The Contrarian
By Deborah Solomon
Published, New York Times: May 31, 2010

Left - Christopher Hitchens photograph by Christian Oth for The New York Times

As a British-American critic, essayist and all-purpose iconoclast, you are known as one of the defining voices of the new atheism. But your just-published memoir, “Hitch-22,” is in fact an exercise in worship — male hero worship. Is it fair to say that you look upon the British novelist Martin Amis as the Messiah?

No, to the contrary. That’s exactly what would make us both throw up. Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake.

Yet you seem to put unshakable faith in your guy friends, including Salman Rushdie and the poet James Fenton, who receive chapters of their own, while your two wives and three children are almost completely ignored.

The book is a memoir. It’s not an autobiography.

What did you mean to suggest by including the detail about your long-ago flings with two men who became part of Margaret Thatcher’s administration?

There are still people who want to criminalize homosexuality one way or another, and I thought it might be useful if more heterosexual men admitted that they are a little bit gay, as is everyone, and that homosexuality is a form of love and not just sex.

Not everyone is “a little bit gay,” as you say. Do you think your basic sexual confusion underlies your political confusions?

No, I wouldn’t call it confusion. I’d call it a punctuated consistency. I argue in the book that my principles were the same throughout.


Full interview at NYT.