The essay, for Hilton Als, is much more than a form: it’s an ethos for being in the world that animates not just his celebrated writing—his indispensable decades of contributions to The New Yorker; his cherished books––but every other facet, too, of a wide-ranging artistic practice that’s as much about images and intuition as his ever-trenchant and revelatory prose. Hilton’s Instagram feed lends the same sharply elegant language to lived experience that his criticism gives to painters and plays. As a curator, he’s mounted exhibitions that figure the visual lives of writers who’ve nourished him—Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, James Baldwin––to craft “visual essays” as he calls these shows, “made not from sentences or clauses, but objects.” He’s a singular participant-observer in what we once called the culture, whose will to think in public has crossed and colored the linked worlds of art and literature, photography and fashion, theater and film. But Hilton’s sensibility has always been about being present, in the most human and vulnerable ways, to those worlds that have shaped his own.

In this vein, Hilton is not the only American to have found his brave heart and dirty mind molded, from the 1980s to today, by the iconic songs and personality of the artist born Prince Rogers Nelson. But he is the only one to have turned an encounter with the late, great purple genius of music into a book-length essay, years later, that turns the conventional profile-form inside out. “Looking into Prince’s eyes,” writes Hilton in My Pinup, “must be like looking at the world. Or more specifically, the world of one Black man loving another.” That world, and Prince’s eyes, are but two of the subjects he explores in this essay on the artist, a portrait that becomes an oblique inventory of the writer’s own self—and of the culture that made them both, in all its racial, sexual, and emotive contours and contradictions.

It was an honor to host Hilton’s sole public event for My Pinup at Pioneer Works, in the borough where he grew up.

We met years ago in Berkeley—or Berserk-ley, as you call it.

Do you guys want to hear the story?

Yes!

I was invited by the University of California, Berkeley, to talk to graduate students in English and Geography, which I didn't know was a subject. A very close friend of mine–my friend Valda, who I wrote about in White Girls—had just passed. I was in this beautiful place, and there was this twinkling little student in the first row, and that was Josh.

Twinkling! Ha.

Twinkling. I was very sad and very by myself. Then there was an email from this person named Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, and I could not get over his name. That was the first thing. Then the second thing was that he said, "Do you have any friends here? Would you like to have dinner sometime?" He made himself available to someone he didn't know, who was passing through but who he had an intuition about. The point of the story is that we're here at Pioneer Works because of Josh's openness. You should take every chance you can in this life to be close to people who want to be close to you.

Well, that is something that you've taught me so much about, the necessity and the challenge, really, as a writer, of being open and vulnerable to the world. We’re here to talk about Prince. And about your beautiful habit of turning your engagement with art and artists you care about into writing, into art of your own. But I wanted to ask you about the first artist I know you were drawn to, and sought out, at a young age. You grew up in Brooklyn, and you admired the novelist Paule Marshall, who's from Barbados, as are your forebears. You looked her up in the phone book.

Yes.

Tell the story. How did your mother react to you doing that?

I adored my mother. She was a great reader. She had six children. There were four older sisters, and then there was me, my brother, and my sister closest to me in age at home. My mother loved Paule’s book, Brown Girl, Brownstones. I remember picking it up and loving it, and wondering why my mother connected to this story of a first generation Bajan woman in Brooklyn. I thought Paule would be excited to meet me. Why wouldn't she? My mother loved me.

Why not?

I looked her up in the phone book, and there was her number. She lived at 101st St. on Central Park West. I called her up and told her how much I loved her book. I was 10. She was like, "Really?" I just went on, and I told her about my mother, and about our life in Brooklyn and Bajan families, and so on. I said, "And I would love to come see you sometime." She was like, "Oh, well, okay." When I told my mother what I did, she thought I was dreaming. She looked and saw the phone book and that I had circled “Marshall, P.” She just sat down. She couldn't believe it. I think a week later, I got on the subway and figured out how to get uptown, and I went to Paule’s building, and her mother came to the door and wouldn't open it. It was something that I was very familiar with: a West Indian woman of a certain age. She said, "She's not home." "Well,” I replied, “will you just tell her that Hilton came by?" You know, like a suitor. Then I went home and I told my mother. She sat down again. It has always been my habit that if you love something and your mother loves you, why wouldn't you want to visit?

That’s continued to be your habit as a writer and a thinker––the will and willingness you’ve had, which is sometimes fraught, to engage people whose work you resonate with on a human level. For much of your career, that’s something you’ve done in the context of magazines, in the idiom of the magazine profile. In this new book, as in other recent projects, you've turned the profile form on its head, pointing to its inadequacies as a form. Long before you wrote about Prince, you were drawn to his records—to those first albums he released in 1978, 1979, 1980. For You, and then the self-titled one, and then Dirty Mind. Bring us to when you first discovered his music, to when you came to value him as a performer and an artist.

For many years I lived in Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy, and there was a record store named Sam Goody's on Nostrand and Fulton, somewhere around there. It would often have very interesting windows. One day, there was a picture of what I thought was a man, with a mustache and a blowout—a combination that sort of terrified me in the way that Little Richard terrified me, right? Because I was like them inside, and nobody was supposed to know that I was like them inside. He was 19, and then maybe a year or two later he was on Saturday Night Live in garters and a raincoat with his band. Watching him and no longer being afraid—because he was also making music—I remember this feeling of complete liberation. His early songs were so incredible to me because they were not really so much about objects as much as they were about identification.

There's a beautiful line in the book where you say that when Prince hit with those early records, in particular, it was the first time a Black pop star was not limited by blackness. What you meant by that, I hasten to add, was not something essential or essentializing about blackness; you’re talking about the ways in which blackness is performed and enacted in music.

It's important to remember that I grew up in New York. In the city, no one was just one thing. For example, I was madly in love with a girl whose mother was Puerto Rican and her father was Jewish. We would have Passover, and her mother would make pork.

A New York Passover.

My experience of New York was always that it was an amalgamation of cultures and people, and [Prince’s] arrival was a breath of fresh air, because it was representative of worlds that we understood. I remember feeling this enormous relief in his artistic presence. There were other people that I would discover subsequent to Prince who were raising these questions, but in terms of pop music and a pop sensibility he wasn't frightened the way that Michael Jackson was frightened. “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” is a masterpiece, because it's about Michael’s anxiety. He says, "They eat off of you. You're a vegetable," and he's speaking in the second or third person about himself, whereas Prince would often talk in the first person. But he would also bring in a character that he identified with, whether it was Dorothy Parker or his cousin or whomever. There was always an inclusion of a self that wasn't supposed to be you, but was you.

In that sense, he’s an essayist, right? Someone who brings in different stories, different characters. Obviously, his songwriting is extraordinary and he's a virtuosic musician. We know these things, but one other aspect you write about in the book—and particularly when he comes out and, Wow, what is this? What is he not afraid of?—is that his bands modeled a kind of female empowerment that wasn't about suffering, but joy. A genuine queerness that was about being open to who you are, how you want to be. In the worlds that you came of age within, people referred to Prince with the pronoun she, right? Michael Jackson as well.

Yes. When I go back now and think about music simultaneous to Prince, the B-52s were also super important to me, because again, they were transgressing what a white band was supposed to do, which was to not make danceable music. But then here they were, some white people from the South, who had the locution of Black people that I knew in New York, and at the same time they had great rhythm, and they could dance.

I remember they were on the cover of a magazine—Melody Maker or something—when they first came out, and the tagline was: "The B-52s Say They Don't Hate White People." Then you open the article, and they are all white. At CBGB’s, in New York, there was a lot of confusion around them, because it was dance music. I'm always very drawn to a confusing cultural element, so if it's a band of gay men and two female singers who speak Southern American in music, I'm there. With Prince I was also there, not because he was singing out of marginalization but because he was singing out of his own originality.

That was particularly true with his first records. Then, in the '80s, he became interested in pop stardom and achieved it with these massive records––Purple Rain, “Little Red Corvette,” and all that––that weren’t as interesting to you. But he won you back, later on, with Lovesexy. You thought this was someone you could write about in a fruitful way. And you finally did so after you met him for the first time in 2004, during his tour for the Musicology album. You write about meeting him backstage, in St. Louis.

He was really beautiful. I mean, he was stunning. I just have to remind you of that. He looked like the most beautiful turtle I'd ever seen, because he had this long neck that came out of his sweater. He was tiny, and you just wanted to kiss him and help him with his homework. [laughs]

You’ve talked before about falling in love with André Leon Talley, who you wrote your first New Yorker profile about. It’s a process of falling in love and then extricating oneself—or not. It can be very tricky.

It is very tricky. You're in the process of loving them while you're writing about them. You have to love them, and then you have to go away. You have to be critical of the love that you feel. A funny thing happened recently. I'm writing a very long piece about Angela Davis. She's just a great human being, and incredibly vulnerable and true.

I was leaving San Francisco, and I had the files for my story at my feet in a bag. I looked up, and there was Angela in the lounge. My heart started to beat the way it does when someone you're in love with is in the room, but I also couldn't speak to her, because I was rewriting her. I couldn't say, "Hey, Angela."

She's become a character.

She's in my mind, and she's in my bones as writing now. She can't be that separate person.

It becomes a profound collaboration, but also you need the space to write it yourself.

You have to. During the time that you're spending with that person, you're not there. There's a great quote from Diane Arbus, one of my favorite artists, where she says, "I never rearrange the subject. I rearrange myself to see the subject." That's what I do, so sometimes those people are shocked by the piece, because I've rearranged myself for a year to be them. Then, sometimes, if it's a shorter, more critical piece about their work, it's less entangled. There's less projection. You're listening in a different way, and you're less exhausted. It's an exhausting process.

Indeed—this process of falling in love, but also the ways in which you can't be present for that while writing an essay. But in My Pinup, you write about meeting him after this arena show, the conversation you had with him..

What he did that truly lives in my heart—as if it was yesterday—was when he had this enormous show in St. Louis, and I had been backstage. As I was leaving, I heard, "Mister, mister," from one of his makeup people. She said, "Prince wants to see you. He would kill me if I couldn't find you." And so we went back to his trailer and he was in the makeup chair, with that beautiful head. He turned to me and said, "Hey." Then he turned to the makeup lady, and he told her, "Number 14," and it was his eyelashes. He had just given a show for three hours. After all of that noise and theatricality and giving, he was able to see himself and be present—with his eyelashes. It was so profound.

Then he or his assistant said, "Oh, why don't you come back to Paisley Park [Prince’s home and studio], and we'll write a book together," and you rejected him.

Oh, that was going to be trouble. I would have never left. He was really beautiful.

One of the wonderful things you do in this book, around the edges of this meeting, is to write about your desire for love, your desire for admiration, your desire for twinship. It's a theme that appears and reappears in your work—in White Girls, in your essays about literal twins, and in My Pinup, through Prince and his performing partners like Cat [Glover], and your own desire for a twin. In the realm of writing, do you find it true that the people you're drawn to reflect something in yourself that you identify with, like it's yourself but not yourself?

One of writing's great liberties—or liberations—is that you get to explore. It doesn't cost you anything; it's a pencil and some paper. You get to investigate aspects of yourself that sometimes someone else has articulated. Marianne Moore is one of my favorite poets, and she quoted others quite a bit. She said, "If a person has said the thing better, why wouldn't you quote them?" For me, quotes that the subject gives are a way of understanding why I was there in the first place, that my intuition about the situation has everything to do with where I am at and where they're at. I almost never write about really famous people because they already have their face, or think they do.

Prince was an exception to that, in a way; the iconography is so tremendous that you can just get rid of it. I was taken by his small town manners, his understanding of other people, and his concern that you be entertained. That was his job. He wasn't smug and he wasn't superior about that work. He just didn't like record executives. But I think that I'm mostly interested in subjects that don't have their face yet. Even if they're putting on their number 14 eyelashes, they're still trying to determine who they are—he was that. We all are. ♦