce court. It's not [as easy as saying] "Honey, I think we need to separate." It means a real legal break. It's no longer a matter of filling a few cardboard boxes and walking away.

I think that is what we [as gay people] are starting to realize about our relationships. What do we really want? Are we really ready for this?

EDGE: There's been a lot of fist pumping over the dawn of equal marriage rights. But has there been much reflection as to whether we are ready for those rights? Do we take them seriously? And, you know, we're stereotyped as Peter Pans who never grow up, but how much of that comes from having been told that we're not fit for family relationships?

Bill Mann: Are gay people ready? I look at some of the couples who are getting married now who have been together for forty, fifty years already, and sure I think they're absolutely ready. You see that in the commitment, and you see that in the love of these couples.

But I think as a culture, as a population, we don't have a lot of experience with that yet. And I think that our generation is the generation that's teaching. I've often felt that: gay men of our generation, in our 40s, are the ones who [are setting standards and blazing the trail] because so many of the older generation are gone. They died from AIDS. There should be so many more of them, but there aren't.

We've always been the vanguard; we're the ones who won the rights, who dealt with the aftermath of AIDS. And we'll be the ones who show whether we can endure in these newly legal relationships. Will our marriages last? Will they prove even more resilient than straight marriages? I think it will be interesting to do a comparison of gay and straight divorce rates after we've really had a chance to settle into the institution, ten or twenty years from now.

EDGE:You view our generation as being in a position of leadership, but do you view yourself, as a gay novelist and biographer with a dedicated readership, as in any sort of mentorship role?

Bill Mann: I would love that, if it were the case. I don't want to presume that--but I do get a lot of mail from people in their 30s and 40s saying, 'You could have chronicled my life,' and that always feels really terrific.

But I also have a lot of friends who are in their 20s. I love younger gay men--I love their energy, I love their company. I feel very optimistic about the future when I hang out with younger gay men because I say, you know, "If these are the guys who are leading the cause into the next generation, then we are in good shape."

I'm not saying that every one of them is perfectly enlightened and ready to lead the charge, but overall it does seem that younger gay men have an acceptance of who they are earlier and much more comfortably than I did.

I think there are times when I have been a mentor for some of my younger gay friends, and I love that role. I think it's very rewarding.

EDGE: Now that you're done with your contract with Kensington, for whom will you be writing fiction?

Bill Mann: I don't have a new contract for fiction yet. I think for right now I'm not going to sign another contract for fiction.

I love writing novels and I imagine that I will write another novel some day, but some of the projects that I am working on with my nonfiction editor are bigger and pretty exciting, and they're going to take up my time for the next few years. I want to go in certain directions, and they're terrific, they're open to hearing what I have to say.

I like writing biographies, I might do another biography, but for the next book I'd like to write something that isn't the biography of just one person. Maybe a chronicle of a time and a place--so we'll see.

But the ideas that we're thinking about are probably going to take a lot of energy and time, so I'm not going to do another novel, at least in the foreseeable future.

EDGE: Would you like to expand beyond Hollywood?

Bill Mann: In terms of the non fiction? Oh, sure, absolutely. I kind of fell into that. I didn't grow up saying I wanted to write about Hollywood movie stars; it just kind of happened that way.

I was kind of pigeonholed as writing about gay Hollywood for a while, writing about William Haines and John Schlesinger, and doing the Hepburn bio. Even though she was not strictly heterosexual, that book ["Kate"] did kind of break me out of the gay ghetto.

And Elizabeth Taylor, all of her gay friends notwithstanding, writing a bio about her showed that I could write about straight people, too, which was fascinating. God, she had more sex than any of my gay subjects... more sex, more marriages, more everything!

[Laughter]

So it's been quote the ride, [writing the Elizabeth Taylor biography] and then finishing up the novel.

EDGE: Writers sometimes say that they regard their books as their children. Are you proud and happy with "Object of Desire?"

Bill Mann: I do like "Object of Desire." I feel like it's one of my better efforts. I don't know, I like the story. I felt like I did something that... if it's my last fiction for a while, I can go out feeling good.

One of the things I think I'm known for is being a good beach read. You can take one of my novels to the beach and enjoy the sexy romps with boys in West Hollywood or Provincetown, and that's great. I love that. I love when I walk down Herring Cove and I see guys reading my books. It's fabulous.

But I also try to get a little something more into those stories, and with this one I think I succeeded pretty well. I hope readers agree.

"Object of Desire" is scheduled for publication on July 1.