Benoit Denizet-Lewis (Medill ’97) was once a frat boy who feigned heterosexuality for two years and barely scraped by with a 3.0 GPA. Fourteen years later his pieces on addiction, sexuality and Perez Hilton have earned him three book deals and two professorial gigs in Boston. A contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine at 28 years old, the former DAILY staffer still loves watching the Wildcats and relishing the days when “there was nothing to do in Evanston but go to the Keg and cry.”
ExcerptsDAILY: You come back to Evanston for basketball games and write a column about Northwestern athletics for Deadspin. Why stay so involved?
DENIZET-LEWIS: As a Northwestern alum, I’ve tried to stay pretty connected to the University through sports. I have a second addiction-NU sports. I do try to stay as connected as I can to NU academically. I would love to teach magazine writing or nonfiction writing at NU at some point. I did value my time at NU even though I skipped a lot of morning classes. If I could do it over, I would have gotten up earlier and gone to more morning classes. I remember I squeaked by with a 3.01 GPA. I think I got a ‘D’ in statistics.DAILY: What was your career trajectory like after leaving NU?
DENIZET-LEWIS: I certainly wasn’t the star journalism student when I was at Medill. It seemed like a lot of my friends were getting glorious internships at places like the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, and I was not getting those. I ended up going to the only job I could get out of college, which was a summer internship at the Lexington Herald-Leader. I worked at a few other places, and eventually I quit and started freelancing and writing cover stories for SF Weekly. I pitched to The New York Times Magazine. I’ve been writing for them since.DAILY: Why did you decide to be so open about your experiences as a gay man or a recovered sex addict in your stories?
DENIZET-LEWIS: I would certainly prefer not to be out publicly as a recovering sex addict, since I don’t think it’s anyone’s business. But when I decided to write about addiction, one of the points I tried to make is that we have too much shame about addiction in this country. That shame and misunderstanding lead to a lot of problems, and as a result we don’t deal with addiction in any intelligent way. In my book (“America Anonymous: Eight Addicts in Search of a Life”), I was really making the argument that we need to talk more productively about addiction, not just when a celebrity goes to rehab and we make fun of them. I couldn’t write that book and not tell my own experience.DAILY: Did that contribute to speaking out about Tiger Woods? Do you regret naming the center that he was being treated at on your blog?
DENIZET-LEWIS: I wrote on my blog that I deeply regretted naming the facility where Tiger was being treated, though I wasn’t the first person to report it. I forgot for a second that I was a recovering sex addict, and I really went into journalism mode. The next day I realized I shouldn’t have done it, but I wasn’t going to stop talking about sex addiction. As one of the few people out about it, I felt I had a duty to talk about it in an intelligent way.DAILY: How does it feel to be labeled one of the NYT hotties on Gawker?
DENIZET-LEWIS: Gawker seems to have a love-hate relationship with me, but that was nice. They say as a writer you should never read your reviews. It’s hard to write a piece for The New York Times Magazine, and you do the best job you can, and you spend six months on it, and dealing with criticism or praise can sort of be a m*ndf*ck. A challenge for me is to realize what is going to help me and what is going to make me depressed all day.[email protected]
