Brooks Kolb is the author of the new memoir Landscape in Lavender: A Young Gay Man's Search for His Gay Identity. He is also a landscape architect, and he lives in Seattle.
Q: Why did you decide to write this memoir?
A: Landscape in Lavender began in a very happenstance fashion. One day in 2018 after a lap swim, I was getting dressed in the locker room of my local YMCA when I overheard a man talking to another guy about how he had lived in London for several years.
He soon approached a locker near mine, so I spoke up and mentioned that I, too, had lived in London on scholarship for one year, way back in 1975, and had thoroughly enjoyed the experience.
I then launched into a tale of how Sir Ian Davies, head of the Royal Dental School, had personally bailed me out after I failed to receive the check I was expecting to cover my living expenses at the beginning of the academic year.
On my way out the door, it occurred to me that I could have told the man a lot of other anecdotes as well. I should write a memoir, I said to myself on the drive home. But when I sat down to write, I didn’t know what story I was trying to tell; I only felt a strong urge to reconnect with my younger self.
Now I was leading an entirely different life in Seattle with a new cast of friends and loved ones, so I wanted to ask the younger me who he was and why he had left Seattle to travel far and wide over a span of 23 years. Eventually, my random scrawling coalesced into my story of coming out and coming of age in the 1980s.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: Choosing a good title was a dilemma, which surprised me because I have a spontaneous habit of thinking up great titles for books I have no intention of writing!
For several years, my working title had the word “rainbow” in it, referring not only to the LGBTQ rainbow flag, but also to the almost inevitable fact that I twice refer to The Wizard of Oz in the book. My baby-boomer generation even had an erstwhile discreet habit of referring to gay men as “Friends of Dorothy.”
When my editors pointed out that all this was hopelessly cliché, I had to find a different approach. Eventually, I settled on Landscape in Lavender. “Landscape” refers to my career as a landscape architect and “lavender” to my identity as a queer man, pointing to the rising conflict I describe experiencing between the two halves of my identity. Despite the risk of sounding like a coffee table book of photographs, it works!
Q: The author William Kenower said of the book, “Landscape in Lavender is more than a story of one man’s sexual self-discovery; it’s the story of an entire era in America.” What do you think of that description?
A: I absolutely love Bill for saying that because, once I figured out why I was writing Landscape in Lavender, I realized that I had lived through not one, but two eras in America: the sexual revolution of the 1970s and the devastating AIDS era that immediately followed.
What’s more, I had the good fortune to live in a time and place of prime significance to the history of LGBTQ people in America: San Francisco in the years following Harvey Milk’s assassination in 1978.
Q: What impact did it have on you to write the book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?
A: I understand who I am as a whole person much better now that I’ve written Landscape in Lavender. For decades, I’ve devoted myself to my professional career—the landscape part—but I wanted readers to know about the lavender part, and I wanted to celebrate all the people who nurtured the lavender side of my identity.
Beyond that, I’m more fully aware of how amazingly lucky and blessed I am to have survived the AIDS pandemic, especially after losing my first great love, James Draper, to it.
There are two main ideas I hope readers take away from the book. The first is that the spirit of every single person who died of AIDS is worthy of our sustained grief and our fond memories. Those individual stories, and the individual value of each and every person lost, tend to get forgotten in the overwhelming force of the pandemic, when so many people—mostly men—were dying all at once.
The second takeaway is more positive. I hope readers have a chance to experience the joys as well as the frustrations of actual lived gay relationships, and particularly the nuances of interracial gay relationships. Having read more than a few gay memoirs, I’ve been surprised by how seldom they explore their author’s relationships with his gay partners in any detail.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: For now, I’m mainly working on my Substack blog, brookskolb.substack.com, but I’ve been toying around with the idea of writing a collection of essays. Maybe I’ll revisit my rough draft of a manuscript on a secular or interfaith spirituality. The working title is “Many Paths, One Mountain.”
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Please tell the young me, the narrator of Landscape in Lavender, that the old me turned out all right. He found a wonderful new love and a terrific community to engage with! His decision to return to Seattle was the right call.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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