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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781573445795 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Start Publishing Llc |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2006 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 248 |
| File size: | 997 KB |
About the Author
Richard Labonté edits books, walks dogs and works as a chef's assistant at an addiction recovery center on Bowen Island, off the coast of British Columbia, Canada, after living in Los Angeles and San Francisco from 1979 to 2001. One of the founders of A Different Light Bookstore, he has coordinated the judging for the Lambda Literary Award since 2009. He reviews 100 queer books a year for Q Syndicate, which distributes "Book Marks," his fortnightly column and has edited the Best Gay Erotica series since 1996 (along with a couple of dozen other books for Cleis). Eight of his books, including five editions of Best Gay Erotica, have been Lammy finalists, and three of them have won the award.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
I WAS JT LEROY'S BUTTBOY
Simon Sheppard
The voice on the phone was soft, almost feminine. "Simon?"
I knew who it was immediately. "Yeah," I said. "Hi, JT."
I'd first heard from JT LeRoy via email; he'd gotten in touch with me when our stories had been published next to each other — cheek by jowl, as t'were — in Best of the Best Gay Erotica 2. That had been something of a thrill for me, actually, seeing as how JT was the Hot New Thing on the San Francisco al-ternalit scene, a rising star who was hitting it big — Danielle Steel for the thinking queer. For half a decade, he'd blazed a trail across the Bay Area's literary firmament; his "preternaturally mature" (Kirkus Reviews) work had attracted the attention of such queer superstars as Gus Van Sant, and his book The Heart Is Deceitful Above AllThings had already been turned into a movie.
And now JT LeRoy was emailing me — me! — to tell me how much he liked my silly little tale about tricking with a dia-perboy on meth, a piece that faded into insignificance, really, compared to his clearly autobiographical, "savagely authentic" (John Waters) story of a teenage hustler hired by a sadistic john. I was being honored by the attentions of an avant-garde legend-in-the-making, a wunderkind who wore a necklace of raccoon penis bones and wrote with the skill and daring of someone twice his age. A-fucking-mazing!
But then, I supposed he appreciated my stories of anomic, drugged-out hustlers and homeless kids, though they formed only part of my — oh, let's call it an oeuvre, shall we? What the hell ...
"It's great to talk with you again."
"Same here. What can I do for you?" I knew that there probably would be something I could do for him: proofread a manuscript, help him out with a plot point, something. Granted, I wasn't as big a deal as many of his friends, folks like Dennis Cooper and that singer from Garbage. But I was always accessible, and I found it hard to say no. If part of that was just compassion, it was also due to the fact that I eroti-cized hard-luck hustler boys, boys like JT had been before he found the balm of writerly creativity, and ... well, we all have mixed motives, don't we? Anyway, being literarily hit on by JT was still a lot more flattering than other events in what I with increasing despair thought of as "my career," things like the dismissive response of one publisher who, when I objected to my customary fee being cut in half, responded, "If you don't like it, I'd be happy to pull your story from the antho." Yeah, doing scutwork for JT LeRoy was massively better than that. "Simon," said JT LeRoy in his high-pitched Southern drawl, "I'd like to meet you."
"For real?" I was amazed. JT was notoriously shy. He never read his own work in public, getting celebrities — increasingly, major-league ones — to stage readings instead. The few times he showed up in public, he appeared in disguise, a short boy in a hat, blond wig, and big sunglasses. If Greta Garbo had written stories about truck-stop whoring, she would have been JT LeRoy.
"For real. When can I come over?"
"Would you like me to come visit you instead? Or meet some neutral place, a coffee shop or something?"
"Your place. Say nine tomorrow night?"
I'd never entertained such a Famous Author at home before. Naturally, I was nervous as hell; now there would only be two degrees of separation between me and Courtney Love. There was no way I could remake my place overnight — it would remain a cluttered outpost of bohemia. But I rearranged my piles of books, making sure that if JT looked at them, he'd spot Foucault and Bataille, not Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen.
At last I relaxed and waited for the doorbell to ring.
It did, only thirty-three minutes late.
I'm on the top floor, so when I opened my apartment door, clomping footsteps echoed in the stairwell.
"Simon?"
I damn near fell over. I'd been expecting a shy, sexually ambiguous little alterna-boy, probably in a blond wig.
"Hi. I'm JT LeRoy."
There in my doorway stood a handsome, bearded, middle-aged man, really tall — maybe six foot five — and dressed head to toe in gleaming black leather. I was speechless, utterly speechless. And — I admit it — turned on.
"Aren't you going to invite me in?"
My eyes drifted down to his basket, a big, blue denim bulge framed by black chaps. Nice. "Sure, JT. Come in." And then I had not one fucking idea of what to say next.
"Yeah," LeRoy or whoever said, "I know what you're thinking. Surprised, huh?"
I found words, sort of. "But ... but ... the person I spoke with on the phone ..."
The butch man in leather smiled. "What about him?" His voice had suddenly gone up an octave and gained a Southern accent.
"Jesus," I said. "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus." The literary find of the decade was, apparently, the literary hoax of the new millennium ... or so it seemed.
"Listen, Simon, you're a writer." His voice had settled back down to normal pitch, with the trace of a New Jersey accent. "You know how damn hard it is to get published. And how little you get paid when you do." I thought of that publisher telling me to take fifty bucks or get fucked.
"But ..."
"And I'm sure you're postmodern enough to understand that 'the author' is just a construct, right?"
Okay, I knew of writers who invented personae in order to get published — that young, urban gay male porn writer, for instance, who was really a very straight middle-aged woman living on a farm in Kansas. But this was different. This was serious. "Yeah," I mumbled, "but ... exploiting abuse ... AIDS ... homelessness ... hustlers ..."
JT LeRoy — or whoever — grabbed my shoulder, hard. "Get a fucking hold of yourself. Lou Reed reads my work in public. You can barely afford his CDs. What does that tell you about truth and authenticity, huh?"
"But JT, who is that little boy in the blond wig who ap-pears ...?" "Simon, you can either forget your fucking principles and accept my honest praise — because I think you're a helluva writer, really — or you can suck my dick." His hand pressed down on my shoulder.
"Or both."
Now, anybody who's read my autobiographical work — which is really true nonfiction, by the way, not some self-serving invention like JT's, I swear — knows that I'm a top, but a top with a wide submissive streak. I willingly let myself be pushed to my knees.
JT LeRoy unbuttoned his 501s and reached inside. My mouth watered — I mean, it actually did, though whether for dick or for famous dick is open to debate.
The cock that appeared, still half-hooded in foreskin, was just a bit bigger than average, large enough to be a nice mouthful, small enough to deep-throat without gagging. Perfect. At that sacred moment, I didn't care whether JT LeRoy thought I could write or not. After all, lots of people can write passable gay porn: grannies with good imaginations, straight guys who wouldn't be caught dead actually touching a hard-on, me. But not everybody can suck cock. At least, not well. If there's one thing my decades of slutdom have taught me, it's that.
I happily licked swollen dickhead. JT LeRoy hadn't bathed for a while. I was well and truly turned on.
"That's it, you fucking freelance writer," the leatherman growled. "You suck that ... notorious cock." Well, his boudoir chat was nowhere near as accomplished as his written prose, but no matter. I grabbed on to his cowhide-clad thighs and swallowed the swollen shaft, my tongue doing little tangos on the underside as I gulped it down.
"Mmm," said the man who was — maybe — JT LeRoy.
"Mmf," I replied.
I imagined myself as the JT LeRoy the world thought it knew: a fucked-up trailer-trash kid pimped out by his mommy, turning redneck tricks, being used and abused. Fuck. I sucked even harder. I wallowed in the now-familiar JT LeRoy mulch of hard-edged sexuality, Southern gothic, and innocence-lost sentimentality. It felt nice, even though my face was being fucked so hard that tears came to my eyes.
A big, strong hand came down on the back of my head, forcing me further onto his big, stiff dick. "That's it, you overeducated little fuck. Show me you understand what life is really about."
Well, that seemed like more of a philosophical challenge than I was up to at the moment, but I did my level best.
Okay, I almost never swallow. It's not that I think it's particularly risky. It's just that I cut back on my sperm intake a long time ago, and I never went back to indiscriminate cum-guzzling. But this was JT LeRoy, dammit, and when, with much grunting, he came, I chugged down every salty drop. It was, well, positively Whitmanesque. And if it wasn't Whit-manesque, not really, at least I'd gotten closer to the real JT than that shoplifter Wynona Ryder most likely ever would.
That was it. That was that. A blow-and-go. Not to be repeated, or even spoken of, though I would have been up for a rematch. But whenever JT wrote me afterward, he never referred to my giving him head. Same went for his phone calls — not a glimmer of the sex we'd had, just him asking for favors and sympathy in the same femmy Southern voice he'd always used. I didn't want to press the point. But it made me wonder whether the man who showed up at my door was the real fake JT, or a poseur posing as a poseur. Now that was postmodern.
I never told anyone about my blow-job brush with notoriety, figuring that my non-writer friends would, hurtfully, not care, while my fellow authors would reckon I made the whole thing up, spun out of whole, envious cloth, like I was aiming to hitch my wagon to a slutty star. So I was left to wonder, by myself, about the motives and veracity of would-be JT and his maybe-famous phallus.
And then, a couple of months after the suck job, the big JT LeRoy hoax story broke. An article in New York magazine led the way, followed by other exposés and equivocal confessions. It turned out that, no, JT LeRoy wasn't some young whore-turned-genius. He was, in fact, an almost-forty-year-old woman named Laura Albert. And oh, the shock, the gnashing of teeth, the reproach, the soul searching that gripped the world of queerish writers and otherwise edgy authors. As a few churlish observers pointed out, the story was strikingly similar to one that Armistead Maupin had written years before, The Night Listener, and so We Should Have Known Better. But, as with WMDs and transubstantiation, it's human nature to be willingly misled; countless generations of con artists have made big bucks by exploiting just that very thing.
I myself had mixed emotions. While I deplored the exploitation of HIV, abuse, and homelessness involved in "JT LeRoy's" rise to fame, the envy I'd had for JT's career now morphed into a kind of sullen admiration. It had taken balls to parlay a knack for writing into global notoriety, even if those balls belonged to a woman named Laura. Sure, I was sympathetic that a couple of my more-famous-than-me writer pals were distraught over being used, but hey, when they'd been involved in organizing proxy-JT events, they'd never invited me to read.
And anyway, I had career troubles of my own: more cuts in what had already been pathetically small fees, my online column being canned. My finances were increasingly shaky, my ego was in the toilet. I was thinking about giving up writing altogether, and taking up something more lucrative, like babysitting. Surprising, then — actually, much more than surprising — when I got another phone call from JT LeRoy.
"Simon?" the familiar femmy voice said. "This is JT."
"Um, uh ..." I said.
The voice on the other end did a glissando down the scale, all the way down to a leatherman's toppish basso. "You were such an amazing cocksucker," he said. "The best." Was that true? Well, I wanted it to be. "So I've decided to fuck you. When's a good time?"
"Listen, JT ... or whoever you really are ... I just don't think ..."
"I'll explain everything when I get over there. And I promise I'll fuck your ass but good."
Both my curiosity and my horniness were piqued, jostling for dominance in my forebrain. Sure, I was usually the one doing the topping, but if I was going to get fucked, I could imagine no one better suited to the job than Mr. Leather Whoever and his impressive erection.
And hey, it wasn't like Laura Albert had actually confessed to anything. The gun might have been warm and smelling of gunpowder, but it wasn't actually smoking, so maybe I was indeed going to get fucked by the really real JT. In any case, it was becoming increasingly indisputable that I was going to get fucked by somebody.
And, at base — let's face it — I wanted JT LeRoy to want me.
"Laura? Laura was just my front, though she did help out a little, with the Southern stuff mostly. Wheels within wheels, eh?" We were lying in bed together, my asshole pulsing with that just-fucked feeling. The leatherman continued, "I mean, how do you think JT knew all about the S/M hustling scene? And if you met JT and he turned out to be a middle-aged woman, what kind of a story would that be for you to tell?" (Or maybe he said "sell." I wasn't quite sure which.) "Not as hot as this one, Simon, not fucking nearly."
Well, the sex had been indisputably scorching. I'd been cleaned out and naked when the leatherman arrived. Within a couple of minutes — questions about veracity rendered irrelevant — I was on my back, looking up at my fucker's handsome, bearded face as he eased himself down into me. I don't get screwed very often, but I know how to relax, and I took the full length of his cock without a whimper. Men who have never been screwed may wonder, "How can getting fucked not hurt?" but the rest of us know it feels great.
"JT" was surprisingly gentle at first, until he'd guided himself inside me, but then the stroking turned to pistoning, and soon he was ramming away. I reached for his butt, in hopes my grasp would moderate his thrusts and keep him from tearing my hole apart. But fuck, it did feel amazing. My hands moved up, stroking his back; around to his hairy chest, pausing to play with his prominent nipples; then grabbing him around the neck, hungry for his kiss.
He obliged, and our tongues met. By that point, I'd totally surrendered to his cock pumping away in my ass, and I couldn't even wrap my mind around caring who the man inside me was. But then, do we ever know who our sex partners really are? Really?
And just when I thought I'd have to ask "JT" to back off and give me a rest, he said, sweat dripping from his face, "You want to come? I'm fucking close." So I nodded, reached down for my limpish cock, and tortured it till it hardened and got ready to shoot.
"Now," he said. "Now?"
"Yeah, JT. Go for it."
And we came at pretty much the same pornographic moment, him inside a regrettable-but-necessary condom, me all over my belly. He climbed off me and we wriggled round until we were lying side by side, panting, his strong arms wrapped around me. And, as soon as the spasms had subsided and we caught our breaths, he leaned over and whispered in my ear, "That's what life is about — fuck or get fucked."
I stared at him, not sure if I should try to kiss him again or not.
"And I have a film deal," he continued. "I'm going to be writing a screenplay, Laura's story. Well, actually she's the one who's going to be credited with it, but ..."
"Profiting from a hoax, huh?"
"Well, somebody should." The scent of spent jism rose from our bodies.
I looked over at him, hopefully, ashamedly, and asked, more eagerly than was seemly, "So you need any help with the script?"
CHAPTER 2COMING TO GRIEF
Dale Chase
Jake ruined me for anybody else and when he didn't stick around, when he went and died on me, I wanted to die too, almost did one night and it would have been so easy to miss the turn and hit the wall but I didn't and now here I am with my dick in some poor sap who I didn't warn off but shoulda.
I can fuck but I hate it not bein Jake so I get rough which most like but sometimes a rough fuck ain't enough and I've been known to beat the shit out of people so mostly I jerk off. Thinkin of Jake. I can forget the bad part then, shut my eyes and shoot a load remem-berin him suckin it down.
This guy I'm doin now says he's comin but I don't give a shit. He's just ass to me, place to put my dick and get off. I hold him at the hips, ram a few more times and feel the rise and holy hell, mother fuck, Jesus god.
When I'm done I pull out, toss the rubber, and look where I been, hate his hairy ass. I slap his butt and he falls over onto his side, grins at me which I want to wipe off his face but I hold back which is like holdin off a fuckin hurricane and I'm up and dressed and out the door before he can try to stop me which would get him the shit beat out of him.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Best Gay Erotica 2007"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Richard Labonté.
Excerpted by permission of Start Publishing LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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