Sexy and Loathsome: author J.T. LeRoy talks to the creators of the graphic novel How Loathsome about one of gay readers' leading phobias: sexual ambiguity.

J.T. LeRoy: Do you ever have this feeling like transgendered stuff is starting to have its day?

Tristan Crane: Transgender stuff is almost one of the last taboos, and yet at the same time everybody is super-, superfascinated by it.

Can you explain [the setup] for people who haven't read the first story?

Crane: Catherine, our main character, is dragged to an S/M play party by a couple of her nefarious friends and meets Chloe who is, in her eyes, this drop dead gorgeous fabulous vision who--Ted Naifeh: Represents everything that Catherine finds attractive.

When you write transgender stuff, it's almost like it makes the gay community uncomfortable.

Crane: Oh, it makes them deeply uncomfortable. People who don't use the word "queer" to describe themselves like to talk about how the gay and lesbian community is very open-minded toward the bisexuals and the transgender people, which I think is the hugest load of stilt. Hopefully, in the next 10 years this rift can go more by the wayside, because the younger people I know don't really identify as just gay or just lesbian or even bi. The people I know really fall more [under] that queer umbrella.

I know a lot of people in the gay community were kind of afraid of my book Sarah for those exact reasons, being that [it dealt with] gay men who are transgendered, people who are transgender and prostitutes, or gay men that might be having sex with children, you knew.

Naifeh: It shines an unfavorable light on gay male culture. A socially unacceptable light.

Crane: Well, I wouldn't say it's socially unacceptable. I read your book and I was like, Oh, thank God, somebody who is trans more in the way that I am. Embracing a more fluid identity and embracing your past and having to use everything that you can because you don't have very much--that's something that I can definitely relate to.

Your stories are peopled by some transgendered folks, but they're also about people's search for connection and identity and love--

Crane: I tell people it's a love story and they laugh at me, but it is. It's about failing for that person hi the corner who freaks you out and trying to figure out [how] to get that person alone.

Naifeh: Well, I always think of it also as a tragic romance between a man and a woman, except for the man is also a woman and the woman was once a man.

I just think it's important for gays to expand their--what's the word?--not their horizons hut their visibility.

Crane: I hope somebody would pick up the book and find it validating--maybe a little intimidating and scary, [but] like, Wow, people are taking what we did and Stonewall and taking it so much further, and seeing that as a really good and wonderful thing. None of the up-and-coming queer kids are going, "No, don't be gay men," they're just saying, "This is how we're gay and this is how you're gay, so let's all be queer together."

Find more from this discussion, including J.T. LeRoy's scary encounter with Robin Wright Penn, only at www.advocate.com

Staring at a sexy figure across a crowded room, you suddenly catch yourself: Wait! Is that a boy or a girl? To which the authors of the underground comic How Loathsome might reply, "Who cares?" For artist Ted Naifeh and photographer Tristan Crane, who cowrite the comic--in addition, Naifeh does the drawing, Crone the lettering--the importance of fluidity and honesty and possibility far outweigh the politics of sexual identity.

Now that Loathsome's first four issues have been republished as a beautiful, compelling graphic novel, every gay man and lesbian whose lust has ever accidentally crossed gender lines has a chance to meet supercool Catherine Gore, the comic's adventurous central character, and Chloe, the magnetic and mysterious object of her affection. And maybe gay readers will come away from the experience a little closer to, "Who cares?"

With its "dark milieu of sexual surprises and heroin addiction, How Loathsome isn't your average Joe Phillips romp. So who better to get the scoop than queer author J.T. LeRoy, who fictionalized his own dark, gender-defying past in his first novel, Sarah. LeRoy caught up with Crane and Naifeh by phone.

--Bruce C. Steele