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Going Too Far
© 2001 Felice Picano
I was sitting, minding my own business, performing one of my more prosaic weekly chores, opening and reading the mail that came into the post office box of The Gay Presses of New York, one afternoon in the early Spring of 1984, when out of an overseas envelope spilled a bunch of much stamped official looking documents from The United Kingdom Customs and Overseas Commerce Ministry. With them was a short note scribbled by one of the partners of our company's British distributors explaining the purport of said papers. It seems, Aubrey wrote, that GPNY's shipment of sea voyaging books had been restrained at a docks in Liverpool and had been opened by the authorities. The official had gone through the sealed boxes of shipped books, scanned their contents, and had chanced upon a title that he looked at a bit more closely. He then declared it to be "Obscene and Pornographic-- Unfit for Sale in the U.K." While the other titles had been eventually released to GMP, all forty-eight copies shipped of this particular Gay Presses of New York title had been impounded, and after sundry authorizations were signed by one of Aubrey's partners allowing him to receive the other books in the shipment, the entire box of the offending title had been formally burned to ashes on the dock. The volume in question was my own collection of short stories titled Slashed to Ribbons in Defense of Love. By 1984, the book was in its third printing, with some eight thousand copies in print. When published the year before, the book had been featured on the cover of Writers magazine, as well as reviewed inside, along with collections by such literary luminaries of the day as Donald Barthelme, Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver and Alice Munro. "Short Story Renaissance!" the cover had proclaimed. Since then, the stories had been positively mentioned in the few extant gay media outlets of the day, and had appeared for several months running, albeit in a lowly position, on the Christopher Street Magazine best seller list. So, obviously, I was surprised to see my work labeled as obscene and torched, like someone accused of witchcraft. Or heresy. Looking more closely at the official papers as I phoned my GPNY partners to tell them the news, I saw that the official had written, "with especial regard to material found on pages 131--144.:" I turned to those pages in my own copy of the book, and there it was: my story, "Expertise," the story I have chosen to reprint in this anthology. While outwardly outraged during my discussions with my partners and my attorneys, as well as in letters to my congressman and senator and to the British Counsel offices in New York and Washington D.C., I have to admit, secretly I was pleased. Very, very, pleased. How often has anyone written thirteen pages that has been found so offensive by someone else that it had to be impounded, then destroyed by fire? It meant that I was now officially bad. I was thrilled. Clearly, I was upset, too. Since someone had failed to understand my intentions in writing the story, I had to now wonder how many other people had also misunderstood it. According to our British distributors, it was themselves, not me -- a barely known foreign author-- who were the Customs Ministry's target, singled out and persecuted by the authorities during that Orwellian year. Their intent was clear: to harass Gay Men's Press and the Gay is the Word bookstore in London as much as possible. And, by putting various sorts of pressure on them, to keep them from getting and selling books from abroad. Or merely even to make it too expensive -- by destroying incoming books -- for overseas shippers to continue to service their account. I realized all that. Intellectually, at least. In my heart, I knew I'd at last GONE TOO FAR and was reaping the richly ambivalent rewards of such an exercise. For years, my parents, my school teachers, my college professors, not to mention various friends, had warned me that someday I would GO TOO FAR. Now I had done so. I had proof. So, in a sense I had succeeded. I was fulfilled.
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From the first, whenever writing gay themed material, I noticed that I seemed to do what today we call "pushing the envelope." I didn't actually do this consciously, say, like Voltaire or Evelyn Waugh, to epater le bourgeoisie. It was simply the way I saw life around me, the way I thought of it, how I evaluated it, and as a result, the way I wrote about it. To me, my writing about gay life, was more or less reportage, informed a little by my own peculiar tastes and my own weird sense of humor. Of course, when I was first writing, to write anything at all about gay life and try to publish it, was GOING TOO FAR. Did this stop me in any way? No. When I had completed my first (to myself) successful short story, titled "Slashed to Ribbons in Defense of Love," I immediately mailed it off to The New Yorker. Two weeks later, some secondary assistant associate fiction editor there actually hand-penned a rejection note and mailed it back to me. He did not ask to see anything else of mine. Didn't those Philistines know art when they read it?! It would be another eight long years before that story was published by anyone. And when it came out in Christopher Street magazine and in its fiction anthology, Aphrodisiacs, the story's ending was edited. My story was still too much for even an openly gay periodical!! Meanwhile, I was writing poetry-- and it seems that I was again GOING TOO FAR. Although I'd written and published three mainstream novels by 1977, my first gay book to ever be published was the poetry collection, The Deformity Lover. It's title poem was about a homo who sought only handicapped and disfigured men to have sex with. A commentator on a New York public radio station not only read the poem, he also strongly objected to the poem, and disparaged me as its author. Or so I heard at second hand. Other poems in that tome however, proved no better when it came to sensitivity or political correctness. One was about drugged-out dance fags, another about overfastidious phone-sex callers, another about hypocrite leather queens, another about s/m stupidties, another about an exhibitionist jerking off while riding a bicycle in public. There happened to be a few magazines of the time that dared publish such poetry-- Mouth of the Dragon, Fag Rag, Gay Sunshine. And to me, these poems, most simply put; were my subject matter. What I saw around me. Also they were what made my book new. As in Gertrude Stein's dictum "Make it new." Needless to say the book was scarcely read, never mind, reviewed by anyone outside the gay media. Inside the gay media, The Deformity Lover was met with what could charitably called a "mixed" response. I remember going around chanting what Edgar Allen Poe had written in a letter a century and half earlier about the reaction to his poem "Annabel Lee" --"My poem is damned!" Poe wrote. "Damned in the quarterlies. Damned in the journals! Damned upon the pulpits and within the salons. Damned in the coffee houses and taverns of all the seaboard cities! Damned, I tell you. Damned!" And yet someone must have read my book: it sold out three editions in five years, and was backordered for years. Having learned little from my experiences with the short story and poetry, I stumbled on. My second gay book, the novel, The Lure, was and perhaps still is twenty two years later, one of the most sexually explicit gay books put out by a mainstream press, promoted by a mainstream bookclub, and translated into eight other languages. It dealt with the nighttime scene of gay life in Manhattan during the late Nineteen Seventies. And I do not mean black-tie parties at the Frick Collection or charity galas at the Metropolitan Opera. It was dark, it was dirty. But it was real. I'd lived it, dated men who closed bars at four thirty a.m, then joined them for after hours parties. I knew what I was writing about. Having written the damned thing, and then having found people nuts enough to publish it, I then compounded my act of chutzpah and dedicated this in your face fag book to whom? To my parents, naturally enough. Obviously, I had CEASED TO CARE who I offended anymore. With the expected results: the entire collective of The Body Politic and a few other active gay groups put me on the top of their hit lists. Someone actually shot at me. Bullets lodged in the outside wall of my apartment building near my study windows. I decided to leave town until things quieted down. I foolishly thought that my third gay title, An Asian Minor, being distanced in time some thirty five hundred years might calm these people down. It was, I admit, a bit cheeky. A retelling of the Graeco-Roman Ganymede and Zeus love affair, it was not penned in elegant Silver-Age, Ovidian rhymed stanzas, but instead in contemporary everyday prose, as told by Ganymede himself. That lovely lad I characterized as a tough, knowing, contemporary street hustler, in search of the ultimate sugar daddy. Again the reviews were "mixed." Many older homosexuals, academics and the type I used to call "Classic-Fags" fond the novella deeply odious, profoundly repugnant. But it too sold well, and became a stage play, “Immortal!" running Off Broadway a while. Unredeemed in any way by these experiences, when a year later, I came to collecting and titling the eleven short stories I had written and had published in various periodicals over the previous nine years, I decided to purposefully GO TOO FAR. The novella "And Baby Makes Three" was about a love affair begun when one participant was an adult, the other a toddler. The story, "Hunter" was about a young gay man who ended up having a supernatural sex affair. Another was about a blow job I got from a (thinly-disguised) movie star. Another about an equally ill-disguised classical musician and his infamous affair with a young hustler. "Xmas in the Apple" is about three gay men's various, but mostly depraved and depressed holiday. ”Teddy the Hook," is about a handsome guy with a misshapen, if sizable, penis who finds sexual paradise in gay Vietnam. "Mr. World Buns" is about a national contest for the prettiest rear end, and was specifically subtitled "A story without a moral." I hoped there was something in the book to offend everyone. I even thought of titling the collection Gay Tragic Romances, after various woman-oriented magazines of the "Fifties." (Note: An Asian Minor and Slashed to Ribbons have been reprinted by Alyson Books, as The New York Years.) And yet, strange to report, until that letter arrived in 1984, no one had ever hinted that I had succeeded in GOING TOO FAR with "Expertise." What was worse, since the stories had been published to less than the usual annoyed reviews (maybe they'd given up on me?), I'd felt a bit liberated. So much so that I had charged ahead and written the first of my memoirs -- or perhaps anti-memoirs, as Andre Malraux had cleverly called his own such book -- Ambidextrous: The Secret Lives of Children. That publication told what it had been like when I was a child, aged eleven to thirteen, growing up in a middle-class, melting pot New York City suburb, and had done so without pulling any punches whatsoever. In print ever since and now considered something of a gay classic, Ambidextrous itself would soon after the receipt of that fatal British letter, begin to undergo its own attempts at censorship, as publisher after publisher turned it down. To a person, they found its mixture of material disturbing: I might have easily written about gay and straight sex among children who were sniffing airplane glue, looking at gay porn photos, and vending straight poetry porn, one wrote. Except that I had dared to write all that and then to place it -- as in truth it had occurred in my life -- alongside such acceptably fond childhood memories as kid's softball games, bike rides through cones of autumn leaves, classroom antics, arts and crafts valentine exchanges, and school museum trips. One editor took me to an expensive lunch where he explained why he could not publish that book: I had yoked together preadolescent gay sex and military heroism from the Korean and Viet Nam War, in the end demeaning all war veterans: I, and my book, were patently offensive and egregiously unpatriotic. When Ambidextrous was published by my GPNY partners in the U.S. it was barely reviewed anywhere. The Publisher's Weekly reviewer evidently only read the first six pages. In the UK when it reached across the ocean -- saved from the torch there I'm guessing by its childlike cover art -- Ambidextrous was reviewed by someone in The Manchester Guardian who wrote, and I quote, "Mr. Picano. Children don't have sex. Period." to which I responded. "Mr. ____. Check your OED. This book is not fiction. It is a memoir. Children did have sex. And this is how they had sex. Period." Since then, however, two straight women have told me they wrote favorable reviews of Ambidextrous for 1) The Village Voice and 2) The San Francisco Chronicle, reviews that were turned down by the book editors who had assigned them and thus never printed by those allegedly liberal organs. Again because I had GONE TOO FAR. Subsequently in my writing career, I have made it a point to GO TOO FAR, no matter what I pen. When Dr. Charles Silverstein chose me over several other more evident choices (including a very disgruntled John Preston) to co-author The New Joy of Gay Sex, Silverstein said it was on the basis of reading Ambidextrous and the next memoir, Men Who Loved Me (A title found to be monstrously pushy and egotistical by many). When we commissioned the art work for the sex book, I instructed Deni Ponty, who did the beautiful color paintings found in the front of the original edition, that his initial sketches were okay but the men weren't close enough to each other. Ponty wanted to know how close they should be. "You shouldn't be able to slip a piece of paper between their bodies," I instructed. When equally talented Ron Fowler who did the black and white illustrations, asked could he depict anything? Anyone? Silverstein and I said sure. Thus we got pictures of men of all sizes, shapes, and colors, including skin-heads, midgets and a guy in a wheel chair -- fucking, sucking sixty-nining, masturbating, having circle jerks, pissing on each other, and in one controversial unpublished drawing, with barbed wire twisted around their scrotum. Harper-Collin's art director and editor found that last art a bit too controversial. I couldn't see their point, but we took it out anyway. Because by then I understood how I'd was no longer able to take discretion as the better part of valor, or in fact as the better part of anything.
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Unlike "Mr. World Buns," "Expertise" is a story with a moral. Or sort of a moral. Or something that might be construed as a moral. Which makes the story being taken as obscene especially jejune. I wrote the first draft of "Expertise" in l979, at my rented summer cottage in Fire Island Pines, as all the brouhaha was getting started around the publication of my novel, The Lure. I revised it in May of 1980, in Manhattan. "Expertise" was, naturally enough, based on my own experiences in bathhouses, on boardwalks, and in sex clubs of the day, but especially in the club specified in the story. That site was either The Glory Hole in Manhattan located on 11th Avenue and 22nd Street, midway between two leather bars, The Eagle and The Spike, and operated by a pair of entrepreneur lovers from Texas; or the original Basic Plumbing in Los Angeles, located somewhere on Fairfax Avenue (does anyone know the exact address?) within a young man's orgasm distance to West Hollywood. I was seriously dating someone but we had one day a week "off" from each other. He liked bathhouses on these nights. So I went to the other kind of clubs. Actually, I liked these other clubs better. One needn't spend as much time in them, or make as much of a personal commitment as was required in a bathhouse environment. You could sail in between beers, suck dick, get blown, then sail out again. Often I'd be home hours earlier than my guy, able to read a book or listen to a few LPs, before he arrived. Little by little, I began to notice that some men always seemed to be in these clubs whenever I rushed in for a quickie. I began to notice, then to watch, and later on to spend time observing these regulars. They had their favorite booths. They'd wait around outside them while others were inside then dash in as soon as they could and stay there for hours. They had little rituals, connected with hours-long stays in the booths. One arranged his bottle of butyl nitrate, cans of 7-Up and joints of grass, in between regular cigarettes, along a wooden shelf. I began to notice well known gay men in these clubs. A few authors. One of the Village People. A celebrated, avant garde playwright. Manhattan's top commercial illustrator. A mulatto physique model. A bearded Japanese classical musician. A well known pianist-cabaret artist. Two guys from the first U.S. Punk band I ever heard. In Los Angeles, the club was even more dotted with recording stars, professional athletes and actors. I had sex with all of them. I never became obsessed, never myself became a "regular," but I found it all fascinating. The writing on the walls --"I sucked off a hunky, well hung, Catholic Priest -- he came twice in a row, moaning “Jesus Loves You!" -- "Got buttfucked six times. Number seven felched it all out" -- and other such graffiti. I felt it was a unique site, a uniquely gay male experience, and it, and its various denizens, just had to be written about. The last visit I made to such a club was to Basic Plumbing in LA in mid-summer of 1981. It was a cloudy afternoon. Quiet. I was about to leave when I noticed two handsome big men come in. The white guy was my type, but I couldn't get his attention, Meanwhile the black guy was after me. When we stopped to chat, I told him I wanted his friend. He suggested a three way. We found a booth that could hold all three of us. We took turns doing everything to each other, ending up with me being "Lucky Pierre" between the two of them (like a slice of meat between two thick slabs of Italian and Pumpernickel bread). Afterward it turned out they were football players, L.A. Rams. I felt I had experienced the most sexual gratification to be found in such a setting, and could never top this experience. So I never returned. "Expertise" was first published in Blueboy's May, 1981 issue, and collected in Slashed to Ribbons in Search of Love and Other Stories two years later. More recently (1997) it appeared in the U.S. and U.K. in The Mammoth Book of Gay Erotica, edited by Lawrence Schimel, who told me it was one of his key gay stories. I'm not sure if I'd want my writing to be represented by "Expertise" alone. I doubt if I'd approve of gay life or even the gay 'Seventies to be solely represented by it. But it's a true story. And while sensual and erotic, it's not in any way obscene, I think, nor pornographic. What it is reportage, with a sly little comment at the end. Since "Expertise", and in fact, since the story collection, I've not written that much gay erotica. Only one or two scenes in my big novels Like People in History and The Book of Lies could be considered erotic. With my novel, Onyx, however, to be published in 2001, I have returned to describing a series of erotic experiences between two men. The relationship in Onyx between the gay Ray Henriques and the younger, "straight," married with children, workman, Mike Tedesco, is based on a seven year long relationship I myself experienced, in which -- at his request -- I homoerotically educated another man. Like "Expertise" and my other stories and novellas and poetry, it's my attempt to accurately yet also artistically report on a life experience. © 2001 Felice Picano |
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