Ask the Author: Andrew Tibbetts
[admin / November 30th, 2010 / Interviews ]The fiction of Andrew Tibbetts is included in our Queer Issue and he talks with us about perfect gifts, sassy black women on TV, his catch sitcom phrase and more.
1. How would a homosexual make the perfect Christmas gift this holiday season?
I don’t believe in the buying and selling of human beings. What kind of magazine is this?
2. How would the effect of the story change if you made the setting Hanukkah instead of Christmas?
It would make it repulsive. The Jews have been picked on enough. What kind of magazine is this? Besides: Jews and homosexuals together in a single story? Too holocausty!
3. What Iggy Pop song would you like to walk in a room to?
Grace Jones’ cover of “Nightclubbing.” In my personal heaven, (Jamaican session musicians) Sly and Robbie will be with me always and forevermore, our three clouds tethered as if one, I, on a Rick Wakeman sized whack of vintage keyboards, Farfisa, Hammond B-3, a Rhodes…maybe a Fairlight synth. What kind of magazine is this?
4. Aren’t there other sassy women of color on television?
I think to be “of colour” and “a woman” on television, there is a sass requirement. Even Oprah has to drop her serious face and “go all ghetto on it, girlfriend” to lead into the commercial breaks. There are powerful unexamined ideas riding on it.
5. What would be your sitcom catchphrase?
“That’s my fucking yoga mat, Bernice!”
6. What leashes do you wish you could get rid of?
I’m seriously in love with a little stripper named Mathieu who leads me on just to pump money out of me. Giving me his home number but rarely returning my calls! Agreeing to meet for drinks but only just before his shift and just around the corner from the club, not like on his day off or anything! Telling me he’s in an “open relationship” but then asking me not tell his boyfriend what we get up to in the back room–which is sort of his job, not really adultery! It’s making me psychotic –so, I guess the leash of my own stupidity and the leash of love. But no, not the leash of love. So, um, the leash of third world debt…instead of the love one, ‘K? Not the love leash! Leave me the love leash! Untether me never (which happens to be my other sitcom catchphrase! And also: “What kind of magazine is this?”) but end those ridiculous world bank restructuring programs.