Richard Knight interviews Brian Kellow, Pauline Kael biographer, on critic's gay appeal: 'Like yourself, I grew up reading Pauline Kael as a lonely teen in Nebraska...'

Richard Knight recently interviewed for the Windy City Times out gay writer Brian Kellow about his new Pauline Kael biography, which has been enthusiastically received by both critics and book buyers.

She presided over a group of budding film critics (many of them gay and dubbed "the Paulettes" by her enemies), urging them on in their own careers...
     Windy City Times: Like yourself, I grew up reading Pauline Kael as a lonely teen in Nebraska and was delighted to learn in the ensuing years that so many of my gay friends had done the same thing. Do you think part of her appeal to gay readers had to do with her pride in being "an outsider" which really comes through in your biography?
     Brian Kellow: I suppose one of the things that gay men have always loved about her writing is the sharpness of it and the fact that she is willing to take no prisoners and she writes in a very outsized manner and style...
     WCT: She was like the literary Thelma Ritter, no doubt... There are these intriguing conundrums in her life—this whole thing that she had these love affairs in her youth with gay men and then found herself at the center of controversy with the gay community over what was perceived as homophobic comments in some of her reviews. What I got from your book was that she felt so comfortable in her life with gay men saying stuff like, "Oh, you're a big fag, shut up" with humor, she didn't get that it wasn't okay to write like that in her reviews...
    Brian Kellow: I don't think she was homophobic. I think that in her review of Funny Lady and the way she references Liza Minnelli at the end of it—and I think it's one of the funniest things she ever wrote in her life: "What are you going to do now, eat the audience?"