Tom Pyun on Dating White Men, Navigating Privilege, and Following His Passion
The debut author's book, 'Something Close to Nothing,' focuses on a gay male couple whose relationship is at a crossroads.
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Tom Pyun's Something Close to Nothing is the type of story that rarely gets told—about hopeful, yet flawed, queer people navigating our complicated 21st-century reality. The book's plot is focused on a mixed-race gay couple's messy surrogacy journey, and it starts with a bang: Wynn, who is Korean American, leaves white guy Jared at the airport, so that he must fly to Cambodia solo to collect their daughter Meryl (yes, named after Streep).
Told through alternating points of view, the narrative jets between scenes in San Francisco, Cambodia, Thailand, Connecticut, New York, Switzerland, Boston, and even Kenya. The novel begins in 2015—the same year as the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage throughout the country—but shifts as far back as 1995 as well as forward, imagining a future 2036.
I was thrilled to talk to Tom since he tackles thorny subjects in elegant (and humorous) ways. It turns out we’re the same age and understand many of the turbulent shifts that have taken place over the past three decades for our generation of LGBTQ+ people, and he stuffs a lot of those complex themes into his wonderful debut novel.
“People need to understand how hard it is to do art in late capitalism,” Tom explained when asked about some of the takeaways he hopes readers glean from it. “I think the book is a lot about living in a kind of hyper-capitalist San Francisco. That's a big theme in the book. Obviously, I'm trying to pack in a lot, but I took a lot of different messages from different experiences and knowledge, and I stitched them together into a quilt.”
Read on to find out more about Tom’s experiences dating in San Francisco, his obsession with hip-hop dance, and why it’s crucial that interracial couples talk about the tough issues at the core of their attractions and relationships.
Tom Pyun’s novel, Something Close to Nothing, is available now.
Jerry Portwood: To get things started, I wanted to know your age and how you identify generationally. Like, are you Gen X? Millennial?
Tom Pyun: I'm officially Gen X, but I'm like, a young Gen Xer. I'm 47. But I relate to a lot of Millennials. I think this is a very Millennial novel, right? Because I definitely feel more aligned with Millennials. With all the complaints about Millennials, I was like, “Oh, that's, that's the stuff I struggled with.”
And where are you currently living?
I'm currently living in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I’m part of a program called Tulsa Remote, in which they basically pay remote workers to move here and try out Tulsa for a year. I moved here in May, but before that, I was in LA. Before that, I was in San Francisco for 15 years. And I was born and raised on Long Island. I lived in New York City on-and-off for four years; I did grad school there and stuff. I have a nomadic kind of personality, so this has been fun for me.
And how do you identify on the LGBTQ+ plus spectrum?
I'm gay or queer. It's such a funny question because I took a sex gender class [in 1998] when I was at Vassar; this bougie Women's Studies class with a really great professor. And she's like, “Are you gay? Are you queer?” It's really an issue around class, and how do you identify in terms of anti-normativity. So I guess I'm gay or queer; I'm comfortable with both.
How about your relationship status? Where are you right now in that journey
I'm extremely single.
Is that your ideal relationship?
I don't know anymore. I mean, I think I do want to be in a relationship. I just, I mean—I don't know how vulnerable I want to get with you—but I just think that, for years, I just wasn't healthy enough to be in a relationship. I feel like I'm starting over in the last two years, because I've done a lot of personal development work. I'm not convinced I want a relationship. I think I could be happy single.
OK. Well, that's really interesting, because I was curious if some of the characters’ defining features resembled experiences that you’ve had? Obviously you felt this was an essential story you wanted to tell as your first book. Plus, you set most of it in 2015, which is this pivotal year with the Supreme Court ruling for same-sex marriage. Walk me through it: Why was this narrative essential for you?
So none of it is autobiographical in terms of events. It's all in my sick imagination, right? I think the character traits, defects, are very much from experiences.
Right. You were imagining what would happen in this scenario…
Exactly. I was a career management consultant in the nonprofit social sector. I was living in San Francisco and hit some level of professional success, and I was not satisfied by it. I just had too high of expectations for how much my career could really fulfill me. My expectations weren't realistic. So I started taking a lot of dance classes and singing lessons.
Then, I was 35 and I took my first creative writing class, and the teacher was like, “You know what? You have potential. You should stick with this.” Nobody said that in dance class and singing—not really. I'm really good at being a synthesizer of information. So writing, for me, is just being able to take disparate information and synthesize it into a story, which is what management consulting is.
Plus, I was really not feeling my social group at the time: a lot of people I knew were having kids via surrogacy, and I thought I had some ethical issues with it, because I studied public health, and I was interested in bioethics. Concurrently, I was also doing this hip-hop dance workshop for beginners. I'm actually quite bad. But I got really obsessed with it—like I took it six days a week. I couldn’t stop; I was so addicted to the dopamine from these classes.
I think part of this book is, in ways, processing my grief over dating in San Francisco. I've lived a lot of places, and it's the worst of any place I've ever lived. I found it very difficult. I felt like, at the time, even if I wanted a relationship, I don't think I could have had one with anyone. I tried there, and then I went to LA, and actually LA was much easier—if you could believe it—to date. So I think it was a way of processing the grief of not being able to find a partner in a relationship. So I created this.
One thing that I was really impressed with is how you reveal Wynn and Jared’s sex life, especially that they don't have anal or penetrative sex. I think it's something that people don't talk about enough. They don't talk about, if two gay men are not having an expected type of sex, what does that mean about them as people and as gay men. Russell T. Davies, who also created Queer as Folk, explores that really well in the Cucumber and Banana TV series. Like, are we even gay if we don't have sex? Why did you have that dynamic? Why was that important between the two guys?
I needed there to be reasons for the dissatisfaction, and I felt like sex life is often the issue. I love listening to people's stories, and I had a lot of friends in San Francisco who—that's usually the first thing that gay men complain about in their relationship, especially in their long-term relationship. I wanted Wynn and Jared to grow up together and then grow apart.
A friend's mom used to tell me: “You either meet someone when you're very young and you grow together. Or you meet someone when you're old, and you are accepting of the other person.” Obviously, she was very black-or-white, but I think anything in-between is quite hard. So, I knew I wanted them to meet when they were baby gays and grow up together, and then have them grow apart.
And it’s even more complicated since Wynn is Jared’s first kiss, his first boyfriend, and he latches on to him and never considers an alternative. That can happen—especially when there's fear of HIV and AIDS, and it can affect sex lives.
So for the sex scenes. I wrote a couple of them, and I was shocked by all the straight people in these great writing workshops in San Francisco, they were all down with the gay sex scenes! They were just like: More! They weren't saying I was writing a lot of good stuff in general, so I glommed on to that compliment, because people were tearing apart my work in the workshop.
People would say, “These characters were so damn unlikable.” And I'm like, “Wow, you wouldn't survive in the gay community. These are gay men who have a lot of trauma. This is how it works in adulthood within, not mixed company, but in this kind of a closed setting, gays within gays, right?” So all the positive feedback was about sex scenes; people, loved them. I wasn’t trying to make them erotic. Eventually they came out funny.
The other topic that I thought you handled so deftly is around race. I have not seen or read enough on that. I've tried to write about it as a white guy, and I realize it's almost impossible for me to do it without it coming off wrong. So, thank you for doing this!
Jared is not quite a WASP, but he is a white man and is only into dating people who are non-white. Wynn is Korean American, and he thinks and talks about race when it comes to that, but there are landmines. Tell me how you how you decided to approach that topic.
Well, I knew I wanted the Asian American character to be from a more affluent background. And I wanted the white character to be from a more working-class background. That was important to me—that they both have blind spots. I wanted Wynn to have a lot of class blind spots, and I wanted Jared to have some racial blind spots. These are hard terrains to navigate in this day and age. We're all trying to make sense of our privilege, and the changing social socio-economic times and racial politics of our era are rapidly changing. So I wanted to document that.
I think I was probably processing a lot of my own feelings about dating in San Francisco as someone who's Asian American and struggling with dating—and struggling with dating white men in general. I just felt like, whenever the issue of race came up, it just was not heard.
Then, struggling to meet other men of color where there was chemistry. I was meeting a lot of men of color, and they were like, “Oh, I only date white guys.” And it's like, “OK, well, this sucks.” Or, the other way around. Sometimes men would like me, and I'd be like, “I don't like you back.” Is it because I'm internally racist?
Why don’t interracial gay couples talk about this? Because all the women of color I know who are married to white men, they're very in touch with this stuff. They talk about the challenges and clarifying the rage they sometimes feel about being married to a white person—even if that white person is so unbelievably progressive and empathetic. I guess on some level, there is that privilege that it's hard to be so close to and see.
There's this one paragraph, which is from Jared's perspective, where he says:
“Maybe I also needed a book on how to date men of color? Better yet, I needed a book explaining why I was primarily attracted to non-white men. … I imagined that part of me wanted to be them, to fuse our identities together so we could set ourselves apart and confirm our “specialness.” Or that I had always wanted to be “cool,” even though I wasn’t and never would be, and dating “cool” might be the closest I would ever get to it. Thinking about this, let alone talking about it with anyone, made me anxious. The last thing I needed was another person accusing me of being racist.”
And I thought, “Wow, you just encapsulated so many questions and fears.” I’m a white guy who rarely is attracted to other white guys—especially if they look too much like me. But why do I prefer people who are quite different physically from myself? You summed it up from the white guy's perspective pretty well.
That was a workshop thing. Someone, a person of color, said, “I want you to explore that.” I sat down and had to dig a little deep, which is what later drafts and novels are like, digging deep within yourself to find the right answers.
One thing I didn't mention—and your personal testimony made me think of it—is that, why are we attracted to who we are attracted to? Like, none of us really know, right? It's a mystery why I'm attracted to who I like. Why do I like Chris Evans more than Chris Pine? It's a black box that—even for the people who are the most self-aware—it’s impossible to know.
The irony of it all is that Wynn ends up with a guy who is passing, who identifies as black, but is passing, and I wanted to do that because, you know, maybe that's his issue. Like, his politics don't align with his dating preferences. Did you ever read that [2010 Playboy] article with John Mayer? Everyone thought he was a douche bag because he said that he really loves people of color, but he only dates blond women. People hung him out to dry. And I was like, hey, that’s refreshingly fucking honest, right?
Yeah, and obviously there's more to it than just ethnic or racial qualities. We fall in love with people's minds, their intellect. It’s not all physical.
The other thing that you also poked at—which I think is essential, and that I've been trying to get people to pay attention to—is the “roles” that men in same-sex relationships end up performing.
Often men don't know how to navigate it. At one point, you have Wynn saying that Jared expects him to be the housewife, and then later, his friend Nicole tells Wynn that he’s misogynistic for even thinking that. Why did you know that this idea of the roles men perform in a relationship was important?
Gosh, I think what I really wanted was there to be a lot of tension between them. There had to be more than one reason why someone would do something as extreme as leave someone right before they're gonna have a baby—because that's a horrible thing to do. So, I think with straight couples, personally, maybe they say the biggest issue they fight over is money, right? I think with gay men, it's actually sex and then money—or they're tied or something.
So I knew they were going to have tension around money and spending. I don't want to generalize too much, but I think it's really hard for two high-achieving professionals, especially gay men, who tend to be competitive. I wanted it to be some sort of shift: Where one started out less successful, like Jared, and then ended up more successful later. I kind of threw that in there with Wynn and the dancing because dancing doesn't pay. Like, if you're the unemployed member of the couple, you're going to be asked to lift more of the load at home, right?
I think these types of stories are important because we don't have decades and decades of models of how to put ourselves together in relationships, right? When queer people get into them without any instruction, without any guidance, they are often confused why it's not working. Interesting enough, you actually have Jared having another response—which is to say:
“Straight people need to see that our love is as real as theirs. They need to see that we can build a family that’s just as legitimate and loving. … We need to learn there’s more to life than circuit parties, orgies, and party drugs. Monogamous, committed relationships, and raising children will save us.”
He's trying to prove something rather than just live his life, right? And it's like having to demonstrate how assimilated and how normal he is, which can be just as damaging in a relationship.
I agree completely.
To pivot slightly, did you have any LGBTQ+ role models growing up or remember any important pop culture moments that might have influenced your ideas about love and relationships?
I watched a ton of TV growing up, so the first two people who come to mind was Greg Louganis, who got HIV. He was unbelievably so good looking and talented, and I was scared, like, “Oh my god, this dude's gonna die!” And then the season The Real World with Pedro. Yep, all my role models all got AIDS. Some of them died, but they all got sick, you know? That's trauma in itself, right?
Then there’s John Ritter. I loved Three’s Company as a kid. I don't know why, and John Ritter's character—who pretends to be gay and lives with two women—he's playing into all these horrible stereotypes. That show does not age well, right?
It's funny, because so many men of a certain age have all said that about John Ritter and Three's Company when I ask them that question. It was important because we didn't know better.
Really? That’s so funny!
Since you've written a whole novel about relationships, I'm curious: What is your philosophy about relationships? What do you think makes them work, or what do you think makes them destruct?
I think, now that I’m getting older, unfortunately, all my standards keep raising and my criteria keeping increasing in number. For example, I don’t want a heavy drinker or partier, and I feel like that sort of knocks a lot of people out of the running. So we just need to be on the same wavelength in terms of that. I’m looking for someone who doesn't want kids, and someone who is comfortable with a level of independence. I'm really used to doing my own thing. So I feel like that's a tall order involved.
I'm getting all spiritual in my older age, so I'm like, “You know what? If the universe wants that, then I'm down for it. But if it doesn't, I'm not going to fight and push for it, right?” I mean, for instance, why I left San Francisco and LA? I was like, I'm tired of fighting to live here. And I feel the same way about relationships. Now, it must line up. Relationships are work, but I don't want to have to fight too hard in the beginning.
This is a tough question, but it is one that I ask everyone, but how would you define love? Is it the thing you work at for a long period of time, or is it the strong feeling you feel for someone right from the beginning, for no reason?
I'm personally the type of person, fortunately—whether it's to my detriment—I need that first spark. I wouldn't call that first spark love, but I need some attraction. Infatuation is not healthy, but I need it to motivate me to kind of go deeper with someone. I think really love is kind of a longer-term thing—where you're kind of proving yourselves. You're proving your consistency, stability. And it's hard. So I mean, I think more the latter—whether or not I do that in practice, is a whole other thing.
I'm curious if you remember any good or bad advice you received from a friend or maybe a queer elder.
Let me think about that one. I mean, not off the top of my head. I can think of bad advice. My therapist told me, “Just be with someone, anyone—even if they’re really mediocre.” I was really struggling to date in San Francisco, quite frankly, I find a lot of men boring. So I think that actually is bad advice for me. I just feel like I was wasting time. Wasting another person's time, too.
I think the hard thing for me is to differentiate, like, “Am I just trauma bonding with this dude, or is there a genuine connection?” It's something that I'm starting to kind of interrogate now, but I think, back then, I couldn't differentiate. So I think that's why he wanted me to just be with someone extremely mediocre and boring, but stable. I don't think that was the right advice, and so I ignored it.
That’s a good answer. I like that!
He's a therapist, so like 80 to 90% of what he said was good advice. He's allowed to give me some, you know, flawed advice.
Well, then, on the other hand, what sort of advice would you give someone younger who thinks that it's impossible to find love, especially as a as a gay man or a queer person?
I would say, I think I definitely did not give enough of the good guys a chance. I see what my options are now, and I look at my back at what my options were in my twenties or early thirties, and I didn't give a lot of really nice guys a chance. I always thought there would be something better, maybe subconsciously.
I probably had some deep intimacy issues as well that I needed to work out. But I think getting a really nice guy who you're attracted to, who seems like he has his shit together? Give that person a chance. I'm kind of going a little bit against what I said earlier. I'm kind of balancing out the advice that my therapist gave me.
Yeah, I get it. Sometimes people are too picky. Or living in a big city, there is that grass is always greener thing.
Definitely, definitely
OK, last question. You've worked so hard on this book and now it’s time to put it out into the world; when you have no control over it. What do you hope readers get from the book? Is there a message that you hope that they get?
I really believe in having a passion at some level, on all levels, actually. So that was important to me: to have a character who followed his passion. Also, I hope people have a more nuanced understanding of race and being queer.
I also hope people understand that having kids is not for everyone. I think it's something that some people are called to do, but somehow society and biology force people to do it, or just happens, right? But I think older people are always telling their kids like, “You need to have kids. I want a grandchild.” It's like, well, that might not be the right thing for your 38-year-old daughter or son, right? I really wanted to interrogate that, and I hope readers get that.
Tom Pyun’s novel, Something Close to Nothing, is available now.
