Robert Plunket – or Bob, in company – always suspected that he was going to get rediscovered, but he’s a little surprised, at 80, that he’s alive to see it. “I thought it would be after I was dead,” he tells me from his home in Florida; “it’d make a better story if I was dead. But as it is, I’m still alive. So, you’re stuck with me.” 

We’re talking about Love Junkie, the second of his two novels, which was originally published in 1992. Plunket was at the centre of the New York gay scene in the 70s and 80s (he even played a ‘timid gay guy’ in Scorsese’s After Hours); his books, both satirical comedies of manners with dazzlingly immoral protagonists, have a small, dedicated fanbase, and might have even been an influence on Seinfeld. Yet, despite this acclaim, Plunket’s books fell out of print, and he decamped to Sarasota to become a gossip columnist.

Plunket’s fans have, however, finally succeeded in bringing him back to public notice, and both his books have now been reissued in gorgeous, colourful editions with Penguin Modern Classics. Love Junkie’s reissue, in particular, is one of the most exciting things to happen to contemporary fiction in years. It tells the story of Mimi Smithers, a bored, mildly evil Westchester housewife who falls into a circle of New York gays and becomes infatuated with Joel, a professional hustler. Amidst the comedy of Mimi’s descent into madness, the novel silently fills in the background with a sharply detailed portrait of the start of the AIDS crisis. 

Love Junkie’s sensibility is usefully different to more contemporary queer fiction, but it also gains a lot from critical lenses that have been honed more in recent years. (Plunket brings up the book’s trans resonances unprompted: “In retrospect, though I didn’t intend it, there’s definitely this transgender quality to the whole book.”) Good news, then, that we are ‘stuck with’ Plunket; he has lost neither his charm nor his critical eye, and he’s working on his first new fiction in over three decades.

Dazed spoke to Plunket over Zoom about sexual obsession, the book’s influences, and the psychology of hustling. 

I love the title Love Junkie. There are a bunch of different ways you can parse it. I don’t know if Mimi’s primarily a junkie for love, but it depends on how you use ‘love.’ Why did you call it that?

Robert Plunket: I was watching television, and there was a talk show about women who fell in love too much, and how it caused issues in their lives, and they’re all sitting around talking, and one of them says, ‘I feel like a love junkie.’ And a lightbulb went off.

Love Junkie is, in some ways, out of step with what queer fiction tends to do now, but I think it’s a welcome out-of-step-ness. We have so much very sincere, very authentic, very trauma-informed contemporary gay and queer fiction. Getting a spiky comedy of manners feels like a gulp of cold water. 

Robert Plunket: I don’t follow current gay fiction, but I certainly know what you mean. The more irreverent side, the side with an edge, doesn’t seem to be there much right now. 

There will be people coming to Love Junkie now who won’t have much of a frame of reference for what you’re doing here. If someone reads Love Junkie and likes it, what would you tell them to go read? What were your influences at the time?

Robert Plunket: There are two novels I can think of off the top of my head that deal with and explain the same period in gay history, and I would very highly recommend either. The first one is Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran, and the second is Faggots by Larry Kramer. They’re both from 1978, and they were the first ‘legitimate’ gay novels; they both proved that gay literature wasn’t just for queer men. It was good enough for everybody.

If a gay guy tells the story, then it’s entirely a ‘gay novel’, and straight people are not interested in gay novels. So, I got the idea to have a woman telling it, which opens the story up to a much wider audience

Mimi is a kind of slantwise narrator. She’s both inside and outside of the gay milieu that the novel is describing. What do you think we get out of seeing it through Mimi’s eyes, rather than through a gay guy’s eyes? How does her positionality contribute to the story?

Robert Plunket: Well, actually, I chose to have it narrated by a woman for a very crass commercial reason. If a gay guy tells the story, then it’s entirely a ‘gay novel’, and straight people are not interested in gay novels. So, I got the idea to have a woman tell it, which opens the story up to a much wider audience. 

Then, once I decided that Mimi was going to be the narrator, I had to figure out how women think. That was very difficult. But it was fun. I asked a lot of women: ‘What would you do in a situation like this?’ And they gave me all kinds of crazy answers, which led me to believe that Mimi, in her naivete and her lack of comprehension about men and sex, is expressing something accurate.

I saw someone in a review say they didn’t think Mimi made a convincing woman. And, well, she’s clearly quite heightened, but I disagree. There’s something real there. 

Robert Plunket: I hope so. I can see why people say that she doesn’t make a convincing woman, but so what? She’s still a great character, and hopefully she’s fun to hang out with. And, though I didn’t intend this at the time, there’s this transgender quality to the whole book. You’re playing with gender, and you’re switching around, and you’re looking at situations through a female eye, then a male eye, and perhaps through a transgender eye.

100 per cent, there’s a transgender effect there. Mimi’s very readable as trans. I also love how Mimi is pursuing this very straight fantasy, but every step she takes to get to it seems to make her gayer? She leaves her husband, kills her dependent, trashes her house, and has lesbian sex multiple times, all in an attempt to get closer to Joel.

Robert Plunket: I think that’s the gay man in me coming out, in talking about the effects of sexual obsession, which is such a tricky subject. It’s hard to explain. You either have it for somebody or you don’t.

Seeing some of the ways in which Mimi is deliberately deluding herself as to Joel’s actions, it can make you think, ‘I hope that’s not me.’

Robert Plunket: Uh…[laughs] It probably is you.

We should accept it. 

Robert Plunket: Now I’m old, that doesn’t happen to me anymore. And I do kind of miss it, you know? Those sexually obsessive relationships, they were a lot of fun. They usually don’t last very long. But one of Joel’s great gifts in the book is that he knows how to make that kind of relationship last long enough for him to get as much money out of it as he can. 

I love Joel as a character. He feels like this figure produced by the place where straight women’s and gay men’s fantasies meet. It can feel weird to act like straight women and gay men want the same things – writ large, they don’t – but he’s where they overlap. 

Robert Plunket: I didn’t think of it like that, but I think you’re right. And I think the reason is that Joel has this talent for sex. He understands how to use it; he understands how to make money from it. 

It’s interesting that he’s not always very good at the practicals of sex, though. But the fantasy seems to sustain itself enough that it doesn’t necessarily matter.

Robert Plunket: Maybe not, but he understands what the other person wants. He has a sixth sense for figuring out what they need, sexually. And sometimes they don’t even know. But he can put his finger on it. I saw that firsthand, because my lover was a hustler, and he had clients and he had to figure out how to make money off of them. He figured out what they wanted more than anything, and then he gave it to them. It really is a skill. And, of course, you’ve got to have the looks. But he worked at it, five hours a day, he was lifting weights, doing exercise, keeping himself in perfect condition.

What did the research look like for Love Junkie? Were you drawing mainly on areas that you knew a lot about anyway? There’s an encyclopaedic understanding of furniture in this book.

Robert Plunket: I didn’t need to research the furniture; that’s all stuff that I’ve been obsessed with my entire life. And, well, everything in the book really happened. You know? I changed the names, I switched the situations around and fictionalised them, but everything in it happened.

The disastrous film production, which was based on real stuff?

Robert Plunket: Oh, yeah, that happened.

Did people get annoyed at you when the book came out, or did they consider it more fair use, using that kind of circulating gossip?

Robert Plunket: No, nobody got annoyed at me, believe it or not. Of course, most of them had died. Which sounds awful, but it’s what happened. There was a woman I knew quite well who had many of Mimi’s characteristics. I think she was a little annoyed, but, you know, she forgave me. Presumably, she didn’t want to bring it up because she was pretending that it wasn’t her. So I somehow came out of it without making any enemies. I was surprised.

I don’t think people realise how dangerous sex is [...] It can kill you, and it always gets you in trouble

You didn’t design the book to reappear during this period. If you’re presented with the question of how Love Junkie can speak to, like, gay life now, conditions now, does that preoccupy you? Or is your vision for the republication different to that?

Robert Plunket: I’m not really interested in whether it does or not, because it’s a period piece. It’s very specifically about AIDS. It’s like writing about Vienna in 1938: the horrible thing is about to happen, and nobody quite realises it yet, and their doom is being set up. And that’s such a very specific and unusual situation. It couldn’t happen again in that way, because when AIDS happened, it was out of the blue and no-one could have imagined such a thing. Now we know the story behind it. But when it happened, it was an incredible shock.

Why is it particularly pressing to read about AIDS in the 80s now?

Robert Plunket: Well, I hate to tell you the first thought that popped into my mind, which is, ‘because it’s fun.’ [laughs] Or, you know, I made it fun. It’s important because I don’t think people realise how dangerous sex is. We pretend it’s this wonderful thing where you fall in love with somebody and you have this intimate moment of sharing and you understand humanity, and infinity, and God’s grace in the world for the first time. But it can also kill you. It can kill you, and it always gets you in trouble. Now, maybe you’ve been lucky and it hasn’t gotten you in trouble, but it’s always gotten me in trouble.

It’s gotten me in some trouble.

Robert Plunket: It’s a very dangerous part of being a human being. And you have to be careful with it. That’s certainly the lesson I learned. 

Love Junkie is out now