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n 1993, Tom Perrotta wrote Election, a novel that would be adapted into a critically acclaimed Hollywood film, help launch Reese Witherspoon's career and presciently foreshadow the 2000 Gore-Bush recount debacle. Unfortunately, almost nobody read it.

In fact, it wasn't even published until weeks before the film adapation was released. In the meantime, he wrote a short story collection called Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies, and a fantastic novel called The Wishbones about an aimless thirtysomething wedding singer. Yet even after Election was nominated for an Oscar for Best Adaptation, Perrotta remained largely unknown. It wasn't until he published Little Children in 2004, a disquieting story about a sex offender's return to his hometown after prison, that people began to take notice of Perrotta's biting chronicles of suburban life.

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His latest work, The Abstinence Teacher, again takes place in a middle-class suburb. It traces the lives of two people: Ruth, a liberal high-school health instructor who's forced to teach abstinence education by a vocal minority of local religious fanatics; and Tim, a recovering addict and a conflicted member of that minority. Ruth and Tim's lives intersect when Tim, as coach of the local youth soccer team, tries to lead the players in prayer following a game; Ruth, a secular fundamentalist, pulls her daughter from the group. The tug-of-war for the town's spiritual soul escalates as the Christian newcomers try to steer the town onto an ever-more theological path, with Ruth feeling increasingly marginalized as the only good, sane atheist left on earth. It's a relevant storyline that is no doubt being played out in suburbs across the country even as we speak. Perrotta spoke to Hooksexup about condoms, Christians and his first abstinence rally. — Will Doig

I found it difficult to read this book. Evangelical Christians make me so angry, I actually found my heart racing as I read some of the dialogue. Do you feel that same anger when you're writing about them?
I split the novelist part of me off from the political person, but I think that political anger and bewilderment was an early motivation. I remember in 2004 having really strong opinions: Bush had to go, the country was in terrible shape, these people cared more about gay marriage than about the war or poverty or whatever. There was a moment where my bewilderment gave way to a desire to understand, and that was the germ of the book.

In the novel, you sometimes depict the religious fanatics as not that different from the rest of us. Tim compares the churchgoers to his Deadhead friends as similar in their function as communities. Why do you think religious fundamentalists and the rest of us feel so separate if we're so similar?
I think one reason nobody minds Deadheads is they're not telling you that you have to take acid and wave your hands in the air. They're not telling you that your kids have to take acid — actually, some people probably think they are, and you'll find people who feel they lost their kids to that tribe. I think Ruth is blind to the fact that she enrages the Christians in a similar way. She feels that she's just providing helpful information to kids, whereas these parents feel she's providing really hurtful information that contradicts stuff that they believe deeply.

Tom Perrotta (Photo: Debi Milligan)

Ruth comes off as just as fanatical a secularist as Pastor Dennis is a Christian. I think those of us who are against public religion risk alienating people in that Christopher Hitchens sort of way. Ruth's attitude is, it has to be all secularism or nothing.
Maybe that's just an inherent part of democracy, but it's gotten so sharp now. I think a lot of this goes back to the Clinton presidency. From a liberal perspective, he was a real moderate figure, somebody who had taken the Left and moved it toward the center, and you would think he would be welcomed by the Right for that, but he was brutally vilified. You say Ruth is somewhat fanatical — I think like a lot of people on the Left, coming face to face with the ferocity of her enemies has made her more ferocious than she might normally be. And that's how these conflicts really start to spiral. Everyone feels like the injured party going for revenge rather than the aggressor out to put somebody down.

Do you think the abstinence education movement actually has traction among high-school students today?
Probably not much. Again, when I started the book in 2004, [abstinence-education advocates] had made real inroads in terms of affecting legislation. School boards were adopting it, partly because the federal government was providing funding for it. The only federal funding for sex education under the Bush administration is for abstinence education. What's happened is that, in the meantime, there have been studies that seem to show that kids who get abstinence education and kids who get comprehensive sex education have sex at the same rate and use contraception at the same rate. What I think that's going to do, outside of the Bible Belt, is make it very hard to teach abstinence education. I think, like intelligent design, it's probably crested.

It seems like the fight isn't so much about making kids have less sex as it is about conservatives having sway over the agenda in general.
That's right. It's really about the official rhetoric that the culture puts forward about sex.

What was sex education like at your high school?
[Laughs] I think we had a very basic reproductive biology unit in health class sophomore year of high school, by which point some of the people in class were already having sex. It was a little late for the basics. I'm forty-six years old. The sexual revolution had happened, but it hadn't really trickled down to working-class New Jersey, so there was still a lot of the kind of shame that would amaze a kid today.

There was a kid in my school who was caught by his friends. They were coming to pick him up one night. They knocked on his door and he didn't answer, so they went around to his bedroom, which was on the ground floor, and peeked through the window and saw him jerking off. He was so mercilessly ridiculed at school that he had to leave. We never saw him again. He was made to suffer for everybody else's guilt. He became the literal scapegoat, because everybody felt guilty about doing something they weren't supposed to do. Instead of laughing about it like people would do now, he was made a pariah. I remember maybe four or five years later, driving in the car, I heard Dr. Ruth on the radio, and it was the first time I'd ever heard someone say publicly, "It's okay. Everybody does it. It's your body." So it's impossible for me to think about sex education outside of that context of shame.

What was your personal reaction to the kid getting caught?
On one level, I was glad it was him and not me. I wasn't mocking him, but I wasn't necessarily defending him.

In the book, Tim struggles because he used to have really hot sex with his very un-Christian ex-wife, and he can't seem to have that with his new Christian wife, because she's too demure. Do you think piousness and religiosity are mutually exclusive from hot sex?
I don't, and I think contemporary, evangelical culture realizes they have to compete with the wider American sexual culture. Particularly, there's a real concern [among evangelicals] that they're getting deep into porn. So, within a marriage, certain evangelical cultures are promising that you can have as much sex and as wild sex as you want, with the exception of threesomes and whatever.

One of the ways they sell [abstinence] to kids is say, "Do you really want to walk into that room on your wedding night and think that your wife is comparing you to five other guys?" There's this beautiful story, the story of two people who God meant for one another, who both find

One of the ways they sell [abstinence] to kids is say, "Do you really want to walk into that room on your wedding night and think that your wife is comparing you to five other guys?"

each other completely pure, and they get to discover this whole amazing world of sexuality together. That's their reward for being disciplined and chaste: great sex [laughs]. I was taught that sex was disgusting, filthy and immoral, and that you need to save it for someone you love. But now what they say is, "Sex is beautiful, powerful and wonderful, but don't even think about that for ten years." Every now and then, I meet a couple who met in high school who have been married twenty-five years, and clearly they're still in love. They've experienced their entire sexual lives together.

I feel about that the same way I feel about people who spend their whole lives living in the tiny town they grew up in. It's sort of romantic and fanciful, but horrifying at the same time.
I agree. One of the things that struck me about this whole abstinence thing is the total fear of experience. Even something as simple as getting your heart broken. I've had my heart broken two or three times, and it's taught me a few things about relationships. It makes you smarter. It makes you kinder to other people. There are all sorts of ways to talk about getting your heart broken that aren't the end of the world. But if you go to an abstinence rally, the metaphor they love is: "Your heart is this pure thing, and every time somebody comes, they rip a chunk out of it! They take a chainsaw to it, and then you have this jagged, awful thing that doesn't look like a sweet Valentine heart anymore. Is that the way you want to go through life? With a damaged heart?"

It seems like abstinence advocates are obsessed with HPV, because that's the STD they can point to that's not 100% prevented by condoms. Every time they speak out against teaching kids to use condoms, they shout, "HPV! HPV!" Which always struck me as disingenuous. For one thing, not that HPV is pleasant, but it's a common, manageable virus. And second, the real reason they don't like condoms is because they're against contraception, but they can't say that, so instead they just keep talking about HPV.
The thing that strikes me about the American Right is that they attack their opponents' strengths. I think people realized this pro-condom argument was taking some of the steam out of abstinence, so instead of saying abstinence-plus-condoms might be a good way to do this, which is what people looking for compromise had proposed, they just go at it. For high-school kids, [condoms are] birth control. Hillary Clinton would talk like this: "We all want to reduce unwanted pregnancy and abortion, so why can't we make condoms more widely available? Why can't we encourage sexually active teenagers to use them?" But that's exactly the way the Right doesn't want to go. It would suggest, in a way, that the goal was to cut down on unwanted pregnancy, when the goal is actually to encourage marriage.

Speaking of Hillary, let's quickly talk about Election. You've said the two main characters running against each other for student-council president, Tracy Flick and Paul, are based on the two major candidates from the '92 election. I'm not saying this just because she's a woman, but Hillary strikes me as a bit Flickish. She's super-methodical, and she seems 100% focused on winning.
[Election director] Alexander [Payne] made Tracy sort of right wing. She's an aide to a Republican congressman at the end, but in the book, there's nothing in her actual politics that goes beyond personal ambition. I think it'll be interesting to see how many people make this Tracy/Hillary connection. I don't think I knew Hillary all that well at that point. I wrote it in '93, right after the election, and she had been in the news, but mainly as Bill's long-suffering wife. The health-care thing hadn't happened yet.

It's too bad that the book and movie aren't being released now. They seem so relevant to this election.
It's funny, because it also had that retroactive quality in 2000 when they had the recount. It seems to have resonance for all kinds of American political scenarios.  

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