Well how about that. I just discovered that one of my favorite writers, Clive Barker, is gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. In any case, I love him even more. You got to admire the dude for his macabre imagination. When I was in high school, I eagerly sat through the five Hellraiser films. While the quality of the films decreased (rather enormously) as the franchise plodded on, there were still remarkable bits of fancy, (although very very rare), despite the fact that  Barker himself has already removed his name from the succeeding films (beginning with the first straight-to-DVD release Hellraiser: Inferno).

China Mieville (question: how do you pronounce his name?) is a big Clive Barker fan and he even acknowledges the author in his books including the Abarat-inspired Un Lun Dun.

Quotes:

“…I think that gay men with any real heat to their nature—I’m not now talking about the heat between their legs—I’m talking about how that influences the way that they think, their appetites for art, and whether they like Stephen Sondheim or not, whether they know who Stephen Sondheim is or not. They will gravitate to places where they, firstly, can be their own people, and meet their own people, and, yes, fall in love, and yes, have sex, but I think more importantly, shape the culture. I think that AIDS did a terrible thing to the culture. I think it stripped it of an amazing number of extraordinary artists. And I think we won’t really know the scale of that damage for many years to come. But we’ll see that there’s a hole in the culture that has never properly filled.”

“But I come from a very working-class family, and my parents didn’t want me to go to art school. They said, “Please, this is the last thing we’ll ever ask of you, we’ve supported you going to these schools and it’s been expensive, please don’t disappoint us now by wasting it all by becoming a painter.”“

read the rest of the interview here