Pete Crighton dishes on music, sex and finding his soundtrack to queer joy
He discussed The Vinyl Diaries on Bookends with Mattea Roach
Growing up in the midst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic left Pete Crighton with a huge fear of sex — and he threw himself into music as a way to cope with those anxieties.
"Even before I was struggling to make sense of my queerness, music just was another world for me," said Crighton on Bookends with Mattea Roach.
"It was just a play-land where I didn't have to worry about my peers. I didn't have to worry about what I said or looked like or acted like."
It wasn't until his 40s that Crighton knew he needed to face his fears and figure out how to live his queer life to the fullest.
In his memoir The Vinyl Diaries, he takes readers on this journey — pairing big moments with the music that shaped them.
On Bookends, Crighton tells Roach about his later-in-life exploration of sex and why music was so formative to his queer experience.
Mattea Roach: This memoir is structured in a way where you're tying events in your life, relationships that you're in, to the music that you were listening to at the time. When did you realize that this nonlinear structure of association was the way that you wanted to write about your life?
Pete Crighton: It's a great question. I don't know that I really consciously thought about it and it really just happened organically. It's the way I move through the world. All my markers are through what records I've bought, what records I've listened to and how I remember my life is really through those moments.
All my markers are through what records I've bought, what records I've listened to and how I remember my life is really through those moments.- Pete Crighton
I kept really detailed journals and when I would go back and look at things that I wanted to write about, I would actually have written down like, we listened to this record. This song was the one that Preston really liked. So I had this record of these things. When I would think of something I wanted to write about, it would just be in this journal, all of these associations from different points in my life because of those record albums and those songs.
You were in this long-term relationship through your entire 30s. In your memoir, you write about how it was a little bit stifling for you that a lot of your creative impulses and interests didn't have space to breathe in that relationship. Can you tell me a bit about how you realized that that was not working?
With all due respect to the person in question, it was all about me. It wasn't about him, but it was a slow build for sure.
I was really, really terrified of HIV and AIDS when I was a youngster. So just the idea of being married, for lack of a better word, in a very heteronormative kind of way, was my salvation. To me, that's how I'm going to survive. That's how I'm going to thrive. I didn't really get to date a lot of people. I didn't get a lot of connections with other people. So I didn't really know what worked for me and what would bounce.
I was with this person for over 10 years and it probably wasn't a great match for either one of us, to be perfectly frank. But one of the things I point to in the book is that he hated my record collection. That should have been a sign right from the start that maybe we weren't compatible because it's such an important part of my life. I think it's just those things that build up over time. There was no real thing that I could point to to be like, this was the day that it became untenable for me.
You talk about marriage and monogamy as this kind of salvation, was the word that you used. Can you talk more about that? Why did it feel so central that you'd be willing to sacrifice some of your major interests and freedom and creativity in order to access monogamy?
I was just so terrified of sex because of the HIV/AIDS crisis. I was 16 years old when Rock Hudson died and that was this big moment in the mass culture's understanding of what HIV and AIDS was and it just shut me down from truly wanting to explore my queerness and particularly my sexuality. So it wasn't so much marriage that I was after, but that idea of a monogamous relationship where we knew no one else was having sex with anyone else. And that felt safe to me. That felt like a protection from the thing that I was most afraid of, which was HIV and AIDS through sexual contact.
What's really fascinating about this book is you tell this story about getting to explore hook up culture in your 40s, which is a story that I've heard about from talking to guys your age who've had that experience, but not a story that I'd read about in a book before. Why did you want to dig into that part of your journey?
In fairness, to see it. I hadn't read this story and I grew up thinking your mid 40s is sort of like you're done, like that's the end of your life and you might retire and then you might play some golf or something like that. And I had never really read about this midlife excellence or excitement. So that was a real part of it for me was like, "Let's just be honest about what this journey is."
For so long I wasn't honest about my own desires and my own sexuality that it just felt like laying it out really openly felt like the right choice to do as an artist and a writer.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Liv Pasquarelli.
