Interview with Rod Downey,  author of The Moralist

  

Why did you write The Moralist?

 A number of reasons.  As an artist, I feel it’s my role to deal with issues that challenge people; I want to confront the reader with a radical perspective on the most controversial taboo of our day.  Like Red in the story, I too am outraged at the witch-hunt hysteria that is gripping our culture.  It’s destroying the lives of decent people, shredding our civil rights, and poisoning the relationships between adults and young people.

 

Do you mean sexual relationships?

No.  I mean emotional bonding between teachers and their students, coaches and athletes, mentors and their protégés, even parents and their own children.  Adults are afraid to touch any child or young person, for fear they might be accused of abuse.  That’s insane, and it’s no accident.  This is the real agenda of the witch-hunt.  It’s not the sex; it’s the love they’re after.  Red says this in The Moralist.  Sex is a smokescreen.  These people are not only anti-sex. They’re anti-love, because love is Dionysian and won’t submit to their authority.  That makes it a threat to them, because they want to supplant love with power and control.

 

But The Moralist is not just about politics.  It expresses a philosophical moral and ethical perspective as well.

Yes, it’s so easy to focus on the hot-button issues and miss the bigger picture in The Moralist.  The moral perspective looks at ethics, not in terms of principle but in terms of impulse, and that changes the equation.  The question ceases to be one of “doing the right thing” to “doing the beautiful thing” or “doing the loving thing,” which is far more risky to the individual, because it follows its own instinct, irrespective of abstract principle or the approval of others.

 

 So how are the political concerns of the book related to that?

It goes back to what I said earlier about the Dionysian nature of love.  The Moralist is a love story between a man and an adolescent boy.  This love cuts through the mores and taboos of the culture, because that’s the creative nature of love.  Love is always revolutionary, and that makes it dangerous.

 

 A lot of people who have read The Moralist are convinced that it’s a true story.  Is it a true story?

No, The Moralist is a work of fiction, but there’s a lot of truth in it.  The abuses of our civil liberties and the viciousness and hypocrisy of the hysterics are real things that are really happening in America today.  Love relationships like that between Jonathan and Red are also real.  They’ve existed for thousands of years and are as natural as the sunrise.  The current madness surrounding this issue isn’t going to stop it.  Try as they may, the witch-hunt hysterics can’t legislate love.

 

 

 

 

 

© Rod Downey