Tuesday, September 07, 2010

Why yes, I am he.

Now the second boot drops.

In addition to The Catalyst, I am also working out agreements to bring back into print two more books, one a novel and the other an anthology - and neither of these has been published under my name before.

See, back when I wrote them, women were not generally allowed to publish gay male porn under their real names.

Yet - we wrote a LOT of it. TONS of it. Filled magazines, digests and anthologies and then websites. I even edited a magazine called Bad Boy. My agent for those short story sales was a woman. Women edited - and continue to edit many gay male publications and websites. It was just understood that no gay man would EVER buy smut written by a girl - ewwww, cooties! - and no one else would ever read gay male stories.

Certainly not, oh...straight women, for example. Or lesbians, for that matter. Let alone polymorphous perverts. (Grin)

Funny how these understandings change over time. Now, MM erotic fiction is probably MOSTLY bought by straight women, and many men buy their reading material based on, oh, the story, or the cover art, rather than the name on it. And some don't even mind if it's written by a woman. We're in a new age, for sure.

So, I allowed myself to be convinced by two sharp editors to bring back into distribution two works of mine, written under the name Christopher Morgan.

(Doesn't Christopher Morgan sound manly, yet accessible? Very boy-next-door, I thought.)

Anyway, the first one out will probably be *Shop Stud & Other Tales*, a collection of some of my gay male short fiction. There is some SM in it, but tons of vanilla, LOL. Most of the stories were written for those little digest sized magazines with names like Country Boy and College Boy and City Boy and Just Boys, OK? (My memory might be a bit fuzzy on the titles.)

The second release will be Musclebound, the first novel I ever wrote. It is a brutal tale of sex and abuse set in a gym. And from my new introduction...

"It won’t surprise too many of my readers that I have written vast amounts of gay smut, especially of they have read my more far reaching erotic works, where I do my best to throw in something for everyone. It might surprise a few at how this brutal tale of pumped up bodies and punishing sex became the first book of mine ever mentioned in academia.

No less a figure than Will Roscoe, one of the major voices in gay men’s spirituality in the United States, anthropologist and winner of the Margaret Mead Award, devoted a neat chapter to Muscle Bound in his book Queer Spirits (Beacon Press, 1995.)

In this chapter, Roscoe seems delighted to find a little porn novel that fulfills the requirements of a mythic story; he writes about his my hero Tom relates to the story villain with “fear and attraction based on a sense of lack, (that) all too often characterizes how we as gay men relate to our fathers.” He talks about the “initiatory themes” of the sex scenes, and how Tom grows with the transformation of his body, “a common feature of tribal rites.” He mentions Divine Twins, Rabelais, liberation and subject-SUBJECT relationships.

Here is where I reveal my years of study of literature, anthropology, sociology, sexuality and, well, the mythic archetype. Here is where I admit that when faced with completing my first novel, I decided I couldn’t mess it up if I just told The Story, of innocence to experience, ordeal to triumph, blah, blah. That it had brutal, sweaty gay sex was beside the point. I knew what I was writing. And here, this guy saw it and wrote about it, probably never dreaming this story was written by 1) a woman, and 2) an academic drop out with too much useless information to sit around and not use it from time to time. I was delighted. I was amused.

And I couldn’t TELL anyone!"

Now, I am telling you. I am coming out of the closet as a gay male pornographer. Surprise! Are there more pseudonyms hiding in my past? Well, yes. But not covering an entire genre.

Both of these books will start out as e-books, and then we shall see if there is an interest in making print-on-demand versions. I will have links and purchasing information as soon as the publishers do that voodoo they do.

Laura

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