"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 clarified. "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 a 2012 op-ed for "The Daily Beast", while apologizing for a series of controversial tweets, Ellis came out as gay. "Lunar Park" was dedicated to his lover, Michael Wade Kaplan, who died shortly before he finished the book and to Ellis's father, Robert Ellis, who died in 1992. In one interview Ellis described feeling a liberation in the completion of the novel that allowed him to come to terms with unresolved issues about his father. In the "author Q&A" for "Lunar Park" on the Random House website, Ellis comments on his relationship with Robert, and says he feels that his father was a "tough case" who left him damaged. Having grown older and "mellow[ed] 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). Earlier in his career, Ellis said he based the character Patrick Bateman in "American Psycho" on his father, but in a 2010 interview he claimed to have lied about this explanation. Explaining that "Patrick Bateman was about me," he said, "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 was "about me at the time, and I wrote about all my rage and feelings." To James Brown, he clarified that 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." Ellis named his first novel and his latest after two Elvis Costello references: "Less Than Zero" and "Imperial Bedroom", respectively. Ellis called Bruce Springsteen his "musical hero" in a 2010 interview with "NME". Ellis's first novel, "Less Than Zero", is a tale of disaffected, rich teenagers of Los Angeles written and re-written over a five-year period from Ellis's second year in high school, earlier drafts being "... more autobiographical and read like teen diaries or journal entries—lots of stuff about the bands I liked, the beach, the Galleria, clubs, driving around, doing drugs, partying", according to Ellis.