Best Gay Erotica 2006, page 23
I don’t disabuse Buddy of his conviction that he doesn’t fit any stereotypes. And indeed, it seems that the only people who perceive Buddy as stereotypically gay are visiting urban gays. I accompany Buddy on his nearly nightly rounds of the roughest dive bars on the waterfront. Buddy plays pool with sailors. I sit on bar stools and listen to career Navy alcoholics’ sea stories.
These guys tend to come from small towns in the southern United States—or neighboring Idaho. Young men who never once jump on the ferry to Seattle by themselves, because they never have. Instead, they booze and brawl alongside the Bremelos.
Buddy takes to introducing me to local people as a “famous author”—a title that calls for too much explanation. One night I adjure my drinking pal, “Don’t tell people I’m a famous author. Tell them I’m a famous photographer.”
I’m half-joking. The only photos I’ve had published are in my own books. But among the thousands of Lincoln sailors, a half dozen or so who have become “downtown” regulars exude indisputable star quality, and one night it becomes more than I can bear.
We’re in Buddy’s favorite bar. I’m entertaining an outof- town dignitary, a professor at one of the military academies. The prettiest of the Lincoln boys is there—drinking Bud by the pitcher, playing pool, and stealing the hearts or at least admiring glances from everyone present. He’s winsome beyond measure, from his disarming constant grin to his tight Wrangler jeans to the heavily autographed cast on his broken arm. An inscription jumps out at me:
DON’T JERK OFF SO HARD
Buddy and the professor are merely charmed. And as for me…. When yet another young sailor staggers in, spots Castboy, and with unstudied passion immediately throws his arms tightly around him, I get all misty-eyed, struggle to recite Whitman, and drunkenly vow that I will not return to this bar without a camera because “That picture would have been worth more than all of my books put together.”
Buddy is keen on the idea but cautions me that before I start taking any pictures of sailors in the bar a protocol must be devised. I should wait until the hour when everyone is a little drunk but not yet sloppy drunk. The first pictures must be of people we know—say, Buddy and a woman, and then with some other guy. And only then take pictures of a sailor, but still only with a girl.
“If anybody gives you trouble, I’ll back you up.”
There was trouble, all right. But not like Buddy expected. The first night I worked up enough nerve to pop my electronic flash in a waterfront pool hall a sailor angrily confronted me: “Why are you taking pictures of him instead of me?”
Of course I obliged him. But this angered the sailor I had been taking pictures of. Losing the spotlight, he sulked. Seeing this, I reassured him, “Well, don’t let it go to your head, but you definitely have the most potential as a model.” That was Mike, the sailor with the cast on his arm.
When his best friend from the ship walked in, Mike proudly repeated my appraisal.
This sailor in turn took me aside and demanded, “Him? You’re wasting your film. Dude! His ears are too big!” And that was Packard, the sailor who would end up starring in Out of the Brig, the porn video I made by accident.
Bremerton, Washington—Summer 1999:
Trouble Loves Me
As with any accident, memory blurs. This much is known:
That summer Honcho ran an interview with me to promote Military Trade. When I e-mailed the editor my thanks, I attached some JPGs of sailors drinking and playing pool. Doug McClemont wrote back that he liked the pictures. He invited me to shoot a few rolls of slide film for publication in his magazine.
At the time, I didn’t own any strobe lights (much less any video equipment).
Of the three USS Lincoln sailors who’d fought over who was the most photogenic, one was in the brig and another was in a military treatment center for substance abuse. When I relayed Honcho’s invitation to Packard, he expressed skepticism. “Yeah, but how much would it pay?”
I told him how much.
Packard may or may not have dropped his pool stick. It seems like it was only a matter of hours before I’d shot enough rolls of Kodak EPP to FedEx to New York and woke up to a voice mail from Doug telling me the pictures were okay—only, “They’re a little dark. If you can, try to get just a basic monolight.”
For once, I wasn’t “in between books.” I had the money, but what motivated me to spend $1,000 on basic studio lighting equipment was not the promise of selling more layouts. I wanted to spare my models the shame of telltale amateur shadows.
That summer the (beefy but reclusive) Navy master-at-arms living next door to me vacated his one-room apartment. I toyed with the extravagant idea of renting the “studio,” but not seriously—until the building manager accepted a rental application for the unit from a Bremelo with two small children.
“Well, I’ll have the linoleum replaced for you.” My landlady was perplexed but also impressed at my renting two apartments. “And about the cracks in the walls—”
She didn’t argue when I told her I liked the room exactly as it was.
I had sense enough not to gush about how especially fond I was of the vintage Murphy bed and its stained mattress. Instead, I asked her what she knew about how the building had been furnished during World War II when it served as officers’ quarters.
After I dragged up from the basement a battered chair and matching nightstand, my studio was ready. In the thirteen months I rented it I didn’t change a detail.
That summer I was prescribed Paxil (paroxetene), an antidepressant/anti-anxiety drug in the same family of selective serotinin reuptake inhibitors as Prozac. Overall, the medication made me more self-assured and confident. Bold,
even. I would not have dived into neophysique photography without it.
Paxil also abated some of my anxieties about turning into David Lloyd.
But one side effect of Paxil resulted in a new and unwelcome physical resemblance to David. From my first video recording made in the new studio:
PACKARD: I can see why you like the “steady shot” feature so much.
ZEELAND: [mock confrontationally] So what are you trying to say?
PACKARD: I can see your hands shaking right now.
ZEELAND: [Remains silent]
PACKARD: [Coughs and looks away]
The camcorder was an impulse purchase, prompted by cues from sailors I spoke with about modeling. The most succinct and memorable:
“So…you only take still pictures?”
It was in answer to another magazine editor’s invitation that I became acquainted with videomaker Dink Flamingo of ActiveDuty.com. At the close of my interview with him for Unzipped Dink confided that he’d never aspired to become a pornographer. His ambition had always been to be a journalist.
We agreed to “trade places for a day.” Dink promised to contribute some authentic accounts of erotic liaisons with “barracks bad boys” to Alex Buchman’s nonfiction anthology in progress. I pledged to try my hand at playing auteur in his scandal-ridden, sordid “adult amateur video” subgenre.
After patiently bearing with me for nine long months, Dink breathed satisfaction and relief upon receipt of the labor of love I finally delivered.
My timing, however, could not have been worse. The scheduled release date for my video celebrating real-life military deserters coincided with the bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Still, my three masturbating sailors cannot really be accused of “disgracing the military.” The title Out of the Brig is no fantasy; it’s documentary. The sailors in it are real-life tattooed Navy “bad boys” who really have broken the rules, have done their time, and are no longer on active duty—are no longer answerable to anyone. (Even if at the scheduled release date one of them had not yet turned himself in. Had Congress officially declared war, and had he been arrested, he could have faced the firing squad.)
Barracks Bad Boys:
The Movie
The style of my directorial debut is a cross between early Dirk Yates and early Andy Warhol. With, I’d like to think, a human face.
But not mine.
FIRST SAILOR: Approximately three minutes into the opening sequence, which stars Packard, you can hear me say: “You know, you could even sort of self-direct this” (as I hand him a second remote, and flip over the camcorder viewfinder so that he can zoom in and out to…self-direct).
SECOND SAILOR: After a short introductory scene (unscripted and shot in one take at a retro adult video arcade just outside the shipyard), I don’t do much “directing.” This one stars Pro. He masturbates watching DVDs on my living room TV.
THIRD SAILOR: The first two sequences are exactly twenty minutes long. The closing sequence is a film within a film, and a full hour long. It’s an essay by itself, too. For my purpose here, it’s enough to tell you that I miscalculated in thinking that for this shoot I had an assistant who would effectively play “Steve” to my “David.” But when the door to my own studio slammed shut with me locked out, I was surprised but not altogether displeased.
And when an hour and a half later I was allowed back in the room and rewound through some of the tape, I knew that this was it. My “sailors gone bad” had given me enough “raw footage” to meet the basic requirements of the amateur military porn video idiom. Now I could give myself over to endless hours lovingly editing.
Bremerton, Washington—January 2003
By the time you read this I will no longer be in Bremerton, Washington. Every last one of the active-duty sailors I photographed has long since departed. Two or three of them transferred to distant duty stations; two or three received honorable discharges. Between twenty and thirty were kicked out of the Navy for “unauthorized absence” and/or drug use. In February 2002, the Navy announced that all of the ships currently homeported in Bremerton would be moved elsewhere. Also, that the block of 100-year-old buildings adjacent to the Navy shipyard—including the historic Crow’s Nest tavern— would be demolished to provide a “security buffer” against terrorist attack. But the bar shut down even before the wrecking ball hit, after the thirty-seven-year-old owner was found dead under mysterious circumstances.
Pro has long since moved back to Texas. But he’s kept in touch. And at one point when I was too long in replying to his e-mail he left me a voice mail:
“Steve! Come out of your fucking Pax-hole!”
Actually, I’d quit Paxil and sworn off maintenance drugs of any sort just before September 11, 2001.
“Are we still friends or what? Dude! I shot my seed on your TV! ”
It isn’t very often I turn on my TV, and almost never when I’m alone. But one special occasion was the day I opened a package from Dink Flamingo, stretched out on the couch, hit the remote, and watched Out of the Brig.
And noticed I had missed a spot when I cleaned the monitor.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
RALOWE TRINITROTOLUENE AMPU is an annoying black homosexual asshole living in San Francisco. When not cruising bathrooms at chain department stores and college campuses or watching porn, she raps, kind of. She’s also an instigator of Gay Shame. If you’re severely bored, check her website, where you can taste one of more than 150 free MP3s: www.ralowes-confusedsuburbanlaughter.com.
BEN BLACKTHORNE collects Thundercat action figures. He has every issue of Thrasher going back to 1988 and frequently fantasizes about being Tony Hawke’s bitch. He enjoys sunsets, romantic walks on the beach, and public restrooms. Blackthorne lives with his partner and five cats, and is old enough to drink.
PATRICK CALIFIA is the author of twenty books, including five collections of BDSM fiction, Boy in the Middle, Macho Sluts, Melting Point, No Mercy, and Hard Men, as well as a novel, Mortal Companion, and the classic introduction to BDSM, Sensuous Magic: A Guide for Adventurous Couples. He is the author of the seminal texts on sex and gender politics Speaking Sex to Power: The Politics of Queer Sex, Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex, and Sex Changes: Transgender Politics. He lives in San Francisco.
ALEXANDER CHEE is the author of Edinburgh. He is the winner of a Whiting Award and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. His stories and essays have appeared in the anthologies Men On Men 2000, Boys Like Us, Loss Within Loss, Best Gay Erotica 2002, and The M Word. His new novel, The Queen of the Night, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin.
DENNIS COOPER’s most recent novels are God Jr. and The Sluts. He is the author of The George Miles Cycle, five interconnected novels: Closer (1989), Frisk (1991), Try (1994), Guide (1997), and Period (2000). The cycle is published by Grove Press and has been translated into fourteen languages. He lives in Los Angeles.
JAIME CORTEZ is a cultural worker in California. His writing has appeared in a dozen anthologies, his visual art has been exhibited at numerous California galleries, and he edited the anthology Virgins, Guerrillas & Locas. Cortez has worked as a high school teacher in Japan, at the AIDS Memorial Quilt, and at Galería De La Raza, and has lectured on art and activism at Stanford, Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara, University of Pennsylvania, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. He is pursuing his MFA in art at Berkeley.
SAM D’ALLESANDRO studied at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and came to San Francisco as a youth in the early 1980s. He was handsome and charismatic, the man who’d turn your head at a hundred yards. He died of AIDS in 1988, leaving behind a brilliant body of work that ranges from stories of only one paragraph to fully developed novellas.
TIM DOODY has organized political actions to challenge the policies of governments and corporations from the East Coast to the West Bank. ABC-TV’s Nightline listed him as one of the nation’s most dangerous radicals during its August 31, 2004, broadcast. He has been published in Topic Magazine, The Earth First! Journal, XY, The Indypendent, and two other anthologies: That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation and Dirt Road: Transient Tales. Doody can be reached at query@riseup.net.
MARCUS EWERT met Allen Ginsberg while still in high school, and the two became boyfriends. Ewert is currently writing about this exciting time in his life in his memoir-in-progress, Beatboy. He also writes science fiction and children’s picture books, and is the cocreator of the animated series Piki and Poko: Adventures in StarLand (www.pikiandpoko.com).
TREBOR HEALEY is the author of the 2004 Ferro-Grum-ley and 2004 Violet Quill Award–winning novel Through It Came Bright Colors. His work has appeared in Best Gay Erotica 2003 and Best Gay Erotica 2004. His erotic poetry collection, Sweet Son of Pan, will be published in spring 2006. He lives in Los Angeles. www.treborhealey.com.
NADYALEC HIJAZI is a poseur who buys all his cool clothes at Hot Topic. He has every issue of Propaganda magazine going back to 1988, and frequently fantasizes about being Poppy Brite’s bitch. He’s been published in Hot Off the Net and Trikone, and online in Bint el Nas and the late great Roughriders. You can read more of his work on his website at www.nadyalec.com.
THORN KIEF HILLSBERY is the author of War Boy, described by one critic as “the most exciting gay novel in a decade” and translated into German, Spanish, and Catalan. A former columnist and editor at Outside, he has written feature articles for Rolling Stone and many other magazines on mountaineering, skateboarding, and surfing, as well as the punk rock subculture featured in What We Do Is Secret, his second novel. He lives in Manhattan and teaches at Columbia University.
KEVIN KILLIAN is the author of Shy, Little Men, Bedrooms Have Windows, Arctic Summer, Argento Series, and I Cry Like a Baby. He lives in San Francisco, where he is writing a book about Kylie Minogue, a pop singer born in Australia and currently living in London, who appeared in the film Moulin Rouge.
DARIN KLEIN is an artist, curator, and small press publisher. His artwork and writing have been included in independently published projects including Angry Dog Midget Editions, Bedwetter, Incredibly Short Stories, and Poorly Rendered. He resides in and has erotic encounters in Los Angeles. www.darinklein.net.
SAM J. MILLER is a community organizer. He lives in the Bronx with his partner of three years. When he’s not writing or organizing poor people to fight for social justice, he’s binging on silent movies and punk rock. At present he’s working on his first novel, of which “Depression Halved Production Costs” is an excerpt. Drop him a line at samjmiller79@yahoo.com.
BLAKE NEMEC is a working-class phlebotomist, HIV/STI counselor, performer, and former hustler who lives in San Francisco. His writing has been included in the anthologies That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, From the Inside Out: Radical Gender Transformation, and FTM and Beyond, as well as the magazines Spread and LIP. He has published in self-sufficiency zines focusing on sound/ radio and repetitive stress injuries. He can be contacted at aorticvalve22@yahoo.com.
KIRK READ lives in San Francisco, where he is getting his MFA in creative writing at San Francisco State University. He is an HIV counselor and phlebotomist at St. James Infirmary, a free health care clinic for sex workers. He is the author of How I Learned to Snap, a memoir about being out in high school in a small Virginia town. He tours as a storyteller and produces literary/performance events, including the Castro’s monthly open mic Smack Dab, which aims to force-feed the culturally anorexic gay financial district. He can be reached at www.kirkread.com.
JULY SHARK is a displaced Appalachian transsexual who now lives in Oakland, California. Shark works odd jobs for a living and haunts wastelands in the off time.
SIMON SHEPPARD makes his eleventh appearance in the Best Gay Erotica series, with thanks this time to Neva Chonin. He’s also the author of the books Sex Parties 101, In Deep: Erotic Stories, and Kinkorama: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Perversion. His writing has appeared in more than 125 other anthologies, and he writes the columns “Sex Talk” and “Perv.” He’s at work on a historically based anthology of gay porn—anyone with vintage smut is encouraged to get in touch at www.simonsheppard.com.
