Where the Boys Are, page 18
After last week’s odd dream, with X and the scary exhibitionist, I started a massive Google manhunt for everyone I remembered from my salad days, when I was somebody in Minneapolis. I’m single again, and I have the leisure to look back ruefully. I’ve been back in touch with X, via email, ever since city-loathing Melinda, of all people, updated me on his whereabouts in a Christmas card. Melinda had become friends with our brief first hostess, Nancy—don’t ask me how or why—and Nancy had told Melinda that X had given up his old stage name and was now doing performance poetry in L.A. using his middle and surnames: Alex McLeod. I like that there is still an X in his name. But I had not kept in touch with the other people from the old icebox house and beyond.
Tory and Dean have an Internet billboard advertising their gardening business. In the photo, they look much older but every bit as merry as I remember them. Chaka is running for city council as a Green Party candidate. Stacy is teaching sociology as an adjunct at a community college.
As for Adrian, I’ve tried everything. The problem is, truth be told, I never learned the last name of the love of my life. So I Google search “Adrian” and “Minneapolis” or “Adrian” and “music” or “Same Time, Different Place,” and I wade through a sea of Internet flotsam and find nothing relevant except a few postings about the band performing at First Avenue in the early 1990s. There’s no roster of band members, not even a photo.
I was at a party in Jackson Heights last weekend, and I found myself thinking, Adrian could be here. Not at the party, I mean, but here in New York. He seemed like the type who might have made his way here eventually. I’m at an age when parties easily irritate me. There is always at least one person there who is much younger than me and whose work is being shown in well-known galleries. They tend to be loud talkers. I can cope with my lack of fame, but the loss of my youth has left me bitter. I went up to the roof of the building, where some people from the party were smoking. I sat by myself looking back at the Manhattan skyline. I buoyed my spirits by scanning the city and thinking yes, Adrian could be out there someplace. He could be walking around tonight in this vast sea of lights and concrete that I have learned to call home.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
RACHEL KRAMER BUSSEL‘s books include Caught Looking, Hide and Seek, Crossdressing, and the nonfiction collection Best Sex Writing 2008. Her writing has been published in more than one hundred anthologies; she’s senior editor at Penthouse Variations, hosts In The Flesh Erotic Reading Series and wrote the “Lusty Lady” column for The Village Voice. Find out more at www.rachelkramerbussel.com.
DALE CHASE has been happily writing male erotica for nearly a decade, with more than one hundred stories published in various magazines and anthologies. Her collection of Victorian gentlemen’s erotica, The Company He Keeps, is coming in 2008. Chase lives near San Francisco and is working on a collection of ghostly male erotica.
TED CORNWELL is a poet, fiction writer and journalist who grew up in Minnesota and has lived in New York City for the past decade. His fiction has appeared in Dorm Porn and Best Gay Love Stories 2006: New York City, and his poetry has appeared in the queer journal modern words.
JAMESON CURRIER is the author of a novel, Where the Rainbow Ends, and two collections of short stories, most recently Desire, Lust, Passion, Sex.
ERASTES lives in the UK and was a punk in London in 1977, but will only admit to being too young to remember. His gay short stories have been published in collections as varied as Ultimate Gay Erotica, Treasure Trail and Superqueeroes. His first novel, Standish, was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. www.erastes.com.
LEE HOUCK was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee and now lives in Queens, New York. He has written original pieces for theater seen in Vermont, Tennessee and New York; an essay appearing in From Boys to Men; and poetry featured in the Magnetic Poetry Calendar. Additionally, he has created art installations for the Musée de Monoian, and has worked with Jennifer Miller’s Circus Amok for ten seasons. He is at work on a novel. For more, go to www.leehouck.com.
ZEKE MANGOLD has been a Las Vegas blackjack dealer for twenty-two years. He took up writing late in life, having wasted his youth in dark desert taverns all over the Southwest; his first published erotic fiction appeared in Hot Cops, and he is working on an erotic novel set in Las Vegas, tentatively titled Casino Queen.
JEFF MANN‘s work has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies. He has published two collections of poetry, Bones Washed with Wine and On the Tongue; a book of personal essays, Edge; a collection of poetry and memoir, Loving Mountains, Loving Men; and a volume of short fiction, A History of Barbed Wire. He teaches creative writing at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.
ALPHA MARTIAL is a Brit now living on a smallholding in rural France with his long-term partner. When not preoccupied with vegetables and chickens or busy as an artist’s agent, writing is his favorite pastime. His short stories have appeared in several anthologies, including Best Gay Erotica 2005; his first novel, Sappho and Tulle (coauthored with Romy Were), is an exploration of sexuality and fantasy. A selection of his fiction appears on http://telltale.free.fr.
DOUGLAS A. MARTIN is the author of two novels (Branwell, Outline of My Lover), a volume of short stories (They Change the Subject), and two collections of poetry. He is also a coauthor of the haiku year.
SAM J. MILLER is a writer and a community organizer. His work has appeared in numerous zines, anthologies, and print and online journals. He lives in the Bronx with his partner of six years.
KEMBLE SCOTT is the author of the best-selling novel SoMa, based on twisted true tales from San Francisco. He is an alumnus of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, the editor of SoMa Literary Review, and has three Emmy Awards for his work in television news. His website, www.kemblescott.com, features videos shot at the real-life places that inspired the novel, including the locations depicted in this excerpt. Kemble frequently speaks to book groups and organizations. You can reach him directly at: kemblescott@gmail.com.
SIMON SHEPPARD is the editor of Homosex: Sixty Years of Gay Erotica, and the author of In Deep: Erotic Stories; Kin-korama: Dispatches From the Front Lines of Perversion; Sex Parties 101 and the award-winning Hotter Than Hell and Other Stories. His work has appeared in about two hundred and fifty anthologies, including many editions of The Best American Erotica and many, many volumes of Best Gay Erotica. He writes the syndicated column “Sex Talk” and hangs out at www.simonsheppard.com.
ALANA NOEL VOTH is single mom who lives in Oregon with her ten-year-old son, one dog, two cats, and several freshwater fish. Her fiction has appeared in Best Gay Erotica 2007 and 2004, Best American Erotica 2005, The Big Stupid Review and Literary Mama.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
RICHARD LABONTÉ writes book reviews, edits books, translates technical writing into real English, and reads a lot. Sometimes he’s sitting on the porch of a two-hundred-acre farm in Calabogie, Ontario, co-owned with several college friends for more than thirty years. Sometimes he’s sitting on the deck of a home on Bowen Island, a short ferry ride from Vancouver, British Columbia, owned by one of those college friends. Often his husband Asa is sitting with him. Email: tattyhill@gmail.com.
Richard Labonté, Where the Boys Are
