Bill Hayes, writer

Bill Hayes is a writer and photographer, recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in nonfiction, and a frequent contributor to the New York Times.

The author of seven books, Bill is perhaps best known for his magical 2017 memoir Insomniac City, covering his move from San Francisco to New York, and his relationship with the groundbreaking neurologist Oliver Sacks.

Bill's taste in music is as diverse as the rest of my guests', but for this conversation, we chose to focus on the inimitable Joni Mitchell and her 1976 album, Hejira.

You can follow Bill on Instagram here, and learn about his latest book Sweat here.

Tracks of Our Queers is produced, presented and edited by Andy Gott.

You can listen to our Spotify playlist, Selections from Tracks of Our Queers, and find Aural Fixation in your favourite podcast provider. 

Transcript

Bill Hayes
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Andy Gott: [00:00:00] Hello, this is tracks of our queers. My name is Andy Gott and each episode I'll talk to a guest about one song, one album, and one artist that have soundtracked their life as a queer person. Bill Hayes is an award winning author and photographer based in New York, best known for his entrancing memoir, Insomniac City.

Documenting his move from San Francisco to New York after losing his long term partner, the book tenderly tells the tale of his next relationship with groundbreaking neurologist Oliver Sacks. Bill's latest book, Sweat, was released in 2022, and explores the history of exercise from Hippocrates to Jane Fonda, with a few downward dogs in between.

If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, leave a rating or review in your app, or even better, tell a friend. Tracks of Our Queers is an entirely independent production, so [00:01:00] if you would like to help keep the podcast ad free, you can shout me a coffee via the link in the show notes, and I promise every penny goes to episode production.

Over to Bill. 

Bill Hayes. Welcome to Tracks of Our Queers.

Bill Hayes: Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.

Andy Gott: Wonderful. The first question I'd like to kick off with is where you grew up, and importantly, what was playing at home? 

Bill Hayes: I grew up in the Pacific Northwest in Washington state in a fairly small city town called Spokane, and I had five sisters. I. I was the only son, brother. We were all very close in age though. My mom, God bless her, had six kids in nine years. So I sort of grew up to the music my sisters listened to. I was the fifth of six, so most of them were older, and this was a really golden period of singer songwriters.

And [00:02:00] Motown. So I was listening to albums and studying the album covers and lyrics. So Carol King, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Diana Ross, and The Supremes, Marvin Gaye, you know, all of that music. So there was always music in our house, and especially from my sisters.

Andy Gott: I love that I picked up a huge amount of musical influences from my older sister, and I have to ask you, bill, was there ever any conflict in the house when maybe you wanted to listen to something which belonged to someone else and they were like, get your hands off my record. Little brother

Bill Hayes: That didn't really happen. I think my musical taste began to change. Or you maybe I began to develop my own musical taste when I got to college. When I left Spokane and [00:03:00] went off my own and started to get into Wave and punk. I loved Patty Smith, the Talking Heads. So very different music than I had grown up with, and that music also really had a big influence on me.

I am embarrassed, but not embarrassed to say. I think I wrote my college graduation thesis on the music of Patty Smith and her album Horses, which just had a big impact on me. So Patty Smith is right up there with Joni Mitchell and Bjork and some of these other brilliant women. My dad had a huge influence on my life, but I also feel like I was really raised by women, my five sisters and my mom. 

Andy Gott: And such as the queer Experience often. Now we will link in the episode show notes to Bill's thesis on Patti Smith's horse's album, if you can find it.

Bill Hayes: Yeah. It's somewhere in the [00:04:00] dusty archives.

Andy Gott: Tell me about how you made your way to San Francisco.

Bill Hayes: Oh, what a great question. Well, I grew up in Spokane, as I told you, a very conservative small town, and when it came to graduating high school and going to college, I just really wanted to leave Spokane.

Andy Gott: Mm-hmm.

Bill Hayes: that time, I knew I was queer and I was lucky my parents were going to pay for college, but it had to be a Catholic school.

I was raised very strict Catholic and I went to what was then a very small, private Catholic school in Northern California called Santa Clara. So after graduating college, then I moved, which was in 1983. Then I moved to San Francisco. 

Some friends got a flat in the Castro. And they had a spare room and I think I had four roommates at the time. So I moved into a flat in the Castro around 1984, which was the year I came out to my family.[00:05:00] 

It was the height of the AIDS pandemic a really explosive time, both exciting and terrifying in different ways. 

Andy Gott: I can't begin to imagine the conflict between it being such a wonderful time, but also quite unsettling, even scary maybe.

Bill Hayes: Oh, very scary. I first realized I was queer in high school and first had sex with a man when I was about 16, I guess. But I also had a girlfriend in high school and had a girlfriend in college, but was also I. You know, having sex with men and I would make trips up to San Francisco and go to gay bars.

This was really before AIDS surfaced. But then of course it all changed. And when I was living in San Francisco, that was both a very scary, and also very, Kind of exciting time. I mean, there was just so much energy and activism and going to act up meetings and project form meetings.

And I ended up working at the San Francisco AIDS [00:06:00] Foundation. So it was an incredible time, but also scary time because friends and young men my age were getting sick and dying in just months. I've, of course, often reflected on the. Similarities, but also differences between the AIDS Pandemic and the Covid Pandemic.

Andy Gott: Of course. And I guess we're going a little bit off topic here, but we know that, there are vast swathes of people who should be here who just aren't here. And so many of them were your friends and lovers and coworkers and everything.

Do you still, do you keep in touch with. Friends from that time who are still here, who went through that exact same experience. And are you ever like, like half our friendship group just isn't here. 

Bill Hayes: Yeah, I am.

One of the craziest things is that in college, I lived in a dorm. My best friend lived across the hall. We were both gay, but we never came out to each other. We were so closeted until years later [00:07:00] when we'd both had come out and he was the one who invited me to come live in their flat in the Castro.

Of course, I said yes, and we had such a blast. And he's. Like me still HIV negative and thriving. And yet here we are in our sixties, I'm 62, and we've sort of followed different paths, but we've still stayed in touch over the years. And we shared a great love of music. I will say, shout out to David Pellegrini. His name was David Pellegrini. He, I will never forget, introduce me to Prince. I never knew about Prince and he was just obsessed with Prince,

Andy Gott: Mm-hmm.

Bill Hayes: who is this incredible androgynous, very sexual brilliant genius. David was from New York and so somehow he brought Prince with him to this small.

Conservative Catholic [00:08:00] college in Northern California.

Andy Gott: What a blessing. Now, you've written so movingly about grief and about the role in particular of music within your grief. They are powerful companions, music and grief. And I guess I'd love to just hear from you how has and how does.

Music support you in your grief.

Bill Hayes: In so many different ways and so many different kinds of music You know, and those of you who've read my memoir, insomniac City and maybe some of my other work, know, I've had two beloved partners, both of whom passed away in very different circumstances. My partner Steve, who I was with for about 17 years died in 2006.

Quite suddenly unexpectedly traumatically of a heart attack at age 43. I was 45. He'd had aids but the heart attack was not related to that. So it was just [00:09:00] completely unexpected and it was just like, There one moment and gone the next. He died in bed next to me one morning in October, 2006, and I think in the aftermath of that music definitely played a role in my healing.

I was, it was very traumatic because I, again, it was so unexpected. I did C P R called the EMTs, but he was gone. But before we got him to the hospital, And then my late partner, Oliver Sacks, who I was with a bit later and died in 2015 from terminal cancer, very different experience. He's an older man, older than me.

Steve had been younger than me, and classical music had been a huge part of our life, and I feel like I got an incredible education in. Classical music just from being with Oliver, who had a deep knowledge of music and he was someone who had no technology in his life or his apartment. No computers, no cell [00:10:00] phones, but he did have very good BS, radios in every room with the apartment and NCDs, he would play CDs.

So after his death, I think his favorite Bach was a companion in my healing. And that music can still make me cry. I think there's a line I write in one of my books where a good cry is like a car wash for the soul. And I really believe that I came to understand the healing value of a good cry, especially after, after Steve died.

And sometimes, you know, I would play music just so I could cry in a way. Or I would put on music and it would bring up memories or just make me feel a certain way and not always deeply sad or depressed, but just, you know, missing him or feeling something that music could really beautifully convey in, in a way that no other medium can.[00:11:00] 

Andy Gott: What was the name of Oliver's favorite Buck? Do you recall

Bill Hayes: Definitely the Goldberg Variations and it's, it's normally associated with the piano version, which Bach composed. And he loved the Glen Gould recording from, I think the mid 1950s. So that was like a constant soundtrack whenever I hear that Glenn Gould. Recording it makes me think of Oliver, but he also loved, there was a kind of rare recording for strings.

It's really, really beautiful. And it's very joyous in parts, but also very poignant and tender. So that would, that was part of my healing with Oliver. [00:12:00] 

With Steve, it was different. Years before that I was still in San Francisco and that's when figures like Bjork and Joni Mitchell and Patty Smith played a really important role in my sort of starting a new life,

Andy Gott: Hmm 

Bill Hayes: as it was so unexpected to suddenly be very suddenly be single and starting a new life and feeling like. I could start my life over and eventually, that's why I moved to New York.

Andy Gott: There's a really. A particularly poignant scene to me personally towards the beginning of Insomniac City is when you're describing, the months after losing Steve in your apartment and you have this kind of ritual of dancing to Bjork

Bill Hayes: Yes. Yes.

Andy Gott: you call out some of these songs, and some of the songs you record like Undo and Unravel amongst others. [00:13:00] They are some of her most healing songs, in my opinion. 

Bill Hayes: Yeah, I mean, at a time when one feels so alone, to turn on music and just feel this companionship in a way a singer, musician songwriter like Bjork. it just meant so much, so much. So yeah, those Bjork songs and Joni Mitchell, black Crow, also like trying to find my new path and started a new life.

I went through a little phase where I got tattoos and one of my tattoos is of a black crow and it's was really tribute to the Joni Mitchell song, black Crow. Which I quote in Insomniac City.

Andy Gott: What was some of the music that Steve liked to listen to?[00:14:00] 

Bill Hayes: He had different taste, I would say, and he introduced me to country Western music. He loved country music. At least from that period, the eighties and nineties, country music, you know, Reba McIntyre and that wasn't really my taste, but when those songs come on or I catch them on the street, it reminds me of Steve.

And some of that music is fantastic. So he was more country. I was more into the singer 



---

Bill Hayes: songwriters. 

Andy Gott: I asked you to think of some selections which have resonated with you as a queer person over your life. And you came back with some pretty strong feelings on one artist in particular, who you've referenced a few times.

So I am overjoyed to spend some time. Talking about this artist, why did you how do I phrase this? Tell me why you picked this artist.

Bill Hayes: Joni Mitchell. Well, I have to pay tribute to my older [00:15:00] sisters. As I said earlier, I listened to the music they were listening to, and in those days we had a single record player in our house in Spokane, and they collected albums and it was just so different from today where we can each listen individually to whatever music we like on our headphones or earbuds. Back then it was like, you know, Barb will get to select. A Joni Mitchell album. And then Patty would pick a Carol King album and Mary would pick a James Taylor album. And that's what we all listened to. And that was the only music going on in the house. And my parents loved music as well, so there was also Jazz and Broadway musicals and that sort of thing. But it was through my older sisters that I began to hear Joni, and I feel like I heard her in real time as her early albums came out, [00:16:00] they were buying them. So when her very famous album, blue came out in 1971, I was 10 years old.

I was born in 1961. My sister Barb got that album and I heard at that same time, and I think even as a 10 year old, I understood that this was the music and work of a genius. Even before Blue, she had clouds with that great painting of Joni on the cover. And her famous song, both sides now 

Andy Gott: I can't imagine a 10 year old absorbing something like blue in real time and like comprehending. I mean, you say that you were aware that she was a genius from that album alone, but so much of [00:17:00] her masterpieces came after blue, as we're about to talk about.

But that album in particular just still signifies to me, surely this shift in pop culture of. Truly a turning point in singer-songwriter music at the bare minimum, the influence that that album has had on generations of musicians to follow is still felt.

Bill Hayes: I absolutely agree with you, and maybe I'm sounding a little precocious and saying that as a 10 year old I realized she was a genius. That realization maybe came later, but I definitely heard that music at that age 

and blue is, I. An incredible masterpiece of musicianship and songwriting and vocals.

I love how tight those early albums are. Some of them, when you look at the time length of all the tracks, they're really short. I mean, you can play the whole album in 30 or 40 minutes, and so much is packed into them.

Andy Gott: So much, you did not pick blue though when I [00:18:00] asked you to single out one album.

Bill Hayes: you gave me a really hard assignment. I had to pick one.

I thought for days. I thought for days it was, I mean, really came down to court and Spark versus Hejira. Or some people say Hijera. I've always pronounced it Hejira. That may be incorrect, but Those are probably the two. Those are the two most important.

But I really did, I almost submitted to you Court and Spark, cuz I love that album too. What's amazing to me, and you and I have already sort of discussed this, is that Joni Mitchell. She's had so many brilliant albums, but she had this incredible streak of five albums in a row from 1971 to 1976.

One album after the other was a masterpiece. Each different and an evolution of her sound and her writing Blue in 1971 for the Roses in 1972, court and Spark in 1974, which was kind of the height of her [00:19:00] commercial success. The hissing of summer lawns in 1975, which was controversial at the time cuz it was kind of avant garde and then Hejira in 1976, which I still to this day, remember getting.

For Christmas and just my mind being blown by this new Joni Mitchell album. And you know, there were great Joni albums after Hejira too. She has continued to evolve, but that was an incredible five year streak.

Andy Gott: I can imagine that stunning artwork of hija 

on, you know, the size of a vinyl record, 

just being like,

Bill Hayes: Right. And in those days you would get an album and open it and there would be all the lyrics printed out. And I was this in 76? I was 15. So it hit at an age where I was beginning to think about who am I, not [00:20:00] only queer, but who am I as a person, as an artist? And I'm. Was writing poetry and imagining myself as a poet and writing poems and and really seeing myself, oddly enough in her work.

Andy Gott: And I guess that's what I wanted to ask you about further is it's kind of hard to unpack sometimes. Sometimes it's hard to articulate why we like something,

but that streak of albums coming to you in such a formative period in your life when, as you said, you were already writing poetry and You know, connecting with that art.

Do you think, you know, what it was specifically about Joni as an artist or the music that she was making that was reaching out to you and grabbing you over, over Carol King, over the other singer songwriters at the time, who you still enjoyed, but they weren't Joni.

Bill Hayes: Yeah, and I loved Carly Simon and I loved just pop music too, and would listen to the top 40. So it wasn't, it wasn't just Joni, [00:21:00] but I think it was the songwriting, it was the lyrics. I mean, the poetry of her lyrics, but she was one of those, she is one of those amazing, all around gifted musicians who. Was a great lyricist, a great musician and had incredible vocals. I mean, her vocal performances were incredible and they changed so much from album to album. So if you just think about those five years, her voice on blue is this incredible soprano, but just five years later it's much huskier, almost an alto and a very different delivery.

And that creativity she had and just using her voice also really appealed to me, I think. But what was the one thing? I think probably the lyrics and when it all came down to it, the lyrics on Hejira are just so literary in so many ways and extended.

Poetry, those songs are much [00:22:00] longer than on most songs made at that time. She just really spread out.

And so a song like Song for Sharon goes on and on and it's a nine minute song. And that was. Amazing to me. Amazing to me as a young, person thinking about writing and what form will my poetry or my writing take.

Andy Gott: In just showing that there really aren't limits and that the limits are kind of self-imposed to an extent,

Bill Hayes: yeah, for sure. And it's funny that I never really pursued music myself or wanted to learn how to play an instrument.

Andy Gott: there's still time.

Bill Hayes: Play guitar and become a singer or a songwriter. But yeah, the thing that struck me like a thunderbolt, I still remember putting Hejira on the turntable. 

And the opening song Coyote. Where it's like [00:23:00] a spoken word poem and she really does speak the opening line, and that's not the only time in the album, and she's not afraid to be raspy and to imitate someone else's voice and sort of sound like Bob Dylan almost at certain times. And to open the album with almost a spoken word poem, just saying, no regrets, coyote.

We just come from such different sets of circumstance. And then going into the vocal, it was incredible.

Andy Gott: It's an amazing opening to an album in that when I was re-listening the other day, I hadn't heard it in a while, maybe about a year. And I had really great headphones in

and the quality of the audio of that album opening, I just kind of sat back in my chair and [00:24:00] it sounds a little bit.

Pretentious, but it, it does feel like the music washes over you. You just submit To it because it's so lush and so beautiful. And that flows Throughout the whole album. 

Bill Hayes: Yeah.

and there's this kind of repetition of certain lines the white lines of the freeway and one song just melting into another. and the whole album is a kind of travel log about her cross-country trip is kind of an on the road in music. Written from a woman's perspective. 

Andy Gott: I love the stories that just appear on Google. I dunno what truth there is to this, but when she, as you referenced this journey she was making across the country multiple times,, she'd pop up in a red wig with fabulously camp pseudonyms checking into motels and only eating in health food stores.

And I just think, okay, there's that kind of. Camp [00:25:00] icon that we, that we were looking for from Joni. It just sounds fabulous and I just can't imagine an artist today doing that, but maybe they do. Maybe they are.

Bill Hayes: Yeah, I think she gave herself an adventure and she was escaping in her words from a kind of a love affair and Just exploring the country. I think there really is, when I think back on it, and you gave me this, you know, opportunity to think about what album really had a huge influence on you as a queer person.

It's funny that I would pick Joni, but she represented especially on that album, just autonomy, adventure, pleasure, including sexual pleasure as a virtue. Being your own person, fuck 'em all. Having no regrets. I mean, it opens with no regrets. Coyote. And it's a song about having an affair with, reportedly with Sam Shepherd, who was a really hot man and playwright of that period.

And I think just [00:26:00] that, that independence, including sexual independence, happens to be coming from a woman, but it could just as well be from a man, a queer man.

Andy Gott: You mentioned not long ago the evolution of Joni's voice over just that short period, and as we know, the voice continued to evolve, as did her artistry, her songwriting, her musicianship, and I have to say that by far, I think if I had to take one Joni Mitchell song with me,

the remake that she did of both sides now in 2000, I believe is spell binding and just before I had to watch it on YouTube and it's impossible to not feel emotional watching this 50 something woman who's lived this formidable life and has seen so many things singing.

A song that she wrote less than half her age, and that forethinking, [00:27:00] or, I don't even know what it is, but it's

magical 

Bill Hayes: It is magical.



Bill Hayes: Was incredible and so unexpected, and that was, that had not been one of my favorite Joni songs. I think it's on her album clouds in a much different vocal range. But yeah, you're right. I mean, that's such a beautiful rendition. It's so soulful and so. Just soaked an experience and slowed down and in a much huskier voice.

She herself has said she was a very heavy smoker, unapologetic about that, which I kinda love. So her voice really roughened and changed, I mean, lowered. And she didn't really give a shit that people didn't. Hear the soprano anymore. She had a different way of expressing herself. And that version of both sides now I think it's with a full orchestra, is really 

Andy Gott: Yes. [00:28:00] And you know, life happens and, and isn't that wonderful? Isn't that amazing that people do change and, and they evolve And we love to hear, I, I love to hear. Older musicians perform songs that they wrote decades ago and Bjork is even doing it now. You know 

Bjork in her current concerts is performing songs that she wrote in her early twenties, and there is an additional element of singing those lyrics with life knowledge that you just couldn't possibly have had when you wrote the lyrics.

Bill Hayes: Yeah. It's amazing.

Andy Gott: So if you were in a bar bill and you were with a young, queer person, and you were horrified because you're talking about, you know, Joni Mitchell's one of your favorites and they're giving you a bit of a blank face and you're like,

Bill Hayes: Yeah.

Andy Gott: but they're open.

Okay. They're open to learning. What are some of the songs off the top of your head where you would say, you need to listen to these first?

Bill Hayes: Well, I can tell you from firsthand experience, cuz I'm dating someone who's 30 years old, which [00:29:00] is more than half my age. And he's overheard Joni coming from my. Office or bedroom. And he asked about her and I said, I think you should start with court and Spark. I think court and Spark is very accessible.

And it's impossible to deny its pop music at its perfection. So beautifully produced. And Joni, by the way, was not only a songwriter, musician, vocalist, but producer or co-producer on all of her albums. She worked really closely with a sound engineer, but she was pretty much self-produced and court and Spark is much more polished.

Then other albums and it's a very romantic album, like Hejira. It's really about romance and love and sex, [00:30:00] and. La It's a very Los Angeles album, which is, there's something very seductive about that. I think Hejira is this CrossCountry on the road album, but Corton Spark is very much an LA album.

It's full of sunshine, it's much peppier and poppier and anyway, he listened to it. He loved it, he loved it, and it, it hasn't aged, you know, corten Park still holds up.

Andy Gott: I had a bit of a Joni mentor myself when I was in my early twenties, I was friends with this guy who huge, huge Joni fan, and he. Set me up with the order of the albums as he, as he recommended. And you know, cuz there are some more accessible than others

Bill Hayes: Oh, for sure.

Andy Gott: you know, once you've acquired that taste, to then be able to see things in the music that maybe you wouldn't be able to see otherwise.

I also think it's. Interesting that so many of my idols called Joni Mitchell an idol. I've read before that Madonna, believe it or not, one of her 

most impactful albums was Blue as she was growing up. We've talked about Bjork being a huge [00:31:00] Joni fan, but Prince in particular, you mentioned Prince earlier in this chat, 

there probably wasn't a more famous.

Number one fan of Joni Mitchell. Then Prince, like he was on record multiple times, documenting the influence of her work on his, so for that alone, thank you Joni Mitchell

Bill Hayes: That's so true and isn't that wonderful? I think he even recorded a version of A Case of You, which is one of the most brilliant songs she wrote. Yeah, he really revered her and was a kindred spirit in being a musical genius, though, creating very different kinds of music.

But And also that kind of polymath who could play any instrument and write any kind of song and sing in all different ways. I think both Prince and Joni and Bjork and some of these others really. And Patty Smith Mavericks, who just went their own way, which is very queer in its own way.

Andy Gott: It [00:32:00] absolutely is queer. And also that singular vision of they actually didn't really need anyone else in the studio. They could, 

if they had to perform every instrument, write the lyrics, perform the songs, and what was produced on that record was their singular vision

Bill Hayes: Yeah. That's what I love. And you're also right to say Joni has many albums and they're not all masterpieces. You know, she did have this incredible streak, I think in the seventies. It's not that I love and play every one of her albums, but she's always, always been very interesting.

Andy Gott: Bill Hayes, the most recent book that you wrote? Is called Sweat,

um, which is quite a sexy title for a book. And there's so many sexy moments in this history of exercise. If I say so myself on a queer music podcast, I would love to know, and you've, I've heard you talk about [00:33:00] this, but I would love to know.

Your current contemporary take on listening to music while you exercise? What does Bill Hayes do?

Bill Hayes: It's changed so much for me because I feel like such an old guy saying this. I don't really listen to music on my phone. So I don't do the earbuds in the gym thing. But that means I hear new music that's playing at the gym that I may not be exposed to otherwise. And I love hearing new music.

I love hearing new artists instead of just my going to the gym and listening to Bjork and Joni, you know, and being exposed to new artists.

Andy Gott: I think you hit on something important there, that while we're here to talk about our love for music I reflect on maybe some of the forms of exercise, which I've. Found the most joy in in recent years, and both of them, yoga and swimming are audio free generally. And I think a big part of that mental [00:34:00] connection with the exercise and just really, you know, mindfully enjoying what I'm doing is the fact that I don't have earbuds in my 

in my ears. 

Bill Hayes: I think it's really good for you. I'm like you. I love to swim. And I fear the day that they will make it possible to, for people to talk on the phone while they're swimming or to

text. To text while they're swimming or to be on scruff or grinder while they're swimming.

I think it's great to escape the whole digital world and go for a run or go for a walk or go for a swim or do yoga and, and unplug cuz we're, myself included, so plugged in.

Andy Gott: Can I ask? Are you writing anything new at the moment, what your next project is?

Bill Hayes: I'm not, I'm taking some time just to think about what's next. I've had a really productive, prolific six or seven years. My memoir, insomniac City came out in 2017. That's really a memoir about. My moving to New York at 48 after Steve [00:35:00] had died and starting my life over, I'm falling in love, first of all with the city, with New York City and falling in love with Oliver Sachs and and that was followed by.

A volume of my street photography. There was street photography included Insomniac City. I bought a camera and sort of by accident became a photographer. Just through exploring New York with my camera and How we live now, which is about the first 100 days of the Covid Pandemic here in New York, both pros and photography, and then sweat, which is different from those three books, which I think of as kind of my New York trilogy.

Sweat is a history of exercise and really closer in form to my first three books, which combine scientific or medical history with a kind of personal narrative.

So I, I am sort of taking a pause right now and just thinking Insomniac [00:36:00] City, the memoir is being made into a film and I've written the screenplay for the film.

And it's in development and it's financed and, you know, fingers crossed it will get made, but that's kind of where my head is at.

Andy Gott: That is so exciting. Can I just ask, how is it surreal to s. Because Insomniac City is a memoir by its nature, is it surreal to then translate those words into a script, which is gonna be performed by actors?

Bill Hayes: Yeah, it's very surreal. I'm really lucky the producers who optioned the book said from the beginning that they wanted me to write the screenplay, and I said from the beginning, I've never written a screenplay. I. And I'm not sure, but they said, you know, we sort of have a method and we'll help you.

And they did help me and I learned how to write a screenplay, how to adapt a screenplay at least. But it's been a journey and you know, writing my own character was probably the hardest part. I always wanted to give scenes to Oliver. Just be the [00:37:00] one in the background, not saying anything. But inside next city is very much from my point of view and traces my journey.

And so yeah, it's been a challenge, but really an incredible creative challenge and I've loved it, to be honest. I really loved it. I'd love to write more screenplays, adapted maybe from other people's books, no more of my own.

Andy Gott: Maybe this is the first of many.

Bill Hayes: Yeah, hopefully.

Andy Gott: Is there a queer charity Or initiative that you'd like to give a shout out to?

Bill Hayes: Oh man. You know, one I think of so fondly, when I moved to New York in 2009, I didn't really know anyone here. 

Andy Gott: Mm-hmm. 

Bill Hayes: I. Except for my agent, and I didn't yet know Oliver and my books were not making enough money that I could just move to New York. I had to get a job. So I had a nine to five job with a nonprofit that still exists that was working to develop an AIDS [00:38:00] vaccine.

Andy Gott: Mm-hmm.

Bill Hayes: It's called International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, and by its very nature, AIDS is not. A disease. It only affects queer people, but it certainly has and had and they're still hard at work. You know, we're so lucky with Covid to get a vaccine so quickly and distributed. Not necessarily well but quickly.

But with AIDS, we have to remember that there still is not a vaccine. There still is not a cure. People still get H I V and aids and so I think of that organization, which is called I A V, international AIDS Vaccine Initiative.

Andy Gott: Wonderful. Well, bill Hayes, you are queer and thank you very much for your tracks.

Bill Hayes: Thank you. It's been really a pleasure and so much fun.

Andy Gott: You can find out more about Bill You can find out more about Bill, his writing and photography in this episode's show notes, or you can follow him on Instagram at at Bill [00:39:00] Hayes underscore NYC. This episode was produced, recorded, and edited on unceded Gadigal land by me, Andy Gott. You can email me at tracksofourqueers at gmail dot com, follow the podcast at at tracksofourqueers on social media, and if you're not already, please subscribe.

See you next time.[00:40:00]