Paul T. Klein: You’ve said that you hope that the book might be a comfort to readers who are questioning their gender and sexuality, and in many ways Midnight in the Cinema Palace is about how we try on different identities, or how we undertake transformations with regards to many aspects of our lives, like gender, sexuality, or our professions. I’m curious how you’ve gone about finding your own identity. Did you undergo a period like your protagonist Walter? 

Christopher Tradowsky: Thank you. Yes, but I still am going through a ‘Walter period, I think. I don’t think identity is ever done or ever decided. Judith Butler’s theories are really important to me, and one of the things that she makes quite clear in Bodies That Matter is that gender is never done—it’s never arrived. You’re always learning and exploring, I hope that the novel stays true to that. 

And it is a novel—it’s not a memoir. There are no direct analogs between any of the characters and anyone in my life. But the closest to an analog is Walter. I gave him a lot of my interests and characteristics, and I wanted to have that aspect of being lost and exploring and trying to find your people…of not really knowing what you desire or what the contours of your desire might be. 

PT: The novel takes a different approach to a normative coming-of-age story. Walter begins the novel very self-assured as a young gay man, but then he experiences what you call “a minor identity crisis” about his sexuality. What was it like to approach this kind of story from the perspective of a character who seems to know their homosexuality but not necessarily their queerness? 

CT: Walter gets to San Francisco thinking, “I’m as gay as they come.” One of the things that I’m really concerned with in the novel and in life is that this idea that men’s sexuality is rigid. It’s a kind of stereotype that’s been repeated and repeated. People will say that women’s sexuality is much more fluid, or that lesbian sexuality is more fluid than gay male sexuality. I always thought this was nonsense and was something that needed to be challenged. Walter is pretty sure that he’s a Kinsey Six. But once he gets to San Francisco, it’s not only a question of, “am I bisexual?” It’s questions of, “What is a man? What is a woman? What is this spectrum? Where’s my identification, and where is my desire along this spectrum? Can that change and shift?”

PT: You’ve also said that you hope that the novel can serve as a tonic for people who are “pondering how to live in a world that can be indifferent…and even overtly cruel.” The shadow of the AIDS crisis haunts many of the relationships in the novel. Walter wonders, you write, “if he would ever know how it felt to have sex without the angel of death hanging over him.” Or, in my favorite scene, a queer elder takes unexpected pleasure in an impromptu Christmas feast. But having said goodbye to so many of his friends, it remains bittersweet. He says that “beauty doesn’t save a single life.” We live in a moment of perilous politics and public health. What thoughts do you have on how we get through all of this? How can a novel like Midnight help us make sense of a really challenging moment? 

CT: Be brave. Be forthright. Be true to yourself. I am inspired to be courageous when I see other people acting courageously. 

When I was writing Cary and trying to define her character, I was trying to think about what makes her so popular. She’s popular because she’s brave. She just refuses to be anyone other than herself. 

Of all the chapter titles, “The Conformist” really resonates with me because I have that conformist strain in me. But I see people around me being courageous, and being out and proud, and I’m so heartened by that. And I’m inspired by the bravery of younger generations. I still have hope—lots of hope, actually. 

PT: We need it. We need voices of hope. 

CT: But we’ll circle back to one thing that you said. I think something that’s vital about my novel is the recognition that there’s history here. We were always talking about these issues. We didn’t have the same language—we didn’t have the same discourse around pronouns—but we did talk about gender and sexuality all the time. 

PT: The three central figures in the novel, Walter, Sasha and Carrie, develop this “ambivalent,” as you call it, relationship, to normative relationship models. It’s very Design for Living or maybe Challengers. What sort of drew you to these characters, and in this arrangement? 

CT: I understood the dynamic of a three-way relationship that was very romantic. I wanted to make it really romantic. Why shouldn’t poly folks or non-monogamous folks have that? All the stories about polyamory and non-monogamy are, I think, quite prurient. They’re always kind of seedy and trashy. Of course I wanted it to be sexy, but I wanted it to be as romantic as a heteronormative book about pair bonding… 

And I mean Challengers is different. Challengers is a love triangle, right? It’s not the same as a true, threesome. The men are competing for a woman. But this is not what’s happening here. The dynamic in my novel is less normative for that reason.

PT: Midnight is in many ways about nostalgia, whether for one’s youth, for a past that one never lived through, or for the art of a different time. But it also seeks to temper that nostalgia. Your characters are interested in the films of the 1930s and 1940s and in supper clubs and in jazz, but they’re living at the dawn of the Internet Age. How do you approach that push and pull towards nostalgia?

CT: I'm a very nostalgic person myself, and I cannot help indulging in nostalgia. It’s looking back with love at these kinds of idolized works of art in the Golden Age of Hollywood—and I’m counting camp as a form of love in that. 

But then the other aspect of nostalgia is that it can be real dangerous. Because nostalgia is a kind of idolization that can really blind you to the reality of the issues. That’s a theme that runs through the novel. Walter’s romanticism gets him into trouble. He’s glamorizing and romanticizing everything, and it keeps him from seeing his friendships and his relationships and his world clearly. I tried to make this clear with the character of Lawrence. Lawrence is not about nostalgia. He has this moment where he’s like, “fuck your nostalgia, fuck the idea of a more elegant time. That more elegant time was ruthless and exclusionary.” 

PT: You’ve walked yourself right into my follow-up question, which is about the intoxicating power of nostalgia. We live in a moment when that intoxication is rife, and when nostalgia is being used politically to enact retrogressive and like revanchist policies. So, the question is, how do we harness that intoxicating power of nostalgia for good? 

CT: I think that’s what Cary and Walter want to do with their screenplay. They rewrite film noir and make it overtly queer. So, it's looking at the past with a nostalgic eye but also an eye to revision. What can we take from the past and update? What can we celebrate, but also what can we redefine and what kinds of prejudices can we leave behind as we’re redefining it? That kind of stuff. 

PT: You’re able to play with the form of the novel by including extended passages of the screenplay that Cary and Walter write, as well as their brainstorms and notes. What was your experience in getting to work in those different forms? Was this your first time writing a screenplay? Were the challenges in changing or mitigating different styles and tones while creating a cohesive whole? 

CT: Yes, absolutely, there were challenges in that form. I haven’t written screenplays before, and I went into this thinking, “that’ll be good,” because Cary and Walter don’t know what they’re doing either, so I went into this letting that ignorance guide me. 

The thing I really wanted from it was a change of tone, a change of texture, and a change of pacing. I love folio novels where you have letters and dispatches from newspapers, and it’s all worked in. I wanted a little flavor of that, where suddenly the narration that’s been flowing along is gone and you have these kinds of notes where they’re figuring out what the heck they’re writing. And then the screenplay has a different mood and a different pace. I wanted the silvery color of the black and white implied.

I’m someone who writes imagistically. I have an image in my head, and sometimes it’s a tableau, or it’s a longer scene, or sometimes it’s just a frozen image, and I want to get it across.  

PT: I’m glad you brought this up because the novel is full of these wonderfully cinematic passages. When Walter first spies Sasha you write that “the light from the window produced a thin halo that flashed along her profile.” Not only does one understand the image you’re creating but they also get a sense of depth of field. You just said that you write imagistically, but I’m wondering, do you also write with a sense of cinematic grammar? 

CT: I think that I do in the sense of jumping between scenes. The novel’s quite chronological, but there are some ellipses. The whole novel is third person and very close to Walter almost the entire time. But film isn’t tied to a protagonist in the same way that a novel is, and that’s something that I find very exciting.

PT: Similarly, novelists, like directors, must make sense of all the constituent parts of their work. You have characters and ideas and scenes and phrases that you’re trying to form into a cohesive whole. You end up choosing—consciously or unconsciously—the details that go on to the page into the scene in the same way that a director chooses their mise-en-scène. How do you decide which elements of an image, or a scene, are those that require attention? 

CT: I love that question because I love thinking about that debate in cinema history about mise-en-scène versus montage. I love, say, Jaques Tati’s Playtime…

PT: It’s my favorite.

CT: It’s your favorite? It’s so incredible. And one thing that’s so great about it is that you just have to see it on a big screen. It just does not work on a TV…never on a laptop. That makes me sick to think about… 

I love films that are heavy on mise-en-scène where they set up the camera and you don’t know where to look and you spend the whole scene trying to figure it out. It involves so much engagement and activity on the part of the viewer, and I love it. 

In novel writing, I can’t do that. There’s no way that I can set up a scene and have the reader look wherever. I’m like the editor. The reader can only see what I can show you. I love giving the reader a lot of details to observe and hopefully delight in. But then the question is, “what is the detail that’s really going to animate the scene?” If you’re describing a whole room, what are the details that are going to paint the picture without having to describe every single detail? And that’s difficult. I lean towards over description, but I also love novels like that, so, sorry, not sorry.  

PT: Never apologize for your work! I love that you brought up Playtime because one of the things I have always done in my relationships—friendship or otherwise—is show people movies. And there are certain movies that, if they don’t like them, I know we’re not going to click. Playtime is one of those for me. If you can’t sit through a Tati film, we’re not going to connect. There’s this great scene in Midnight where Walter takes a date to Les Enfants du paradis, a 190-minute French drama from 1945, and it doesn’t go so well. Are there movies that you show people in order to get to know them, or movies that are dealbreakers for you? Or are you more forgiving of the people around you than I am?

CT: I have so much patience with art films that I have to be lenient with folks who just don’t have the same stamina. I went on a first date with a guy and I took him to see Peter Greenaway’s The Falls. This is one of the hardest art films I’ve ever had to endure. It was incredible. It’s four hours of short documentaries that are all about people whose last name starts with F-A-L-L. This poor guy… After the film he was like, “it was kind of long,” and I was like, “it was amazing! Peter Greenaway is a genius!”

PT: I’ve been there.

CT: “Can we see a Sharon Stone film next time?” I’d recommend some leniency on that. People can grow. 

PT: People do.

CT: You can absolutely grow with Jaques Tati. I believe that.

PT: What drew you to writing about movies in this way? Film noir is everywhere in Midnight. Why noir specifically? Do you have any favorites?

CT: I wanted my central characters to bond over a shared obsession and, drawing from my personal history, film seemed the obvious choice. For a character like Cary, who is style-obsessed, film noir is irresistible because it’s so stylish. It has everything in a way, it’s sexy and edgy, but it’s also full of humor, and can be very camp, and often contains lots of coded queerness. Most of my favorite noir titles are explored in the novel, but one of my very favorites is Strangers on a Train, which is loaded with queer subtext. Strangely enough it doesn’t feature a femme fatale—unless you count Robert Walker’s character Bruno as a femme fatale—I think there’s an argument to be made there.

PT: As an historian who works specifically on movie theaters, I relished your descriptions of, and clear admiration for, great theaters like the Castro, the Roxie, and the California. What drew you to these kinds of theaters?

CT: I am a big proponent of the cinematic experience over and above simply watching films at home. I really believe that something crucial is lost when movie theaters close—especially wonderful old movie palaces. I love the publicness and the communality of moviegoing, and especially the shared energy of watching films surrounded by an audience—communing in the dark with strangers. I feel like I could talk about this for hours.

But why an old movie palace, in particular, more so than a state-of-the-art cineplex? That comes back to style, overt stylishness. It has to do with being transported someplace, not a neutral black box but a heightened reality. One word I use to describe the Castro Theatre in the novel is eccentric. While you’re there you’re transported to an “eccentric realm” where fantasy overtakes mundane reality, and the architecture announces that, in a way.

PT: Last question, if you could adapt Midnight into a film, who would you want to direct it?

CT: Believe it or not, I haven’t thought about this much, because I haven’t allowed myself to fantasize about it—it’s too much to dream about, in a way. 

Who would I want to direct it? Preston Sturges! That’s cheating, I’m sure you want me to name a living director. But I’d really like Preston Sturges to write the screenplay… I would need an expert psychic to pull that off.