This post was submitted by Neil Plakcy, a gay mystery novel writer who will be holding a reading at Lambda Rising in May. He shares here a story of two books and two magazines that changed his life.
When I was in the 10th grade at Charles Boehm Senior High in Yardley, Pennsylvania, my English teacher, Mr. Norman Haider, gave our class an assignment that changed my life.
The book he assigned us was A Separate Peace, by John Knowles, about the friendship between two boys at a New England prep school during World War II. The book came at just the right time for me; I was that age, and desperately wanted a friend like that, a soul mate. I didn’t know at the time that I wanted a sexual relationship with another man—it would have been enough to have that close connection to someone else. To compound the impact, the movie version of the book came out that year, with John Heyl as Finny and Parker Stevenson as Gene.
Our assignment, once we’d read the book, which is written from Gene’s point of view, was to rewrite it from Finny’s. We gaped at Mr. Haider open-mouthed. He expected us to write a whole novel? He explained we just had to think about the difference in point of view and write something—as little as a page—which encapsulated our opinion of how the book would change.
I loved that assignment, as much as I loved that book. It showed me that writing was a way to approach the ideas that mattered to me, and that is something I have carried with me for the last thirty-three years.
I found the next piece of reading material that shaped me in the bottom drawer of my father’s bureau. Sometime when I was in high school, my father served on jury duty. I imagine he was bored sitting there, and stopped at a bookstore somewhere for reading material, which he brought home and stashed in that drawer.
I don’t know if he knew I snooped through his bureau and his night table. I tried to be careful, putting everything back just the way I found it. When I discovered this new stash of magazines, I eagerly pawed through them.
There was a Penthouse Forum, filled with letters about intimate sexual details. A copy of Gallery, with explicit photos of men and women having sex. But the most interesting one was a women’s porn magazine called Viva. I’d never seen anything like it. The photo layout featured a soap opera actor, naked, standing ankle deep in the ocean off some deserted beach. The headline read something like, “John Brown going down to the sea without ships.”
I hadn’t read John Masefield by then and didn’t recognize the source of the quote. But those photos electrified me in a way I found thrilling and scary. I was a near-sighted kid, wearing glasses since third grade. When it came time to shower in gym class, I could barely find my way from the locker to the showers and back without my glasses. Other than my father, I had never gotten a good look at a naked man—certainly not such a handsome one, with shoulder-length blonde hair, ripped abs, and a penis that hung out in all its splendor.
If I wasn’t sure how to react to those pictures, my dick sure knew how. It popped straight up, the first time I opened that magazine, and every time thereafter. Whoever that actor was, he gave me a lot of pleasure!
I read the second book that mattered to me a few years later, sometime in the late 1970s. I was at the Lambertville Flea Market with my parents, browsing through a bin of paperbacks with their front covers ripped off. I later learned that bookstores would rip the front covers off, and send them back to the publishers for a refund, then sell the coverless books at a deep discount. It was a way of cheating the publishers. But all I knew then was that there were tons of paperbacks for a dime or a quarter apiece.
I picked up David Kopay’s autobiography and my heart quickened. He was a retired pro football player, and he was gay. And he’d had sex with other football players, and other masculine men. In the time it took me to hand the bookseller my dime, my world view changed. Previously, I’d thought only effeminate men were homosexuals. I didn’t see myself that way, and I wasn’t attracted to guys like that—like Liberace and Paul Lynde and the pair of antique dealers my parents occasionally bought things from, who had a shop on the upper level of the flea market. When I’d whine about how long my parents took in their shop, one would say, “Kid, go play in traffic.”
But if David Kopay was gay, then that stereotype wasn’t totally true. At home, I read the book through, then again. It was like the ground was shaking under my feet.
I didn’t go to the X-rated bookstore on Biscayne Boulevard too often, maybe once every couple of months to pick up a magazine or two. I liked buying the coverless ones they had shrink-wrapped; I didn’t care if they were last month’s or last year’s magazines, as long as the pictures looked appealing and they had a couple of stories I could read.
I was mostly attracted to the fiction, anyway, and I knew which magazines had the best stories. One day about three years ago I picked up a package which had two magazines back-to-back, faced out. When I got it home, though, I discovered there was a third magazine sandwiched in between, one I’d never seen before, called Bear.
It was black and white, printed on cheap paper, but it opened a door to a whole side of the gay experience I never knew existed. Bears are gay men who don’t look like our traditional image: they are often heavy-set and hairy, with bears and mustaches as well. They have their own complicated code of “woofiness”, ranking bears, otters (slimmer, hairy guys like me) and cubs, young guys who are attracted to bears.
They also profess an attitude that is very different, one of acceptance and solidarity. The men they profile in the magazine are usually solid citizens with jobs, hobbies and social lives. They could be anyone you’d meet on the street or at the grocery store.
The photo layouts were a particular revelation to me. Big, fat guys, their bellies protruding out, photographed as if they were fashion models, their weight and their hairiness eroticizing them. Bears were photographed kissing and hugging each other, demonstrating their appeal and sexuality.
I didn’t particularly find them attractive. What did strike me, though, was that there had to be a lot of men out there who liked that look, or else there wouldn’t be a market for the magazine, and its offshoots in calendars, bars, baseball caps and lapel pins. That meant, I was able to intuit, that there were probably guys out there who would find me attractive.
You’d think that wouldn’t be a big step to take, but given the images that surround us in the gay press, it’s reasonable to assume that everyone has the same tastes, with minor modifications, and that in order to be the object of anyone’s desire you had to be handsome, buffed and below a certain age limit. Bears, on the other hand, could be fat, fifty, out of shape, tattooed, pierced or whatever, and someone, somewhere, would find that erotic.
Two books and two magazines that changed my life. And who knows what I’ll read tomorrow.
Reading with Neil Plakcy, Anthony Bidulka & Mark Richard Zubro, Tuesday May 13, Lambda Rising Bookstore, 1625 Connecticut Ave. NW, 202-462-6969
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