I'm Open to Anything

by William E. Jones

A perverse and explicit new take on the coming of age novel, William E. Jones's I'm Open to Anything explores bohemian Southern California of the late 1980s and early 90s, before gentrification ruined everything. The book's narrator flees a crumbling industrial wasteland in the Midwest and finds himself in sunny Los Angeles without a car, working in a neighborhood video store and spending many hours watching films. He explores his adopted city and befriends a number of men, most of them immigrants, who teach him the finer points of sex. He acquires the skill of fisting, giving his partners intense pleasure, and at the same time hearing the stories of their lives. They too have fled their hometowns: one to escape torture at the hands of a Salvadoran death squad; another to study anthropology after years of wandering and religious questioning. Alternating between explicit scenes of kinky sex and intimate conversations about matters of life and death, I'm Open to Anything is a porno novel of rare ambition and humor. The book recalls Olympia Press's heyday, when authors made quick money churning out dirty books, but couldn't hide the intellectual obsessions that made them writers in the first place. William E. Jones's previous book, True Homosexual Experiences (also published by We Heard You Like Books), a biography of Straight to Hell's iconoclastic editor Boyd McDonald, celebrates the frank, raunchy language of the first queer 'zine. Jones brings the same unsparing and profane attitude to I'm Open to Anything, his debut novel.

Genres: Fiction, Queer, Gay, LGBT, Sexuality, 21st Century, Queer Lit

169 pages, Paperback

Published April 15, 2019

About the author

William E. Jones is an artist, filmmaker, and writer. He has published the following books: Is It Really So Strange? (2006), Tearoom (2008), Heliogabalus (2009), Selections from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton (2009), Killed: Rejected Images of the Farm Security Administration (2010), Halsted Plays Himself (2011), Between Artists: Thom Andersen and William E. Jones (2013), and Imitation of Christ, a catalogue for the exhibition he curated at UCLA Hammer Museum in 2013. Recent books include Flesh and the Cosmos (2014) and True Homosexual Experiences: Boyd McDonald and Straight to Hell (2016). His first novel, I'm Open to Anything, was published in early 2019. Jones's writing has also appeared in periodicals such as Animal Shelter, Area Sneaks, Artforum, Bidoun, Butt, Frieze, Little Joe, Mousse, and The White Review.

Reviews

[Erik · Rating 3 out of 5]

William Jones' "I'm Open to Anything" is not for feint hearts or weak stomachs.

Guillermo grew up in a conservative little town in the Midwest and escaped to LA at the earliest possible moment in the late 1980s. Coming into his own sexual identity at the peak of the AIDS epidemic, he finds himself - and pleasure - in discovering alternative, perverse forms of sexuality, forms he learns about through the porn he rents and the people he meets. As he comes to terms with the power of self-censorship, and works to overcome, he falls in love in a very nontraditional way and in these socially perverse forms of kink and sexuality finds what it means to truly be free.

Though portions of the book - especially mentions of art and leftist politics feels forced and contrived - the story of finding freedom by bucking conformity is an important one, and one you should certainly read.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

An alternate title could have been "Sex and Sensibility:" while the former is the hook, it's really the latter that carries the whole thing off. For better or worse, this is very much what I imagine the results would be like if I ever try my hand at fiction. Well, without the fisting, but very much all the long digressions on topics like Fassbinder, Caravaggio, and LA Plays Itself, as well as a melancholy investment in documenting the fleeting pleasures of now-disappeared places and esoteric technologies. Oddly charming in its own peculiar way.

"Whenever I entered the house of an acquaintance, I would gravitate to the bookshelves. If I found that this person had no books, I would turn around and leave without a word, taking the next bus home. After this happened on multiple occasions, I softened my position towards the willfully non-literate: such people actually existed, but they had no inner lives."

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I spent the morning reading the last pages of a novel by William E. Jones called "I'm Open To Anything" in the bathtub. I do a lot of reading in the tub because it's a private zone where no one can reach you. Bathrooms are a unique location for such excellent isolation. I have made some of the most serious decisions while sitting on the toilet or in the bathtub. Many work decisions came from the tub and reading the finest literature, such as Bill's book.

Without a doubt, this novel has the most provocative cover for a book. The cover photograph is by the author and undoubtedly a conversation starter but in some company, not an entrance to communication. "I'm Open To Anything" reads like a memoir of a man's journey into the sexual world of Los Angeles. For reasons I don't fully understand, as a straight man (whatever that means these days), I love the Gay/Lesbian underground subject matter. I admire society's society and how it stays away from the mainstream world in such a fashion that it's invisible unless you know the secret password to that sensual and emotional landscape.

Jones's novel is one of the great Los Angeles books, and he's an author who knows the city well and understands its sexual energy. All his encounters in these pages are fascinating and mostly with Latin men of all sorts. Jones has a deep appreciation for other characters to tell their tale. Here we get a Revolutionary, a book store owner, and various others who roam the same landscape as the author's character. For those interested in the craft and technique of fisting, William tells it in beautiful prose. It's great to read an author who can articulate his sexuality and practice. It's lovely to spend time in the tub with this book.

"I'm Open To Anything" by William E. Jones
ISBN: 978-0996421898 We Heard You Like Books

[Bill Arning · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant Story that gets so much right about queer self discovery and the way in which smart arty gays discover their kinky desires and affections. It’s a quick read but so many memorable vignettes are haunting me still . The real
Life figures like the late Fred Halsted give the story a documentary feel

[Dennis Holland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh, so that’s what he means by open. Droll, daring and dirty. ‘I’m open to anything’ from Jones. 👊

[Ereck]

I’m Open to Anything works urgently yet patiently to open up American interiors. Jones’ novel is astonishing both in its declarative clarity and its contemporary pertinence. It’s without question a sexy read, but to my mind its focus is genuity: a complex genuity gaping with much to impart about education, art, American economy, American politics and international involvement, convention, resistance, corporeal intimacy, and the unreasonableness we race to suppress. It’s a lonely, haunting, and hopeful book.

[jimmy · Rating 2 out of 5]

idk what it is about LA gays but i just can't do it

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book started innocently enough before it turned into 100 pages about fisting! Even though the material was quite racy, I still quite enjoyed the story. Even the more philosophical passages were readable and not overly academic. This novel was a quick read and a fun learning experience.

[Macartney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing.

[Jonathon McKenney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Month of gay books continues. A fun novella, literary pulp. I find it achieved exactly what it said its aims were. I waffled between 5 and 4, but some of the convos were so contrived and structured, like a Don DeLillo novel, that can be a little grating. But overall, fantastic find from an independent press

[Bill Hsu · Rating 3 out of 5]

I know it's a trap to read a novel like it's the author's memoirs. But there certainly are connections here with the author's life; see for example Halsted Plays Himself (Semiotext(e)). The whole encounter with Fred Halsted probably didn't happen, but if you read the author's Halsted book, you'd wish it did. Overall I'm not sure what I think of the novel, though (like most California queers of my generation) I did enjoy all the references to pre-gentrification LA (Silverlake! Circus of Books! Club Fuck!), and the conversations about Witkin, Genet etc in between the sex scenes.

[Dalbert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is this serious fiction? Is it genre fiction? Is it erotica? I secretly think it’s probably a thinly veiled memoir that does an excellent job of encapsulating the complexities of identity, intellect and sexuality. A very solid read.

[Liam Oznowich · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bracingly explicit coming of age tale in the tradition of outsider/outlaw literature that is definitely not for the faint of heart (if you can’t tell from the front cover pic, taken by the author himself). I am pretty open minded about this kind of lit but even this one made me a tad squeamish. Still, I’m happy this book exists - censorship is the death of creativity, of course, and stories from the margins of experience can be shockingly relatable if one allows them to be.

Some really interesting introspective moments relating perversity and trauma. Features some comedic and even tragic cameos by niche gay cultural icons like Jean Genet and Fred Halsted. Still, the prose is really flat - it became a chore to read it at times - and the structure is random and haphazard, with an unclear passage of time that felt messy rather than intentional.

The pseudo-love story that it ended on was oddly moving, leaving me curious enough about the subsequent two books in the trilogy to keep me going.

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

a saucy and smart take on the coming-of-age novel. it’s certainly explicit, but there are many themes explored here too: censorship and taboo, religion, geopolitics, to name a few. it’s a book about intimacy and — ahem — opening yourself up to the world around you, in more ways than one.

[blake · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most of the reviews on this book highlight its vulgarity; and while there’s plenty of that, I was more mesmerized than I was provoked. Specifically, I was gripped by the weaving together of South American history and how eroticism fills spaces left empty by emigration, city-living, and unspoken desires. The descriptions of LA were sparking off the page into the hot, dry Summer air as I read by the pool. The story catches flame and before you know it, it’s already over—leaving you in retrospect surrounded only by the smoke and ephemera of what was once there.

———————————————————————————

“If you don't grow up under capitalism, this country is a complete shock. You have the freedom to be gay, but everything has a price, and this mercantile aspect of life poisons every social interaction.”

“I now think that my mother must have been incredibly lonely, but at that time, I couldn't acknowledge it. I was preoccupied with my own loneliness.”

“To her, California was merely an image, vague and iniquitous, about which she (like all Midwesterners) knew a single thing: it was a place from which one did not return.”

“Consequently, I always associated images of sex with a backward glance. Practically from the moment I first saw sexually explicit films, my viewing habits were an exercise in nostalgia.”

“Over the last few decades, we have exchanged one regime of power— a state apparatus punishing non-conformity-for another regime of power— a liberated consumer culture that does not punish the perverts, but rather, in a multitude of ways, encourages them to conform. Everything has become inverted: in former times, queers engaged in elaborate rituals of conversation in order to have sex with each other; now we engage in elaborate sex rituals so that afterwards, we can have a decent conversation.”

“It's fascinating to me. I'm more curious about why I like what I like and how it's all connected."

“It's difficult for academics to admit that they don't know something. They're supposed to have a command of their field, but if you draw the boundaries of the field in a different way, suddenly they don't know anything. They're not in the center anymore, and they're thrown into crisis when their work is no longer relevant."

“Any ‘universal’ culture rang false to me because it was irredeemably compromised by the egotism and smugness of artists and the blood-soaked history they memorialized.”

[Tom Garback · Rating 4 out of 5]

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Critical Score: A
Personal Score: B
Reading Experience: 📘📘

Terrifically moving at the start, but wavers into aimless, if eye-opening, conversations while throwing the plot into the backseat.

Plenty of smart writing, and plenty I could relate to. A pace at varying degrees of slow hurt my momentum.

Still, this deserves to be more popular, although that kind of goes against the point.

The scenes cycle largely from sex to art criticism to cultural analysis as an effective reflection of its thematic statements on censorship and taboo, artistic expression, and the evolution of queer communities in relation to the culture’s shifting tolerance.

Jones captures the essence of the time quite well—though I’m not the one to evaluate its success on those grounds, as I wasn’t even alive back then. You can just tell that he writes in the throes of the zeitgeist.

I enjoyed this most when the story dealt with him moving around, his family, and basic sex. It was least entertaining when the narrator when on tangents analyzing art and detailing fisting sessions. Not *entertaining*, per-say, but super enlightening were the conversations around politics, social movements, and war. These up the relevance and educational value of the work for those Americans who, like me, don’t get these kinds of foreign criticisms and insights in our public classrooms.

The most impressive thing here is the book’s discussions of artistry and it’s willingness to forge its own narrative path as a way of exemplifying those discussions.

[Inge Frank · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the interplay of cultural references, the analysis of porn and sexual safety. It was very fun to read about fisting in so much detail.
I was a little bit sad about the part that included Genet though, it made the book feel like a 'story', even though it is a story it feels like a biography and that part felt a bit too fantastical in comparison to the rest. I had that feeling a couple of times, but in general I liked it!

[Kris · Rating 3 out of 5]

A coming-of-age story about a young man from the American Midwest who moves to Los Angeles in the mid-1980s. The book contains some explicit descriptions of "alternative" sex acts (not sure what Goodreads will allow, so I won't say what sex acts are described) but the story is really more about blazing one's own trail instead of doing what "the world" expects of you.
An interesting side note - I read this shortly after reading John Fante's "Ask the Dust", which is also a coming-of-age story about a young man moving to Los Angeles. Fante's book is set quite a bit earlier, and is not nearly as explicit, but I could definitely see similarities.

[Michael Dipietro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jones has a lot of interesting ideas and political perspective. He makes no claims for the sex here to be anything other than pornography, and it's hot. Not the best writing style though, a little stiff.

[George Neville-Neil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fast moving and clever writing the book is packed with intelligent observations of a world that is both past and present.

[Jesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Seriously filthy book with high literary and political aspirations for itself that ultimately get in the way. Too many scenes of one character giving a lecture, historical or otherwise. Too little sense of connecting with the characters as real, whole people. That can be done in a book this dirty, but it doesn’t happen much here. And even if you’re just going to sell it on the merits of how truly smutty it is, at least throw in a bit more plot and conflict, fewer self-conscious cultural references, so it moves along a bit.

[Ingmar · Rating 4 out of 5]

There’s a lot of focus on the explicit content in this book, to the detriment of the rest of its themes. I’m Open to Anything is a wonderful exploration of someone who is curious about the entire world around him. Each kinky scene is balanced out by a dive into complex themes such as religion, geo politics, aesthetics, family ties and racism. Think Bret Easton-Ellis and Dennis Cooper in a dark doom, with Donna Tartt watching on apathetically.

[Callum Jurisic · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want to try fisting

[Jays · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really went back and forth on this one. I don't think it's bad. I suppose it just doesn't have a lot of heft to it. By which I mean the author is clearly writing about his own experience, which I have no doubt is meaningful to him, but he doesn't quite find a way to make it meaningful to the reader. He's writing a coming of age story about leaving a sheltered existence and having an adult awakening, one particularly informed by sex. That's well-trod ground, but not so well that it can't still be mined for an interesting story, particularly given that the kind of sex he wakes to is kinky gay sex.

The problem I kept having was that the book is sort of betraying both of its declared premises, those being an examination of the underseen Los Angeles gay kink scene in the era just before gentrification AND a straight up down and dirty porno novel. In both cases, the author introduces the topics but kinda quits halfway in. We never really get an understanding of what a pre-gentrified LA looks and feels like from the eyes of gay kinksters in the early 90s. We only meet two or three of them total. And while we get several graphic fisting scenes, there's really nothing else about kink in this. Even the fisting scenes themselves have a bit of a "and then they were hit by a bus" approach with no real pacing or tension building - just a rote description of how deep an arm makes it in followed by a "and then he orgasmed".

Add this to the fact that author's opinion of himself is clearly quite high and his contempt for other people who don't live up to his standards and it makes for a story that just doesn't ever deliver on anything. It's competently written, and clearly written from a perspective of someone wanting to tell this story about their life, but there's little to no narrative throughline, no sense of character development, and no real sense of atmosphere. He's recounting the events without giving them context or theme. It's too bad because there's a real concept in here that he just never manages to bring out.

[Andrew Marshall · Rating 4 out of 5]

A gay coming of age story from the late eighties and early nineties, 'I'm open to everything' is supposedly a novel but I would guess that it is heavily autobiographical. The narrator comes from the crumbling industrial wasteland of the Midwest and draws a circle of 500 miles around his hometown and blacks in everything in the circle so he is not tempted to not move far enough away from home. The story is about how he leaves his family - not just physically, emotionally and intellectually - which is often par for the course with growing up gay but by joining the sexual underworld (and becoming an outcast from polite gay society too).

The book worked on many levels for me. It introduced me to LA in a period I didn't know (and I was amazed at how what seems like a relatively recent era has become history ie: video rental stores and AIDS being a killer). I loved the distinctive voice of the narrator and his unexpected opinions. It also introduced me to real life characters like porn star Fred Halstead - of whom Jones has written a biography.

My only complaint is that 'I'm open to anything' is quite short and I would liked to have spent more time with the narrator - especially as the ending leaves us sort of hanging.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am seriously ambivalent about this book. I cannot ascertain exactly what it was the author desired to impart, and the hook of fisting seems to me to be altogether missing of any psychological refrain from which the reader can have a discernment above and beyond the subjectivity of this act, which in the author's purview reads as a distant and detached drive-by, disengaged from the intimate interaction of which he describes in beige overtones. He offers deeply psychological responses from one of his partners, resultant of the shared act, but gives very little of his own. It is an unsexy, plainspoken meandering through what I take to be a "coming-of-age" apotheosis from a young man who doesn't seem interested in anything more than leaving his hometown behind as his sole goal of intent, and from which no further map has been dreamed up or considered. I dislike enormously that I am so ambivalent about an author who clearly has my attention (from other writings, video-works, and the like), but from who in writing "I'm Open to Anything," I found no distillation of self-discovery from which I can then investigate myself further, which most specifically is what I experientially seek from any artworks I engage with.

[Dan · Rating 2 out of 5]

This has been on my shelf for a bit. I bought my copy from a bookstore in silverlake lol. I was very interested in reading this because the description made me think I had found an author similar to Dennis Cooper. In some ways, there are similarities, but it never grabbed me as Cooper’s books do. The constant name dropping of people of importance was okay at first, then it became annoying displays of narcissistic intellectualism. It reminded me of a date I went on with a pornstached white boy that valued knowing intellectual talking points over art itself. It’s not genuine love for knowledge, it’s a power play. I enjoyed the book when it became more about the feelings around sex/fisting, especially with Daniel’s views on why he enjoys it. The relationships between the characters were interesting enough for me to finish the book in one sitting, but I’m unfortunately disappointed. Now that I know what to expect, maybe I’ll enjoy the second book a lot more.

[Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

A slim novel packed full. There's so much here: anti-imperialism; LA; fisting.

I was half way through when I realized it was a novel not memoir, which made me a tougher critic. In scenes with 3-4 other characters, the narrator inserts these mini-lectures on a topic--often one raised first by their conversation partner--that over the top didactic if you are looking for a genuine representation of conversation. Or, maybe it's totally real and you are supposed to read the character as not very self aware and a little condescending. However--at least politically--I liked everything the narrator had to say. I ended up settling into reading this as it if were some modern day religious parable text, where the wise, all knowing narrator was thrown in with real people to generate plot and give you space to absorb the ideas without reading the "lessons" straight (I should say queer).

[Tyler Tousley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall pretty good. Easy read and easy for gay men to relate to. The 2 things I didn't love were that the main character seemed very pompous - for example, he thought being a gay man and growing up in a small midwestern town and not liking sports made him incredibly unique and somehow better than those in his town who enjoyed sports. That kind of mood is held throughout. It is also primarily about fisting. So really "I'm open to fisting" would have been a more accurate title.
Despite all this I did enjoy reading this and it was an easy, quick, and engaging read.

[Alec Mendoza · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5✨

Realmente fue un muy buen libro, me gustó que no solo fuera algo completamente sexual sino que se involucrara la cultura pop, queer, cosas culturales y sociales.
Llegó un punto por el final en el que sentía la trama muy perdida y eso no terminó de encantarme pero en general fue un muy buen libro