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In analyzing Genet as a homosexual, what he tries to get to is the nature of the outsider.

Black people in America are classic outsiders, in other words, in a Christian culture, his premise is that the nature of the Christian metaphysic, is that one has to be saved, therefore there are the Saintly and there are the Sinners. And if this is the defintion of reality, whether or not one is an actual Sinner, the culture requires one to have Sinners.

If you set up a metaphysic, a societal metaphysic, that says that Christinaity is based on the concept of Salvation, that therefore there must be in life a moment of Revelation, in which one is transformed from a Sinner into a Saint. If this dichomtomy, or if this split is made in the psyche, not only individually but collectively, you have to have in any society, Sinners and Saints, because the Christian metapsychic has required it, it is an obligation.

If you take this context and you apply it which he does, not only to homosexuals, he applies it to blacks, he applies it to women, what you come away with is the recognition that in American society, we have been defined as the Sinners. Some particle of the society has to take the blame for the sins of that society, the evil impulses of that society.

[When] You’re working out of a Christian metapsychic, that says one is first one thing and by an act of transformation, one becomes something else. It’s the essential split in the psyche. Positing that split in the psyche, transfer it to the society, and what you get is projected sinfulness on somebody.

We were the most convenient scapegoats. It's a game or it's a projection that has gone on now for several centuries. It is important to understand one’s, not only one’s position in the society, but the emotional role that you play in the society. And the role is more important than the position, because the role defines not only your behavior, but the necessity of the insider to have you there as an outsider, so that the notion of sin can be projected outside of him and onto somebody else.

In this culture, what has happened is, we have been defined as the outsider. Instead of experiencing sin as an inner dynamic, what a white person does, psychologically and literally in a collective way, is he imposes his notion of evil onto us. It is why we experience intense discomfort for example, when we walk into any social situation with white people. There is an immediate discomfort that we experience. It is physical in its intensity, and it comes out of the knowledge that we are the projection. That whatever they could not handle in their psyche has been projected onto us, therefore in some ways we experience ourselves in a public format like a collective garbage pail. It is an ugly way to do it, but I insist on the ugliness because I do not know of one black person in my experience who has not had, psychically first, to deal with their own feelings of ugliness. And the feeling of ugliness comes out of what has been projected onto us as the Sinner. As the person in whom evil resides, as the split. The division has been made. It was very conveniently made. Slavery made it a very convenient formula.

If you are the outsider, if you are the Sinner, you are by definition extraordinary. Meaning you are either super good, or you are super evil. You are super sexual, or you are super ascetic. You cannot arrive at normality, because that is the one thing that has been denied you. You have to be – if you look at the history of black literature – with few exceptions, it is the history of creating mythological or mythical black people. Hagar in Song of Solomon, is a woman without a navel. Why? Because she is meant to contain wisdom, a certain psychic, spiritual power that is extraordinary. This notion of the extraordinary forces us narratively when we begin to do our own stories to write about ourselves, it requires or it imposes because we are the outsider and because this has been so deeply infected into some part of the psyche, that it’s almost like you looked at your spine, one part of your spine is normal and the other part of your spine is this huge person, that is bigger, bigger than life. Now, not bigger than life necessarily in a positive way. But bigger, must be bigger, more evil, more sexual, more, more, more. The word larger applies, not the word normal.

In your personal relationships, I posit that this creates a kind of self consciousness in the individual. And it creates a self consciousness in which our experience of normal emotions, love, death, marriage, birth, are to some degree distorted. And while we go through the same human experiences that everyone has gone through in any culture, generation after generation, they happen to us in a slight void. They happen to us, and I’ll take one example, for example, the cliche is that someone like me was raised looking at Greta Garbo fall in love. Elizabeth Taylor fall in love. It is not only that my beauty was rejected, that’s ultimately shallow. What is important is that my ability to participate in the emotion of love was fundamentally distorted. Because I was not Elizabeth Taylor, therefore if I had any notion of love, I had to imitate someone’s idea of it. It was not my idea. I was not an insider, therefore anyone I loved, I did so to some degree – it’s a very subtle level we are working on – I did so to some degree, self consciously. Meaning, the outsider dared love.

It is no accident that white people do not enjoy seeing ordinary black people’s lives. It is no accident that in most TV series that the black characters are still, and this is the insistence, are still caricatures. There is no, no, no difference between Hattie McDaniel 50 years ago and that woman who plays the maid in whatever that bloody thing she’s in. The point is, the notion of ordinary existence is denied. When Losing Ground (1982) was first shown in a theatre for distributors, after the film was screened, as you know it’s basically about a husband and wife. The husband is an artist and the wife is a philosophy teacher. You see them go through a trauma in their marriage, and you see them try and resolve it.

When white distributors saw that movie, they came up to – not me. They didn’t dare come up to me. But they came up to the people who were working for us, trying to get us this distribution. They said we don’t know any black people like that. We don’t know any black women like that. This is amazing, because uh, where is the racial angle here? I posited that that movie had so many racial angles. But what it starts from, the premise of the movie, and I take this back to the experience of love, the premise of the movie is that no one ultimately is going to mythologize my life. No one is going to refuse me the right to explore my experiences of life as normal experiences. Neither outside, nor inside. Human experiences. And that the humanisms of that experience is – I posit, the last hurdle we have to transcend.

Now, when it comes to character development then, which is really what we come down to. When it comes to actually telling stories, what I really want to present to you, is how do we divest ourselves of the need to make ourselves extraordinary. Now, the danger, and I think it’s a danger that maybe we are just becoming to grips with. The danger is that we must now be too good. If you’ve been too evil, if you’ve been the notion of sin incarnated, and you’re now trying to correct that balance. What do you do? You make black people into Saints. You go from being a Sinner to being a Saint. Neither one is true, neither one has anything to do with reality. Both are traps to dehumanize you, both refuse to accept the fact that you live, breathe, and die out of an internal psyche which is extremely private, extremely idiosyncratic and is neither Saint nor Sinner.

Therefore, when you begin to think about narrative, the problem for us is the process of demythologizing ourselves. Otherwise, there can be no truth apprehended. That’s very theoretical, on a practical level, where you write scripts, where I write scripts. If you can hold that as the subtext, which is my subtext, I write out of that subtext, I refuse to create mythological characters. That is my obsession, that is my artistic stance, that is where I will rise or fall. I am not interested in mythology, I am interested in ideas, I am interested in how human beings evolve. A consciousness which is true to who they are here, in the center of their being, and I am interested in telling stories that give pleasure to the psyche.