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.
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