Mar 18, 2005  |  By: JOHNNY HOOKS  | COMMENTS     

their fiction editor at the time. It was called “November Brings Fog.” It was different from “Light Before Day,” but it, too, was about this young gay man who was obsessed with this phantom serial killer named the West Hollywood Slasher.

BLADE: Was the lead character still Adam Murphy from “Light Before Day”?
RICE: Yes. I don’t know if he was named the same, but yes. The character who was not in the short story was James Wilton.

BLADE: Is he based on your late father (poet Stan Rice)?
RICE: Yes, very much so. My relationship with my father was largely good. He was a complicated man. We were very close, and it was an adult-adult relationship. He never treated me like a kid. The father/son relationship between Jimmy and Adam was just a natural by-product of writing the novel so soon after my dad died.

BLADE: Do you embrace being called a “gay writer” or are you just a writer and the gay part comes with it?
RICE: I don’t think I have been labeled a gay writer. I’ve never seen a bookstore stock my titles in the gay section. I’ve never seen the limitations that come with that label. I think the reason writers don’t like that label is that it implies a lower standard for their work. African-American writers don’t want to be called that because it implies their work can’t be compared to that of white male writers.

BLADE: Is that an unspoken standard?
RICE: I think we’re seeing a migration of a lot of books out of the gay interests section and into the general fiction section. I think that’s a good thing.

BLADE: Does it bother you that with mainstreaming of gay content, some of the gay sections in chain retailers are bigger than entire gay and lesbian bookstores?
RICE: It’s upsetting. I don’t know what’s happening to these bookstores or how to save them. If we don’t patronize them for more than just porn, they’re all going to close.

BLADE: What does your mother (novelist Anne Rice) think of “Light Before Day”?
RICE: My mom thought it was wonderful. She had a stronger reaction to this one than the other two. She thought it was about a completely independent and sovereign gay community, a gay community where they were not dependent upon or blaming the straight community for their own problems.

She was very good friends with John Preston, the famous writer who died of AIDS in the ’90s. She used to tell him all the time, “You need to write about what you’re doing for each other in this epidemic.” The Reagan-bashing had been done, you know?

She felt I touched on that in this novel, regarding the relationship between Adam and Nate Bain, how they watch out for one another. She said while Jimmy may be important, he’s<