The New Yorker Radio Hour - Episode 19: Father Pfleger, Larry David, and the History of Autism

Episode Date: February 26, 2016

This week, Father Michael Pfleger, a white priest on Chicago’s South Side, holds a funeral for a young man who threatened his life; Larry David applies his passive-aggression to Missed Connections listings; and the authors of a new book on autism discuss “patient zero,” an elderly man in Mississippi who was the first person ever to receive the diagnosis. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

in a conversation with someone when they have that revelation. It's making sure. You mean, you could get a source for it? Yeah, the telegraph. From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. I'm David Remnick, and this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. We have a lot coming up today, including, I'm very excited about this,

a performance by Larry David in fine form as an impossible. crank venting on the internet. So stick around for that. We're going to start off, though, in Chicago on the south side. Chicago, like much of the country, is a safer place than it was 25 years ago. The murder rate is, roughly speaking, half of what it used to be. But violence on the south side remains stubbornly, tragically high, and many neighborhoods there have been dangerous for generations. Among the people trying to change the south side is a priest named Michael Fleger. Father Fleger is such a well-known figure that Spike Lee based a character on him in his recent film, Shirek. Evanos has been spending a lot of time with Father Flegger lately, and he attended a funeral recently

that Flegger led for a young gang member. Father Michael Flager is 66 years old. He was raised on the southwest side of Chicago and became a priest in the 70s. In 1975, he was assigned to St. Sabinus, which is the largest African-American Catholic Church in Chicago. And the obvious fact about him when you meet him is that Father Flager is white and his congregation is almost entirely African American. Really the defining moment for Michael Flager growing up was 1966. And in that summer, Martin Luther King marched in Chicago against housing discrimination. And Flager went and watched the protests.

And there was one march in particular in Marquette Park where the crowd was throwing things, bottles and rocks. and Martin Luther King was hit in the head by Iraq. Oh, I've been hit so many times I'm immune to it. And later, Flager was going home and was thinking to himself, this was the craziest man he had ever seen. It's definitely a close society, and we're going to make it an open society. And in its own way, it launched him on an obsession, as he puts it with King and also with the struggle for civil rights.

and it became the defining fact of his life. Over the years, Father Flager has become a very powerful figure in Chicago politics. There is nobody, no mayor, no member of the city council who can afford to ignore him. And partly that's because he thrusts himself into the middle of debates constantly. And you see him on the five o'clock news. Father Michael Flegger of St. Sabina's Church was posting this Facebook message about the violence in Chicago. In the first month of 2016, he has almost single-handedly built this presence in Chicago politics by being unrelenting and by constantly calling reporters, calling the newspaper, letting them know when he thinks something is unjust or something is wrong. And he knows that they will love a good story.

And Michael Flager is a very good story. Come on one more time. Put your hands together and open up your mouth and just give a scream to God. In January, I attended a funeral at Flager's Church for a young man named Philip Dupree, though everybody in the neighborhood called him Tune, which was short for cartoon. He'd been nicknamed that when he was a kid because he had a big forehead and big ears. And he was very well known in the neighborhood because he was a member of the gangster disciples, and more specifically a part of the gang called Gville,

which controlled an area right near the church. and he had been arrested over the years many, many times for assault, for cannabis possession, for what's called gangloitering, for carrying a weapon in a vehicle. And Cartoon had recently been shot and killed in a car a couple of blocks from the church, and Father Flager had rushed out and had gone to the scene of the crime and found him there. cartoon is laying at the front of the church in a silver casket beneath a tall portrait of a young black Jesus and a long white robe

and the church holds over a thousand people and it's packed everybody of a certain age in that neighborhood new cartoon and a lot of the people who are there are members of the local gangs and it's not at all clear what it is that Father Flager is going to say to them Philip was much bigger than two Some both just knew tune on the street, but I knew Philip.

Philip was a person, as everyone said, love people. Philip liked to come in every situation and just turn it up. Came here to church, I said, over here and want to turn up church. I said, this is my church, Gillip. There are a lot of funerals like this at St. Sabina, because it sits in one of Chicago's most violent neighborhoods. There were about 500 people killed last year in Chicago by gun violence. And Father Flager was not going to miss an opportunity to talk about this violence and what the people in that church could do to try to bring it to an end.

What's it going to take to stop the madness out here? We tell you something, sisters and brothers, I'm fighting like hell to get bad cops off the street. I will fight every day to put every cop that's on the street. in jail where he or she belongs. But what we also got to do is stop the shooting and the killing of each other. Father Flager is deeply embedded in this community. He's been here longer, in fact, than many people in the church that day have been alive.

And for him, that means being responsible not only for people inside the church, but also involved in their struggles outside in the neighborhood. And as the violence has become more intractable in that neighborhood, he's led marches where people go and literally call out the names of the gang members and call on them to stop killing. And there's a lot of people who don't like that he's doing that. I'm not going to stand here and pretend that Phil was all that and that a tune didn't exist.

I ain't going to pretend that. I told his mom that. Many of you probably remember me when we used to do marches on Friday nights. I'd call Cartoon out. I'd run down the street and we'd be out of the child and say, Cartoon, come talk to me, Cubb, come talk to me, stand, come to- I called them all out. I ain't afraid of nobody.

I got God on my side. What Father Flager didn't tell the congregation is what he told me, which is that Cartoon had threatened to kill him. A few years ago, when he was going around the neighborhood, calling out the names of gang members, he says that Cartoon put out the law. word that if he didn't close his mouth, then Father Flager could end up dead. He doesn't really know why nobody carried out the threat to kill him.

As he said, a lot of people have threatened me over the years. Part of the reason why he decided to have a funeral for this young man who had threatened to kill him was partly because, I think, on some level, he believed or wanted to believe that cartoon was trying to turn his life around. before he was killed, he'd started coming to church and was talking to the priest about it. I also think he saw it as an opportunity to talk to people who he may never have that opportunity to talk with quite that way again. He looked out over that crowd of hundreds of young men, and he spoke to them with a kind of fury. I mean, he was saying,

to them almost explicitly, if you don't change your ways, you will be next. You'll be here. And without putting too fine a point on it, perhaps the one thing that cartoon actually gave Father Flager was an excuse to have a very hard and very necessary conversation with the people around him. We better make up our mind, the governor, the mayor, the alderman, the police. They ain't going to do nothing about this. You waiting on them to change this.

You might as well give up waiting. We have to stop this. We have to stop this. In Auburn, Gresham and Englewood and Chatham and Laundale, we have to stop this. And we have to stop this crazy spirit of retaliation. Because guess what? You never get even.

There's no such thing as that. Get this one, this one, gets this one, and it always says, amying up, and we're just watching blood run down our streets. You never get even. We got to stop this stupidity. No, I'm going to upset some people, but that's all right. I got friends. I don't need no more. We've got to stop this stupid mentality.

Well, Marshfield belongs to them. Laughan belongs to them. Boster belonged to them. Carpenter belongs to them. 76 and Holster belongs to them. We're going to stop all that craziness. Are you kidding me? We're going to fight and shoot and kill over blocks

that have been abandoned and neglected by the city and the state and the federal government so long. Some blocks that look like third world countries and we're going to fight over a block that other people don't give a damn about. How stupid is that? Instead of banding together and said, we're going to be in the real fight.

We're going to fight city hall. We're going to fight the governor. We're going to fight the president and bring some economic development, bring some job, bring some hope, bring some possibility back to our community. You can't just say stop the violence. Give me a job. Give me a way out. Give me an opportunity. This fight.

This fight is in our hands. It's impossible not to listen to Father Flager and think of the way in which he was shaped by the struggle of the 20th century, which was the civil rights struggle. And the strange miracle of him is that he betrays no sense, no knowledge that he has another one of these funerals in another few days or a few days after that. It's a certain form of suspension of cynicism that he is allowing himself to imagine that the acts of one person on any given day can, in fact, perhaps change the history to come. I need y'all to stand on your feet and give these brothers a hand as they come back to their seat. Come on, keep your hands clapping. Encourage his brothers. Evan Osnos, staff writer at the New Yorker,

talking about Michael Fleger, the senior pastor at St. Sabina in Chicago. You can read Evans' profile of Father Fleger at New Yorker Radio.org. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. Come on, swing that. I was at a coffee shop in Park Slope. You were sitting next to me,

talking to your friend about how you're a vegan, but you secretly eat eggs. I really wish I had said something to you. Your voice was loud and distracted me from my work. I'm David Remnick. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. You know those misconnections? They used to be in the back of weekly newspapers, now they're on Craigslist and wherever else. This is Mist Connections for A-Holes by Ethan Cooperberg,

read for us by none other than Larry David. Hi, I saw you with the dog park. You had the German Shepherd and I had the terrier? If this is you, please message me the name of the park and your address. Your dog was not well attended, and I'd like to report you to the proper officials. You were in front of me in line at the Chipotle in Queens. You ordered a carnitas burrito with no beans, add guac. I still remember this because it took you almost ten minutes to order.

You had all the time in the world while we were in line. What were you doing then? How could it take you so long to decide, to have beans. Either you want beans or you don't want beans. It's not that hard. Please, email me. I need to understand this. We made small talk in the checkout line at Trader Joe's. You said that you literally could not live without the salsa you were buying. I wish we could talk again. You used literally incorrectly. I wish you could literally not live without that salsa because then I'd take it from you. At a bar celebrating my friend's birthday in Midtown.

You were wearing Google Glass. I tried to mouth. You looked like a moron. Did you record that? He was sitting right next to me in an airplane terminal, and we were both on our laptops. You were totally hogging the armrest. But when you moved your hand to cough,

I took the armrest. You glanced at me angrily. This just happened. Now I can see you writing a post about me online. So I'm doing the same thing. You're still writing. Me too. We can both see each other's laptop

as we write. I wish we could just talk in person so I could tell you not to be so passive-aggressive, out loud. That was Larry David performing Ethan Cooperberg's Missed Connections for A-Holes. Judd Apatow has been responsible for an amazing amount of the comedy of our time. He's not always the one telling the jokes, but as a writer, director, producer, cultivator of talent, he's been behind cult favorites like freaks and geeks and some of Hollywood's biggest comedies, including the 40-year-old virgin and bridesmaids. So maybe it's a good thing that Apertau's early career as a stand-up comedian

didn't exactly take off. But now with a lot of success behind him, he's recently been performing on stage again. And the New Yorker Susan Morrison, who is herself a great cultivator of comedic talent for the magazine, met up with him at one of his favorite comedy clubs. We're going, we're downstairs.

We're in the actual comedy cellar. So we're here in the comedy cellar on McDougal Street, which is kind of like a time warp, Judd, why did you want to come here? I just thought maybe we would promote them and then they'd give me better spots. The reason why we're here is just, I love it here. They've been here 30 years.

It's a small comedy club. And I found it really fun to do stand-up here again because you come in and then just Chris Rock walks in or Dave Chappelle or Louis. And there are these magical nights. A few months ago, Chris Rock came in And everyone was like, is he going to go on? And he went on stage and just improvised Oscar jokes for half an hour.

I was pretty blown away. And as a comedy nerd, I was in heaven. Because I'm really only a comedian to get to watch stuff like that. It's like that's my pass into the kingdom. So you started out doing stand-up and then you hadn't done it for 22 years. Why had you stopped initially? Well, it's hard to know because it's so easy to rewrite history. One reason was because so many of my friends were so good at it,

and I really felt like I'm not as good as them, and it bothered me. And I think I was a little bored of myself. I didn't have much to say. I didn't have a strong point of view. I wasn't angry. I wasn't reinventing the form. And then I kept getting jobs as a writer. I was really good at writing in other people's voices.

So if Roseanne Barr said, can you write jokes in my voice? I didn't have any problem doing that. It was much harder to do it for myself. So when you came back to it, do you think that your years of experience being a television writer and a producer and a husband and a father? I mean, that made you better at it? Or do you think, I hope this isn't insulting or people laughing at you just because now you're a name brand? Exactly. Well, I think that they laugh for maybe two minutes.

You know what I mean? If they don't know you, they'll ride it a little bit. But if I'm a disappointment, it's a drag. So they don't give you the courtesy laugh for too long. Does it give you something that the rest of your career doesn't? I mean, what do you get out of it that you don't get from being a director and a producer and a writer? Well, there's so much you want to talk about that you can't do in a movie. Movies are painful.

I mean, when they go well, I usually just feel like I dodged a bullet. Right. But a good comedy show makes you happy, and then a bad one, you're like, well, do it again tomorrow. Right, it's this combustive thing. It happens. It happens. It's over, and then you can start again the next day. But if a movie bombs, I'm not sleeping for a while.

I've wasted millions of dollars of other people's money. A giant corporation is suffering. Now, last year you did stand up at Carnegie Hall and at comedy festivals and also on The Tonight Show, where you killed doing a bit about Cosby. It was your imagining of what Cosby's act would be like today. Isn't that weird? He's like doing stand-up? What do you think his act is like?

Do you think he's still talking about it? You think he says, like, says, like, you ever been in trouble with the wife? You, like, get into the dog house with the wife, you're in the dog house with the wife, because of something that you did. Like, the other day, there was something about reading the paper. And I didn't want my wife to read the paper.

So I got up at 5 in the morning, and I snuck out to the driveway to get the paper. And I hid the paper. And the next day, I got up, and I hid the paper. the paper. Now you were an early and really ardent voice against Cosme and a defender of his accusers. Why were you so vociferous about it? Is it because you have two daughters? Is it because he was your boyhood hero? All of that. And I know one of the victims and I've met a bunch of them since. And when you meet them, it just becomes very obvious. You know, it's a lot of people

with the exact same story. He had an M.O. He had a way he was behaving. I don't think there's any question that it's true. I felt that someone had to say, let's just be honest. He did this

and we can't let this disappear again. He should pay for his crimes or he should do something for these women. He's worth probably almost a billion dollars. You'd think he could do something thoughtful for these people before he dies and do something that shows that he understands that he's hurt.

hurt people. That's what his whole life is about. His whole life is about personal responsibility. So it's very weird for a guy at the end of it to not take any personal responsibility. But I think what you say, there's a case for reparations. It's kind of interesting about against these women. Wouldn't it be amazing if out of the blue Bill Cosby just said, I heard a lot of people. I'm a very wealthy man. These people's lives were forever affected by this. And I'm going to try to do something for them. Would that be the greatest lesson to the world? Maybe he'll hear this.

I doubt it. I doubt it. What do you think he's watching on TV right now? Now, I read that you told an interviewer once, quote, people have been trained to think that being amused is what's most important in our country. I think that you said that in relation to Donald Trump, right? And we're all kind of guilty. You know, at the beginning of the Trump campaign, even we in the media sort of viewed it

as this delightful joke, and then it got scary. But there is a sense. that comedians have become our public intellectuals. I think comedians have always pointed out BS. And I think young people have learned to look at the world through that lens. They've looked at it through the Daily Show or the Cobeyer Report. And I've always said, I feel like a lot of comedy has mocked lack of tolerance. So that's why I think gay marriage was accepted much faster,

because people like John Stewart were just eviscerating anyone that, would have an issue with it. And so you have a whole generation of people who are much more rational. I mean, we'll see how that ultimately plays out if that's correct. But I think a lot of young people are taking a second look in a way that hopefully is healthy. The Trump thing is different. It's tapping into all sorts of rage and frustration. And hopefully as people figure out this is what he would do, though,

Here's what he would do. Do you agree with these steps that they, you know, will realize there are probably better people than him to make these decisions? Now, your parents were divorced when you were an adolescent, and your mom worked in a comedy club, right? Which allowed you kind of entree to round the clock stand up. One summer after my parents separated, my mom was a hostess at the East End Comedy Club in Southampton. I got to watch all the comedians and all the shows all. all summer. And sometimes I think, maybe my mom did that just for me. What could she have gotten paid a hundred bucks or fifty bucks? I think that is such a beautiful story. I'm sure she did it

for that reason. On some level. I mean, as a kid, you never think your parent is doing something like that with you in mind. But I'm sure she must have been. But yet she seemed to enjoy it, but really loved that I enjoyed it. And so I went to every show all summer. Amazing. I've read that you thought there's a connection between the up here. of your parents' divorce, and you're ultimately becoming a producer and a writer rather than a performer. Can you talk a little bit about that? Well, I was a, you know, a middle child and a child of divorce, so you become someone that tries to create safety. I always found safety in working, because I always feel like if I'm in motion, I'll be okay. And as a producer,

you take the most damaged part of your psyche and you use it for good. So if you're a nervous person and if you have catastrophic thinking and you're always going, what could go wrong? As a producer, that's the best attribute because you're thinking, how many days do we need to shoot this? What would be the appropriate budget? How do we make sure we do it in the right amount of hours? And you could run these problems and solve them all day long because you're a nervous person.

And feel in control. No, I mean, it's made me think when I was 13, my father went crazy and my family imploded. And I'd never drawn the connection between, you know, I started out in my career, always wanting to be an editor and not a writer. Yes. You know, wanting to kind of shape everything. And that's what you're saying about process. And it's only now in my old age that I feel like I've got it together enough to,

to want to be a writer the way. Sure. And be interesting. And also to be supportive of other people. There's something about that, too, where you feel like, oh, I can help people. and I can make people's lives less chaotic. So if I'm working with Amy Schumer, I enjoy giving her an experience as a writer and an actor that's pleasant.

But on some level, you're doing it for yourself because you feel like I've had hard times, and I like helping people not have hard times. Right. It's kind of paying it forward. Now, let's talk about your new show on Netflix, Love. A lot of your work is about a man-child getting his act together and growing up. It seems to me that in love, the Netflix show, it's a woman. So that'll be 235.

Dude, I don't have my wallet. Can I pay you back later? You see, he's in a charity. I'm good for it. I'll come right back. You know what? I got this. Okay.

And a pack of cigarettes? Tell us about that as a familiar arc. Well, I think for comedy, people need to be in district. or a mess, you know, people who have their act together are just not that interesting. So every story is about someone who's a mess or someone who's immature. And as they get older, I'm 48. I don't know anybody who's mature, really. When I talk to them about their lives, everyone's in a panic.

Everybody's nervous. Everybody's trying to do the right thing. So I feel like that's just being a human being is being immature. unless you're like, I don't know, Bruce Springsteen? I hope not. I don't think he is mature. Those records are about all of the different things that went wrong in his life and adjustments that he's made. Yeah, so everybody is in turmoil, and that's what I find fun.

And I think relationships bring out everything you're struggling with. And that's what's interesting about the show. It's two people who are basically hiding who they really are because it's the early. early romance and slowly their histories are revealed to each other and they have to deal with it. Yes, and the show seems to take place in real time. Yes, and I feel like the, you know, what's fun about the show is it's 10 episodes. I think it all takes place over 10 days. And so you're seeing the moment they meet and in the moment when they have to decide,

do they want to go out? And then if they go out, do we want to do that again? and you're seeing all those in-between moments. Before we were talking about stand-up, which I imagine is pretty scripted, or you write it out and you memorize it. But your movies utilize a lot of improv. Is love a show that has a lot of improvisation at it, or do you stick to a script?

There is some improvisation in the show. Paul Rust is one of the UCB greats, and Gillian is very good at it, and there's a lot of people from that world on the show. but we probably improvised more in the first bunch of episodes. But I'd like to tell everyone on any set, if you think of something, just say it. If you're acting and in the moment something occurs to you,

no one is ever going to be mad if you just go a completely different way. And that changes how people act because they pay more attention to each other because they know, oh, they may not say the line. So no one... So you have to listen. You really have to listen because people are going to subtly reword everything all the time. Right. I know that your movies have so many more thousands of feet of film than most people's movies.

And I always think about it. Oh, I guess so. Dating myself. I always wonder whether in some, you know, future age people could put together like six different versions of knocked up something with all the leftover footage. I mean, is that something that worries you? James Franco asked me if I would give him all of the dailies. of freaks and geeks. He may have asked for a knocked-up also, and he would just want to...

Just play with them, right? Just play with them. Just play with them. Cut something, turn it into something else. You know, which is a really fascinating idea. I mean, that's what should happen at film school. Like, if you were studying to be an editor, someone should give you two million feet of film of knocked up and say,

okay, don't ever look at the movie again. Turn it into a movie. That would be great. I'm seeing the Judd-Apato chair at USC. Exactly. This is going to be a great tax deduction for you, too. You've got to do this. Here's all your heavyweights footage.

Go for it. Now, the Times' op-ed columnist Ross Douth that wrote kind of a weird editorial in the Times praising your work for what he called its essential conservatism. Now, I guess what he meant is that the movies often end with a wedding, like a Shakespearean comedy. But how does that, how do you respond to that comment? I'm always for people trying to better themselves.

And I'm for people trying to find happiness and love and sanity and relationships. I don't think that's a conservative value. I think it's a human value. So, yeah, I think it's nice to not spend your life alone and miserable. And so in a lot of the movies, people are attempting not to do that. And sometimes they succeed. Sometimes they don't. I like showing hope.

I like showing people struggle to figure out how to make it work. but I certainly don't think that's a conservative idea. In terms of reproductive rights, obviously I'm very pro-choice. But if people, you know, it goes back to knocked up. You know, if she has an abortion, the movie's over eight minutes in. And I thought it was interesting to see two people try to get to know each other. You know, this baby's happening. And we don't really like each other,

but maybe we should see if we're wrong about not liking each other. Right. I'm on board. Yay! I really appreciate you saying that. No problem, you know, so I'll tell you, you know, maybe if you could help me by telling me, like, one thing that I am supposed to do, that that would be good, because I literally have no idea whatsoever. I have no idea either. So, um, do you want to, like, get together and talk about it or something like that?

Yeah, sure. Like a date, I mean. Yeah. I'm Dr. Apetow talking with Susan Morrison. I'm David Remnick, and you're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. The novelist Edmund White has been at the center of gay fiction since the 1970s. His book, A Boys' Own Story, was the first widely read coming-out novel in America, and he's written many novels since, along with four books of memoirs, collections of essays,

a play, and biographies of Marcel Proust and Jean-Gene. This spring, at the age of 76, White will publish, our young man, his 13th novel. The New Yorker's Josh Rothman sat down to talk with him about it. Okay, good. So I want to call you Professor White, but I think I should call you Edmund. Well, I wanted to talk to Ed for a number of reasons. One is, you know, he's actually had a huge influence on me as a person and a writer. I met Edmund because he was my creative writing teacher in college. I had never heard of him, you know, before I had him as a teacher. I had just never read anything. like his books. As a straight man reading them, you do have a little bit of envy.

I mean, you envy the, you know, sexual freedom, the excitement, and also just the difference. And one thing that is famous for is that he's unapologetic about loving gay culture as it existed pre-AIDS. His new novel, which is called Our Young Man, is about a male model and it's sort of ageless male model who never gets older. and he lives a life like frozen in time. In this book, Our Young Man, I was writing it right after, well, during and right after a heart attack where I was in the hospital for 40 days and couldn't walk or talk, but I could still scribble.

And I think I was trying to write about a more glamorous period in the past that would cheer me up. I didn't want to write about old people dying like myself. I mean, all of writing, I think, is made up of two elements. One is my mesis, where you're imitating actual life experiences. And the other part is fantasy, where you're imagining another world, another life. And I think there's always has to be a balance between those two. But in this one, I think I tip more toward the fantasy end of the spectrum.

I basically feel like I know you very well after all of these years of reading you. Yeah. Do you write in part to be known by people? Well, when I first started writing autobiographical fiction, nobody's like me couldn't write autobiographies. You had to be the winner of the Battle of Iwo Jima or something to write a memoir. But in writing about sex in such a frank way, was there any, what was your feeling in doing that? Well, I felt rather defiant about it.

I still feel this, that it's one of the most important parts of human experiences, It's where people actually live in their minds and that it's remarkable how little it gets written about. I always say that straight male writers can't write about it because their wives would be angry. And gays had a kind of freedom now less so because they're all married. Right. I mean, what do you think about the, so I'm 36. I'm too old to be involved in the sort of millennial world of Snapchat and sexting and things like that. But there does seem to be like a casualness, or at least theoretically,

they're supposed to be a casualness about sex in the sort of digital social media universe. I mean, do you have any consciousness of that? Oh, yeah. I mean, I had dinner last night with a friend who's 24 and very handsome and who's always on a grinder. But I think he's always kind of slightly disappointed because people are so dumb. I mean, he's the biggest reader, I know, and no one can keep up with him. So the new novel, it's the life of a male model named Guy, he's an aperture into a world of glamour. He's so good-looking, so beautiful that it's almost like he doesn't realize what is happening around him or what effect he's having on people.

I think the burdens of being beautiful are something people don't talk about too much, but it's something that's always interested me. Could I convince you to read a passage from the book? I marked a beginning. His first weekend on Fire Island with Pierre Georges, who turned out to be unexpectedly hairy in a swimsuit, Ghee slowly descended the wooden stairs from the dunes to the beach, wearing nothing but a tight white swimsuit and sunglasses. And a dozen men looked up from their towels at him, and he was afraid he might faint. He thought to himself, I'll never be this perfect.

again, an idea that made him sad. Something about being beautiful, induced melancholy in Guy. He was aware of how brief his perfection would be, and then sneered at himself for being so narcissistic. He and Pierre George took a public speedboat at midnight from the grove to the pines with a bunch of over-excited guys, and they all rushed into the sandpiper. Guy was stoned and taller than most of the other men, and as he stared out over them, he was stoned. He was stoned out over them, He experienced a distinctly Buddhist feeling of evanescence. He looked out over the shirtless, muscled, tanned men and realized that right here on this disco floor,

there was such a concentration of fashion, slimming, money, bleaching, plastic surgery, psychotherapy, and all for naught. In a few years, they'd all be old walruses and in a few more dead. Thank you. I mean, when I first started to read you as an 18-year-old straight guy who had mostly read novels by straight men, I had just never read anything about male beauty. Like, the vocabulary of beauty had just never been applied to men. And it changed my view of the world. I mean, it changed the way that I saw myself and other men, too.

How does beauty work in gay culture, gay life? And how has it changed over time? Well, when I was young, the only thing to be was a beautiful boy in gay life. And then when you turned 30, your friends would have a funeral for you because your life was over. But there was a real dichotomy of the men and the boys. The boys were the objects of desire and the men were the predators and who had to pay money usually to go to bed with the boys. But with gay liberation, everything changed. And suddenly the new ideal was to be 35 years old with a mustache and to have a lover and adopt a Korean daughter.

And there was a kind of emphasis on being macho and working out at the gym. I mean, before the gym, you had to be born beautiful. But after the gym, you could work out and become beautiful. So, you know, when I think about sometimes if I'm trying to describe what your books are about to people, I'll say they're about love. They're love stories. A lot of your novels are love stories. But they're not like Jane Austen.

They don't end at the moment of love. They kind of continue into time. Do you think of yourself as a romantic person or someone? Yeah, I do. I think, yeah, I made everybody furious during the AIDS here when I said, well, some things are worth dying for. People didn't want to hear that. Yeah. But Foucault used to say that for straight people, courtship was the important thing, and it led up to marriage or a consummation of sex somehow.

And that for gay people, the most romantic moment was putting your trick whom you just had sex with in a cab, sending them uptown. And that when you were alone and could muse about what the whole thing was like and replay it in your mind, that was more romantic. than the courtship. You know, gay life has changed so much. And as a novelist, the aesthetic possibilities of it have changed. I mean, you still do describe gay life as it existed in the past. But once it meant one thing to write about it. Now it means something different.

Has something been lost or something gained in that comfort or openness? The fact that so many people are able to pass now as straight is fruitful, I think, for a novelist. Yeah. You know, because you could have a character who you'd have to read two-thirds of the book before you discovered he was gay. I don't know. Like, my students are so strange. Like, half them are Christian and where purity rings. And the other half are hooking up every day and going to these drunken routes.

Like, I have a terrible gay d'ar these days, and I can never tell who's gay. and gay students of mine have to wear a t-shirt saying, I am gay. They don't really do that. They did. One of them did. Otherwise, I don't get it. That's the writer Edmund White, talking with Josh Rothman.

White's book, Our Young Man, will be published in April. I'm David Remnick, and this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. At a place called Finnellys, Bob Bozick was the bartender, the kind with a huge personality and a miss. million stories that could never be true. He was a prize fighter, a bank robber, an heir to a rich inventor from Serbia. But it turns out that most of these stories are true. Next week, Nick Palmgarten brings us the story of Bob Bozik and his quest to reclaim his family's mansion in Belgrade.

I'm David Remnick, and this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Now, autism was first named and diagnosed 75 years ago, and it was believed to be a rare condition. In recent years, ideas about autism have changed a lot, and the number of people diagnosed with what we now call autism spectrum disorders has grown at a startling rate. John Donvan and Karen Zucker are journalists for ABC, and the authors of a new book called In a Different Key. It's a history of the condition and a study of how people are affected by it. Now, this is a subject I follow with particular interest. I've got a teenage daughter who's profoundly affected by autism, and the subject is also very, very personal. for John Donvan and Karen Zucker.

I have a 21-year-old son with autism, and I would not have written this book if I didn't have a 21-year-old son. Where is he now? What kind of condition is he in? What's his life like? He's a really interesting guy. I would say he was always on an upward track until this year. He's at a special program in Arizona called Chapel Haven West, which is for life skills and living skills off the university.

And this is his third year. He's coming home in June for good. And he's capable of flying there by himself after years and years of practice. But if any sort of curveball were to happen, if anything out of order, it could be somewhat disastrous. A lost ticket, a late flight. Yeah, I mean, he usually does not land with his ID or anything that he went on the plane with. But he gets there. So he's a good traveler.

But he can't manage himself. need support for his life in order to just make sure that he eats and buys the right food. And he's working on all that, but he does not have it down. And John? I'm married into the autism community, quote, unquote. My wife grew up in Israel in Tel Aviv with a younger brother, a year and a half younger, who was born in the late 1960s and diagnosed at the age of about three with autism. At a time when the diagnosis was considered a very rare thing. And when the advice her mom was given was to put her brother, whose name is Drol, into an institution. And her mom went and looked at the institution. It was horrible. And she actually, as a result of that, became an activist in Israel, and she

built schools and built residences. My understanding is that, in fact, I was once at a dinner, seated next to the wife of a very prominent Israeli politician who we were talking about this. And they're explaining the care that adults with autism have in Israel and some other countries, and it's markedly better than what we have here. Well, because we have... Next to nothing. Thank you for saying that. Next to nothing.

I know it all too. No, and it's challenging because all of our kids grow up to be adults, and we haven't figured out the adult piece. And apparently we don't live forever. Right, that we know too. And it's scary. It's scary to be a parent. It's scary to know that as your child gets older, as opposed to things getting better and better. You know, there's a term people say falling off a cliff. It's real. What do you mean by falling off a cliff? What happens? You turn 21. You know, parents and the parents in this book, the advocates, they fought to get their kids out of institutions. We talk about the civil rights. And we talk about how parents then change the laws so that their kids could go.

to school. Well, that's their protection until they're 21, is that the law says they have the right to an education. And at 21, the law doesn't give them anything. Now, we hear that the prevalence of autism, not so long it was 1 in 120, and now it's at 1 in 68. What are these statistics in your mind reflecting? Is it a greater ability, a keener ability, a greater willingness to diagnose people with Asperger's autism somewhere on the scale? or is it increasing, in fact? Well, autism is now a spectrum. It's called the autism spectrum.

And over the years and decades, we keep changing the definition of what autism is, and we keep broadening the definition. And so each time we count how many people we are, we're counting apples and oranges. We're not counting the same thing anymore. We also, as a society, are much more aware of autism

than we ever were before. and that makes people more willing to sort of own up to it. Do you think there's sometimes some overdiagnosis when you hear some? I constantly hear, and maybe my ears are specially tuned to this as yours are, but when I hear somebody sort of flippantly say, oh, he or she, kind of on the spectrum, there's something, this has entered the language, that at any kind of behavior that's a little unusual or quirky, somehow the spectrum is invoked. Well, that's what's happened, is that we have made the spectrum so large that you have such extreme ends of it that, you know, we sort of think down the road it will break apart again and maybe we'll start to look at things like different types of autisms.

And it is not one spectrum because you can't call the person who's banging their head against a wall or who can't care for themselves. the same guy who has a PhD. They have something that's so incredibly different. And, you know, as a parent, I feel that it complicates things. So you have written about it's one of the centerpieces of this book, the man who's known as Patient Number One, Lee O'Connor identified a child named Donald Triplett as autistic in his early paper in the 30s.

He's still alive. You know him. And how did your relationship with Donald inform this book? Well, we set out to find Donald. There were archival medical records that we were able to find. And so then we needed to find Donald to see if we could get access to them. And John and I sort of set out to do some investigative reporting. And we knew he was in Forest Mississippi.

That's because Leo Connor, left a lot of clues throughout the medical speeches he gave here and there. And at one point, he mentioned this town forest, Mississippi. So I started calling all the T's in Forest. That's because, again, we need to explain that the medical literature did not give Donald's last name. He was described as just Donald T. Dash. So we had the first letter of his last name. Right. And there weren't a lot of Donald's, but there were a lot of T's. And, you know, it wasn't that many down the line, about 15 calls. in. How big a town is Forest Mississippi?

Not 3500. Yeah, it's not a huge place. But I got lucky that it was, it didn't take weeks. And I called this number and I get this answering machine. And it says, hello, happy spring and happy fall. And have a wonderful Christmas and welcome to 2007. And I hang up the phone and I call John, we got him. This is Donald.

I know this is Donald. We absolutely have found the guy. That comes from personal experience. That's probably the most I ever heard him speak at one time, was on the answering machine. Because he's not chatty. He is our friend. He's 80. He's 82.

And he has traveled the world. He learned how to drive when he was 27. Cares for himself? Yes. He lives in the same home that he grew up in. but he also has this town called Forest, Mississippi, that has completely embraced him. And John and I believe that a lot of his success has been growing up in a place where people have watched out for him his whole life and embraced him and just made him one of them. I assume that there are many parents out there who are listening who have children on the autism spectrum.

And certainly everybody knows somebody. and the interest in this is thankfully rising all the time. What hope is there in terms of therapies, in terms of maybe the word shouldn't be cure, but analysis? Where is the research heading in autism? The research primarily is going in the direction of studying the genetics of autism. That's a field where the deeper they get in, the more complicated they believe it's going to be. As Karen said before, we may find that there are so many different pathways to this condition, which really is defined by rather subjective observation of people's behaviors.

It might turn out that there are many, many kinds of autisms. But we're very, very far away from that. I don't think we're at a point where in our lifetime we're going to figure out what causes autism. We do know that behavioral treatments, which are very intense and very expensive, can ameliorate some of the more limiting behaviors. But I think our thought on putting our hope for the solution to the predicament and dilemma of severely affected people on science and cures is maybe not the right focus. The focus we really think needs to be. If our book has an argument, it's that society needs to find a better way not to be jerks towards individuals with autism. Find a space for them, a place for them in society.

Make it easier. Karen, where should activism push? You know, I don't, I think that John sort of nailed it in the sense of acceptance, and I can speak to that. My son, who on some levels is competent, but on most levels, really struggles. He tried to get on a plane last summer, and he didn't make eye contact with the woman on the floor while he was getting his ticket. And she tried to prevent him from flying. And she went and got his supervisors. And it became this ordeal where, you know, one of the, one of, I just sort of said,

go, go. You didn't do anything wrong. You have a right to fly. Just, just go. And he got himself through. And the next thing I knew, this woman who's working at the counter is chasing after him, as if he's some sort of terrorist, literally, to bring him back from flying on an airplane. So we really have a lot of work to do on the most basic level. Of awareness. I mean, we feel like we've come far. We're not locking people up in institutions. That's fantastic.

We're not, our kids get to go to school. That's great. But as a society, we really, there are pockets of acceptance. And mostly with kids. Yes, with kids of real kindness on the street and in a society. store. Absolutely, but it is kids. And my son's 21 now. And they

wouldn't have stopped him as a kid. But as a six-foot skinny guy who doesn't shave very well, people are freaked out. They don't know how to react. They really are. And that would be the goal.

Thank you both. I really appreciate it. I appreciate more than I can tell you the book itself. Thank you. Thank you. That's Karen Zucker and John Donvan, the authors of In a Different Key. And that's it for today. Next week, we'll take a look at a devastating and necessary play about sexual violence, performed by a cast of high school students.

I hope you'll join us. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garvis of Tune Yards. This episode was produced by Emily Boteen, Ave Carrillo, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Sharon Meshihi, Sarah Nix, Paul Schneider, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Becky Cooper and Matt Fiddler. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.