Writing Below the Belt: Conversations with Erotic Authors

by Michael Rowe

Award-winning journalist Michael Rowe interviewed the best and brightest erotic writersboth those well-known for their work in the field and those just starting outand presents the collected wisdom in Writing Below the Belt. In each of these revealing conversations, the personal, the political and the just plain prurient collide and complement one another in fascinating wayswhich should be no surprise, given the fact that each of these writers can be counted among the genre's most talented practitioners.

480 pages, Paperback

Published August 1, 1997

About the author

Michael Rowe is an independent international journalist who has lived in Beirut, Havana, Geneva, and Paris.

His work has appeared in the National Post, The Globe & Mail, The United Church Observer and numerous other publications. He has been a finalist for both the Canadian National Magazine Award and the Associated Church Press Award in the United States. The author of several books, including Writing Below the Belt, a critically acclaimed study of censorship, pornography, and popular culture, and the essay collections Looking For Brothers and Other Men's Sons, which won the 2008 Randy Shilts Award for Nonfiction, he has also won the Lambda Literary Award. He is currently a contributing writer to The Advocate and a political blogger for The Huffington Post.

--from the author's website

Reviews

[Thomas Murphy]

A pretty significant author, especially for the Toronto area, Michael Rowe, deftly interviewed fifteen iconic authors in among LGBT and BDSM and erotic / porn authors. I loved that in some part it's an oral history of gay or alternative Toronto just a few years prior to my arrival in that city where I ended up living for the next fifteen years. It's also an oral history of queer publishing and genre writing from Toronto to New York to Vancouver to San Francisco. This book firmly placed me in my favorite decade in a favorite stage of my own life and taught me about iconic people I had never heard of who did so much for the gay community even decades before that time: both men and women (often with women writing as men apparently). One of my favorite passages explains this tendency toward alter-ego:

"...the pseudonym is totally transparent, you play a psychological trick where you let yourself be totally uninhibited. It's sort of like wearing a costume. It's still you; but because you have a costume on, it liberates you. It's not a deception, really; it's the lie that tells the truth. It allows the truth."

~ Steven Saylor, who wrote under the pseudonym Aaron Travis

This quote let me think about the relationship between pseudonyms and drag queens: men performing as women (that is to say, NOT transwomen themselves). Harris Glenn Milstead was such a shy, soft-spoken, and kind man, but when he became Divine, he said he could say and do things that Milstead himself would and could never do. Indeed, the majority of the LGBT community have lived two lives with two identities, and they are both us.

Our first is the one before we come out or later it can be more of a public face or professional one, and this one carries A LOT of baggage from our history that belongs to other more insecure people who probably don't really know themselves or who haven't really accepted themselves. Reading a book like this that shares so many unique experiences, still, to this day, helps me shed some of that baggage while still being able to love who I was at a time when the world and the community around me prevented me from being an authentic person. Luckily, the gay was too strong in me and that time was VERY temporary. People who haven't lived this don't understand the pain of being in the closet, having to deny your ideals, but they might understand why I absolutely loathe inauthenticity and liars now.

I really respect and envy how many of these authors lived their lives, and it makes me vow to be as gay as possible from now on.

I first heard of this author in a UofT English class where his book "Enter, Night" was an assigned reading. I recommend that book also.