(About sexual acts by men, so not appropriate for kids or the sexually modest.)
Pulled from a Facebook discussion with Jeff Shaumeyer about writing gay porn (something he and I both have done), this comment from me:
A little while ago, a former undergrad student of mine [call him U] who now is a professor himself wrote to say that he had put an old short story of mine, “Roseate Tom” (available on my blog) — a piece that is *both* fictobiography (telling a somewhat fictionalized version of an event in my life) and flat-out gay porn — to good use by jacking off pleasurably to it. I was delighted and charmed (also pleased to get recent news about U’s career).
… We live in many worlds simultaneously.
Then in e-mail from me to U (lightly edited):
That actually pleases me mightily. the story is meant as fictobiography, but also as straightforward gay porn, and so it was fairly carefully polished to get the reader off in the right amount of time — not too fast, not too stretched out. (It’s utilitarian literature, and works or not on its own terms.)
But also it was fictobiography, and since I’m eons away from experience in the shadow world of sex with men, my source of material for such stories has dried up. However … I was impressed at the time, and impressed in looking back at that time now, that though you might think that men are irreparably damaged and coarsened by having this part of their sexual lives shunted off into the subterranean world of tricking — and this does happen — most of them in fact cope admirably with trying to craft some sort of half-decent life for themselves, given the constraints their situations have placed on them. [Many of them were in circumstances where coming out would have damaged significant parts of their lives: they would have lost their jobs, become visible targets for gay-bashing, been kicked off teams playing sports they loved, and so on. I’m excluding several special cases here — notably, men married to women; men who identify as straight and see tearoom sex as a form of male bonding; and clearly homophobic straight men who view tearooms merely as a place to get first-class blow jobs from fags.]
They were in fact, nice guys, worth getting to know. [Several, with whom I had repeated subterranean encounters, would have made excellent boyfriends.] The Tom of “Roseate Tom” is one such; the final section, which zooms out from the steamy sex to the real world, is intended to make that point. The actual Tom was a really nice guy, doing the best he could with the cards he’d been dealt.
[On other gay porn and steamy fictobiography in my writing: A few of my Sundance and Butch set pieces (also collected on this blog) are crafted as jack-off stories (and are obviously not fictobiographical). Also, in recent days I’ve returned to the (rather ramshackle) fictobiography in my 1996 Superbowl Sunday tales, with an eye to understanding them better. On these:
two 1996 postings on Superbowl Sunday that year (about a visit to the gay baths in San Jose CA); the texts are as I posted them on AZBlogX on 10/3/10, with various bits of later commentary from me:
— AZBlogX on 10/3/10: “Superbowl Sunday (Part I)”
— AZBlogX, on 10/3/10: “Superbowl Sunday (Part II)”
Of course, all my pieces on the gay baths (again, collected on this blog) are steamy fictobiography; the later pieces veer into participant-observer anthropology.]
Jeff Shaumeyer / Jay Neal. Amazon information about the author of On Waking Up Bear (where bear refers to the gay male type), 1st ed. 2012, 2nd. ed. 2016:
Cover of the 2nd ed.Jay Neal, the nom-de-porn of Jeff Shaumeyer, has been an aficionado of facial hair as long as he can remember, largely thanks to the influence of Tom Selleck’s mustache – a fact revealed in this, his first collection of stories. “Husky” is his favorite adjective and he likes his men like he likes his peanut butter: extra chunky. Basically a geeky, vanilla kind of guy originally from Kansas, thoughts of such men fuel his fantasies and he gains quite a bit of satisfaction from making up stories about sexual adventures with bears and their ilk. He’s been writing them down since late last century. Neal, his partner of twenty-five years whom he married in 2010, and their small herd of rescued greyhounds, enjoy their life of domestic tranquility in the suburbs of Washington, DC.
(I have in fact visited them there, back in 1993.)
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