Starf*cker: a Meme-oir (26 page)

So, armed with the self-confidence that being published gives you, I sent my book to 29 publishers and waited.

There’s a reason this process is called “submission.”

It didn’t take long for fairly warm rejection letters to trickle in, some of them praising my novel’s humor but most of them stating that it wasn’t commercial enough for them. When I received tiny offers from the venerable Sunshine Gay Press and Alyson, I was over the moon. Offers piqued Jane’s interest all of a sudden, so she offered to do the contract for me once I settled on a publisher. Because I was an SMP author, it was obvious that I’d give them a chance to publish me, and I hoped against hope that being in their stable and coming to them with a project that a rival press wanted to publish would make them want me. I would have loved more than anything to have been a part of Michael Denneny’s Stonewall Inn Editions.

My timing was lousy—the day I sent him an (interoffice) query about my book, it was announced he was leaving SMP. His assistant, Keith Kahla, took over. Keith chain-smoked like Charles Pierce doing Bette Davis. He was tight with my science fiction boss, and neither seemed to find me as charming as I found myself. Nonetheless, he was the gay editor at SMP, so my novel went to him.

In the meantime, I’d been talking up my novel to a young editor, Ensley Eikenburg. Ensley reminded me of a young version of my agent, Jane, in that she had a primness to her undercut by an appreciation for the outré. There was an intellectually naughty streak there, and a lot of ambition—she was running the company’s immensely popular
Let’s Go
travel series but was always on the look-out for something she could sink her teeth into. She loved
Boy Culture
and became a huge advocate for the book when Keith came back to me, saying he felt it was “thin” (the one and only time this adjective is not a compliment) and not worthy of the Stonewall name. I was crushed, but was very lucky to have Ensley on my side. They went at it over the book in front of Tom McCormack and Ensley emerged victorious: For a tiny advance that still trumped the other offers, she would get to publish
Boy Culture
as one of the only (if not the only) gay novels at SMP not under the Stonewall Inn umbrella. I think Keith was ticked off, but if I could get over his disdain for my book, I hope he got over the fact that it was allowed to be published.

Ensley and I saw eye-to-eye on
Boy Culture
(not so much on
Totally Awesome ‘80s,
where my frustrations over the overly cautious legal read would lead to some big fights and probably made her hate me forever), and it was a pleasure to have someone reading my work and offering intelligent criticisms. One of the luckiest things that could ever have happened did when the book’s jacket was assigned to Evan Gaffney, a gay in-house designer who was exploding with talent but whose reputation was not yet in place—he would go on to design covers for
Bridget Jones’s Diary
and
The Devil Wears Prada
. As in sync as I was with my editor, I felt like Evan understood the book, and gay readers, on a molecular level. He used a sexy, mysterious image by Hans Fahrmeyer of a muscled torso that perfectly communicated sexuality and secrecy. I was giddy.

Years later, when I met up with Hans at his place, I was floored to be told that he’d shot the image in his tiny flat, in which he would stow away his Murphy bed and create a makeshift studio. Also interesting, considering that the novel has so much to do with straight and gay mores, was his gossip that the model was hiding his face because he was a straight go-go boy who didn’t want to be associated with anything gay. His shame was my pride—the book sold briskly and garnered lots of attention, at least some of which I humbly acknowledge was due to its provocative cover.

Granted, when Nick Hornby reviewed me positively in
The
New York Times Review of Books
, praising my observational skills, he wasn’t mooning over the hot cover. But I had no illusions that a huge reason why my book was a #1 seller at gay bookstores (‘memba those?) nationwide was a cover you kind of wanted to go to bed with.

I didn’t get rich off of
Boy Culture
, but I made some money and most unexpectedly, I had a small taste of the kind of fame I’d always appreciated in others. For the first time, now that I had a couple of books out there in the world, I was being approached by fans of my own.

I did some packed (and also some deserted—location, location, location!) book readings, had guys gushing to me about whether they were partyboys (a category my narrator “X” describes in the book), received letters, signed autographs. Even 20 years later, people who read my blog at BoyCulture.com often react with starstruck surprise when they put two and two together and realize I wrote that book.

It’s a very weird feeling to attract the kind of attention I’m more used to doling out. It’s nice, but it’s a little scary. Especially since some of the people armed with the experience of having read my novels will approach me as anti-fans, and I won’t necessarily know that they feel that way until deeper into our interaction. The line between fan and anti-fan is gossamer-thin. Someone who’s impressed that I was published might also resent that what I published was lousy, in their opinion. Or they might’ve loved the book and then might find the author lackluster. You see it all the time among fans of divas, who are 100% devoted to them until they do something wrong—forget to tour in an accessible city, put out a crap album, have children—and then the screeching begins, like in
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(1978): You are not who I want you to be!

This is at the heart of fandom, and is both why fandom is comforting and why it can be toxic—fandom is a comfortable way to place many thoughts and feelings into one item (an artist, a film, a genre)—but things get uncomfortable when and if that item begins to exhibit signs that it isn’t exactly what the fan thought. Not a big issue with a static creature, like a movie. But when you’re talking about an evolving musical artist or really any human being, the chances that he or she can live up to a set of standards imposed by scores of people, each set of standards slightly different, are nil. That’s why people lose fans. And it’s why objects of adulation sometimes lose their minds; it’s an impossible proposition.

For me, it wasn’t such a big deal because my book was a big success but was not a cultural phenomenon. I did not become J.D. Salinger, Anne Rice, Judith Krantz, or David Leavitt. But I did express myself in a way that had an impact on a lot of young gay men, and I did it with an organ north of my belt. For that I was extremely giddy at how lucky I’d been to have gotten that job at the literary agency instead of the one folding towels at the gym, that I’d been hired by St. Martin’s Press instead of Hyperion or Crown or HarperCollins, that I’d had the balls to sell a book on Madonna to a high-powered editor, that I’d had even more balls to submit my gay novel to 29 editors, that the wrong editor at SMP had fought against it so that the right editor at SMP could fight for it, and that my little book was about to go into print and stay there for 20 years and beyond.

Two especially cool things that happened when
Boy Culture
took off: First, the accomplished writers Michael Bronski (famous for non-fiction) and Christopher Bram (who’d just published
Father of Frankenstein
) called me up and took me to eat at Chelsea’s Bright Food Shop, which was later replaced by a Qdoba, which was later replaced by a juice place, which will later be replaced by…). I wasn’t sure if they were going to suggest a three-way, but was game. Look, I wanted into the next Violet Quill, and maybe that was the initiation. But instead, they simply felt me out to see if I was a serious writer and gave me warm advice. That used to happen.

The second especially cool thing is that a psychologist named Philip Pierce, who dabbled in the movies, fell in love with my book and met with me about the idea of turning it into a film. We dined on the cheapest Vietnamese possible on the outskirts of Chinatown, and he pitched me on how he saw the film. We entered into a deal—I’m afraid Jane, for all her smarts, still looked down on my gay book, taking the approach that we should be grateful for
anything
and locked me into a pretty terrible agreement—just before another suitor came calling, Victor Simpkins, a savvy guy who’d co-produced
Swingers
with Jon Favreau, the film that made Vince Vaughn a star. (Let’s forgive him for that.) But all was well, as Victor, Philip, and Stephen Israel did a deal and worked on getting the movie made together. On some level, I’m not sure I thought the film would ever happen, it took so long. But Philip respected me, asking me for input on casting. I wish I had all our e-mails, but he’ll back me up that I pitched so many people who, if the producers had been financially ready and could have signed them up, would have been pretty spectacular gets—everyone from Paul Walker to Josh Hartnett to Ashton Kutcher. My obsession with pop culture had made me a good spotter of talent, something that would define the longest, most important phase of my media career, as a teen-mag editor.

But first, I had some boners to wrangle.

My next move, career-wise, after Reuters was a Hail Mary (or an “Oh, Mary!”) if ever there was one: I went into porn.

No, I didn’t
make
porn. Jesus, I still keep my shirt on during sex and at the beach and during sex at the beach. Rather, I went to work for a company that produced a slew of porn mags, some of the very ones Mick had introduced me to in college. Of the gay ones, we’re talking
Torso, Mandate, Honcho, Playguy,
and
Inches
, including the offshoots
Latin Inches
and
Black Inches
.

I’d been writing dirty stories for years, including X-rated letters to fellow Madonna fans and erotic shorts that went into books that a friend was editing. I am a word whore, so I love using words to make people laugh, cry, think, get angry and, yes, get horny. I’d submitted some stories to Mavety Media in Soho, including one about a three-way that they’d accepted and published, so when I saw their ad in the
Village Voice
for an editor, I thought I might have an in.

The HQ, above a French cooking school, was mostly very bland—bored secretary at the door behind glass to buzz you in, offices for the bigwigs and a conference room, long hall leading back to the cubicles where the art and editorial departments worked. Most of the support staff was housed in a New Jersey complex that was dominated by a warehouse stuffed to the rafters with back issues, where we rarely had to see them. Which, after seeing them, was revealed to be a big plus.

My job interview was conducted by my future boss, who quizzed me in his small office, the walls of which were caked with things like lewd Tom of Finland illustrations, wordy interoffice memos, images of little people, a newspaper photo of Warhol superstar Billy Name. He had the eyeballs of a Bassett hound, but a scarecrow build, shaved head and black wardrobe that made him look like someone at a callback for the lead in
Wit.
When he crossed his legs, I could see white athletic socks peeking out from his black leather boots.

“I think porn is arrrt,” he told me. It should have registered with me then—because now it feels like remembering Typhoid Mary saying, “I think I feel a cold coming on…”—but while I didn’t agree with him, I didn’t realize that his outlook would make the next couple of years pure hell for me and for many others around me. Porn can be artful, art can be pornographic, but they two are not interchangeable. It was our job to create prurient images to help men masturbate, but my boss was hung up on an ironic approach that was too smart for porn and too dumb for art. It was more geared toward making him, personally, into a personality.

He would eventually have us experimenting with counterproductive approaches, such as publishing a sex magazine with the fewest number of words on the cover as possible. Even with a strong (literally…those arms!) cover model, nobody was going to pick up
Torso
if the only text on the cover was SWOLLEN BICEPS AND MUSCLEBUTTS. He turned
Honcho
into some wannabe-relevant artzine, interviewing his favorite artistes and hiring photographers who wanted to shoot porn as a statement rather than shooting porn as a way to make men paying seven dollars ejaculate.

But back at my first interview, I liked him, and he liked me. He liked that I was a published author, too, and showed me off to the owner, singing my praises. He would come to regret this, since the owner shared, to some extent, my boss’s urge to be more than
just
a pornographer.