About 'Still Dancing'

Still Dancing collects twenty of my short stories about the impact of AIDS on the gay community written over the last three decades. Ten are from my 1993 collection Dancing on the Moon and ten are more recently written, and for this new collection I've chosen stories that revolve around gay New Yorkers — those lost, those surviving, those displaced, those undaunted, and those who became expatriates.

I’ve been a New Yorker now for thirty years. I arrived in 1978 after graduating from Emory University in Atlanta and lived in a small and expensive apartment in the West Village that I could barely afford. In my early years in Manhattan, I worked as a telephone operator, a legal proofreader, and an entertainment publicist, sometimes all in the same day. Many of my early AIDS stories were inspired from my experiences with my friend Kevin Patterson when he became ill with AIDS. Kevin was a playwright (A Most Secret War) and a theater publicist (he worked at the Public for many years). “Winter Coats,” the story in the collection about two friends shopping for a winter coat — one who is struggling with AIDS — was written after an outing with Kevin. The tale of the two friends with AIDS sharing an impromptu cab ride around Manhattan in “Reunions” was a story I pieced together while I was with friends at a diner on Ninth Avenue after Kevin’s memorial service. The details of “What They Carried” are drawn from my actual experiences while caring for Kevin when he became ill with AIDS — the overwhelming things I and his other friends physically carried to and from his hospital room and his apartment in his final days. In the process, we created our own community, network, family, and support group. This story was written during the week following Kevin’s death as part of my grieving process. It is one of the most truthful stories I have ever written, and is as close to being nonfiction as it is fiction. I always approached this story as a sort of personal therapy and a story I had to tell, not a story that would ever be published. Even though I wrote this story when I was thirty-two years old, it is still the story of a “young man.” At the time, I had only had published two short stories with gay themes and a handful of essays on being gay — and felt I was still learning how to write fiction. (This story is also one of the few works that I have written that I cannot be objective about because it holds so much truth for me. And it is one of the handful of things that I have written that can instantly bring me to tears when I pick it up to read it again.) Since this story is also collected in a writing textbook that is used at several colleges, I still get e-mails from students and find that I revisit the story many times during the course of a year.

My early AIDS stories were published in Dancing on the Moon thanks to my friendship with David Feinberg (author of Eighty-Sixed), who showed my stories to his editor, Ed Iwanicki, at Viking. David and I were in a Gay Writers Workshop together back in the mid-1980s that met regularly in the members’ homes and our friendship continued up until his death in 1994. My friendship with David is also reflected in the story “The Chelsea Rose,” which opens Still Dancing, though David and I never lived in the same building. “The Chelsea Rose,” along with “Manhattan Transfer,” is one of the more recently written stories in the new collection, about the history of the inhabitants of a Chelsea apartment building, depicting the migratory path of its residents and the deep devastation the epidemic left on a generation of gay men. “The Chelsea Rose” begins in the late '70s, just as I did in Manhattan. “Manhattan Transfer” takes one of the marginal characters in “The Chelsea Rose” and focuses on him twenty-five years later, as he grapples with surviving the epidemic, being HIV-positive, and looking to give a new meaning to his life.

I do draw inspiration from my own life for my fiction — though I am not usually a “true character” in my stories — and I’ve always felt that the issues AIDS summons up — loss, grief, illness, death, among the early ones — needed to be discussed and included in gay fiction. I thought the exodus of many gay men from the city to go back to their families needed to be detailed — which was part of the genesis of “Montebello View,” about the separation of two lovers. The gay community in New York has always been on the cutting edge in shaping the national culture — in fashion, theater, advertising, and art, for instance — and I wanted to show the impact of ACT UP beyond the national news reports and the local chapters springing up — which was how “Civil Disobedience” came about, about two teenagers in a small Southern town mirroring an ACT UP demonstration. I thought sero-discordant dating was an important topic that also needed to be addressed, which is why “Fearless” was written. And these early “issues” changed with the advent of protease inhibitors and drug cocktail medication therapy in the mid-1990s — and these issues also needed to be presented in gay fiction. “Health” was the first story I wrote after this shift, about a man with AIDS suddenly restored to health and wondering what to do next. Like “What You Talk About” and “Fearless,” “Someone Like You” is a dating story, but this one, written in the third decade of the epidemic, reflects the easing of the divide that had separated sero-discordant partners as HIV infection became more medically manageable. And this shift in important issues becomes so wide that the satirical letter writer in “Do I Know You,” RSVPing to a gay wedding invitation, must remind himself of how far he has traveled in his gay life. And one of the new issues that I find that I am dealing with as an aging gay man is sentimentality — which is reflected in the title story, “Still Dancing,” about a gay man who must continue to pull himself out of his apartment and experience his life. It is based on a desire to revisit my Southern roots while learning how to two-step, and was inspired by the dance classes which were held at the Lesbian and Gay Center in the West Village in the mid-1990s and sponsored by a group of expatriates called the Southerners.

The gorgeous photograph that is being used on the cover of Still Dancing was also taken by a New Yorker—Matt Chapin, who is a member of the NYC Photo Club, which meets regularly at the LGBT Center in the Village, and which was where I spotted Matt’s work on exhibit this summer as I was assembling my AIDS stories into a new book.

I am grateful to the editors, publishers, readers, and fellow writers who helped shape these stories. Along with Ed Iwanicki and David Feinberg, I am most indebted to Anne H. Wood and Brian Keesling, who have weighed in on all my writing. Anne and Brian and I met via a writing workshop we took together at the Writers Voice at the uptown West Side YMCA back in the mid-1980s. David Leavitt was our moderator/leader/mentor/guide. Brian and Anne and I have been getting together ever since then—now approaching something like 25 years—to have dinner and critique our latest scribblings and would-be manuscripts.I have also been blessed by working with Hermann Lademann on Where the Rainbow Ends, and Kevin Bentley and Andrew McBeth on Desire, Lust, Passion, Sex, and their imprints can be found in Still Dancing, along with those of Sean Meriwether, Lawrence Schimel, Darryl Pilcher, Robert Drake, David Bergman, Greg Wharton, Ian Philips, David Waggoner, Jay Quinn, and Martin Tucker. Special thanks are also due to Arch Brown and his foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Anne-Laure Hubert and Olivier Gainon of CyLibris, who brought my AIDS stories to a French-speaking audience, and especially to Steve Berman of Lethe Press, who has given me—and many other gay writers—a new home for our works when it is most needed.

About "The Bloomsbury Nudes"

My short story, “The Bloomsbury Nudes,” is now available in Unspeakable Horror: Shadows from the Closet, edited by Vince Liaguno and Chad Helder and featuring stories by other gay writers such as Rick Reed, Lee Thomas, and Kevin Reardon.

“The Bloomsbury Nudes” is a tale of overlapping relationships centering around the artist Clive Elliott and his companion, dancer Jared Tremain. Clive, in his youth, had posed for the Bloomsbury artist Duncan Grant, who privately passed around his nude sketches to his friends like party treats.

Here is some background on how I came to write the story.

In 1988, on the death of a close friend, I came into possession of several Bloomsbury artifacts — correspondence of Lytton Strachey, a sketch by Dora Carrington, and a drawing by Duncan Grant. I knew more of Virginia Woolf than I did of these other Bloomsbury folks, but over the course of many years more knowledge seeped in and my appreciation for these artists deepened. I had always been intrigued by Duncan Grant, an openly gay artist, and was particularly impressed by his nude sketches that I had seen in a catalog published by the Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London.

I learned more about these nude drawings through the writings of Douglas Blair Turnbaugh, particularly Duncan Grant and the Bloomsbury Group, published in 1987, as well as from the advent of the Internet and the exhibits and information on the artist available through the Leslie/Lohman Gallery in New York and Adonis Art of London. For years I had toyed with the idea of creating a fictional backstory of the men who had posed for these sketches, and I researched quite a bit on who they might have been. When I sat down in 2007 to write this story, I was influenced by a lot of the horror anthologies I was reading at the time, and I decided it was apropos to have a young artist be one of Duncan Grant’s nude models, and that’s how I came to the character of Clive Elliott. It was also during this writing process that I decided to overlap the influences of Aleister Crowley, another legendary British fellow whose life and career and writings had always intrigued me. In the story, Clive Elliott, Jared Tremaine, Bart Pearson, Roger Sage, and Teddy Rushton are all fictional characters and Crowley’s link and association with the men of the Bloomsbury group is purely from my own speculation.

"The Learning Curve" in Nine Hundred & Sixty-Nine

Nine Hundred & Sixty-Nine: West Hollywood Stories, edited by Stephen Soucy, and published by the new Modernist Press, is now in bookstores and includes my short story “The Learning Curve,” about the struggling relationship of two gay men torn between wanting to be actors and making a living as waiters in Los Angeles. The story was inspired by friends I knew when I worked in the theater as an entertainment press agent many years ago.

The anthology also features stories by John Morgan Wilson, Ben Scuglia, Rakesh Satyal, Joe Symon, Kyle T. Wilson, Max Pierce, Timothy State, Alex Roberts, Felice Picano, Shaun Levin, Paul D. Cain, Frank Bua, and Stephen Soucy.

I’ve also lived in Los Angeles twice as a boy — for a year in Van Nuys and a summer on Sepulveda Boulevard. I visited the city many times as an adult — several trips for research for the final section of my novel Where the Rainbow Ends, as well as celebrating my fortieth birthday (also, many years ago…) in a penthouse suite at the St. James Hotel (now the Sunset Tower) on Sunset Boulevard, courtesy of a generous boyfriend.

A Bookstore Tourist

This October I took a cruise to the Mediterranean, visiting Venice, Dubrovnik, Santorini, Corfu, and Ephesus (in Turkey). The weather was gorgeous, as was the scenery, and the overall experience was very interesting and relaxing (and which was what I needed). The highlight of my trip, however, was my final day in Paris because of a stopover flight — a bright, sunny Sunday afternoon crowded with Parisians strolling arm and arm through the streets. I walked through the Marais till I found Rue Ste Croix de la Bretonnerie, where I was relieved to discover that Les Mots à la Bouche, the gay bookstore was open. I was tired from the flights and my stamina isn’t what it used to be, and I wedged my way through the aisles looking at titles, searching for books that might be familiar to me in their English editions. And there, face out on the shelves with the other works, was Les Fantômes, the French translation of my AIDS stories by Anne-Laure Hubert that French publisher Cylibris had published in late 2005. I’d seen the edition before; I have several copies and have given many as gifts to friends. But I had never seen the book in a bookstore.

It’s hard to explain this sort of thrill to someone who hasn’t had the experience of seeing their writing displayed in a bookstore. It’s immensely gratifying and awesome and exhilarating, probably like what an architect might feel standing in front of his completed building, particularly if you have spent years and years, as I do, writing a book, struggling with the plots and characters and themes and then trying to find a publisher who was willing to release it out into the world. I remember the first time I saw a book of mine in a bookstore — it was the winter of 1993, late February, and I was temping at a job on Park Avenue in Manhattan. My first collection of short stories had been accepted more than two years before by Viking, but because of a recession and a company freeze on signing contracts with new authors, the book was not slated for publication until that spring. The store was a small Barnes and Noble outlet, situated on a corner of one of the high-rising glass skyscrapers on Park Avenue near Grand Central Station. I hadn’t expected to find my book so soon in a store. I was on a lunch break, escaping my desk where I had eaten a sandwich because I was too poor to afford the neighborhood restaurants. It was a winter I could barely even afford to take the subway. I had stepped out of the cold into the bookstore, thinking I might look at a magazine or find a title I might later be able to get from the public library, before I headed back to my dismal job, where, at the time, I was typing up the license plates of cars and trucks that had been abandoned and were sitting in a lot in Queens. And there, in the store on a shelf with the rest of the fiction, were five copies of Dancing on the Moon. The first sight of them remains one of the happiest moments of my life, particularly when I correlate it with the unfortunate experiences and deaths from AIDS of the friends who inspired those stories.

That spring and the following one were full of similar thrills. My book found its way into the windows of Brentano’s on Fifth Avenue and B. Dalton’s in the West Village on Eighth Street. I did readings and signings for the first time — including at Lambda Rising in Washington, D.C and Glad Day in Boston, among other stores. I’m not a widely bought or distributed author and the press runs of my books haven’t been the kind to impress any kind of bestseller list, but I’ve now seen my books in an airport bookshop (in New Orleans), in foreign bookstores (also at Word is Out, the gay bookstore in the Bloomsbury district of London, where I was on the shelves with many of my friends’ books), and part of a suggested reading list posted at a university bookstore. And even now, fifteen or so years later, I still get a thrill discovering something I have written in a store, even if it is a used copy of my novel, Where the Rainbow Ends, in the second-hand bookstore in my hometown, north of Atlanta.

Hopefully as you get older and wiser, you discover things about yourself that keep you happy. I have been fortunate to have taken some amazing trips during the last two decades — many due to the generosity of friends — and I’ve learned that I find great joy in being a bookstore tourist. Some people go to museums or sporting events or concerts or restaurants when they travel. I love to hunt for books — and, for the record, not for just my own. I search out local ghost story anthologies, local gay history books, local literary journals and magazines, unusual translations, and all sorts of novels and fiction by both mainstream publishers and small presses. Of all the bookstores I've been to, some other memorable experiences stand out — a deja-vous experience at the Haunted Bookshop in Cambridge (realizing I had already been there decades before with a friend who was now deceased), a boulevard in Pisa, Italy, lined with bookstores, store after store after store, with bins of books outside in the bright sun, the same with Galway, Ireland and the Shinjuku district of Tokyo. I remember the first time I walked into City Lights bookstore in San Francisco and didn’t want to leave because the friend I was with wanted to go elsewhere. I can still spend hours wandering along Charing Cross while many of my other friends are out at the theater. And I’ve often thought I might one day retire to Napa, California — on my last visit there a few years ago I counted more than four bookstores within blocks of each other. I'm not ready for that yet, though. (I still have a few more years left...) And first I'd like to find that town in Wales where there's nothing but bookstores.

"The Bloomsbury Nudes" forthcoming in Unspeakable Horror

My short story "The Bloomsbury Nudes" is forthcoming in December in the Dark Scribe Press anthology, Unspeakable Horror: Shadows from the Closet, edited by Vince Liaguno and Chad Helder.

The Dark Scribe folks have posted an online Q&A with me about the story here.

And they have also released a book trailer here. Enjoy!

"Wait!" - A new ghost story now online at Velvet Mafia

Happy Halloween! My ghost story, “Wait!,” about an unexpected encounter in the parking lot outside of a nightclub, is now online at Velvet Mafia through December 31, 2008. "Wait!" is one of a dozen stories that are now part of The Haunted Heart and Other Tales, a collection of gay-themed ghost stories that I have been working on for the past six years.

Some background on this ghost story: After reading several horror anthologies and ghost story encyclopedias, I decided that I wanted to write a gay version of “the phantom hitchhiker” legend and I began writing this story in 2002. I was never satisfied with the original ending I had created — I had the story end after Clay’s visit to Lisa Braden’s house — and I let the story sit unfinished for several years. Then, when I finally sat down to revise the story, I realized that the story did not end at Lisa’s and that Clay’s search for the meaning of the haunting should continue for many years, and that the phantoms Clay witnesses are not a random encounter or his own haunting, but belonged to Mitch, the guy he had originally tried to pick up at the club.

Best Gay Stories 2008 Now Available

Best Gay Stories 2008, edited by Steve Berman, is now out and includes my short story “Someone Like You.”

"Someone Like You" was originally published in The Mammoth Book of New Gay Erotica, edited by Lawrence Schimel.

“Someone Like You” was written in 2006. Lawrence Schimel, who has used many of my stories in several of his anthologies, including my story “Trust” in his prior The Mammoth Book of Gay Erotica, selected “Someone Like You” from several new short stories that I sent him to consider. The story is about a forty-year-old gay man who has two boyfriends and an “office wife.”

Lawrence, an admirable and prolific editor and author, currently lives in Madrid and blogs at http://desayunoencama.livejournal.com/. And, as an interesting aside, Lawrence and I share the same birthday — October 16 (though I am somewhat older than Lawrence). And two other gay authors who also share that same birth date are Oscar Wilde and Paul Monette.