David Pratt's Blog - Posts Tagged "looking-after-joey"
Bob the Book on Kindle
I see that 135 people have put my novel "Bob the Book" on their to-read lists. Wow! I am very excited. Some of you have commented that you would hold off on "Bob" until the Kindle price came down, so I want to make sure you all know that the Kindle is now $5.99. And if you have already read Bob? I have a new and different novel out this month, "Looking After Joey." And perhaps my favorite of all is my short story volume, "My Movie," a sompelling map of my journey and evolution as a gay man. I'll see you in the pages of whichever one(s) you choose! David
Joey's in Paper!
I am very excited that "Looking After Joey" is in paperback as of today. Thanks to everyone at Wilde City Press: Jerry Wheeler, Ethan Day, Geoff Knight, and Adrian Nicholas, who designed that cover. The photo is by the outrageously talented (and just plan outrageous) Eva Mueller, with actor/writer/model Nicholas Gorham workin' the granola. See more of Nicholas and Eva clicking off photos to the beat of Chris Olsen and Pandafan in the book video! (Tastefully titled "Joey Eats in Bed"!) https://vimeo.com/91786797
Older characters
I am intrigued by a "Looking After Joey" review here and on Amazon, in which a reader gives the book five stars but finds the portrayals of older characters objectionable. His comments really made me think. My response, below, will make sense mostly to people who have read "Joey." And there may be spoilers.
The reviewer specifically dislikes those gay characters who are older than the protagonists. While I do not assign exact ages to any character in the text, there are three characters that are indeed older than the main protagonists: Fred Pflester, who in my mind is 55; Jurgen, who is 67; and Sir Desmond, 72.
I start with Desmond. I love him! I want to play him in the movie! He's hopelessly retro and snooty and a lech, but he says and does just what he wants. No hiding or slinking about. He gets the lads he talks about, and he gets them to do what he desires. He turns his longing for an old school chum into a book and gets it published and it sells. He invests in plays and knows movie stars (and cheese). He is quite self-centered, but at one time or another I critique most all the characters, young and old, for that.
Jurgen is the one really bad guy. He's a kidnapper and a hypocrite. But when Peachy gets him to reveal his childhood traumas, he weeps uncontrollably and elicits Calvin's sympathy and identification, in spite of his crimes.
Finally, Fred is the most interesting. He is a hard-ass businessman and a snob, and, at the height of the AIDS crisis, he marketed a line of condoms whose names suggested they outright prevented HIV transmission. But he tells the truth when he says he did it all to help his disabled nephew. It is not the case, though, that, years earlier, when Calvin worked for him, Fred had to humiliate Calvin. Calvin is ultimately able to confront Fred and let it go, but Fred never repents.
So those are my takes on the three older gay characters in "Looking after Joey." I think they all represent parts of my gay self with which I am or at some time in the past have been uncomfortable. Maybe in a future post I will discuss some problematic (but, to me, still understandable, even lovable) younger characters.
The reviewer specifically dislikes those gay characters who are older than the protagonists. While I do not assign exact ages to any character in the text, there are three characters that are indeed older than the main protagonists: Fred Pflester, who in my mind is 55; Jurgen, who is 67; and Sir Desmond, 72.
I start with Desmond. I love him! I want to play him in the movie! He's hopelessly retro and snooty and a lech, but he says and does just what he wants. No hiding or slinking about. He gets the lads he talks about, and he gets them to do what he desires. He turns his longing for an old school chum into a book and gets it published and it sells. He invests in plays and knows movie stars (and cheese). He is quite self-centered, but at one time or another I critique most all the characters, young and old, for that.
Jurgen is the one really bad guy. He's a kidnapper and a hypocrite. But when Peachy gets him to reveal his childhood traumas, he weeps uncontrollably and elicits Calvin's sympathy and identification, in spite of his crimes.
Finally, Fred is the most interesting. He is a hard-ass businessman and a snob, and, at the height of the AIDS crisis, he marketed a line of condoms whose names suggested they outright prevented HIV transmission. But he tells the truth when he says he did it all to help his disabled nephew. It is not the case, though, that, years earlier, when Calvin worked for him, Fred had to humiliate Calvin. Calvin is ultimately able to confront Fred and let it go, but Fred never repents.
So those are my takes on the three older gay characters in "Looking after Joey." I think they all represent parts of my gay self with which I am or at some time in the past have been uncomfortable. Maybe in a future post I will discuss some problematic (but, to me, still understandable, even lovable) younger characters.
Back from New Orleans!
I have happy and exhausted, back from New Orleans and the always wonderful Saints and Sinners Literary Festival. I saw old friends including "Bob" and "My Movie" publisher Jameson Currier, "Joey" editor Jerry Wheeler, writer and panel moderator extraordinaire Michael Thomas Ford, Miss Bea Oblivious herself (Felice Picano) with excellent career advice, YA author Louis Ceci, masters of the erotic Bill Holden and Dale Chase, warm and fuzzy bear editor Ron Suresha, writer and blogger 'Nathan Burgoine, and many more dear people and wonderful writers. As for the city itself, beignets and coffee with chicory at Cafe Beignet, ice cream at Creole Creamery, yummy sandwiches and salads at Satsuma, wine, hummus and music outside at Bacchanal, funky music at The Spotted Cat, Kajun's Pub, the Freret Publiq House and on the street, colorful gay toys at Bourbon Pride, and the list just goes on. And I got to read from "Joey." They laughed a lot! More on Nola and Saints and Sinners in the next post!
Laughter
At Saints and Sinners in New Orleans I was on a panel about humor, and I said, apropos of "Joey," if you can laugh about it, it's going to be okay, and since you can laugh about anything, anything and everything will be okay. To which I would add, if we can thus guarantee that everything will be okay, then maybe there is a God. Thus answering one of Joey's tacit questions about this world. Also at Saints and Sinners, I told a friend, after hesitating and apologizing ten times for saying something so corny, that I think in the end there are only two things in life, laughter and love. And "Joey" is about both. On the actual level and on the meta level. Of course the book also has a lot of mockery and snark. I will address that in the next post.
Pulling Against
I have been anxious for some time to write a blog post about a recent review of "Looking After Joey." In its entirety this review reads, "I thought this would be a comedy of errors, what I got was a dissertation on existentialism. Interesting book." The tone is unenthusiastic and the reviewer gave just three stars, but I love this review. It makes me proud of "Looking After Joey," because the truth is that "Joey" is both a comedy and, well, not quite a dissertation, I hope, but a rumination on time, loss and the need for love. And the two overlap. Some of the biggest laughs point to truths about ageing and connection and what we owe one another. And some of the more wistful moments suddenly explode in laughter. I myself would tear up when I read over the Joey and Doug scene in which the former is trying to decide whether or not to stay in this world. And yet one can't help but chuckle because Joey's dilemma is precipitated by... Well, I won't give away any more of a spoiler than I already have. But that scene shuttles back and forth many times between tears and laughs. Different emotions pull against each other all the time in "Joey." I think it's natural. (Speculative fiction allows for this in a way realism may not.) Our worries, losses, anxieties and failures have their poetry. Often jokes are part of that poetry. Jokes are how we make those things okay. And when we do succeed, when we connect, well, of course that is poetic, too. I think all this is why the reviewer quoted above, while having their expectations frustrated, also had to conclude, "Interesting book." I second that emotion! (And I still maintain that "Joey" is a beach book! Pick up a copy along with your suntan lotion!)
What to Curl up With (Part One)
What do you take to a desert island? Say you’re allowed ten books. They should be…what? The ten greatest ever written? Anna Karenina? Remembrance of Things Past? I’d kill myself. Or the ten most inspiring? What inspiration do you need? It’s a desert island! So maybe we want the ten most comforting books. But those might be ones you had as a kid. They would take between three minutes and three hours each to read. Whatever the case – comfort, inspiration or genius – one thing is certain: these would have to be books you could read over and over. Depending on what else there is to do (does this island come with shelter? what’s the food situation?) you will be reading each book once every two weeks for the rest of your life. Here is what I think I would take. Part one.
1.) My Norton Anthology. Kills a couple hundred birds with one stone, dunnit? And to be clear, it would indeed have to be my Norton Anthology, the one I used in Introduction to English Literature at Hamilton College in the fall of 1976. The one with which I learned to read. And quite possibly write. In high school, the teachers’ questions ran to, “Why does Atticus mean when he says that?” and “Why does Pa Joad do that?” They’re trying to sharpen your mind and mold your character. Fat chance. In my case. But in the big, bright room in Hamilton’s Root Hall, Professor Austin Briggs took Chaucer and Shakespeare and Pope apart, line by line, often word by word, to reveal simply how literature works and what it does. It was my first sustained encounter with poetry, which high schools, at least then, thought students thought was boring, so they avoided it. Then suddenly Beowulf. Suddenly Spenser. Suddenly sonnets. Grown-up stuff with a grown-up purpose. Why had no one told me? I did not write back then, except for assigned papers. But I believe Austin Briggs’s impassioned, witty, detailed exegeses of these writers made me wish secretly to do the same thing, and those exegeses gestated and eventually, well, Bob the Book is not The Faerie Queene, but then, The Faerie Queene is not Bob the Book. At any rate, I am packing my Norton Anthology, complete with the scribblings of a suddenly energized 18-year-old in the margins.
2.) Spenser and Pope are fine. More than fine. But at the end of a long day, you can’t quite sit down by the fire and have a whiskey with those towering and ancient intellects. E. B. White’s essay “Home-coming,” the first in his collection One Man’s Meat, is actually about the end of a long day, a day of driving up Route 1 to North Brookline, Maine, where the Whites had a house and, more importantly, a barn that became the setting for perhaps the greatest work of children’s literature ever. “Home-coming” is witty and sharp-eyed, as is everything by White, and what is more, it calms the soul: sunset along tacky Route 1 and the woods and fields and marshes beyond; the arrival at the empty house; the whiskey by the fire; and a curious and amusing event that suddenly brings a gaggle of neighbors – aka the volunteer fire department -- into White’s parlor. I would happily take just “Home-coming” (yes, the hyphen belongs) to my desert island, but of course I am going to take the whole book. One Man’s Meat also contains such White classics as "Clear Days," "Salt Water Farm," "The Flocks We Watch by Night," "Once More to the Lake" and the lovely "First World War." Life amused White, and it made him anxious, and he is frank about both. Of Route 1 he says, “There is little to do but steer and avoid death.” And so I know I shall have at least one perfect soul mate on my island.
The next installment of my desert island books shall be revealed soon!
1.) My Norton Anthology. Kills a couple hundred birds with one stone, dunnit? And to be clear, it would indeed have to be my Norton Anthology, the one I used in Introduction to English Literature at Hamilton College in the fall of 1976. The one with which I learned to read. And quite possibly write. In high school, the teachers’ questions ran to, “Why does Atticus mean when he says that?” and “Why does Pa Joad do that?” They’re trying to sharpen your mind and mold your character. Fat chance. In my case. But in the big, bright room in Hamilton’s Root Hall, Professor Austin Briggs took Chaucer and Shakespeare and Pope apart, line by line, often word by word, to reveal simply how literature works and what it does. It was my first sustained encounter with poetry, which high schools, at least then, thought students thought was boring, so they avoided it. Then suddenly Beowulf. Suddenly Spenser. Suddenly sonnets. Grown-up stuff with a grown-up purpose. Why had no one told me? I did not write back then, except for assigned papers. But I believe Austin Briggs’s impassioned, witty, detailed exegeses of these writers made me wish secretly to do the same thing, and those exegeses gestated and eventually, well, Bob the Book is not The Faerie Queene, but then, The Faerie Queene is not Bob the Book. At any rate, I am packing my Norton Anthology, complete with the scribblings of a suddenly energized 18-year-old in the margins.
2.) Spenser and Pope are fine. More than fine. But at the end of a long day, you can’t quite sit down by the fire and have a whiskey with those towering and ancient intellects. E. B. White’s essay “Home-coming,” the first in his collection One Man’s Meat, is actually about the end of a long day, a day of driving up Route 1 to North Brookline, Maine, where the Whites had a house and, more importantly, a barn that became the setting for perhaps the greatest work of children’s literature ever. “Home-coming” is witty and sharp-eyed, as is everything by White, and what is more, it calms the soul: sunset along tacky Route 1 and the woods and fields and marshes beyond; the arrival at the empty house; the whiskey by the fire; and a curious and amusing event that suddenly brings a gaggle of neighbors – aka the volunteer fire department -- into White’s parlor. I would happily take just “Home-coming” (yes, the hyphen belongs) to my desert island, but of course I am going to take the whole book. One Man’s Meat also contains such White classics as "Clear Days," "Salt Water Farm," "The Flocks We Watch by Night," "Once More to the Lake" and the lovely "First World War." Life amused White, and it made him anxious, and he is frank about both. Of Route 1 he says, “There is little to do but steer and avoid death.” And so I know I shall have at least one perfect soul mate on my island.
The next installment of my desert island books shall be revealed soon!
What to Curl Up With (Part Two)
More desert island books…!
3.) Book #2 was by E. B. White, partly because a man so amused by yet so anxious about life is a kindred spirit to me. But for a real kindred spirit I need a gay man. Funny how, as gays gain more “acceptance,” I feel a greater need to be something of a separatist. I didn’t like the closet, but I continue to love what’s left of the gay demimonde. I loved “gayborhoods” and I mourn their passing. So to recall those times, and to have some more terrific writing with me, I’d take to my desert island Felice Picano’s True Stories: Tales of My Past. Picano has a way of crossing paths in funny, serendipitous ways with great gay literary figures like Tennessee Williams and W. H. Auden. The essay about Auden leads off True Stories, and it is beautifully detailed, warm and hilarious. But the real genius of the book is in its portraits of everyday people, including Picano’s father, his publishing partners (in addition to being an author, he founded Seahorse Press) and most touchingly, a friend known simply as James, with whom Picano bicycled all over New York City. Just bicycled. The essay on James contains one of the most touchingly told moments in all the gay lit I have read. I am hoping the Commissioner of Sending People to Desert Islands will let me bundle Picano’s sequel, True Stories, Too, along with the original. I haven’t read TST yet, but I know it will be a great summer 2014 treat.
4.) Gay and bisexual women made a huge difference in my life, especially just before and after my coming out, and one in particular made a huge difference to me many years later. In 1995, at the OutWrite Conference in Boston, I heard Leslie Feinberg speak (on a panel with Kate Bornstein; does it get any better?), and I bought her famous first novel, Stone Butch Blues, in the old Firebrand Press edition. I adored it from the first sentence. Every evening for the next two weeks I rushed home from work to read more. Eventually I came to consider it the greatest LGBT book I had ever read. It flabbergasted me that it actually fell out of print at one point. It is written in the most beautifully rough-hewn, emotional language I think I have experienced. But I do have one reservation about taking SBB to my island. I loved it so much, could a second reading ever equal the first? For twenty years I have avoided re-reading it, so anxious was I to preserve that thrilling original experience. A few years after I read it, Feinberg signed my copy of SBB—“in the spirit of Stonewall.” That made the physical book a whole other thing. Whether I ever re-read it or not, Stone Butch Blues is going with me as a totem or amulet. It will go under my pillow and give me strength on those long, lonely nights when I might otherwise lose myself.
5.) Speaking of “blues,” I bend everyone’s ear so much about William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways that I am not going to bend yours. I am just going to say that the genius of this tour-by-van of U.S. backroads in the spring of 1978 is that the author mixes his curiosity and wonder at new places with history often acquired later, so that, with his reverent and amused voice in your ear, you see the everyday of each place simultaneously with the broad sweep of history. There is no one Heat-Moon won’t start a conversation with, and many of them, also immortalized in the author’s black-and-white photos, will stay with you forever. It also helps that the author is running—from a crumbling marriage and from unemployment. As much of an authority as he is—or, rather, as he became during subsequent rewriting—he’s also a struggling regular guy like us all. As with the Norton Anthology, this would have to be my own Blue Highways, which I gave my dad in the 1980s and took back when he died. It has his margin notes and it has mine from successive readings every few years.
Next time: I go all erudite on you!
3.) Book #2 was by E. B. White, partly because a man so amused by yet so anxious about life is a kindred spirit to me. But for a real kindred spirit I need a gay man. Funny how, as gays gain more “acceptance,” I feel a greater need to be something of a separatist. I didn’t like the closet, but I continue to love what’s left of the gay demimonde. I loved “gayborhoods” and I mourn their passing. So to recall those times, and to have some more terrific writing with me, I’d take to my desert island Felice Picano’s True Stories: Tales of My Past. Picano has a way of crossing paths in funny, serendipitous ways with great gay literary figures like Tennessee Williams and W. H. Auden. The essay about Auden leads off True Stories, and it is beautifully detailed, warm and hilarious. But the real genius of the book is in its portraits of everyday people, including Picano’s father, his publishing partners (in addition to being an author, he founded Seahorse Press) and most touchingly, a friend known simply as James, with whom Picano bicycled all over New York City. Just bicycled. The essay on James contains one of the most touchingly told moments in all the gay lit I have read. I am hoping the Commissioner of Sending People to Desert Islands will let me bundle Picano’s sequel, True Stories, Too, along with the original. I haven’t read TST yet, but I know it will be a great summer 2014 treat.
4.) Gay and bisexual women made a huge difference in my life, especially just before and after my coming out, and one in particular made a huge difference to me many years later. In 1995, at the OutWrite Conference in Boston, I heard Leslie Feinberg speak (on a panel with Kate Bornstein; does it get any better?), and I bought her famous first novel, Stone Butch Blues, in the old Firebrand Press edition. I adored it from the first sentence. Every evening for the next two weeks I rushed home from work to read more. Eventually I came to consider it the greatest LGBT book I had ever read. It flabbergasted me that it actually fell out of print at one point. It is written in the most beautifully rough-hewn, emotional language I think I have experienced. But I do have one reservation about taking SBB to my island. I loved it so much, could a second reading ever equal the first? For twenty years I have avoided re-reading it, so anxious was I to preserve that thrilling original experience. A few years after I read it, Feinberg signed my copy of SBB—“in the spirit of Stonewall.” That made the physical book a whole other thing. Whether I ever re-read it or not, Stone Butch Blues is going with me as a totem or amulet. It will go under my pillow and give me strength on those long, lonely nights when I might otherwise lose myself.
5.) Speaking of “blues,” I bend everyone’s ear so much about William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways that I am not going to bend yours. I am just going to say that the genius of this tour-by-van of U.S. backroads in the spring of 1978 is that the author mixes his curiosity and wonder at new places with history often acquired later, so that, with his reverent and amused voice in your ear, you see the everyday of each place simultaneously with the broad sweep of history. There is no one Heat-Moon won’t start a conversation with, and many of them, also immortalized in the author’s black-and-white photos, will stay with you forever. It also helps that the author is running—from a crumbling marriage and from unemployment. As much of an authority as he is—or, rather, as he became during subsequent rewriting—he’s also a struggling regular guy like us all. As with the Norton Anthology, this would have to be my own Blue Highways, which I gave my dad in the 1980s and took back when he died. It has his margin notes and it has mine from successive readings every few years.
Next time: I go all erudite on you!
Here's to the Ladies Who Blog
My blog tour is off and running! Kazza and Son created a beautiful spread, while Ro asked me about genres, and I told her about throat singing (and no, that’s not a euphemism).
Seriously, though, these folks devote enormous energy and creativity to getting the word out about their favorite books and authors: an invaluable service to our community. I am very honored to be featured on both these blogs, and there are more to come. Oh, and they are not all ladies. I'll be guesting with the lovely and talented Jeff Erno, and I will be stopping by GGR soon.
On Top Down Under (free giveaway here): http://ontopdownunderbookreviews.com/giveaway-looking-after-joey-by-david-pratt/
Literary Nymphs: (also with giveaway)http://literarynymphshotlist.blogspot.com/2014/06/looking-after-joey-by-david-pratt.html?zx=8484aa7bcaf675e6
Seriously, though, these folks devote enormous energy and creativity to getting the word out about their favorite books and authors: an invaluable service to our community. I am very honored to be featured on both these blogs, and there are more to come. Oh, and they are not all ladies. I'll be guesting with the lovely and talented Jeff Erno, and I will be stopping by GGR soon.
On Top Down Under (free giveaway here): http://ontopdownunderbookreviews.com/giveaway-looking-after-joey-by-david-pratt/
Literary Nymphs: (also with giveaway)http://literarynymphshotlist.blogspot.com/2014/06/looking-after-joey-by-david-pratt.html?zx=8484aa7bcaf675e6
How I Found My Cover Boy
Take a look at the Looking After Joey video, then read how I found cover model Nicholas Gorham. The video is here: http://vimeo.com/91786797
I had two cover concepts for Looking After Joey: the one I ended up using; or, more discreetly, a montage of everyday sights from Chelsea, the New York City neighborhood where the characters live: door buzzers; street signs; a breakfast table; a subway entrance. Joey is a sequence of outlandish, hilarious events, but it is also a book of the everyday. People get up and make coffee. They trek to work, go out after, grumble about the price of the wine and tapas, come home and watch reruns and chat about their day. You might call Joey a domestic romantic comedy – a dom rom com! I wanted that everyday-ness on the cover. On the other hand, one of my characters was straight out of a porn film. Here was my chance to legitimately put a naked guy on the front of one of my books, just like everyone else! Could I resist? No.
But who?
My photographer friend Eva Mueller knows more gay men than I do. She volunteered to help me find the guy. But still, who would it be? What were the criteria, exactly?
Joey, as I mentioned, is a character from a porn video. In the pantheon of porn archetypes, he’s the innocent kid, the one who reluctantly (at first) forgoes an algebra test to have a sexual encounter. I sent Eva a couple of pictures of eighties porn star Mike Henson. In the meantime, I could not resist looking for my archetype as I walked down the street. It was titillating, of course, but, if Eva couldn’t find someone, might it even prove necessary? I hoped not. Contrary to what you might think, the prospect of having to find a photographic model on the street is not pleasant. You’d have to convince them you’re not crazy. You’d have to hope they’re not crazy. And while you may think the streets of New York swarm with beautiful young men and while you would in fact be right, when your filter is “must look like a porn character,” guess what? Many beautiful young men don’t pass through that filter.
Of course today we have “amateur” porn in which almost anyone can be a “star.” But the classic porn looks are very specific. If we think “porn star” just means “sexiest” or “most built” or “most beautiful,” we are wrong. In those days of pretend-scouting my cover boy, I saw many compelling types of male beauty and sexiness that did not come near the porn look. Ironically, one potential criterion for sexiness is having no idea that you are sexy. You do have to pay some attention to clothes and grooming, but looking too deliberately put-together can be off-putting. It’s become a cliché that inner qualities make someone sexy, and it is true: confidence, curiosity, and the cluster of qualities we call character all make a man sexy. That is how I created the character of Doug in Looking After Joey. He has a bad haircut and wears a lot of plaid, but he is honest, loyal, forgiving, and the list goes on. He’s not a paragon. He sometimes lacks belief in himself, but he does not give up. Doug’s presence in Joey’s life ultimately makes Calvin rethink his and Peachy’s obsession with getting into the party.
I have written elsewhere about gay men and character. When I was growing up, homosexuality was a moral failing. So you hid all those tendencies from a young age. Making you, in turn, deceitful and even a liar. So many of us felt automatically shut out of the whole character thing. The whole student-council-president-graduation-prize-winner thing. You started compensating in other ways. All A’s. Perfect hair.
Eva ultimately found my cover guy, Nicholas Gorham. Interestingly, he did not have the exact look of a porn star, either. But he could convey the impression, which was what mattered, and that was actually better than actually being a classic porn star. Nicholas is in fact an actor. He is a very good-looking actor, true, but it was his ability to act the part of beautiful, lost, needy, clueless but decent and loving Joey that made him perfect for the cover. And while acting was involved, he did bring his own qualities to the shoot. I don’t know Nicholas well, but I could tell from the moment I met him that here was someone who had consciously worked at being a good man. Of course, we might have found a real porn star that could have conveyed all this, but I think maybe a professional porn actor might have had trouble surrendering the smoldering image to the playfulness and vulnerability we needed, to the whole colossal joke of sitting there in his underpants eating muesli – a running gag from the book, which you now have to buy because you are so curious.
Nicholas, on the other hand, took up cereal and spoon with perfect grace, flashing that slightly-guilty-but-not-really-because-he-knows-he’s-going-to-get-away-with-it grin over and over, making it spontaneous every time, while I called “Hey, Joey!” and “Stop eating in bed!” from off-camera and Eva snapped away. It wasn’t easy. He had to eat a lot of cereal. It was granola, not muesli, as muesli does not photograph well, and for a similar reason, it was half-and-half, not milk. And the dribble on his thigh was an accident that really happened; it was not photoshopped.
I had two cover concepts for Looking After Joey: the one I ended up using; or, more discreetly, a montage of everyday sights from Chelsea, the New York City neighborhood where the characters live: door buzzers; street signs; a breakfast table; a subway entrance. Joey is a sequence of outlandish, hilarious events, but it is also a book of the everyday. People get up and make coffee. They trek to work, go out after, grumble about the price of the wine and tapas, come home and watch reruns and chat about their day. You might call Joey a domestic romantic comedy – a dom rom com! I wanted that everyday-ness on the cover. On the other hand, one of my characters was straight out of a porn film. Here was my chance to legitimately put a naked guy on the front of one of my books, just like everyone else! Could I resist? No.
But who?
My photographer friend Eva Mueller knows more gay men than I do. She volunteered to help me find the guy. But still, who would it be? What were the criteria, exactly?
Joey, as I mentioned, is a character from a porn video. In the pantheon of porn archetypes, he’s the innocent kid, the one who reluctantly (at first) forgoes an algebra test to have a sexual encounter. I sent Eva a couple of pictures of eighties porn star Mike Henson. In the meantime, I could not resist looking for my archetype as I walked down the street. It was titillating, of course, but, if Eva couldn’t find someone, might it even prove necessary? I hoped not. Contrary to what you might think, the prospect of having to find a photographic model on the street is not pleasant. You’d have to convince them you’re not crazy. You’d have to hope they’re not crazy. And while you may think the streets of New York swarm with beautiful young men and while you would in fact be right, when your filter is “must look like a porn character,” guess what? Many beautiful young men don’t pass through that filter.
Of course today we have “amateur” porn in which almost anyone can be a “star.” But the classic porn looks are very specific. If we think “porn star” just means “sexiest” or “most built” or “most beautiful,” we are wrong. In those days of pretend-scouting my cover boy, I saw many compelling types of male beauty and sexiness that did not come near the porn look. Ironically, one potential criterion for sexiness is having no idea that you are sexy. You do have to pay some attention to clothes and grooming, but looking too deliberately put-together can be off-putting. It’s become a cliché that inner qualities make someone sexy, and it is true: confidence, curiosity, and the cluster of qualities we call character all make a man sexy. That is how I created the character of Doug in Looking After Joey. He has a bad haircut and wears a lot of plaid, but he is honest, loyal, forgiving, and the list goes on. He’s not a paragon. He sometimes lacks belief in himself, but he does not give up. Doug’s presence in Joey’s life ultimately makes Calvin rethink his and Peachy’s obsession with getting into the party.
I have written elsewhere about gay men and character. When I was growing up, homosexuality was a moral failing. So you hid all those tendencies from a young age. Making you, in turn, deceitful and even a liar. So many of us felt automatically shut out of the whole character thing. The whole student-council-president-graduation-prize-winner thing. You started compensating in other ways. All A’s. Perfect hair.
Eva ultimately found my cover guy, Nicholas Gorham. Interestingly, he did not have the exact look of a porn star, either. But he could convey the impression, which was what mattered, and that was actually better than actually being a classic porn star. Nicholas is in fact an actor. He is a very good-looking actor, true, but it was his ability to act the part of beautiful, lost, needy, clueless but decent and loving Joey that made him perfect for the cover. And while acting was involved, he did bring his own qualities to the shoot. I don’t know Nicholas well, but I could tell from the moment I met him that here was someone who had consciously worked at being a good man. Of course, we might have found a real porn star that could have conveyed all this, but I think maybe a professional porn actor might have had trouble surrendering the smoldering image to the playfulness and vulnerability we needed, to the whole colossal joke of sitting there in his underpants eating muesli – a running gag from the book, which you now have to buy because you are so curious.
Nicholas, on the other hand, took up cereal and spoon with perfect grace, flashing that slightly-guilty-but-not-really-because-he-knows-he’s-going-to-get-away-with-it grin over and over, making it spontaneous every time, while I called “Hey, Joey!” and “Stop eating in bed!” from off-camera and Eva snapped away. It wasn’t easy. He had to eat a lot of cereal. It was granola, not muesli, as muesli does not photograph well, and for a similar reason, it was half-and-half, not milk. And the dribble on his thigh was an accident that really happened; it was not photoshopped.
