Bret Easton Ellis: 'I Was Fairly Bisexual In College'

In a 27-page question-and-answer interview (conducted by Out fave Jon-Jon Goulian) in the most recent issue of lit bible The Paris Review, Bret Easton Ellis, he of the Twitter addiction, Gleehate, and noir porno starring James Deen, talks at length about his career and life since he rocketed to fame with 1985's Less Than Zero.

The interview, a portion of which is available online here, is a fascinating read, and not just because we're Ellis fans. And while the conversation does tend to focus on the editing of his work and his inspiration, it also touches on a subject we're most definitely interested in: his sexuality.

See, Ellis has always written with what seems to us to be a pretty gay sensibility. And he tweets about a "25-year old," perhaps the same one New York spied in his apartment in 2010 and referred to as "a slight, arty, twentysomething guy slouched on the sectional sofa, watching a cartoon on the big TV, a guitar leaning next to him." Still, we never quite had confirmation, and our hunches aren't always correct about such things.

"I definitely don't identify as gay, " he told Metro Weekly in 2002 when asked point blank how he identified. "So I can't commit an answer. "

Still, Ellis said to Goulian, "I was fairly bisexual in college--I had girlfriends, I had boyfriends." He went on to discuss how that experience informed his book The Rules of Attraction. "I identified with Victor not realizing that there was this girl who care for him a lot, but she was just a blip on his screen. I related to Sea, where maybe a guy really liked me, but nothing was going on, and yet he was talking to other people about his feelings toward me, while I was fucking everyone else in sight. I related to Paul and Lauren, liking someone and being rebuffed by them. I was able to feel everything that everyone was going through in that book, and that's one of the reasons why I wrote it. I had been all of them."

And even if his admission that he once went on not exactly a date with Donna Tartt doesn't clear things up, we do walk away with some ideas about what the writer is up to. He discusses working on "a shark movie," otherwise known as Bait, an HBO series, a recently finished script on the suicides of art darlings Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake, and a possible Duran Duran biopic. A collection of projects that leaves us just as confused as we were before.