Thomas Mallon On Literature And AIDS

His new collection of diary entries is an emotional tour of NYC in the ’80s and ’90s.

Tom is a novelist, essayist, and critic, who once described himself as a “supposed literary intellectual/homosexual/Republican.” He’s the former literary editor of GQ and a professor emeritus of English at GW. He’s the author of 11 books of fiction, including Up With the Sun, Dewey Defeats Truman, and Fellow Travelers — which was adapted into a miniseries. His nonfiction has focused on plagiarism (Stolen Words), letters (Yours Ever), and the Kennedy assassination (Mrs. Paine’s Garage). His new book is The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983-1994.

For two clips of our convo — on the “mixed marriages” of the AIDS crisis, and Hitchens before cancel culture — head to our YouTube page.

Other topics: his struggling middle-class family on Long Island; his dad a WWII vet; neither parent finished high school — and Tom went to Harvard for his PhD; the Space Race; when you could make a good living as a freelance writer; novelist Mary McCarthy as a formative influence; Capote; Vidal; Mailer; Updike; Orwell and clarity in writing; the Danish cartoonists; the Jacob Epstein plagiarism scandal; Martin Amis; Elizabeth Hardwick; Tom’s conservatism; the New Deal as a buffer against socialism; the anti-Communism of Catholics; Bobby Kennedy; leftist utopianism on campus; Bill Buckley; AIDS bringing America out of the closet; losing a boyfriend to the disease; the fear of an HIV test; the medieval symptoms; the deadly perils of dating; the dark humor; writing Virtually Normal thinking I would die; the miracle drugs; survivor’s guilt; advocating for gay marriage; its relatively quick acceptance; and Tom’s husband of 36 years who’s had HIV for more than three decades.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Tara Zahra on the revolt against globalization after WWI, trans activist Shannon Minter debating trans issues, Scott Anderson on the Iranian Revolution, and Johann Hari turning the tables to interview me. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

From a fan of last week’s pod with Edward Luce on geopolitics:

I love the Dishcast, but I really got my money’s worth from your talk with Luce.

On China and Taiwan, however, what you didn’t discuss brought to mind some questions I’ve had about a possible invasion of Taiwan. The first was inspired by following Peter Zeihan, a fairly credible thinker on this stuff. He believes with some factual backup that China, as a nation, is on a political death spiral because of its ongoing demographic crash. This will lead inevitably lead to its economic, political, and military collapse. I think he believes it will crash in a decade or so. You often discuss the impact of societies not welcoming babies, and it works for China, too.

Second, like a lot of brilliant pundits, you don’t seem to do like to do “military” on the Dishcast. If you’ve ever had a military expert on, I missed it. China has not been in a serious war since Korea. The only nation I know of that waged an effective military campaign lacking two generations of experienced veterans was Germany, during its Schlieffen offensive on France and Russia in August 1914. And even though it was brilliantly executed, it failed. Wars are awful, but they teach your military how to fight through the clusterfucks that actual war always produces.

Promotion into the top ranks of the Chinese military is based on political loyalty, not talent. You and Luce discussed this problem regarding government policymakers, and historically, it’s a recipe for fiasco — ditto with war planners and fighters. The US has no such deficit of experience.

Noah Smith, on the other hand, expressed far more worry about China when he was on the pod last year:

Another wonders:

You say your hometown is in West Sussex (where Edward Luce also grew up). Do you know Walderton?

Nope. Here’s a listener with a “dispatch from small-town America”:

I have really enjoyed your recent pods about Great Americans (Ben Franklin, William McKinley, William F Buckley), and with people from all perspectives who love America (Chris Matthews, Walter Kirn, and poor Batya Ungar-Sargon, who is so wrong but clearly comes from a good place!). These episodes almost seem like a prayer or a hope that America is still out there. I’m here to tell you that it is.

My husband and I recently moved back to my small town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan after 15+ years in the DC suburbs. I think friends from both places wondered whether we would really love abandoning good sushi, urbane conversation, and urban conveniences. Yep.

Here is why: We spent last night on a bar crawl with the woman who, on the first day of kindergarten, declared to my mom that she was going to be my best friend. We ended up at a rooftop bar where we spent the night dancing to an epic cover band with her husband’s policeman friends, my old high school teachers, and some of our friends’ college-aged kids. Every generation was represented in one awesome, loud, drunk square block. And you know what? All of those people danced with equal gusto to “Fat Bottom Girls” AND “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy.” People drank Miller Lite and mojitos. Old and young, gay and straight, all had a blast. And my best friend — a lifelong Democrat and retired teacher who was an active union member — sang loudest to “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” by Toby Keith.

And in seven awesome hours of drinking and talking, not one person mentioned politics, where they worked, or where anyone went to school. Nobody looked over anyone’s shoulder to see if someone more important was coming in. All to say: you are right, Andrew. America is still out here. Know hope!

Awesome. We have to highlight more of this reality to counter the social media distortions. Meanwhile, a scientist just got around to hearing the pod with Francis Collins:

I very much enjoyed your interview with Collins. Thank you for the way you framed the conversation about the failure of scientific institutions during COVID, and about how the choices leaders of those institutions made damaged Americans’ trust in science, and in scientists. As a scientist myself, I took this very personally and am still incredibly angry about it.

I noticed what seemed to be a logical inconsistency in Dr. Collins’s explanation of the origin of the COVID virus and wondered if it had occurred to you, too. Among the rationales he mentioned for his religious faith was the existence of patterns in the natural world that seemed surprising or inexplicable, and that suggested an intelligent decision-maker (e.g., the value of the gravitational constant). However, when the topic of the very surprising patterns found in the DNA of the COVID virus (e.g., a furin cleavage site in a spot in the genome not seen in any other coronavirus), he said it was so surprising and inexplicable that it could only be due to random evolutionary processes.

This seems to me an altogether too convenient lack of consistency in his thinking. I can understand why every fiber of his being would resist the idea that this horrible virus that killed millions of people had been engineered in a Chinese lab that received NIH funding under his watch, but I think he should really be more humble about how likely that possibility is.

Me too. But, like Fauci, being distantly implicated in a scientific experiment that killed millions is too much for the ego to bear.

Here’s a guest rec from a “young gay guy in NYC and a new paid subscriber to your delightful podcast”:

In addition to expressing my appreciation for your pod, I’m very curious to know your thoughts (if any) on fellow gay, opinionated, right-of-center writer-podcaster (and perhaps a contemporary, of sorts?) Bret Easton Ellis. Would you invite him on your podcast; and/or, would you go on his pod if asked? I’m deeply interested in hearing you two talk.

Yes. Good idea. Another rec:

Jo Ellis is a Chief Warrant Officer and Black Hawk helicopter pilot who has served in the Virginia National Guard for 15 years — and a trans woman. Jo came to prominence after being blamed by a right-wing influencer for the Jan 29 helicopter crash over the Potomac, resulting in a defamation lawsuit against said influencer by Jo. I recently watched a lengthy interview with Jo:

Jo is extremely reasonable and intelligent, and although I was not on Jo’s side going in, I came out thinking that any trans-related legislation must consider those like Jo. I know many trans people don’t want to come on the Dishcast, but I think Jo definitely would — and that it’d be a fascinating conversation!

A transman, Shannon Minter, will be on the Dishcast soon. A reader writes:

Your latest column catalogues your issues with Trump’s handling of deportation, and on an individual level, I can’t argue with most of the points. It’s worth taking a step back, though, to look at the big picture. I’ve seen credible estimates of 40 million illegal aliens in the country. I’m amazed at how many people continue to claim there are only 10-12 million. I began hearing that number in the early 2000s, and we have generally averaged close to a million entrants per year, with more than double that under Biden’s four years.

Those of us on the populist right base who want to see that number significantly reduced see these four years as our only real chance. And so every minute counts. For decades, we have heard administration after administration (of both parties) give lame excuses as to why it couldn’t lock down the border and have serious enforcement. We also see increasingly preposterous lawsuits and District Court rulings designed to do nothing more than throw sand in the gears of the deportation machine and run out the clock until 2029.

We all know that the next Dem administration will go back to weak border enforcement and minimal deportations, and I have very little confidence that even a President Vance would be able to stand up to the business interests that want that.

My preferred solution would be to deport every illegal alien who came in when Biden purposely flung open the border — but there is positively no way to do that. You find whichever people you happen to find, whether they recently arrived or have been here for generations. You can, of course, ask each person apprehended whether they arrived between the years 2021 and the beginning of 2025, and all of them will lie. It’s an imagined solution.

I’ve always argued that E-Verify is the cleanest and most efficient way to effectuate large-scale deportations. I can appreciate, though, that winning an election means building a coalition, and for Republicans, that means donations from the agriculture and construction industries — both of which would suffer a lot without a cautious program of deportation that exempts many of its workers. I don’t like it, but I understand it.

I appreciate that you were one of the few voices outside of us right-wing crazies who really took the Biden administration to task for its insanity on the border. But I wonder if even you are underestimating the anger this its conduct engendered. Consider that among Latinos — who are most affected by the current administration’s policies — mass deportations have near or above majority support. When you engage in such recklessness, you really do invite an overreaction in the form of deportations done in a haphazard and arguably cruel manner.

I do understand and empathize. Biden deserves a lot of the responsibility for the current overreach. I want mass deportations of those who fraudulently claimed asylum, and I know the process is never pretty. But there has been an absurd amount of authoritarian posturing and cruelty that really did not need to happen, and is leading to popular backlash. As it should.

Another reader complains about the situation in NYC:

I appreciated your latest column, including the notion that law enforcement should not be masked. But I did want to write about your choice to highlight the comments of a law enforcement officer who complained about “savages” in Times Square.

I am a New Yorker and a legal immigrant. “Savages” isn’t a polite term and probably not helpful, but the Biden era of open borders definitely allowed the entry of noticeable numbers of people who have habits offensive even to normally open-minded and cosmopolitan New Yorkers.

The stairwells in the subway station near my office, for example, routinely stink of urine. I have in the middle of the day seen multiple people urinating openly in the middle of platforms or streets, something I never saw at this scale in time in city dating back to George W. Bush’s presidency. I couldn’t know the immigration status of the pee-ers — this could be the native-born deciding to contribute to urban decay — but public urination, despite being offensive here, is normal and tolerated in large swathes of the world (for men at least).

Encampments are another example of degraded public space. Park space on, for example, Randall’s Island, was taken over by tents. In Brooklyn, residents near one detention facility report they are hit up by door-to-door beggars. Most seriously, my coworkers and I were surprised by a gunshot near our office windows. A teenager, later revealed to a Venezuelan migrant, decided to shoot at a police officer trying to foil his robbery scheme in Times Square, and a tourist was hit.

It is probably counterproductive to call anyone a “savage”, given the history of the term, but pissing on a subway platform or trying to murder a police officer to avoid a shoplifting charge certainly isn’t the height of civilized behavior as we understand it in Manhattan. It makes sense that people are getting fed up.

Broadly speaking, I don’t think it to anyone’s benefit — except maybe employers — to settle large numbers of people with limited economic prospects in one of the most expensive cities in the world. The US-born find it difficult to have a good quality of life here, which is probably why so many second-generation immigrants to New York move to the suburbs, so a non-native English speaker at a large cultural remove from the US is going to have a major challenge.

And I don’t know that Democrats have a good answer to the question of “how should immigration laws be crafted and enforced,” except to complain that enforcement is too harsh, without articulating their own vision. I think they secretly support some amount of open borders because their upper-middle-class base doesn’t compete with migrants for jobs, but they are in the market for cheap nannies, gardeners, and constructions workers. It is hard to square the Democratic Party’s insistence that they are for “rule of law” with their tolerance of lawless immigration.

There is obviously some middle ground on immigration that would make the US stronger, probably by being more selective and permitting immigration at a pace that would allow cultural integration. But right now, for people who support a centrist approach, there aren’t good options over which party to support.

I understand. And sympathize. A lament from the Midwest:

Both my mother and I were hit by illegal immigrants in traffic, in separate incidents. In her case, this person from somewhere in Africa, handed the police officer a bogus insurance card, and evaded all attempts by her insurer to locate him. I was rear-ended by a Mexican national with no insurance and only a Mexican ID.

Even Columbus-freaking-Ohio is a sanctuary city, full of elected officials who ceaselessly fund and promote the arrival of large family networks of illegal immigrants from some of the least compatible cultures in the world. They get the attention and full-spectrum support from governments and nonprofits, while struggling lifelong residents/citizens — black and white and every other color — struggle to access social services, let alone find affordable housing.

We want these people out. And yes, in the interim, they have to be detained somewhere. Democrats don’t want to fund any of that. If Dem officials are going to try to physically prevent people who have zero right to be here from being arrested, and if mobs of thugs are going to try to turn every legitimate operation by ICE into a pitched street battle, we do apparently need a more militarized force.

2024 is the first time I ever voted for a Republican. This is why.

I get it. This next reader talks about her immigrant family:

The United States has always looked the other way when it needed cheap labor to do difficult jobs. My grandfather, who was Polish but living in what was then Russia, came to the US in 1904 because he refused to fight for the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War. He worked in the coal mines in Pennsylvania — on his knees — and earned enough to return for my grandmother, my dad, and his two brothers. We grew up with the stories of paying someone to get them over the border. The family hid in a ditch near the border while the man they paid distracted the border guard.

I hadn’t questioned why they had to hide to get out. My grandfather was AWOL, so he and his family were illegal, but they were not chased by whatever the equivalent to ICE was. And my family did what lots of families are doing.

My grandfather eventually left the mines and opened a grocery store, which my dad and his brother took over when Grandpa died. My dad made enough to send my sister and me to college — the all-American story. That seems to be all the vast majority of new immigrants want as well. It’s a shame that the Congress can’t figure out how to write a comprehensive immigration bill that would change things. Sigh.

Another writes:

Now seems like the perfect time for Congress to find their … footing, and start actually legislating. Not realistic? Probably. But nothing will change, and subsequent administrations will only get worse until either the country collapses on itself or Congress finds its spine.

I found the “No Kings” protests both understandable and absurd. People don’t want a king, but they are okay with laws not being enforced. And when they are enforced in horrific ways, there’s no outrage to change the laws, only to blame the tyrant.

Trump is a reflection of the brokenness of this country. He and the numerous, unenforced/unenforceable laws are the best argument that the federal government is absurdly out of control. Conservatives, for lack of a better label, should be shouting this from the rooftops. If Ds and Rs cannot come together and agree that the federal government has gone way off track now, will they ever? If they cannot use the events from Trump’s enforcement to get together and compromise on both sides to create a humane, enforceable policy, they never will.

One more on immigration:

I think immigration may have become too unmoored from the ideal, and the reality, of assimilation. There’s nothing wrong with an expectation that immigrants will conform with the bedrock principles of a liberal society. And such a view should not be viewed as bigoted or xenophobic. In fact, Trump almost certainly gained the upper hand on this issue not just because immigration surged, but also because concerns about the potentially negative ramifications of that surge were all too often dismissed as shortsighted, narrow-minded, stupid, or just evil.

So in order to argue effectively against Trump’s deportations, I think the Dem/left establishment will have to not just rediscover the virtues of assimilation, but effectively argue for them in a coherent manner. And that’s where they run into all kinds of trouble. The Dems have spent decades pushing the idea of diversity as a strength, not a weakness.

Better, I think, to argue that our real strength lies in our egalitarian values. That would make it easier to argue against the kind of overreach you described: “With masks, we unleash thousands of unaccountable, unknowable, and armed figures on the streets of America, breaking down doors, scaring kids, raiding Home Depots, SWATing car washes, evoking what can only be called random acts of state terror.”

I don’t think the Dems are in a good position to effectively counter this. They can claim, among other things, that Trump’s tactics are un-American, but such claims ring hollow from a group that has invested so much time and energy portraying America as an irredeemably racist hellhole filled with the supposed horrors of capitalism and the rampant evils of a fragile and toxic masculinity. Why would anyone want to defend such a place?

The Dems need a positive vision for the country (their own shining city on a hill), and it should be one that old timers and newcomers alike will be proud — and expected — to embrace. There will always be space for protest, but in order for it to be effective, dissent should be respectful and criticism should be constructive. That’s how the Dems rebuild a coalition, promote reasonable levels of immigration, and establish themselves as the sane alternative to Trump.

Unfortunately, however, they just nominated Mamdani for the highest profile mayoralty in the country. So, not a good start.

On the deadly floods down in Texas, a reader writes:

I have to respond to the ridiculousness of Nina Turner selectively making her case about criticizing the GOP’s budget cuts to NOAA/NWS and then speciously claiming that criticism of the GOP response to the catastrophic flooding and loss of life in Kerrville is “morally bankrupt.” “Now is not the time to finger-point” is the battle cry of politicians who know they’ve consistently failed their constituents in situations like this.

Well before actual budget cuts were finalized in the BBB, NOAA and NWS were hit with staffing cuts and early retirements via the DOGE bloodbath, not to mention the internal hamstringing of FEMA by the Trump administration. That being said, NWS still sent warnings, but it’s left up to local jurisdictions to do what they want — which, when it comes to spending money on emergency response / alert systems in Texas, means doing nothing until enough lives are lost.

Well before the floods happened, Kerrville — after years of trying to get grant money from the state — received grant money from the Biden administration for the system. However, voters and some elected officials wanted to return the funds because they felt it was tainted socialist money. If you want to see the level of conspiratorial bat-shittery, read the minutes of the Council meeting that took place in 2021 when discussing whether or not to keep the money.

FEMA’s delayed response 72 hours after the Kerrville event was a direct result of Secretary Noem having the need to personally green-light every FEMA expenditure, while Trump has politicized FEMA and pushed for its dismantling from the get-go of his second term.

For more than a decade, Texan politicians have politicized emergency response and anything that pertains to either recognizing or admitting climate change exists, as has Trump. Governor Abbott used the shameful analogy of losing a football game to the loss of life and utter failure of Texan politicians and government officials to take their jobs seriously when it comes to serving the citizens and not the special interests that have captured the state’s government.

Experts have warned that staffing cuts, let alone budget cuts, would affect the ability of NOAA/NWS/FEMA to do their jobs effectively. So Nina can take her fake moral outrage about politicizing the government response to the deadly Kerrville floods, and shove it.

To end on a high note, here’s the irrepressibly happy Truman bounding up from the beach:

See you next Friday.

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