SOURCE: “A Last Interview with Manuel Puig,” in World Literature Today, Vol. 65, No. 4, Autumn, 1991, pp. 571-80.

In the following interview, Puig discusses questions of sexuality and repression raised by his novel Kiss of the Spider Woman.

The last time I talked to Manuel Puig, he was calling from the airport, as he usually did when just passing through New York; this time he especially wanted to know about our friend Gregory Kolovakos. That was April 1989, and Gregory was dying of AIDS, as we all knew. Already grieving the recent death of another friend, Enrique Pezzoni, the brilliant editor and publisher in Buenos Aires, we commiserated; and he came as close to raging as I ever heard: “Will this plague ever end?” In less than six months Manuel himself was dead, not an AIDS victim but a postoperative casualty in a relatively backwater hospital, like one of his characters...