It’s a mistake to rile a gunslinging faggot

— 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…