After hours: acclaimed author Michael Cunningham channeled his love of Virginia Woolf in The Hours. In Specimen Days, he considers the world after Walt Whitman.

"I try to model myself on artists most heroic to me," says Michael Cunningham, "people who ignore their obvious gifts to try something new and see what happens." After the success of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours, Cunningham certainly takes quite a few risks with Specimen Days (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $24). Cunningham's new book is a trio of interrelated, genre-bending novellas set in New York City and involving Walt Whitman. The first, "In the Machine," is a ghost story set at the height of the industrial revolution; the second, "The Children's Crusade," is a contemporary crime thriller about a kids' terrorist ring; and the third, "Like Beauty," is an interspecies romance circa 2150 between a lizard lady and a male robot who traffics in homoerotic S/M fantasies. In an Advocate exclusive, Cunningham discusses his long-awaited book.

With The Hours you took on Virginia Woolf. Why now Whitman?

I hadn't planned it. I'm sure there are people who'll say "He cashed in on Woolf, and now he's cashing in on another one." Actually, the first part was always set in New York City around 1865. Doing research, I realized that New York then was an extremely difficult place for everyone but the rich. People worked 12 hours a day, six days a week at factories. There was a coal-laden sky above everybody's head. I thought how interesting that out of this blighted environment sprang Whitman, the greatest American poet. So I put him in the lust [story] and then thought, If he is going to be in one, he should be in all three.

In "The Children's Crusade," a character refers to Whitman as "a lover of boys." Do you think he was gay?

Any doubt about Whitman's homosexuality is heterosexist. Many passages in Leaves of Grass refer to his love of men.

Why did you decide to write three novellas instead of one novel?

I was interested in what ghost stories, thrillers, and science fiction are telling us about human life and mystery.

My favorite is "In The Machine," which is more like your lyrical, realist fiction.

I felt that it was especially important after the surprise success of The Hours not to write that book again, like some literary castrato who sings the same song to the delight of the court. Of course, what I'll hear from the next person is, "I'm so glad you finally dumped all that endless relationship crap."

In "Like Beauty," America is Christian-dominated and feudally governed. Is this the future you see?

The idea of a feudal, fundamentalist future is hardly implausible. I wish it were. But it seems to me one of many possible futures. Personally, I've never felt so stuck between skeptical paranoia and profound optimism.

Specimen Days has no gay characters, yet "Like Beauty" is one of your queerest stories.

I'm glad you noticed. I've always thought of myself as a queer [rather than gay] writer.

Before The Hours, you were a midlist gay author, and now--I'm a crossover writer!

How do you view your new Whitmanesque reach?

My hope is that being pulled out of the "gay readers only" section and deposited in a larger section indicates that the world is just getting bigger. My fear is that I'm the token gay writer who gets to cross over on a provisional basis.

What do you most want to say?

The most effective political act for any gay man or lesbian, especially if you lead a public life, is to be completely open. Although, as a gay writer, I refuse to participate in a system that requires me to write only about gay people, the one obligation that I will more than happily meet is to never be discreet, to never let that book club in the Midwest imagine that I have anything to hide.

Bahr has written for The New York Times, GQ, and New York.

To read more of The Advocate's exclusive interviews with Michael Cunningham and Jeanette Winterson. visit Advocate.com.