How do changes in technology, changes in the speed and ways in which people communicate and share information, affect your role as an author and entertainer?

It's interesting to me now how you can be onstage and you can see people in the audience, you can see their lights come on and it's their telephones, or maybe they're tweeting or blogging. For me, especially when I'm on the lecture tour, I don't really—I can't control it and I can't stop it, but I don't want people in the next town to know what I'm going to do. I don't want them to know what the next story is about.

I used to write people letters and didn't really think about what was in them until they started being sold on eBay. Now I don't write anything too juicy. I would never get onstage and say anything bad about another writer, but sometimes in talking with an audience member in the booksigning line, I would say, "Actually, I can't stand such-and-such." I don't do that now, because I don't know if they'll blog about it.

The publishing industry is in turmoil. Oprah is using the Kindle. Where do you see the future of the printed word going?

When they told me about the Kindle, I thought, "Yeah, right," but I travel a lot, and now I see them on planes. Then my publisher just sent me a letter saying they're aggressively going after these file-sharing sites. I don't know how to get free stuff on the computer. I know how to download songs on iTunes, but I don't know how to get them for free, and I don't want to, because then I couldn't feel so self-righteous about paying for them.

Generally if I'm going to buy, say, a movie, I buy it new, because if it's used the people involved don't get any money, and I don't see why they should do it for no money. When a book comes out, I buy it in the bookstore. I'm happy that people get stuff out of a library, but when people come up to me and say that they got [my work] on tape and made copies for everyone they know, I think, "Why would you say that?"

Publishers are coming up with all sorts of things, coming up with these electronic book contracts they want you to sign. Somebody sat me down for a meeting about Google books, and five minutes in, I said, "Here's what I hear from you: meow, meow, meow."

Many of your essays hark back to when you were younger, un- or underemployed, renting rooms, hitchhiking and otherwise fairly poor. At the time, did your days of being broke feel as amusing as you make them seem now?

The worst feeling on earth is being unemployed and not doing anything about it. Maybe you got the newspaper and maybe you looked through the want ads, and after you take this nap, you're really going to call about that job, you really are. You really would have done it when you got up from the nap, but then somebody called and you rode your bike over and now it's past 5 o'clock.

There's no depression like that, that unemployed depression on the couch, that imagining, "Even if I got the job today, I wouldn't get a paycheck for two weeks." When you get old you think, "I was young, you're supposed to do that when you're young." It would be worse to be that way at 52. I can look back on it now and sort of make fun of myself for it. No one was worse at getting a job than me.

How has your considerable shift in wealth affected your writing and self-image?

Opportunity changes a lot, right? To have opportunities is probably the biggest change in my life. In the past week, say, a French newspaper asked me to write something, a French magazine asked me to write something, an American magazine asked me to write something, I'm closing my story with an editor at The New Yorker, I met today with an old editor at Esquire who now works at GQ. I never could have contacted those people and said, "Could I write something?" They contacted me.

I tend to think of all the people who are much better writers than I am and don't have those opportunities. It doesn't make me think that I'm great or anything; it does make me think that I'm lucky. One thing that hasn't changed since I've been writing is that I haven't tried any less. I haven't gotten to the point when I think, "Yeah, that's good enough." I haven't written anything for money. A French magazine asked me to write [what essentially added up to an advertisement]. It didn't feel right to me. I've never written that way before, and I don't really see the point, and I'm not in a position where I have to start.

Often strangers will give me their writing. This guy in Manchester, England, he worked in a bookstore where I was giving a reading, and I talked to him off and on all night. It took him a long time to admit that he wrote, and then I pestered him some more and I finally got him to agree to send me something.

It was fantastic; it was original and surprising, it was just as if he had reinvented language. I kind of knew it was going to be. Compared to people who come up and say, "'Here's this thing I wrote. I took a creative writing class; how do I get this published?" and I already know it's going to be no good. It was shocking to me when I moved to New York, went to a play and half the audience had invitations for their own plays—you can see people just promoting themselves. I was just so appalled and sickened by that self-promoting behavior. You're going to get a lot further when it's someone else's idea that you're good. Let yourself be someone else's discovery.

What aspects of your life are off-limits to write about?

I don't write about sex because it's not really my subject. I love it when other people write about it, but it's not my subject, and I don't want anyone I've had sex with to write about it. Plus, you're in front of an audience, and they picture wherever you're writing about. I'm 52; no one in the audience wants to picture that.

I didn't write about political things. Not because I didn't feel that way, but because it felt like pandering. Say you've got 3,000 people in the theater. Two thousand, nine hundred and eighty voted just like I did. It's incredibly easy to get them to cheer, too easy. Often, they want to sit in a room and feel like they hate the same people their neighbor hates, and they want to hear John McCain being made fun of.

I just got a letter (regarding a New Yorker essay on the 2008 presidential race) saying, "I was going to come see you in Zurich, and then I read that garbage in The New Yorker. To make fun of a patriot and a soldier who gave so much to this country. ..." But that's not the reason that I don't write political things. I'm not an original thinker that way.

I don't reveal other people's secrets. Everyone in my family has things they don't want the world to know. I don't write those things. I try not to write those things about everyone—things that would prevent them from getting a job.

In your essay, 'Chicken in the Henhouse,' you essentially wrote about homophobia, both in larger society and internalized. Comparing yourself to a straight male stranger who casually spoke with a 10-year-old boy, you wrote, 'Because he was neither a priest nor a homosexual, he hadn't felt the need to watch himself, worrying that every word or gesture might be misinterpreted. He could unthinkingly wander the halls with a strange boy, while for me it amounted to a political act—an insistence that I was as good as the next guy.' That was published in 2004. How has the increased visibility of the queer rights movement in this decade, and its corresponding anti-gay backlash, changed the way you can conduct yourself in public?

That was a time when the Catholic Church was in the news. This happens when pedophilia comes up. People tend to associate it with homosexuals. I was just watching Milk on the plane—in the 1970s they were trying to get gay teachers fired—that was just a particular period when you felt paranoid, just watched very closely. But that same group of people would say, "We need to protect our children," and yeah, you do need to protect your children from pedophiles, but not from me. And the majority of pedophiles are heterosexual anyway.

That was a period when I think every gay man I know felt particularly like he was being watched, being judged more harshly than in years. It's amazing to me—interesting watching that movie Milk as well—just how much things have changed in my life. When I was growing up, I don't think I believed that anyone was homosexual, that anything that bad could have befallen anyone besides me. There wasn't anyone gay on TV, you couldn't go to the library in Raleigh, North Carolina, and read about homosexuals, except maybe in some book on deviant behavior.

When I go on tour now, there are these college boys, and I say, "Where did you meet?" and they say, "We're high school sweethearts." [Growing up], the thought that you could be [same-sex] high school sweethearts—you would have felt the need to turn that person in to the police. There's no way you could have enjoyed yourself.

You can have those 3,000 people in the theater, and 10 percent of my audience is gay. It's interesting to me that those other people are relating to me as a human. When I write about [boyfriend] Hugh, they're relating to it as a way to connect with another person. Perhaps it's because of the way I write about it—maybe if I did write about sex, people would think, "No, I can't relate, you've lost me there." But I don't not write about sex because I'm afraid of losing them.

Other writers who are gay are almost always referred to as 'gay authors' instead of 'authors'—that is, always with the modifier. Though you often discuss your relationship with Hugh and write about coming out in your latest book, almost all articles written about you refer to you as simply 'author' or 'American humorist.' As a writer, what is the impact of being labeled or not being labeled as a 'gay author'?

Twenty years ago, I would be in the gay section of the bookstore just because I used the word "boyfriend." No offense, but that's not where I wanted to be. I wanted to be with the other books: I didn't want to be with that ghetto. It's always interesting to see where people put my book. Sometimes somebody puts my books in the gay and lesbian section; that's the decision of the bookstore. Again, it doesn't bother me in any way to be called a gay writer. I mean, I'm gay and I write. I don't know what the difference is between a gay person who writes and a gay writer—is it just that gay writers write about sex? I don't know, really.

Last time you were in the area, you read 'Undecided' from The New Yorker, where you compared the then-presidential nominees to an airplane food selection between 'the chicken' or 'the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it.' Since his inauguration, how has 'the chicken' been faring so far?

I was talking about that at lunch. My dad—you can't say anything about George Bush: George Bush never make a mistake. ...

There are things that Obama has done where I thought he could do better, like his appointment of [Chicago political fundraiser Louis Susman as] the ambassador to the United Kingdom. But how quickly he changed the perception of Americans abroad. How quickly he improved the life of every American living overseas. People hear your accent at a store, and they give you a thumbs up: "Obama!" It was instantaneous.

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