Bret Easton Ellis - Personal Life

Personal Life

He was born March 7, 1964 in Los Angeles, California, and raised in Sherman Oaks in the San Fernando Valley, the son of Robert Martin Ellis, a wealthy property developer, and Dale Ellis, a homemaker. His parents divorced in 1982. He was educated at The Buckley School; he then took a music-based course at Bennington College in Vermont, which is thinly disguised as Camden College in all of his novels. He was a part-time musician in 1980s bands such as The Parents before his first book was published.

When asked an interview in 2002 whether or not he was gay, Ellis explained that he does not identify himself as gay or straight. He explained that he is comfortable to be thought of as gay, bisexual, or heterosexual and that he enjoys playing with his persona, identifying variously as gay, straight, and bi to different people over the years. In a 1999 interview, the author puts forward that his reluctance to definitively label his sexuality (in his own words, he is "very coy and weird about it") is for "artistic reasons", because "if people knew that I was straight, they'd read in a different way. If they knew I was gay, 'Psycho' would be read as a different book." In an interview with Robert F. Coleman, Ellis refers to his as an "indeterminate sexuality", and said "any other interviewer out there will get a different answer and it just depends on the mood I am in". In a 2011 interview with James Brown, Ellis again states that his answers to questions about his sexuality have varied from interviewer to interviewer, citing an example where his reluctance to refuse the label "bi" had him labelled as such by a Details interviewer. "I think the last time I slept with a woman was five or six years ago, so the bi thing can only be played out so long," he clarifies. "But I still use it, I still say it." Responding to Dan Savage's It Gets Better campaign, aimed at preventing suicide among LGBT youth, Ellis tweeted "Not to bum everyone out, but can we get a reality check here? It gets worse."

In his semi-autobiographical novel Lunar Park, the fictional Bret continues both transient affairs and long-term relationships with men and women at various points in the novel. Lunar Park was dedicated to his lover, Michael Wade Kaplan, and Ellis's father, Robert Ellis, about whom he speaks openly in interviews promoting the novel. Robert Ellis died in 1992. In one interview, Ellis describes feeling a liberation, in the completion of the novel, that allowed him to come to terms with unresolved issues regarding his father. In the "author Q&A" for Lunar Park on the Random House website, Ellis comments on his relationship with his father, and says he feels that his father was a "tough case" who left him damaged. Having grown older and having "mellow out", Ellis describes how his opinion of his father changed since 15 years ago when writing Glamorama (in which the central conspiracy concerns the relationship of a father and son). Even earlier in his career, Ellis based the character of Patrick Bateman from American Psycho on his father. In a 2010 interview, however, he claims to have "lied" about this explanation. Explaining that "Patrick Bateman was about me", he confesses "I didn’t want to finally own up to the responsibility of being Patrick Bateman, so I laid it on my father, I laid it on Wall Street." In reality, the book had been "about me at the time, and I wrote about all my rage and feelings". To James Brown, he clarified Bateman was based on "My father a little bit but I was living that lifestyle, my father wasn’t in New York the same age as Patrick Bateman, living in the same building, going to the same places that Patrick Bateman was going to".