In this episode, host Kate Carpenter is joined by historian, writer, and podcaster Dr. Neil J. Young. Neil has been a prolific writer in venues like The Atlantic, Slate, the Los Angeles Times, and many more, a contributing columnist to the HuffPost and The Week, and he is also one of the co-hosts of the terrific history podcast Past Present. He also helped to create and produce the podcast Welcome to Your Fantasy, with historian Natalia Petrzela, who joined me on a previous episode of the show. Neil is the author of two books. His first was We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics, and his new book this year is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right. I was excited to have the chance to talk with Neil about how his oral history interviews changed the project, what differed between his first and second books, and how he wrote a history that was driven by characters.
Mentioned in this episode:
- Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right
- We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics
- Past Present
- Welcome to Your Fantasy
- Neil on Unsung History
- Nicole Hemmer’s Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s and Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics
- Natalia Petrzela’s Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession and Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture
- Kevin Kruse’s books
- Lauren Sandler
- The New Yorker
- Gary Provost’s advice about sentence length (plus some bonus advice)
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter:
Welcome back to Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history. I’m Kate Carpenter, and today I’m joined by historian, writer, and podcaster, Dr. Neil J. Young.
Neil Young:
Thanks so much for having me. It’s great to be with you.
Kate Carpenter:
Neil has been a prolific writer in venues like The Atlantic, Slate, The Los Angeles Times, many more, a contributing columnist to the HuffPost, and The Week, and he’s also one of the co-hosts of the terrific history podcast Past Present. He also helped to create and produce the podcast Welcome to Your Fantasy with historian Natalia Petrzela, who was on an earlier episode of the show.
Neil is the author of two books. His first was We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics. And his new book out this year is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right. I thought this book was fascinating, terrific. And I was excited to have the chance to talk with Neil about how his oral history interviews changed the project, what differed between his first and second books, and how he wrote a history that was driven by character. Enjoy my conversation with Dr. Neil J. Young.
Neil Young:
I guess I would start it in graduate school, although my mom has these things that I wrote back in first grade, these stories I wrote about bunnies and squirrels. So I always loved writing and I think in a lot of ways always knew I wanted to be a writer.
But really in terms of the career, obviously doing a PhD in US history was sort of a foundational moment for becoming a public writer. And as I was writing my dissertation, I became very fortunate to get to start doing freelance writing. I started writing for Slate as I was finishing up my dissertation.
And it was so exciting because on one hand, you’re writing this dissertation that feels like it’ll never be done, and when it is done, only five people will read it. And then I wrote this piece for Slate that ended up happening, and I pitched it, and it was published within 48 hours, and it was the number one emailed article on the website for a day, and they paid me $400. And I remember not being able to sleep that night. I mean, it was just filled with electric energy, and it was so wild to think that I’d written something that people were reading and responding to.
And so I continued down that path of being in academia for quite some time and then continuing to do freelance writing. And as I transitioned out of academia, ultimately, I had almost probably a decade of having written for public audiences during that time period, which became the foundation for the work that I do today.
Kate Carpenter:
Well, let’s talk about all the practical stuff first. When and where do you like to do your writing?
Neil Young:
I am a morning person. I love to be in my seat as early as possible, and sometimes that’s as early as 6:00 AM, because I’m really not effective after noon. So one of the things I’ve really realized is if I can get in my seat or when I get in my seat, ideally before 7:00 AM, I can get four to five really good hours of work done when I’m really in that book writing mode.
So that tends to be the ideal form of this and one that I really keep too, I think for most of a book writing schedule. But life happens, and then other things force you to adopt different methods.
But ideally, I’m a morning writer. I’m someone who sort of opens up my laptop before I’ve really done anything else. And so I think a lot of what I’ve discovered about what works for me is to get into the writing before I can start resisting it. And the earlier I do it in the day, the better prepared I am for holding those voices at bay that I think become more and more pronounced over the course of the day, and that just sort of make me weary, and make me really self-conscious about it. So I’m a morning writer.
Kate Carpenter:
And do you write at home?
Neil Young:
I do write at home. I usually sit at a desk, but I often write in bed. I write a lot in bed. I would say that my first book, I wrote maybe even close to half of it in my bed or on the couch. Not good for my back and my neck, but I had dogs. My dog just passed recently, but I usually like to be next to them, and oftentimes that was best in bed or on the couch, but almost always at home.
When I was actually writing this book, I mean most of this book that just came out or a good chunk of it was written during Covid, which posed its own challenges that I think we’ll probably get to talk about. But when I was finally able to get out of the house, I actually ended up joining WeWork for three months.
They had this three month trial offer, which was 50% off, and there was a WeWork almost really at the end of my block where I live in Los Angeles. And I did that for three months. It was great. Again, it was just sort of nice to get out of the house after being quarantined. And it was sort of nice to work in a different setting. But as soon as those three months were up, I didn’t choose to extend my membership. I was pretty excited or happy to get back to home. I’m not someone who really likes to be at the library, or at the cafe, or those sorts of places that I think a lot of people enjoy writing. I like to write at home in a fairly quiet and undistracted space.
Kate Carpenter:
How do you organize yourself? Are there tools that you use? Everyone laughs.
Neil Young:
Well, I’m glad to hear that, because I have this idea that everyone else is organized and not. I’m come to find out that is not the case, but I do find myself just so intimidated and really guilt stricken by those people who post on Twitter about their organizational practices that involve spreadsheets and all these apps that I just cannot do that.
I work with paper. I print out all those archival materials that I’ve collected and made into PDFs. I almost always print them out, and spread them around on the floor, and put them in piles. I’m just a very tactile person and very visual.
And so for me, the computer is really challenging in those ways. I like to get the documents out on the floor. I like to highlight, I like to put stickers on them, to move them around. But all of that feels like something I have to do intellectually for my mind to process the stuff. But there feels like there’s just these high inefficiencies in that. But it’s the system I’ve worked with for two books now, and I don’t know that I will change it.
I always wonder if those sorts of organizational habits of documenting what all your documents are, and creating spreadsheets, and creating tables, and cross-referencing in them. On one hand I feel like, well, that would be a really orderly process by which I could retrieve materials really quickly. But it also seems like that’s a lot of time that’s spent doing that.
And so I guess I’ve just decided to stick with the particular trade-offs that I’m familiar with of okay, I do waste a lot of time trying to track down that document I read three days ago, and it’s somewhere in this pile, but I’d rather do that. And I also think that there’s something… It keeps a spirit of discovery through the whole process because as you’re looking for that document that you know you have in mind, you also find that other document that you’d forgotten about. And I don’t know, I sort of like that, or at least this is what I tell myself, that it allows for that continual experience of discovery and serendipity that I think is important in writing.
Kate Carpenter:
Where in your research process do you like to start writing?
Neil Young:
Well, I would say ideally, and this is how I really felt like I did my dissertation, which became my first book, is get all the research done and then write. When I was writing my dissertation, you go away for a year, you go to all the archives, you come home, you go through the stuff. And then I wrote the dissertation, and then that dissertation got pretty dramatically expanded into the first book. So there was another big round of research, but it felt like, okay, I’ve figured out all the other things I want to research, go out and do it, collect all that. Okay, now start writing again. That’s how I would’ve loved to do this most recent book, but again, COVID.
And so that threw a wrench into all sorts of different aspects of the process of this. But I had that experience where I had done enough research in the archives to write the proposal that sold the book, and we got a first draft of the proposal written, I would say about March 15th of 2020, and then spent the next two or three months revising it and getting it ready to go out to editors as the world shut down.
And even then not knowing when archives would open back up. And it took a long time for my archives to open back up. And so I knew because I had a book deadline, that I couldn’t just sit there and wait until I had access to archival material again. And so I had to start writing.
And a lot of things made that possible. I mean, I’d collected a decent amount from the archives. Also, a lot of the stuff wasn’t tied to archives. I could do all the online newspaper research and stuff.
And then also God bless them, there were a lot of archives where I wasn’t looking at a major collection, but a handful of documents, or a folder, whatever. And I just emailed all those archivists, and they were wonderful to digitize those materials and send them.
So it was not the sort of linear process that I had always done before and that I think I still would want to stick to. But it was the back and forth process that something like a global pandemic necessitated.
It did make me feel like I was out over my skis a lot of times, especially early on, because I felt like I was writing about things I barely knew. And also knowing that I needed to consult these huge archives to answer a lot of questions that I was having in the writing, but it was the process that I had to work with given what was happening in the world.
Kate Carpenter:
Then what does your revision process look like?
Neil Young:
So I’m someone who heavily, heavily edits as I write. I have always written this way. I cannot move forward if I’m not really happy with a sentence. And so in a lot of ways, I feel like I’m writing and revising always. And I’ve always wanted to be that writer that just spits everything out on the page and then cleans it up. I cannot do it. My mind doesn’t work that way.
So I feel like writing and revising are one and the same. That said, obviously you write something, you hand it off to other people, you step away from it, and then there’s revision. So I feel like it’s both a process of writing in itself, and then it’s also a stage of writing.
In this particular example of this book, I had the great fortune of having a writing accountability partner throughout, which is a good friend of mine, Rebekah Peeples who we had shared an office years ago when we both taught in the Princeton writing program. And as I left academia, she went the administrative route and as a dean at Princeton, and she had reached out to me sort of at the beginning of the pandemic and was just like, “Hey, I’m working on a project. Would you want to be a writing accountability partner?” And it was wonderful. I can’t imagine having written this book without Rebekah’s help reading every page and reading chapters multiple times.
And so that also brought in another element of revision through the process, because unlike really almost anything I’d written before where I’d sort of done it all by myself and then handed it over to people, I had this constant companion who was reading things as they developed, and helping me rethink and revise as I was drafting. And then obviously, then I had a full manuscript that then went off to anonymous readers who gave feedback and who initiated the official revision process pre-publication.
But this felt like a book that was sort of in that constant process of revision in a way that was so reassuring really. Especially again, as we were in such isolation in that moment. I think it was really meaningful to have this Zoom connection across the country with a wonderful intellectual partner, when it felt like everything else was cut off to us.
Kate Carpenter:
You’ve touched on this in a few ways in terms of the impact of Covid dissertation versus second book, but what was the writing process like for the second book compared to the first book? Did you change your approach?
Neil Young:
Yeah, that’s a great question. I’m not an academic anymore. I certainly straddle or at least keep a toe or two in that world, having left now a decade ago officially from academia.
But that first book, the dissertation expanded. It was the book project that I was using to try and get tenure track interviews and job offers that never materialized, and certainly was envisioned as an academic, as someone who was making a contribution to an existing body of scholarship that was hopefully to be a type of project where I had to get that tenure track job could help me on the pathway to tenure, but that’s not my life anymore.
And this project was very much intended for as broad and general an audience as possible, even as I wanted it to be rooted in the same sort of archival work and scholarship, but to have a different sort of feel to it, to have a different narrative arc to it. To have, again, a much wider audience.
And there was a moment where I was writing a chapter and I was hating it. I mean, I was just hating it. And I realized partly why I was hating it was because on page two or three of this chapter, I had entered into this four page, or excuse me, four paragraph historiographic section where I was like, “Some scholars have argued this and others.” And I was just like, “Neil, you are not doing that anymore. Cut all of this.” And I ended up reducing those four paragraphs to one sentence to sort of situate a reader. And people have argued this sort of stuff before, but that’s all you need to know.
And fortunately, that moment was pretty early on in my writing where I just realized, “Nope, a lot of the work here is the same. A lot of the skills you’re using are the same, because you are a historian. But you’re also writing a book that you want to operate differently in the world. And so you got to let go a lot of the things and you got to emphasize other things if this is going to be that different book project that you have intended.”
Kate Carpenter:
You mentioned having worked at the Princeton Writing Center teaching writing. Did teaching writing affect the way you yourself write?
Neil Young:
I think yes, in the sense that one of the things that the Princeton Writing Program, and this is for listeners, it’s the one required course that Princeton undergraduates take. It’s decades ago was known as freshmen comp, but very much re-envisioned for sort of interdisciplinary age.
I think one of the things that we focused on a lot in the Princeton writing program was something we called motive, which was a concept I don’t think I’d ever had explicitly articulated before to me or have really thought through, but it was this idea of, what is the purpose of this? What is the intervention this essay is making? And again, as scholars, I think we know that. That’s something you know that you’re supposed to have at the heart of your work.
But in making it so explicit to those undergraduate students who those first year college writers, I think it has made it as a much more dominant concept in my own writing. What is this thing doing and how do you go about doing it? And is it how you set up a scholarly intervention? Is it how you set up a correction to things that have been gone before? Is it how you introduce evidence and why that matters for the particular purpose of this piece itself? I think that that is probably the thing I really carry with me from that experience.
Kate Carpenter:
I was curious how you ended up deciding to publish this book with Chicago Press. I know that they have a trade arm, so it’s not just an academic press. But especially as someone who is no longer working in academia, what was the path that led you to Chicago for this book?
Neil Young:
Selling this book was challenging, in large part because we were doing so in the fall of 2020. It was nothing there ever, certainly not recently, great times in book publishing. But it was a really challenging moment.
And so it took a while to find a home, and we had wonderful, wonderful responses from everywhere it went, but a lot of people passed on it. But of those who gave offers, Chicago’s was really just the one that sort of financially and intellectually just was the right fit for me. They made a really strong offer with just the deal itself. But also, it was a real meeting of the minds in terms of what I saw this project was, wanted it to be, and even more than what I had imagined it to be. And so I think that that’s a wonderful moment when an editor can see it as even having bigger potential than the writer itself, maybe has in mind or has envisioned for it.
I think you get really focused on the project, and in some ways, your vision of it becomes a bit bounded by the things you know. And so it was wonderful to work with Tim and for him to have this really expansive notion of all it could mean. And of course, Chicago, I was working with the trade arm there. And they’ve done such wonderful projects that I really, really admire, especially in the last couple of years.
And so I felt very honored to be among that really accomplished list that they’ve put together there. And they also really promised to tend to this book in a way that meant a lot to me, and that I think isn’t really always the case at a lot of places.
So it took a while for it to find the right home. But then when it did, it felt really meant to be and really special. And that continued to be the case over the entire process of writing and revising the book on its way to publication.
Kate Carpenter:
I asked Neil to read an excerpt from Coming Out Republican so we could talk about his approach to writing in more concrete detail. Here’s Dr. Neil Young reading from chapter one of coming out Republican.
Neil Young:
In 1928, Dorr Legg moved to New York City. He just finished a master’s degree in landscape architecture. He arrived just in time to experience the tail end of the city’s boom. The Great Depression brought about by the Wall Street crash one year later meant his work quickly disappeared. Legg then found employment with the new public urban planning projects in the city and on Long Island. But the Republican in him could never bring himself to support the New Deal, even if it had kept him above water.
When FDR came on the scene and said, “My friend’s,” Legg later recalled, “I thought, really.” New York was nevertheless an electrifying place for homosexuals in the 1930s. One historian has described the city as providing an immense gay world where in its numerous speakeasies, cafeterias, restaurants, Harlem drag shows, and Broadway musicals, gay men could cautiously gather and connect.
Legg dove right in. He met other like-minded men at Childs, a restaurant underneath the Paramount Theater, that served as a boisterous and freewheeling hangout for homosexuals. Even in the relative freedom New York afforded, he kept tight control of himself. Tall and lanky with a horseshoe of hair that circled his bald top. Legg always dressed in a conservative suit and tie and maintained a masculine manner. The plain looking Legg had little patience for the effeminate and flamboyant queens who were part of New York’s gay underworld.
He wouldn’t, “Send up flares,” as he described the way some men signaled to each other, and he detested the unseemly whoops some groups of homosexuals brashly made as they paraded down the streets. He worried that their shenanigans and gender subversive behaviors risked detection by law enforcement.
Those concerns, however, didn’t keep him from attending a handful of drag balls in Harlem, where he met several Black friends and lovers. Their accounts of the prejudice and discrimination they experienced gave Legg new insight into his own condition. “I too was a member of a stigmatized group,” he later realized.
Legg’s careful self presentation was not enough to keep the eyes of the law off him. When he returned to Michigan in the mid 1940s to care for his ailing father and manage the family business, his public outings with attractive Black men drew police attention.
The Detroit cops began surveilling Legg as they did many men they suspected of being homosexual. They finally arrested him on a charge of gross indecency two years after Legg’s father died in 1947. Legg, the libertarian was outraged that the police would spy on a law-abiding citizen like him.
Furious that the government would try to interfere in his private life, “Did not the don’t tread on me of the rattlesnake flag,” he fumed, “Mean anything anymore?” He had his answer. When the news of his arrest got out, Legg’s church suspended him, and his landlord threatened to kick him out. Legg didn’t wait around to see what else was coming. He packed his bags for Los Angeles.
Kate Carpenter:
Well, you’ve talked elsewhere about how you really wanted to write a character driven history here. This passage obviously is a great example of character coming through. How did you keep that focus on character in your narrative?
Neil Young:
I think it was one of those things that I constantly reminded myself is the people have to come first, and their stories and their biographies really have to be the way that you set up the chapters, you set up the arguments, you set up how this book moves through all this material.
And in a lot of ways, that was actually a little bit easier in this project because so many of the people I was writing about have never been written about before or hardly known at all. And so in a way, I had to learn about my characters in such contrast to my previous book where I’m writing about folks like Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson, and Ronald Reagan. And a lot of times you can sort of take it for granted and therefore what the reader knows, and maybe let a lot of the character and biography drop away. That wasn’t the case here. I had to learn about who these folks were.
And in doing so, I understood time and time again how their biography was fundamental to the work that they did. And I just think that that made it really easy to keep the characters forward here. And I began almost all of my chapters with some sort of biography of a different person. I mean, I guess not all of them, but a lot of them, especially the early ones.
Kate Carpenter:
I was listening to another podcast, The Discover History podcast, and you talked a little bit about how oral histories were really important to those projects. How did doing those interviews shape your writing here?
Neil Young:
They shaped it a lot. I was nervous to do oral histories. I think as a historian, part of why I picked this line of work is I want to go into a quiet basement archive and look at documents. And I don’t know, it feels nerve wracking to reach out to living people and to ask them to talk about their lives. But it actually ended up being really, really wonderful here and actually fundamental to this project.
I mean, I could have written this book without interviewing anyone, but I think it was substantively different because I did, because so much of this history has been barely documented. And even in looking at these wonderful archives that I was able to look at with just thousands and thousands of pages of documents, I was looking at meeting notes, and correspondence, and diaries. And especially with the sort of organizational materials, there’s such great evidence there. But the richness and the details, they’re not there.
And so you know what sort of issues were being discussed and what sort of votes might’ve come down on a particular issue that a meeting note can give you. But where did this meeting take place or what was it like? What did it feel like to be in that room when you were creating a gay Republican organization in 1978, and what did that mean, and what did it feel like?
I think of this one particular interview I did with this man, Frank [inaudible 00:27:14], who was a really important figure, who was one of the earliest members of the gay Republican organization that was founded in Los Angeles in the late ’70s. And he actually was a founding member of the chapter that ended up opening up in Orange County a couple years later.
And he told me he went to one of the earliest meetings of this group in Los Angeles. He thinks it was probably the second or third meeting that the club ever had. And I had the meeting notes from that meeting that listed him among the attendees, but again, I didn’t know where it took place. And so he got to tell me, well, it was actually in the back room of a leather bar. That’s an incredible detail.
And then he told me this story about driving from his home in the suburbs outside of Los Angeles. He’d found out about this through a friend, one of his few friends that even knew that he was gay at the time, but then also knew that he was a Republican.
And so he’d made his way to this meeting in the heart of Los Angeles. And he told me he parked his car several blocks away from the location spot, because he wanted to make sure that there weren’t any police cars outside of the bar. And so he was going to walk down the street as if he was just strolling through the neighborhood. And if he saw police cars on the street or someone outside the building that looked suspicious, he was just going to keep walking, and he didn’t.
So he entered the building and went into the back room for this meeting, and all of that stuff I would’ve never known, but it was so… First of all, that just provided me a wonderful scene to write as an opening section of a chapter. And also, all of those things were important to huge themes I was developing through the book about fears of government surveillance, of the incredible risk taking that these men were doing in the late-’70s to come out of the closet to begin with, let alone to come out of the closet in order to become politically active and to have a voice within the Republican Party.
And that’s the sort of just richness that these oral histories gave me time and time again as I spoke with these folks. I interviewed about 30 people, and it was wonderful the sorts of things they could tell me that no written material was going to give me.
Kate Carpenter:
Did you ask questions in a way to try to get those scene details to emerge, or did they just happen in the course of interviews?
Neil Young:
I think in some ways, especially early on, I learned a lot by people telling me things I just didn’t expect. And so then I knew other things to ask other folks who came down the line.
I think, and especially with the first sorts of people I was asking, it was just sort of like, “Tell me about where you grew up. Tell me about your background. How did you become politically engaged? Why were you a Republican? How did you get connected to this organization?” Those sorts of things.
And people would tell just the most beautiful, wonderful, rich stories, because it’s the stories of their lives. And in that, I sort of realized I could ask a little bit more targeted questions with other folks I subsequently interviewed.
But I do think from the start, I was really interested. I know I asked everyone, “What did that feel like? What did that feel like?” That was something I was asking people over and over again from the start, because I knew that wasn’t at all captured by the documents I was looking at it. And to me, it seemed really important for what I was writing about.
Again, the risk taking these guys were involved in just from the standpoint of coming out in the ’70s, let alone becoming politically active. What did it feel like to sit in a meeting with other folks when you weren’t out to anyone, but you were now affiliating yourself with an organization that was going to make itself rather public? So I knew those were the sorts of things I needed to ask, but I think I learned a lot through especially those early conversations with people about the sorts of things I should ask to others that I spoke to later on.
Kate Carpenter:
As you were writing, how did you deal with knowing that the people you talked with would read what you wrote, and maybe not always agree with how you had framed it or your analysis?
Neil Young:
I’m so glad you asked this question, because actually it was a huge concern of mine. I think it sort of goes back to what I was saying about being a historian, wanting to work with documents of people that… And as a modern American historian, a lot of the people I write about are still alive. But it feels one thing to write about people who are alive, and may or may never know that you’ve written about them. It’s another thing to ask people to tell their stories to you, and to take time out of their lives to entrust you with this stuff. And then for me to do maybe something different with it than they expected, or to use it as a part of a project that maybe doesn’t align with their sense of things. So I was really nervous about that.
And it was so interesting because through this process… I mean, one of the overwhelming assumptions about me, and this continues as the book is now out there in the world, is that I’m a gay Republican and I’m not. Coming Out Republican is not the title of my memoir. And so that’s been its own sort of interesting challenge, and I definitely didn’t ever do anything to make that unclear when I was reaching out to subjects. At the same time, I didn’t say, “I’m not a gay Republican.” I just said, “I’m a historian who’s writing about this.” And I think people had all sorts of assumptions about whether or not I was one of them, especially because a lot of the interviews I had came by way of other people. I would interview one person and that person would vouch for me to a group of other people. And that was a wonderfully important way of getting a lot of people to agree to being interviewed. But I have no idea what sort of assumptions they had about why I was doing this.
And so I did worry about that. In fact, in one of these interviews I did, I interviewed this man. We talked for an hour and a half. He was this very older man because he had been involved in the organization since the ’70s. And he was wonderful, absolutely wonderful. And the stories he was telling me and just the generosity of his time, and his knowledge, and his experience, and at the very end he said something like, “Thank you. I’m so glad that you, a gay Republican our finally writing our history.” And I said, “Oh, I just have to let you know I’m not writing our history. I’m not a gay Republican, but I intend,”… And he was like, “Oh, okay.” It wasn’t like he was suddenly questioning his involvement in this or regretting that he’d talked to me. But I think again, it was just he had assumed that. And then he said, “Well,” then he appreciated all the questions I’d asked, and the generosity I’d shown him, and the interest I had in his life.
And I think so many of my folks are probably really used to speaking to journalists. And by nature of their politics, they have a certain suspicion and skepticism about the media to begin with. So I think not being in their mind a journalist, but being a historian, although certainly I think a lot of them have their thoughts about academics. But I think they got from our experience that this wasn’t a hatchet job I was after, that I really wanted to hear what they had to say.
Now again, I still worried about what I was going to write, and I do wonder if I sort of softened some things through it. It was something I thought about a lot. And I don’t think I pulled any punches. But what I do think is, and I’m glad I did this. I think I constantly try to show as fully realized and as complex of either a biographical account of these people or their actions and motivations as I could throughout the book.
And so I think in a lot of ways, that was influenced by having spoken to these people, and realizing that the historical subjects you’re writing about are real people who’ve lived real lives. And you can disagree with them on so many things, and you don’t have to hide that or soften your argument. But there are ways that you might characterize them that actually enhances the argument, because it treats them as fully developed people who are making their own sort of complicated choices and decisions through life.
And so I was really nervous about it, and I was especially nervous about it when the book came out. But I think in a lot of ways, it’s good to have those nerves because I think if I hadn’t thought about them at all, I don’t know that I would feel great about that as a writer and as a thinker. And I was very happy to hear from a lot of them, who wrote really wonderful notes to me about how much they appreciated the book.
Now, I should say that a lot of the folks I interviewed no longer identify as Republicans. So I think that obviously shaped their own reading of this. But one of the people I didn’t interview who I wanted to, but we never were able to connect was one of the more recent presidents of Log Cabin Republicans, which is the nation’s biggest and oldest gay Republican organization. And a couple of weeks ago, he tweeted some really wonderful things about the book, and that made me feel good because he’s very much still a gay Republican, and I know he represents a lot of the folks I was worried about and haven’t necessarily heard from. And I hope that that speaks to how my book is being received in those circles.
Kate Carpenter:
So I will confess here that I am usually not a big political history person. I often find it kind of dry, but I do not find this book dry at all. It’s really compelling, so fascinating. And I wondered if you had specific strategies that you keep in mind when you’re writing to make sure that your narrative is really engaging for readers.
Neil Young:
Well, thank you for saying that. That means a lot to me. I’m also, I mean, I’m someone who writes political history but doesn’t necessarily love the genre myself. Although I think the best of our political histories tell compelling stories that introduce us to characters that are memorable and that move us through scenes that are even cinematic in how we experience them.
And I think that was something I really thought about a lot was scene setting. There were so many stories that I came across that just really blew me away that felt so profound, especially because so much of LGBTQ history just isn’t that widely known. And I include myself, even with my PhD in US history and my academic background, I had to learn a lot in writing this book.
But I think that the thing that I was constantly keeping in mind was just, how do I set up these scenes that introduce narrative tension, or that have this sort of propulsive energy to them, that moves a reader through a moment in time that really is gripping and that they want to figure out, find out what happens next, but also then sets up the themes of that chapter or that section that allow me to start building an argument?
And so that for me was the way I really went about this. And it was through a process of heavy revising. That section you just had me read, for example, of Dorr Legg. I mean, I think it was four or five paragraphs. And I’m remembering that those four or five paragraphs came out of, I don’t know, six to eight pages of writing that I first sat down. And it’s like, “Okay, no.” Instead of doing this long biography of him, how do you tell a story about him that actually communicates all this information, but in a way that feels much more narrative? So it was a lot of revising, cutting, moving things around to make something that I hope felt page turning.
And I read a lot of fiction while I was writing this book, and I’m not a huge fiction writer. Reader, excuse me. I’m not a fiction writer at all, but I’m not a huge fiction reader. I love my nonfiction, but again, partly because I think that so much of this was done during Covid. I was reading a lot of fiction, and very mindful of the way that stories were built through novels, and how chapters were begun and ended, and the sorts of things you want to set in motion that connect you to the next chapter, and the other things you want to tie up. And also Netflix. I mean, I was watching a lot of these short series shows and thinking about how you begin and end chapters.
And I’d also benefited a ton from this limited podcast series I made with a couple of friends a couple years ago about the history of the Chippendales. And we learned so much through that process of thinking about episodes, that I still think about this to this day of the way you introduce something at the beginning to just pull a reader or listener in. And the way you wrap things up or don’t wrap things up at the end of an episode or a chapter to move the reader forward.
And so I think those sorts of storytelling lessons of fiction writing and of TV series, I was very mindful of that in this particular project in a way that certainly wasn’t meant when I was writing my dissertation or even my first book.
Kate Carpenter:
It’s super helpful that you mentioned podcasting, because I also wanted to ask a little bit about your work on the Past Present podcast. So in case there are listeners who don’t know what that is, I hope there aren’t, but it’s this wonderful podcast you’ve done with Natalia Petrzela and Niki Hemmer. I know it’s on hiatus now while you kind reimagine the future, but I was wondering how that work and your conversations through the podcast influenced your writing of this book.
Neil Young:
Yeah, I love that question. I think it has shaped me a ton, I mean, most especially just my relationship and my friendships with Niki and Natalia. I mean, we are always bouncing ideas off of each other, and I think really testing them out in real time.
And so a lot of it is just like, they’re the sorts of people that I would share, “Oh my gosh, I just learned this,” or, “I’m trying to figure this thing out.” And a lot of that’s done over text, not necessarily on the podcast. But obviously on the podcast, we were constantly thinking through ideas about politics and culture, and American life through the lens of history.
And I think to make a sense or to try and understand especially these last couple of years that have felt so just topsy-turvy and wild in so many ways, I think all of that really helped a lot with the development of this book because I knew I was writing this book to ultimately come up to the 2022 midterm elections, and I didn’t want the narrative and the argument to feel inevitable, right? We’re all riding towards this inevitability of Trump and Trumpism, and it’s a foregone conclusion.
But also, there was a lot that was really confusing to make sense of in these last couple of years. And I think that having been involved in Past Present and sort of week to week, thinking through how things were developing and shaping up was really, really important to this.
I also think that relatedly, we always tried to envision an audience of smart non historians. That’s who we imagined we were making this podcast for. Smart, well-read people who didn’t have PhDs in history.
And so how you tailor the conversation in a way that is informative and has the right sort of historical background to allow people to feel like, “Oh yes, let me remember what the GI Bill was or the Civil Rights Act was,” so they have enough sort of meat there. But also then, why does that matter? What’s the purpose of understanding this? How does this help us think about this other issue that’s at hand today? That sort of balancing act of bringing evidence and argument together for that particular audience, I think served me really well in doing this book and imagining a similar audience for my book.
Kate Carpenter:
As we wrap up, I just want to ask a little bit about your own sources of inspiration. So I know you mentioned novels and Netflix shows. Are there other people or media that you turn to as inspiration or influence on your writing?
Neil Young:
First of all, Niki and Natalia are huge influences on me. I love how they write. I think we write similarly but differently. So they’re definitely people who’ve had a deep influence on me. Kevin Kruse has been, I think, a real inspiration to me, and he’s a friend too, but I think in the way that he writes for audiences is something I think about a lot.
And then a writer like Lauren Sandler who’s a wonderful nonfiction writer who isn’t a historian, but who writes these deeply reported books that are steeped in evidence but are always character driven, narrative forward, that have a propulsive energy. She’s been a huge influence on my writing.
And I think I would say The New Yorker is my constant reading companion. And I think that that sort of way of writing about sometimes esoteric topics or topics that may not seem, I don’t know, that wildly popular. But that through the article, the importance of them is really communicated.
And I’m not necessarily thinking about a particular New Yorker writer, as much as I just think the bent of that magazine and what its essays do, is a big influence on me.
I do want to really continue to just immerse myself in fiction, because as I said, I think I stepped away from reading fiction for almost 20 years. I mean, really, I would read a novel here or there. But it was in the last couple of years that I just really became a full-fledged, deep fiction reader again. And I’m excited to just learn a lot more from the genre as I go forward as a nonfiction writer. So I would say that those are the influences in terms of particular people and also types of writing that have really shaped me.
Kate Carpenter:
What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever gotten?
Neil Young:
The best writing advice I’ve ever gotten is something that actually came from Kevin Kruse, something he shared. I believe he shared it on Twitter years and years ago, and I saw it, and I saved it, and I look at it constantly, which is this short little paragraph from the writer Gary Provost. And it might be something that a lot of your listeners are familiar with, but it begins with, “This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five words sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring.” And it just goes on and on, and then he starts. It’s about varying your sentences, and about creating rhythm and musicality to your writing.
And I remember when I came across that, when Kevin shared that, I mean, it was probably more than a decade ago, and it was one of those times in which I felt really annoyed by my writing voice. I was just sick of it, but I didn’t know why. I just remember just being like, “I hate what I write sounds like,” is actually what I was feeling if I couldn’t quite articulate it.
So then encountering this, and I think this was really important as an academic because I don’t know if you feel this way, but I certainly think that what I took out of graduate school and my experience as a historian was writing these really long sentences that were multi-clausal, and it was just one after another. And so I felt like my writing was stuck in this rhythm that felt so uninteresting, but I didn’t realize that.
And so that Gary Provost quotation, which people should Google it and read the whole thing, I look at that once a month. And it is a constant reminder of how our writing really should be a type of music. It should have a musicality to it. We should pay attention to rhythm. We should keep in mind the experience of the reader, which is not just about characters, and plot, and argument, but it’s also at the sentence level.
And when I can get a rhythm of a paragraph, that to me is the best feeling in the world, when you start fixing those sentences, when you start breaking them up, or expanding them, or stopping the flow, or propelling the reader through what you’re doing with the word choices and at the sentence level. I think that’s when the writing becomes exciting. And I love that moment when that sort of starts coming into place.
And I also think that the rhythm and the musicality, when you’re getting it right, I think for me, that’s also when I know that I’m getting the bigger picture of the writing right as well. It’s like when everything is really coming together, it’s like the argument is now clear to me, the evidence is lined up. And because of that, I can create a reading experience that does all those things, but that moves a reader forward in this great energy that ebbs, and flows, and builds over the course of the page and through the section. I think about that.
I mean, I read that quotation, I would say probably once a month. I think about that idea every time I sit down to write.
Kate Carpenter:
So Coming Out Republican is out now. It is terrific. I hope it finds a massive audience. I know you have some other fun projects in the works too. Is there anything you’re working on that you want to talk about before I let you go?
Neil Young:
Well, I won’t say exactly what it is, but I’ll say that Natalia and I are writing a book together, which is wonderful because I love collaborative work. I think it is the most exciting thing to engage someone else’s mind intellectually over the course of a project. And we actually obviously have a long history of working together and a great friendship, and this has been really, really fun for us getting this project up and running.
And the proposal just went out to editors. So I’m feeling highly superstitious right now and don’t want to say much more than that to jinx it, but hopefully we’ll be able to say a lot more really soon when we have a book deal in place.
But it’s a different project for both of us, but one that I think is also really tied to a lot of the things we’ve done. But yeah, I’ll say more hopefully very soon. Cross your fingers for us that we have a book deal to make this really official on the sooner side.
Kate Carpenter:
Absolutely. I can’t wait to have you both back on the show to talk about how that project comes together. So we’ll look forward to that in the future. Dr. Neil Young, thanks so much for joining me on Drafting the Past.
Neil Young:
Thank you. This was such a great conversation. I really appreciate it.
Kate Carpenter:
That does it for this episode of Drafting the Past. Thanks for listening. You can find links to all of the books and other things we talked about in this episode at draftingthepast.com, where you’ll also find transcripts for each show. You can also sign up for the Drafting the Past newsletter, support the show on Patreon, and you can always send me an email kate@draftingthepast.com.
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