Tuesday evening I donned a Tom Ford tuxedo and made my way up to the Museum of Natural History for the annual PEN Literary Gala, where I was the honorable plus-one of my friend, the brilliant memoirist and book agent Bill Clegg.

I've been to many fancy parties underneath the belly of the gigantic blue whale suspended over the Hall of Ocean Life, but something about this night felt like graduating from the kid's table. That's not just because of the personal heroes and champions like Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag who have been a part of PEN's legacy, but because the real meat of this particular dinner was less an opportunity to celebrate oneself and more a reminder of how lucky every writer in the room has it. PEN, after all, has been an organization bent on defending and supporting persecuted or censored writers since its inception in 1922. After the first course was served, Margaret Atwood took to the podium to receive the PEN Literary Service Award, where she declared that writers have no employers, or rather that their readers are their employers, and thus they have by right of trade the freedom to express themselves, presumably without having to sell products or tow the company line. That is, of course, both a luxury and responsibility, neither of which many of the other honorees could afford. A poem was read by imprisoned Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo and imprisoned young Burmese blogger Nay Phone Latt who, two years into a twelve-year sentence in Rangoon's Insein prison after his blog became an international weather vane for the 2007 uprisings, received the PEN/Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award.

Writers, even of the Manhattan variety dressed in black tie with free red wine, are notorious recluses. The value of these kinds of ceremonies is that they turn a cabal of loners into a community, and then let that community do what it does best: give voice to what has long been unsaid or has not been allowed to be said. A man who knows a thing or two about the slippery slopes of that predicament, Salman Rushdie, a former PEN president, took the stage to introduce poet and rock musician Patti Smith. Yes, these intellects of so many universities, panel discussions, and book launches quickly retreated into that part of their brains that honors rock 'n roll above all else. Behind every Pulitzer Prize winning poet there is the imperishable dream to be Patti Smith.