Interview by Claudia Steinberg
Portrait courtesy of Lucy Sante

CS Was your curiosity about the underworlds of glamorous cities like New York and Paris an act of existential rebellion against their world of law and order?

LS I was in rebellion against everyone and everything – my parents but also the Americans. The moment I discovered that New York was not America, I fell for the place.

CS Did your rigid parental background nourish an anti-bourgeois sentiment that extended to social outcasts and misfits?

LS To be precise, I'm the product of a mixed marriage. My mother was a barely literate, ultra-Catholic peasant; my father was an urbane, mostly secular, socialist labourer. So, I definitely got a certain amount of working-class resistance from him. 

CS Did the grime and the roughness of 1970s New York inspire the courage to experiment?

LS It didn't really kick in until 1982 or 1983, when the Reagan administration's deregulations trickled down, and buildings began to be sold off.

CS I was thrilled to find ornate, rundown historical buildings in a place I had imagined as the capital of the hyper-capitalist modern world – I would disappear into ancient, dusty fabric stores in Soho for hours. Were there places that held that kind of promise and mystery for you?

LS Absolutely. I've devoted half my career to evoking that.

CS What did the decay mean to you, beyond the fact that it kept developers out?

LS I grew up in Belgium after the Second World War, where in the mid-to-late 1950s it was still common to see war ruins; there was a bomb crater next door to my maternal grandparents' home, so it felt familiar. It countered the shiny new American ideal, which repulsed me. It felt like you could peel back all the layers of history. Looking up at windows, you could easily be persuaded that it was 1932 up there, and 1956 over there.

CS You moved to Kingston, New York, in the mid-1990s. What made you, such a dedicated urbanite, leave the city? Was there something in particular that made you move to Kingston?

LS I was not attracted to the area. I moved here because I got a job teaching at Bard College, which miraculously began the same week my son was born (and he graduated from Bard the day after I retired). My then-wife, who hated cities, took it as an opportunity and vetoed my desire to commute. Now that I've turned in my book and will see some funds, I intend to move back to New York. There's no life up here for someone like me, or any single person, really.

CS In a recent interview, you explained that, “City people had to do a lot of thinking about red and blue.” Does the legacy of your father, who worked in an iron foundry, give you political insights into these red-and-blue conflicts?

LS Yes, of course. I'm always aware of coming from the working class.

CS You always read poetry, a domain largely dominated by “blue” culture and values, and you adored Allen Ginsberg, whom you met. How were you able to navigate such different worlds?

LS Code-switching. In my teenage years, I had intellectual friends in the city and non-intellectual friends in the suburbs, and had distinct ways of talking with each set. After 1974 or so, I stopped going back to the suburbs except for major holidays.

CS Paris was another city you wrote extensively about. in an alternative history of the petty criminals and labyrinthine streets that was pre-Haussmann’s Paris. Do you still love Paris? 

LS Like everything else, yes and no. Paris is also a museum of what it once was, and unaffordable for regular humans. It's been cleaned up. 

CS Before your transition, did you feel as if parts of yourself were segregated from the whole person? Are you a completely different person to your friends?

LS That's a mystery to me. My ex says that I've become a completely different person, but I feel like the same old me. I never indulged in male privilege, and I never felt like a real male, no matter how hard I tried.

CS We live in a time of intense anti-trans sentiment: this tiny minority supposedly represents the decline of American society. What are your thoughts? 

LS Of course. We are a unifying red flag for the anger people hold and a distraction from so much else. 

CS Do you have an idea about what your girlhood would have been like?

LS It would depend, as my life has, on so many layers of contingency that it is impossible to project. I always imagine it as turning out much like my own childhood, because of the one unchangeable condition we would share: aloneness.

CS Could you describe what kind of image you want to project, and how you decided on a look?

LS I think I've ended up with menswear- for-women. I hardly ever wear skirts or dresses anymore, to a large degree because my dysphoria is constant and overwhelming, and I don't want to feel like I'm in costume. I decided I would just be myself, since I am, after all, a woman.

CS Considering your literary output, you must be very disciplined, or was it just the love of the material that propelled you? 

LS Nope. Love of the process is what keeps me going. For me, it's more about writing than it is about any subject. I have no discipline, but I love to write, and I'm constantly, even now, fending off the wolf at the door. My hard work comes from my education, courtesy of the Jesuits, and even more so the late Barbara Epstein of the New York Review of Books, my mentor. .