Behind the Story: Sleazy A

I was a slut in college.

I admit it up front. There’s no shame in slutting. The undergraduate years are ripe for experimentation, and if we follow the metaphor to its logical extreme—boy, did I lean into the scientific method. Hard.

I arrived to college in 1981 with a firm sense of my sexuality, and without any shame or guilt. But I wasn’t out. Nobody was out. The adults I slept with weren’t out. Living as an openly queer person might have been an option in bigger cities, but not in the little Virginia college town where I was incarcerated for four years.

None of the students admitted they were gay. Not one. I was a theater major, for god’s sake. The department that statistically should have harbored most of the campus LGBTQ population. While most of my male classmates in the department eventually waved the rainbow flag as adults, in college they were strictly and belligerently straight. Although I ended flat on my back in the beds and upon the desks of more faculty members than I could easily count—including the entire French language faculty (it's a point of pride)—none of them self-identified as gay. Most were married, or ‘bachelors,’ or so deeply shut down that when they would admit light to creep through that closet door, it only betrayed how warped and stunted they’d become.

Despite the denial, it was so easy to get man-on-man action. A short jaunt into Colonial Williamsburg’s tourist area could net you sex with out-of-towners in the public restroom at any time of day, and the tiny park in Merchant’s Square was a hotbed of activity after dark. On campus, two floors of the student center had cruisy restrooms—one for quick pickups, often with horny tourists, another for more extended, dirtier sessions. I could visit the campus library restroom any time after lunch to find both staff and student dick. The gym showers could be cruisy. And if you had a car, the Colonial Parkway offered opportunities for off-road nooky. (And for getting murdered.)

In a quiet corner of the fine arts building was a telephone booth—for you younger folk, that’s a small, quiet room with a very large iPhone bolted to the wall—that after receiving a fresh coat of white paint, mysteriously and rapidly became a beta test for Craigslist personals. Guys looking for sex would scrawl in pencil or marker a brief description of what they wanted. Later, there might be a response with a suggestion of a date and time, and a place for an liaison. Others would counteroffer or write their own brief personal ad. Eventually, that phone booth was a network of cross-chatter assignation graffiti covering all four walls. Sure, there was always the risk of showing up and getting fag bashed, but a smart cookie might keep his wits about him and hook up with one of the weight room jocks, or a frat boy, or one of the sexy geeks with pale skin from spending all their times in the computer science basement lab, feeding punch cards into the mainframe.

We didn’t have apps or browsers or internet, but damn, if we wanted it, we sure got laid.

Last spring, when I was asked to contribute to an upcoming anthology of college-aged gay erotica, I was initially flattered, but dubious. The more details I heard, though, the more intrigued I became. The book was to be released as an actual physical paperback, styled to look like vintage pulps of a previous era. The collegiate theme itself would be retro, with stories set before 1990, at which point digital hookups became more common and then the norm. At the time the anthology was pitched to me, I was exhausted coming off a semester of teaching an unusually heavy workload. I was looking for a writing project that might be fun and completely unrelated to anything related to my workshops. So, I took a leap and said yes.

I came up with the idea for the long short story/short novel Sleazy A in the space of a couple of hours. I envisioned an inhibition-free college sophomore having a picaresque adventure in a single autumn weekend of 1981: one encounter that was nothing but unbridled lust, another with a deeply-closeted and ultimately fucked-up man, and then finally stumbling into an opportunity for a sweeter, but no less hotter, romance.

A lot of Sleazy A is rooted in autobiography. I set the action at my alma mater. The story’s hero, Wick, is perhaps a bolder physical idealization of myself at that age, but I think I remained true to the free-wheeling, sometimes naive mindset I had at the time. 

Wick’s French professor lover is based on the married French professor for whom I would kneel down anytime he looked my way, all my undergraduate years. He was a married man with two very young children; he’d brazenly bring the whole family to the ice cream shop where I worked, pretend not to know me while he bought cones for the kiddies and a sundae for the wife, then squeeze my hand with meaning when I’d give him his change. I really didn’t care about his home life. For four years he was a joyous and uncomplicated friend and provider of big dick, and I was sad never to see him again when I graduated. (I heard from a reader of the blog, once, who’d had a similar relationship with the man, after my time at the school.)

The deeply weird character of M.J., a man so paranoid about being seen with me that he’d make me duck and take cover in the parking lot of his apartment complex, is based on an economics professor whom first I dated, and then later I was stalked by. The meltdown that M.J. has in the story actually happened, and led to my first relationship break-up. Not included in Sleazy A is the back story that M.J. and my dad were college classmates, and M.J. carried a huge animus toward my dad for some mysterious reason. (My father was always a giant affable Golden Retriever of a man, so it’s impossible to conceive of anything he might have done in college to inspire that kind of long-lasting enmity. Also, when I once innocently asked my dad about M.J. and even pointed to his photo in an old college yearbook, my dad had zero recollection of him.) The one-sided feud between them gave any dad/son roleplay I did with M.J. a particularly pointed, yet not-unerotic edge.

And I did meet a sweet red-headed boy named David at M.J.’s place. Here is where memoir and fiction diverge. In Sleazy A, the characters of Wick and David meet and enjoy a sweetly romantic afternoon in a deserted amphitheater at the back of campus. The amphitheater is real. From the 1940s through the 1970s, my college affiliated itself with an outdoor summer patriotic historical pageant/extravaganza called The Common Glory. Actors like Jonathan Frakes and Goldie Hawn and Linda Lavin and Glenn Close earned paychecks from the thing before they made it big. The pageant shut down after the Bicentennial. The president of the Kappa Alpha fraternity used to take me to the abandoned dressing rooms for some very unromantic (but hot) fucking.

In real life, David indeed invited me to meet him at the amphitheater. When he asked, it was very clear he was interested in me, romantically. I waffled over going, but unlike Wick, I ultimately chose not to. I was attracted to David, yet anxious about the implications of getting involved with another student. Older men were my known quantity. I could count on them to keep their mouths shut about my sexuality and our meetings. They had bigger reputations at stake than I. My peers, though, I simply didn’t trust. I’d had other kids attempt to entrap me into admitting my queerness in high school, and my roommate at the time was sexually harassing me in the most painful ways. David felt like a too much of a risk. I chickened out.

David and I longed for each other for the rest of the year. Our paths crossed in the theater department when we were in two different one-act plays playing the same nights, one after the other. Backstage, we would smile wryly at the other from a distance and stare, while I’d ponder what might have been. In the spring, we sat near each other in a seminar on seventeenth-century British poetry. It was torture. All through the metaphysical poets, I was too distracted with longing to listen, or study. As I’ve written about before, at semester’s end, David spoke to me for the first time, after our final class. He pressed into my hand a smooth rock. For a long time it was a gift that puzzled me. One year, much later, I happened to get the rock wet. The water drew out from its surface beautiful, unseen colors and patterns. While staring at the transformation, I understood why it had been his gift. It may have been a reference to one of the poets we’d studied, that semester...I don't know. 

I still have the rock.

David was two years ahead of me, though, and graduated that semester. He moved to New York City to pursue acting. Three years later, he was dead from HIV/AIDS.

It’s been difficult, over the breadth of my life, to grapple with how much the AIDS pandemic has stolen. For so much of it, I was in denial.

I denied it was happening, until I couldn’t.

I denied it was taking people from me, then denied it could take many people from me…until I couldn’t.

I denied, in the face of what I fully expected to be certain death with no hope of a cure, that the pandemic was paralyzing me. That it was making my dreams smaller and smaller. Until, awash in ruin and afraid to hope for any future, I no longer could.

David’s wasn’t the first AIDS-related death in my life. However, his was my first loss of one of my peers, of someone close to my own age for whom I’d had feelings. His was the first death that forced me to me acknowledge that the flood in which I and my fellows were drowning was irrefutably real. No matter how pretty someone might be, or how sweet, or how young, or how beautiful their art—no matter how well educated or beloved a person could be or how far from one of the big coastal cities he lived—he was not immune from dying to a disease at which the public and government merely shrugged. I turned seventeen in 1981, when the New York Times sounded the first warning bell for the virus that would consume so many. I was barely twenty-one when I learned of David’s death.

The last, fictional chapter of Sleazy A is my idealistic attempt to imagine what might have been had I the courage to meet David when he wanted. Yet from the distant future, as an author I also wanted to wrap my protective arms around these two kids. They meet in the very last months before all hell would break loose—the final weeks before all innocence would evaporate. I wanted the fictional Wick and David to experience their love outside the shadow of what was to come. And in the story's conclusion, I wanted to shelter and preserve them in their romantic cocoon, forever suspended in time among the twinkling amphitheater lights.

In a very real, sense, though, I wanted to honor the real David, who died too soon. Nearly a half-century on, I remember and mourn him as a beautiful, red-headed boy who had so much life ahead of him. Like all victims of that ongoing pandemic, he didn’t deserve his early death. In this story, at least, parts of him—his essential sweetness, the sincerity of his gaze, his yearning for another boy—can live on.

Art’s essential triumph is wringing redemption and even joy from the stuff of tragedy. I truly hope Wick’s adventures paint a lively picture of an era vanished forever.

Sleazy A and the anthology in which it’s included, Dirty Dorms & Fresh Men, is available today. I hope you’ll take the opportunity to purchase a copy to read not only my story, but as well the horny tales of other fine pornographers.