Sam Lansky's Memoir Is an Edith Wharton Book with Gay Sex

The Gilded Razor is a story of teens, drugs, and anal. Typically, critics associate the subjects to CW shows, but Lansky has created a literary memoir as good as Mary Karr's Lit. Like Lady Gaga's mix of Madonna-style hooks and heavy metal, the book works as a pastiche of society writing (think Nancy Jo Sales's Vanity Fair features), addiction memoirs, and coming of age stories. In chapter one, for instance, Lansky describes blowing a boy at his parent's home in a scene very reminiscent of the infamous first chapter in Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story, which opens with a young White losing his virginity as a kid. White refers to anal as "cornholing."

Last week, I met Sam on the garden roof of the Petit Ermitage hotel in West Hollywood. He wore jeans that looked like they were tight-fitting sweatpants. While I ate poached eggs and Sam drank a cappuccino (he did not eat), we discussed sex, how his female friends are integral to the narrative, and why The Gilded Razor is a coming-of-age novel for everyone, not just fags and hags.

Broadly: The book discusses problems you've had since you came out—mostly drug addiction but some eating problems. Did your sexuality contribute to these issues?
Sam Lansky: I think so. Gay men have a different relationship with their bodies than straight men do because you are tracking your own attractiveness against the attractiveness of the people you're attracted to—which is not the straight experience. I definitely remember being chubby as a kid and being attracted to boys who were thin, muscular, and athletic and [thinking], That's not me. There must be something wrong with me. When I got deeper into drugs and started to manage my food intake in ways that were dysfunctional, I was tracking that against the standards of what I thought [male] bodies were supposed to look like and the kinds of men that I wanted to sleep with.

Did your girlfriends—who are a part of the story starting with chapter one—understand what you were going through?
I was always introduced to drugs by girlfriends, but I don't feel like they necessarily fueled it or exacerbated it. The extent to which I got strung out was a very private thing to me—it wasn't something that I advertised. I would party with my friends, but then I would leave and go party with kids I met in bars, alone.

Did they understand your sex addiction, though?
There's a chapter of the book that's really about this relationship that I had with this much older guy who was 43 when I was 17. We fell in love. I remember trying to talk about it with friends, and there's the scene where I talk about it with my friend Sahara. It was hard to get anyone on the same page with me. I knew that's because the page I was on was insane.

Is there a difference between a teenage guy dating an older man and a teenage girl dating an older man?
I think the power dynamics are different. There are specifics to when there are two men that make it different, but all of the rules don't go out the window. There were issues with the power dynamic. I definitely saw myself as this self-possessed boy Lolita, and that was a really big part of my persona and the way I imagined myself. In actuality I had much less power and agency than I thought I did. I thought I was the one in control.

Do you regret dating older men?
Not at all, but looking back at it, now that I'm in my late 20s, imagining being with a teenager is horrifying. I am habitually horrified by the idea of being with someone who was that young. I was sleeping with older guys when I was 14 and 15, and that's just insane now. Whenever I'm back in New York and I'm wandering around the Upper East Side, I see these prep school kids who were the age I was, in their blazers and chinos. They're infants—it's so upsetting to imagine. I thought I was really special. I thought I was precocious and mature and that's the reason older men wanted to be with me. But a lot of them were predatory and that wasn't something that I was willing to examine until I got older.

You graphically describe gay sex. Do you think readers are used to reading these descriptions of anal sex?
Yes, I do. I think that's true. For me, on some level—I'm gonna sound so lofty and pretentious here—it was sort of a political act to write very explicitly about sex. The gay writers I admire—like Edmund White, who I think writes about sex, and gay sex, more beautifully than anyone out there—were a real influence. I didn't want to be pornographic, obviously, but I felt a very strong need to express that it was a very real part of my experience, to not be ashamed of that, and to open up the experience of what it is like to be young and gay and sexually active.

Did gay books influence your writing?
I really love Dry by Augusten Burroughs. I think Lit by [straight writer] Mary Karr is a beautiful book. More than addiction memoirs, the books I really studied were classic boyhood coming-of-age stories: Stop-Time by Frank Conroy, This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff, and A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White were the biggest influences. Despite the fact that it's a kind of trendily drug-addicted, prep school Manhattan story, what I actually really wanted to write a sort of classic [coming-of-age] novel.

How did you prevent yourself from falling into the tropes of gay memoirs: coming out, getting bullied, and AIDS?
One of the things that I was conscious of when I was writing is the fact that a lot of my experience as a young gay man was post-homophobia. I'm a member of the first generation that was privileged enough to have that experience. When I came out at an arts middle school in Portland, Oregon—a liberal oasis—I felt really embraced. I think that was rare. It was 1999 when I came out. I was 11.

Do you think there will be more gay books like yours?
I think that we're going to start to get more of them. I think for a long time the conversation was for so long dominated by the AIDS epidemic—necessarily—and that's such a huge part of our collective history. It was a really predominant [subject] for a while. Beyond that, there are really stories about coming out and the experience of grappling with sexuality. Now that the worst of those two cultural forces is behind us, we get to start telling stories and having conversations about the gay experience that are about things besides [AIDS and coming out].