"The Trout"

by Stephen Greco

An “All About Eve-style story in which a beautiful cowboy stumbles into a literary career without writing a word.” That’s how Out magazine described “The Trout,” the centerpiece of Stephen Greco’s best-selling book of gay erotica, The Sperm Engine (Green Candy Press, 2002),

Following in the tradition of literary provocateurs like John Preston, John Rechy, and Boyd MacDonald, Greco illustrates how people often reveal themselves best during sex—whether through traditional, romantic expressions of love or through the vast variety of “sex sport” and “sex work” that are integral to modern gay life.

The Sperm Engine was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in 2003.

Here’s the full review from

“Stephen Greco delivers a book of stories so steamy it would be easy to mistake The Sperm Engine as cutting-edge porn. But the witty, street-sassy pieces in this smart debut collection defy pat description. In the bulk of these, a brutally frank narrator haunts '90s back-room Manhattan, giving us seemingly autobiographical portraits and observations that read at times like intimate, explicit dispatches. At other times he's strictly literary, even biting. "The Trout" is an All About Eve-style story in which a beautiful cowboy stumbles into a literary career without writing a word. Between this and the breathless, bravura "Men and Their Issues," readers will recognize a writer who ranks with the likes of Andrew Holleran.”

42 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 12, 2010

About the author

Stephen Greco is Editorial Director of InsideRisk and Editor-at-Large of the magazine Upstate Diary. He has contributed to and/or served as editor for Air Mail, Elle Décor, Interview, MTV online, New York, the New York Times, Opera News, Stagebill, Trace, and the Village Voice, among others. Greco is author of the novel Now and Yesterday (Kensington, 2014). His most recent novel, Such Good Friends, based on the friendship of Truman Capote and Lee Radziwill, published by Kensington in May, 2023.

For the stage, Greco has written Peter and the Wolf in Hollywood, an orchestral-theatrical work from Giants Are Small, the partnership of Edouard Getaz and Doug Fitch, that premiered at the Kennedy Center in 2017. With Fitch, Greco has written the multi-media works How Did We…? (2014; University of Buffalo Center for the Arts) and Punkitititi/Breakfast Included (2020; Salzburg Marionette Theater, Salzburg Mozarteum). Greco wrote the libretto for the Victoria Bond opera How Gulliver Returned Home in a Manner that was Very Not Direct, and is working on musical theater projects with composers Scott Wheeler and Douglas Cuomo.

Among the celebrity interviews that Greco has done for various publications are Maya Angelou, Geoffrey Beene, Joan Juliet Buck, Trisha Brown, DJ Cam, Wes Craven, Quentin Crisp. Merce Cunningham, Diane von Furstenberg, Frank Gehry, Allen Ginsberg, Marcelo Gomes, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Cynthia Gregory, Arianna Huffington, Patti LuPone, Gelsey Kirkland, Spike Lee, Marilyn Minter, Errol Morris, Jane Moss, Nana Mouskouri, Mark Morris, Mike Nichols, Yoko Ono, Sir Peter Pears, Ned Rorem, Andre Leon Talley, Donald Trump, and Kehinde Wiley.

Greco lives in Brooklyn, New York.


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AUTHOR PHOTO BY DAVID A. PEREZ