Emil Wilson, The Nightingales

Brett sits down with Emil Wilson to discuss his debut novel, 'The Nightingales'. They talk art school and graphic novels, autobiographical fiction and what differed from real life.  AIDS and his own experience working with someone who had the disease, remembering the past struggles, and two Pomeranians named Henny and Penny. 

Emil's website:

https://emilwilsonart.com/

Emil's instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/emilwilsonart/

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Transcript

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Brett Benner 0:00

Hey everybody, it's Brett Benner, and welcome back to another episode. I was so excited to sit down with today's author, and a large part of this is due in part because in terms of my reading life, I don't know about you, but graphic novels are not something I would normally pick up. In my mind, graphic novels are anime or fantasy. They're not stories that are always what I think I would necessarily gravitate towards. And yet, there have been some absolutely amazing books that are done in this format, and this is one of them, The Nightingales by Emil Wilson. It is a semi-autobiographical story. It is so beautiful, and the artwork inside is absolutely stunning. A little bit about Emil. He is an art director, illustrator, and comic artist who's based in San Francisco. His work has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers, as well as on billboards, gas station walls, NPR, the Oscars, and the Super Bowl. In twenty twenty, he was nominated for a Broken Pencil Award, which is a Canadian award, and earned an Ignatz nomination for Promising New Talent. The Nightingales is his debut graphic novel. So I hope you will enjoy this episode of Behind the Stack. Hey everybody, welcome back, and I'm thrilled to be sitting down with Emil Wilson today for this absolutely stunning debut, The Nightingales, one of my favorite books this year. I was so moved, and it's absolutely beautiful. So thank you so much for being here.

Emil Wilson 1:44

Thank you for having me. This is great. And I'm sorry I sound a little stuffed up, so I apologize But I also sound very masculine, which I like. So that's good. You,

Brett Benner 1:54

you really do. You have worn a lot of hats in your life between being an art director and an illustrator and a- Yeah a comic artist. I'm so curious for you, where did this all start? Like, in terms of, I know that you had a big career in art direction and also in advertising, but, but for you as a young person, were you always an artist? Was this always something that you were into?

Emil Wilson 2:13

Yeah, I was always drawing. I, I was always an artist. Art skills are, drawing skills are great to have in advertising. I think that I, I'd never read a comic book. I didn't read graphic novels. It was not a form that I, I ever really knew much about. And then what happened is a friend of mine died r- rather unexpectedly about 10 years ago, and I had just turned 50. She was 50. And there was just this feeling amongst our friends that, you know, if you've got something on your bucket list, you should probably start it if it's gonna take a while. And I think that that sort of first hit of mortality- Mm in your 50s is a rough little hump to get over. And, you know, my friends basically said, "You should go to art school, not because you need to do art. You've done ceramics and pottery and printmaking and illustrating, but you've never really made art your thing. It's always been the side hustle. And y- just once in your life, you should kind of put it front and center." And I just thought, I don't wanna be a painter. I don't wanna do one thing." I think that's, that's what's great about advertising is that you get to have a lot of creativity. And they said, "Well, what about, like, graphic novels? Because you can write and you can draw and you can design and you can kind of do what- whatever you wanna do." And so I looked at a few and I was like, "Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna try this." You know, it's hard because I, since I didn't grow up with comics, I don't think in panels, I don't think in word balloons. It's just not my thing. And so I went to this cartoon school to study. I was the second oldest person to ever go to the school. I was twice the age of all my classmates. Um, but it was a pretty good ex- it was a great experience. So, that's how I got into it, and then this book is a result of that.

Brett Benner 3:45

Wow. Had you always wanted to write, though? Was that something that had been on your list?

Emil Wilson 3:49

I had always wanted to write, and I had written a memoir about 15 years ago that I couldn't get published, which I'm turning into a graphic novel right now. And I think it was the part that I don't think that I'm a especially great writer. I think I'm an okay writer. I think I'm a much better artist, and I'm also one of those people that can do lots of those things together better. So that was sort of the reason for cartooning, and that was the reason for this book.

Brett Benner 4:12

Well, it's such an interesting thing to me because years ago, my perception of what a graphic novel was was always- Yeah kind of like manga or, uh, you know- Right it was superheroes or fantasy, and it hasn't been until, till the last few years that I've really started to s- to look at them more. And- You know, it's funny because my kids in school, they were taught Persepolis, and so that to me was one of the first times that I'd looked at something and been like, "This is so fascinating." Yeah. And what I find incredible about it, and it speaks so much of it too, and yours is the different ways that so much can be conveyed without using text, actually. And that's kind of an incredible thing because we think of like, oh, books, you know, it's all about the words, it's all about the words on the page. Yeah. But to suddenly see these kind of moments that are happening in this that have no words to them is so powerful to me and so beautiful.

Emil Wilson 5:04

It's interesting. When I was making this book, I found that the, the making of it felt much more like filmmaking in a lot of ways- Yeah than it was writing, because you're constantly thinking about what's the viewer seeing? What's the expression on these people's faces? You don't have the benefit of performance, but you have everything else at your disposal pretty much. So that was, that was a big discovery for me. And also because I don't... It doesn't look like a traditional comic, I didn't feel constrained with having it be like a storyboard, and that was really freeing for, for me.

Brett Benner 5:34

Just technically explain something for me, and in a second I want you to tell our viewers and our listeners your logline for the book, but it all looks like a watercolor sketchbook is kind of how you set it up. Yeah. So when you actually did this, just technically, did you do a lot of this in watercolors and then they reproduced them, or did you just do in the style of? Does that make sense?

Emil Wilson 5:53

It, it does. I mean, the, the trick, which I don't know if you're asking, is, is that I have incredible control issues when it comes to art. So I... Everything is... Like when you look at a page and you see a face and you see a watercolor, and you see like some smudges, each one of those is its own layer and its own piece of paper that I just scanned in. So nothing is actually in a book.

Brett Benner 6:14

Right.

Emil Wilson 6:14

I think that watercolor was a big piece of it, but that was not the only piece of it, and it never was. I thought watercolor was the sort of the beginning of it, and I think watercolor also sort of helps with memory, the idea of memory. But for the most part, I think that the idea of a sketchbook w- was the piece that was so important to me because a sketchbook is so expressive. Mm. It's so experimental. It feels like memory to me because some things are sort of started and half drawn. Some things are really complicated and really well detailed. And I, I thought that if you had to create a visual language that would speak to what memory is, a sketchbook would be a great way to do it. And so that was always sort of part of the or- origin of this book, was to sort of have it be a sketchbook. And I think that the other thing that is true is, is that one of the big hung arcs of cartooning is character design. I'm terrible at it. Because you're supposed to make a character look the same from page to page to page. We don't do that very well. But a sketchbook, everything is kind of forgiven because people sketch their spouses and their dogs 10 different ways, and you always know that it's the same dog, you always know- that it's the same spouse. And I thought, "Great, this is my little hack to get around things that I'm bad at."

Brett Benner 7:23

Wow, that's so cool. All right, so for our listeners or for our viewers, can you... Do you have a, a logline?

Emil Wilson 7:30

I do. So the elevator pitch, if you will, is that this is based on a true story that took place with my family. In 1985, my father had a coworker who was dying, and he invited this man and his two dogs to move in with our family. And it turned our family upside down in terms of my father wanted to be kind and to have this man safe. I think my mother was understandably very uncomfortable with having a stranger and a sick stranger in our house. And what else happens in the book is this friendship that develops between this man and the teenage daughter who's based on my sister. I was away at college. It couldn't have been a memoir because I wasn't there, but I knew enough about the people and I knew enough about the situation, and I met the guy. So I could... I felt like I could take liberties and also make the story. So-

Brett Benner 8:12

There were moments that when I was reading this, just visually, I kept thinking of this movie from 2020 called Uncle Frank. Yeah.

Emil Wilson 8:21

Did you ever see this with Paul Bettany? I did. I love that movie.

Brett Benner 8:22

And Sophia Lillis? And I-

Emil Wilson 8:23

Yeah, and, and Paul Bettany was the, was the uncle.

Brett Benner 8:26

Yes, yes. But that, and the combination with this was kind of like the sepia tone with the colors of this book, it was all kind of like washing in my head. How, how long did it take you to write this and do all this?

Emil Wilson 8:36

It took me about a year and a half, all said and done. It took about four years total, but in the middle of that, I... my father got sick and I ended up caring for him with my family. So there was about a two-year period that was taken out. And then the thing that's interesting is, is that I was accepted into a residency workshop, and I had lied and said that I had finished the book and I wanted to workshop it, and I had only done about f- 80 pages. And so for four months to prep, I just wrote the whole book. And so basically from page 80 to page 416 is all four months' worth of work, which was-

Brett Benner 9:09

Wow

Emil Wilson 9:10

Fantastic to have that kick in the butt to do it, but it was definitely a, a slog there. It was, it was a bit of a, a run to the finish,

Brett Benner 9:19

now, I'm so curious because I know it's, you know, you're, you're fictionalizing based on fact, but-

Emil Wilson 9:24

Right

Brett Benner 9:24

were you, were you able to, like with your sister, were you able to have conversations with her? Were you able to talk about certain things? Were there touch points that you wanted to hit on? I'm so curious how much your family was involved in kind of like giving you stories to kind of flesh things out.

Emil Wilson 9:39

I talked to everybody, which was great. My mother didn't remember much and then suddenly remembered a lot once the book came out, which I thought was fascinating. Um, oh, suddenly you, suddenly you know all the things about this guy, and before it was like, "I don't even remember this." So take that for what it is. My sister gave me just enough that I could make a story. Like she said, "You know, I don't really know what happened at the end. I know he passed. I know that, you know, Dad went to the hospital, I went to the hospital." But so much of the end of the book is from a different experience when I went to New York and worked with, people with AIDS as a buddy for GMHC, Gay Men's Health Crisis. The thing that was the best part of the book is that I got to talk about it with my dad before he died, and the thing that I love about that was that, you know, I said, "What made you have this man come into our home?" And he said, "Well, why wouldn't I?" And I'm like, "Why wouldn't you? Like, your wife wasn't on board. Your family didn't know this, this person. He was sick. There's lots of reasons why you might consider having him move in." And he just was like, "What do you, what do you think friendship is? This man needed something. We had it to give. That's what being a person is. Like, why are you asking me these questions like I've done something wrong?" And I th- remember thinking, "That is the best answer I could ever imagine anybody having," 'cause it's like, yeah, there's nothing behind it. It's just humanity. And I think that that was, that was one of the things that made me really wanna do the book, so.

Brett Benner 11:11

He's such a beautiful character, and so I love hearing that from your dad because he is so compassionate and so loving. And obviously the strains that this puts on this marriage, but also the kind of relationship that kind of forges out of this with his daughter. I just thought it was so beautiful. There's a moment, 'cause I was going through the book again yesterday, and when she's talking to Jim and she asks him, because there's this kind of sensitivity about her dad, and she says, "Do you think he's gay?" And he said, "I don't. I just think he is, you know, has empathy and he has compassion." And, and I- It's interesting, as the reader, that crossed my mind as I was going through it originally. And there's this section that you do that I love so much, where you kind of break down both parents in terms of their psychology, in terms of their histories. And that's another reason that I loved so much of what you did with this book, because you take something which is this linear story, and you go off on these moments that are kind of, for lack of a better way to put it, in my mind, it's like fantastical, and I'll describe more of that in two specific instance- instances that really make things pop in, in, in a way of storytelling that I don't know that it would have worked in a traditional narrative, but it's very theatrical or cinematic, which speaks again to when you're talking about developing how you looked at it sometimes as like a movie. The two instances that I'm thinking in particular are the dogs that Jim arrives with, and you kind of give them their own life and their own show per se. Right. So I'd love you to talk about that as well as the mother and her kind of leaning into her religion, but starts to have this kind of conversations with the Virgin Mary. Yeah. Which I thought was so incredible, so beautiful, and it's kind of, it reminded me of shades of Angels in America. I thought it was beautiful. So I'd love for you to talk about those two things and where those ideas came from for

Emil Wilson 13:09

you. You know, I'll talk about the mother first. My mother was the office manager at the Catholic church, and there was a big statue of Vir- of the Virgin Mary outside of her, where her desk was. And I did sort of imagine, I mean, it was an imposing statue, and I, whenever I came into the rectory, I would look up at it and, you know, it was a pretty interesting thing to see every day. And I just imagined, I wanted some way to reveal who she was without it being... I, I just, you know that the Virgin Mary is her creation, and you know that she's having these conversations that she herself is making up. And the thing that's so interesting to me about the mother is that people have said like, "Why is the mother so angry?" And I'm just like, "I don't think of her as angry." I think that my mother came from a time where she was born at the, the middle of World War II. She was brought up in a very patriarchal family where, you know, the daughters were meant to get married and be mothers. And my mother was in- is incredibly sharp. And I just think, you know, I, I think that this generation of women didn't have a lot of choices. And I think that she's incredibly frustrated, especially when her husband makes a decision to bring someone into the home and she doesn't get a lot of say in it. And I just think I think that one of the great things about writing this book has been kind of giving my mother some grace and understanding what she must have been going through and not sort of judging like, you know, just be nice, this person needs a place to stay. That it, it was difficult for her. So yeah, that was... I think the Virgin Mary was just a great way to sort of get that point across The dogs are a completely different thing. He did have two dogs. They were identical. They were not Pomeranians, they were Shih Tzus, and he had groomed them. Like the type of gay man that he was, he had had them groomed within an inch of their lives. Like, they were beautiful dogs. I remember they had, they had different colored bows in their hair. Because the Shih Tzu sort of have that ponytail that sits on top of their head, and the fur sort of cascades down, and they were gorgeous. Like, they looked like something that you just wanted to hold and touch, and he was so proud of them, and they were so devoted to him. And so that was the reason for creating the dogs. I didn't know anything about that breed. I knew something about Pomeranians. So... And Pomeranians also always look happy. I had a friend who taught one to dance. And so I thought, "That's what I'm gonna do. They always look like they're smiling. I'm gonna give these dogs a, an inner life." And I, I feel like this book needed a little bit of levity, and they were absolutely the levity I wanted. And, and they were so unapologetically feminine that I just love that. I love the fact that they were like girl dogs who liked bows, and they liked, you know, they liked to be girls, and I just thought that would be a really great story, a really nice character to develop.

Brett Benner 16:01

Yeah. They're hilarious. It's funny, when I was growing up, 'cause I completely understand and empathize with the mother character, 'cause my mother was very much the same thing, and it was that same era. And, you know, it was have children, run the house, have dinner on the table every night, and get the kids dressed to go to church on Sunday mornings, and she ran a tight ship. And sometimes I look back now and I think my dad, my dad was really a bachelor who ended up with a family, and he kind of ran his life that way, and he was- Mine too he was a, he was a good father, but a, very much an absent father. But I think so many of us who grew up in those generations, that was what we knew. We, we knew our mom was kind of the, caretaker and ran the, ran the roost. Now, you talked about potentially doing, you know, working on your memoir. Are you doing it in the same format?

Emil Wilson 16:47

No. I'm, I'm trying to figure that out now. I mean, it's a bunch of dialogues. It's a completely different story. It centers on, uh, me and my sister, and it's about family and the families we create, and the families who sort of help the families we create. And I'm just trying to find a different way to do it. I think that, again, coming from advertising, I think most illustrators, most comic artists have a style. They use that style. In advertising, you don't want a style. You... It's always based on what the idea of the piece is. And so I'm sort of developing that now, and it's, it's been great. It's been great. I, I think that so much of my problem with comics sometimes is the dialogue gets stop and started because you're going from panel to panel- Mm from word balloon to word balloon, and the dialogue never has a chance to Just kind of flow. And that's what I'm trying to figure out a visual way to do. So we'll see how that goes.

Brett Benner 17:39

But I have to believe, too, on the other side of it, did you find there's something freeing in some regards to doing it with a artistic way in terms of not the traditional prose prescribing every single moment?

Emil Wilson 17:53

Yeah, I think that my biggest thing was that I didn't want-- It wasn't that I tried to be different. I think I just knew I didn't like the format, and I just kind of wanted to follow my own vision of it. I think that one of the great things about going back to school when you're in your fifties and sixties is it's like you have an instructor who's twenty-five years old saying like, "This isn't comics. You need to do it this way." It's like, "Fuck off, I can do whatever I want." "I'm too old to listen to you." Like, I, I, I could be your dad. So I- And I know that, know that's an incredibly wrong way to look at it, but it was, it was sort of my way of thinking like, "I can do what I want. I don't, I don't need any rules. I'm too old for that shit." So, um-

Brett Benner 18:33

And you're not trying to impress anybody at this point. Do you know what

Emil Wilson 18:35

I mean? Exactly. Like, who knows? I may never get a comic printed, so I have nothing to lose. So I'm just gonna do it my way, and people will either like it or they won't. So- And I think that that was threatening for a lot of twenty and thirty-year-olds that were like, "Well, you can't do it this way." And it's like, where's the police for comics? Jesus. Like, sorry, I can do whatever I want.

Brett Benner 18:55

Well, this is an interesting thing, too, then. What was the path to publication for you in getting it sold?

Emil Wilson 19:00

I think that it was just... I sent it to this person who I knew, and he doesn't represent nor read graphic novels, and he just said, "I was moved by this, and that's all I look for." And that's-- I, I've gotta believe that someone else is gonna be moved by it, and we sold the book in five days. Like it was- Wow it was one of those things that he was like, "No, this is ready to go." And I was like, "Oh no, it's a first draft." Like, "We're not there yet." And he's like, "Oh no, we're there. It's gonna be finished. We're gonna get this published." And that was also another great lesson, was that I think that artists tend to be very precious at some point, and I had made this point to be not precious and then became very precious. And it was sort of taken out of my hands at that point. We had sold it, and I had to just edit it, and it went to market, so.

Brett Benner 19:50

That's incredible.

Emil Wilson 19:51

It was great.

Brett Benner 19:52

I was reading on another interview that you had given, and I found this so interesting, and I don't know if this is one of your students who had said to you when they were talking about the book. And I don't know if the student was gay, but they didn't know anything really about the AIDS crisis.

Emil Wilson 20:07

Yeah. Yeah.

Brett Benner 20:07

And I found that-

Emil Wilson 20:08

I've had that question several times. Like, that's not been an odd situation where someone says, "I c- I don't know anything about it." Like, "I don't know anything about AIDS. Can you just give me a quick rundown?" And I just, I just remember thinking how great that we've moved past it, but how awful that we've moved past it. Like- why am I explaining this to anybody? And the truth is, is that if you were born in, you know, 2005, you don't have a lot of reference for the AIDS crisis. And so I get it. I just don't like it. And it-- for somebody like me and maybe you, we grew up with it. It was everywhere. It was-- it, it formed who we were sexually, regardless of what our sexual preferences were. So It's, it's, that's been surprising for sure.

Brett Benner 21:01

Well, and it's, it made me wonder, like reading that comment, it made me wonder about how much information gets, um, kind of buried, right? I mean, even like you look now, I know with this current administration, like- Yeah literally erasing all the Black history, that they're systematically kind of pretending it didn't happen or kind of creating this, you know, American nationalist white movement that everything is Pollyanna and we've never done anything horrible to anybody or continue to do it e- to people. But I, I felt the same way when I saw that. I was, I was astounded that people have no concept, especially... People generally, but especially as a gay person, to not understand at all this huge, huge thing that took place that wasn't like, "Yeah, some people died, and it was a bad thing." When you think of the complicity of the government, when you think of the amount of people that... Like the, also just the books, the movies, everything that came out of that 'cause people had to kind of find a way to express it.

Emil Wilson 22:01

Yeah, mobilize the community. Like, I can't imagine... I mean, given my age, I can't imagine what being gay would be like without the AIDS crisis and- Right the AIDS epidemic. One of the things that has been great about this book has been the whole back end of the book is based on a friendship that I had with this man that I was a buddy for. And for people who don't know, when you were a buddy and you were assigned somebody, generally your, uh, tasks were to go to the grocery store, go to the pharmacy. And this man had a boyfriend who did all that, and the boyfriend didn't live with him. And so I would go over three or four times a week, and he would just talk to me. He just, he had found that talking about dying was really making his, uh, boyfriend depressed, and the boyfriend couldn't take it anymore, and so he wanted somebody that he could talk to. I was 21 years old. I had never been in a big city. I had arrived in New York two months before that. And I'm sitting in this man's apartment three or four times a week before going to Uncle Charlie's down in the Village, and he would just t- tell me about coming to New York and being gay, cruising for sex in the parks, dying when he had all this, all these dreams of what he wanted to do. And I knew that because o- of the timing of my birth, that had I been born three or four years earlier and I had come to New York, I would most likely have gotten sick.

Brett Benner 23:18

I'm hundred-

Emil Wilson 23:19

And I know that it was my, that timing that saved me in a lot of ways. And so I was always very conscious of that. But what I didn't realize is that this man was giving me this oral history of a community that I was part of and I didn't know anything about. And it was I mean, I had had a teacher in high school who had been gay and had sort of taken me under his wing after I had graduated and basically said, like, you know, "Just love yourself for being who you are." And this man sort of gave me the history of all that, and it was profound. Like I, I-- a couple times I've talked about this at a book reading and started choking up, which is so awkward, but it was so wonderful to have that. I think about it now as... I mean, I don't know how old this man was. I was 21, so everybody over the age of 30 looked like they were Methuselah, so who knows how old

Brett Benner 24:12

he was.

Emil Wilson 24:13

And, and also he was so emaciated by the time I met him that I didn't know how old. I mean, he-- I put him probably in his early 40s, maybe his late 30s, but I'm 60 now, and I've lived 20 years beyond where he was, and I think about him all the time in terms of, you know, who are we and what are we willing to... You know, he was-- he so loved bathhouses and the sex culture of New York. That's what he had come there for. And I think that the first time he talked about it, I kind of reared back, and now I just sort of think, like, why not go someplace and do exactly what you wanna do as you wanna do it? And I just think about him all the time. It was absolutely transformative for me.

Brett Benner 24:54

That's incredible, and I- I- I- I feel, I feel like I reacted so much to the same way you did in terms of hearing something and then coming around to that place of like, look, these were also just spaces where men could go and- Right just connect with each other and feel somewhat safe and attractive- Yeah and be who they wanna be in a society that was constantly, you know, pushing down. And I'm like you, I moved to New York after graduating from college, right as it had all peaked and was coming down, right? But I remember all the time being terrified of just checking my body for any kind of marks all the time, for being terrified to even connect with somebody sometimes. But also just having these men who were just decimated, like you said, at the prime of their life, where they were beautiful, and just coming into who they were and seeing them all just laid out. And, you know, I was a theater kid, and I remember going to see Grand Hotel. Like, that was one of the big things. And, um, Michael Jeter and- Yeah um, and, uh, oh my God, and I'm blanking on, on, on the guy who was the lead, but it was like Jane Krakowski. But-

Emil Wilson 26:09

Tommy Tune. Oh, it was Tommy Tune? No.

Brett Benner 26:11

No, it wasn't Tommy Tune. It was, um, he

Emil Wilson 26:13

was- I c- I can see his face too. The, there was, there was a Tony Award clip.

Brett Benner 26:16

It's- He was, yes, he was a leading man 'cause they were doing, um, "Let's Take a Glass," he and Michael Jeter, right? Yep, yep, yep. Anyway, both of these guys died of AIDS. And I remember when, it was, it wasn't Jeter first, but I remember just being gutted because this voice and this person, it's just, it's so hard. Even my son I was sitting with, and I've talked about this on the podcast a lot 'cause we have a son who's gay, which is, you know, so kind of, it's a, it's a, it's a beautiful thing, but also a crazy thing to have gay parents who have a gay son. Um, but he said something last night. He brought up something about Nancy Reagan. Mm-hmm. And I had to just explain to him very quickly, in the context of conversation, about what her husband represented and kind of the- Right, right politically what that all meant. So I love that you, to me now, hearing this all from you- I guess the gift for me in all of this is that young people who might not know will discover something and perhaps be curious enough-

Emil Wilson 27:16

Right

Brett Benner 27:16

to explore it a little more and find out what this actually was, which is, I guess, what good literature should do.

Emil Wilson 27:23

I, I think so. I mean, there's, there's such a trade-off. I mean, somebody asked me once ab- I mean, I was talking to a, somebody who was in their 20s and saying, you know, being gay in 2026 is so profoundly different than being gay in 1986. Like, I would never judge somebody for not coming out at their job in 1986, and now it's kinda like, w- what are you-- what's the problem? Right. And, and I... So much has changed, and to see, and to have lived through all of that, and to see words like the word queer go from being a... I mean, I remember having my head pushed into a toilet in high school and being called a queer.

Brett Benner 28:01

They used to call s- we used to play a game called Smear the Queer. Smear the

Emil Wilson 28:04

Queer.

Brett Benner 28:04

Yeah.

Emil Wilson 28:05

And then, and then to, now it's this word that's this big umbrella that we all live under. Someone asked me if I identified as a queer artist, and I was like, I have such a problem with that word. It's so triggering for me because it was used so, so derogatorily against me." But, I mean, I get it, and I love the fact that language changes, but at the same time, it doesn't erase the experience that I've had with it. And so I think that that's one of the benefits of growing older, is that you just see the world turn. But It doesn't change what your experience at all. And I think about, especially with this book, about the a- AIDS crisis and, and how we've all come, come through it. In a lot of ways, I still think it's, it's a major thing that we don't talk about and maybe should, but it is really different. It's just really, really different.

Brett Benner 28:54

Yeah. And in some ways I look at it and think the gay culture hasn't changed in terms of, right, there's this-

Emil Wilson 29:00

Right

Brett Benner 29:00

um, in terms of focus on beauty, on youth. Yep. Um, you reach a certain age, you become invisible, all of these kind of things. And so in, in a way, now we're sitting back as kind of like Yodas, like gay Yodas, like looking at this, and I, I, I feel I'm 100% where you are, where I feel like watching it through my son's eyes and seeing- Oh, yeah how this is, and even the whole like binary conversations, and I find it really fascinating, and I do sometimes, and I'm sure you wonder too, like what would life have been like to have this kind of, uh... And listen, we're nowhere near, we can tell in terms of kind of acceptance on a national stage, right? That's not- Sure that we're so far from that, but there is a different conversation that happens now, and there is a way that people talk and, um, that there, there doesn't for, for large groups of people, not all certainly, can have a, a, a freedom to be closer to who they are. And I do think it empowers young people. That's what amazes me, is how they're empowered to really be themselves in a way that I think we were all terrified of opening our mouth

Emil Wilson 30:13

Oh, for sure. And the fact that there's language. You know, somebody-

Brett Benner 30:16

Yeah

Emil Wilson 30:17

you know, I, I think I-- in the book, I sort of describe the father as being a little asexual, and that was never a word that I even knew.

Brett Benner 30:25

Right.

Emil Wilson 30:26

You know, somebody told me that... In art school, someone said, "Well, I'm demisexual." And I'm like, "I don't know what that word is." And he's like, "Well, it's just, I need to have a personal connection before I can- Right have sex with somebody." And I'm like, "There's a word for that?" I thought that was just sex- like, I... Okay.

Brett Benner 30:43

Right. Even hearing, you know, w- w- Ours are much more strident. Like, if you were bisexual, I'm like, "Okay, I understood what that was." But this is the, like, the joy of having kids who will constantly come home and say to me, you know, "No, that's not what it is. No, that's not what it is," or, "It's this now," or, "It's this now," or, "It's this now." Um, you know, e- even the trans conversations and I've been like- Right and them going to school with kids who are beginning to go through the process of understanding, you know, their own lives. And so that has been fascinating. But, you know, I guess this is what we call progress and, and moving on and- I

Emil Wilson 31:21

think so. I think that is what's called progress. I had this, uh, somebody who was trans come up to me afterwards and say, "You know, I, I wanna talk to you about... I don't feel like I've mourned the AIDS crisis enough." And they were probably in their late 20s, and I just said, "You know what? You've got enough fights to fight. We fought that fight. That fight is, for the most part, behind us, hopefully. You fight what you f- need to fight, and then in twenty, thirty years, someone will ask you about it, and this is... You know, just talk to them about it. But don't-- You don't have to mourn the AIDS crisis for f- because... Just know about it. Just know what it is."

Brett Benner 31:57

Yeah.

Emil Wilson 31:57

And, you know, the fights continue. They're just different fights. But Yeah, that just happened to be ours, so

Brett Benner 32:04

Well, and I love, as we're closing out, I love this story because, you know, for anybody going into it, it's about her, this young girl, and her story. And I keep, as we're talking, I'm thinking about the impact that it would have had and had for this character-

Emil Wilson 32:19

Right

Brett Benner 32:20

in terms of this seminal moment of being with somebody. And not only coming to an understanding with this person of perhaps what it is to be with someone who's gay, which they may not even know, but to also be faced with someone's mortality and to have this kind of incredible connection and the way that that will be so lasting. And we know so many people who have gone through that and did have those people in their life, and that's exactly what you were talking about earlier, this, this man that you were the buddy for and, and, and how that's so amazing. My friend Lewis on Instagram, 'cause I told him that we were sitting down today, and he loved this book-

Emil Wilson 32:58

Oh,

Brett Benner 32:58

great and said, um, "Can you ask one question for me?" And I was like, "Of course." And he said, "Can you ask what happened to the dogs?"

Emil Wilson 33:07

I, the truth is, I don't know. Yeah. In the original ending that I wrote, the mother admits to it. We had a dog in our home that the, the, the, the conversation in the book is exactly the conversation we had where she said, well, he was taken to a farm, and I was like 17 years old, 16 years old. And I just, I've always been really frustrated that she felt like she had to lie about it. Um, but in terms of Jim's dogs, I asked my sister, and she's like, "I don't know what happened to them. They were there, and then they were not there." And, and that was enough. That was all I needed to hear based on what I knew. And I wanna believe that my father would have Made sure that they were taken care of. Mm. I, I think that my mother did not like the dogs. I know my mother didn't like the dogs. I remember that vividly. But I don't know, and the thing that was great about having to fix the ending is, you know, my editor said, "Look, if something bad happens to these dogs, and you, and you know it, nobody will forgive you." Yeah. "You'll be the guy that, that does that." And I said, "Well, I don't know what happened to them." She's like, "Well, then lean into that. Like, lean into the fact that you don't know." And it was funny because that weekend we had this cat that we... I'm not much of a cat person, and we had gotten this cat a couple years earlier, and my husband and I fell in love with this cat. Like, I loved this cat. And one night she disappeared, and we found her collar out in the field. And every morning when I got up, I would leave the front door open.

Brett Benner 34:37

Mm.

Emil Wilson 34:37

And finally, after like two months, he was like, "Honey, Charlie's not coming back. I hate to tell you, but she's not coming back." And oh my God, I'm gonna get, I'm getting teary just thinking about it. Um, and I thought it was that, that, that absence of knowing felt like, on one hand, what happened in, what happened in the AIDS crisis. Like, there were so many people that I m- encountered that suddenly they were just gone.

Brett Benner 35:02

Yeah.

Emil Wilson 35:02

And you didn't know. I mean, you sort of knew what happened to them, but you didn't know. And what had happened to the cat and what had happened to the dogs just felt like someone just kind of being taken away, and that was really, really hard. So, uh, yeah, I'm gonna cry about that later, but I'm not gonna do it now. Um, but that was, that was really helpful to, to finish the end of the book, is I, I truly just didn't know. And yeah, I, I don't even know to even speculate. I, I, I wanna believe one thing, and the other thing sort of hangs over what it could be, and I just don't know.

Brett Benner 35:40

Yeah. No, I get it, and I loved how you did it. Well, Emil, the book is- Thank you absolutely beautiful. Everybody go out and get it. Buy independent if you can. But not only is it so beautiful to look at, but it is just an absolutely stunning story, so thank you for sharing it, and thank you for being here today.

Emil Wilson 35:58

Thank you. This has been great.

Brett Benner 36:00

One small postscript. In the episode we talked about the musical Grand Hotel, and I couldn't remember the name of the other actor with Michael Jeter. That actor was David Carroll. David was nominated for a Tony for his role in Grand Hotel, as well as being nominated for a Tony for his role in the original company of Chess. If you liked today's episode or other episodes of Behind the Stack, please consider liking and subscribing so that you never miss an episode. Also, if you have the time, what would be really amazing for me is if you can go to your podcast platform of choice and give the show five stars, and if you have even more time, to write a review. All of these things are really helpful to get the podcast out in front of listeners who may not already know about it, so I can continue to bring you conversations like this one I can always be found on Instagram, YouTube, and Substack under Brett's Book Stack. And as always, thanks for listening