JOHN CORIOLAN SUMS IT UP IN PERSON
LINKS: Dancing on the Barricades ( Novel,
Print and e-Book)
A Sand Fortress
(Novel e-Book)
Christy Dancing
(Novel e-Book)
Dream Stud
(E-Book Short stories
The Smile of
Eros (Novel e-Book)
Unzipped
(Novella e-Book and
AND NEWLY WRITTEN BY THE MASTER!!
Of This World and the Other (New
2005 Novel e-Book)
Country Boys
Aristocrat
The Destiny of Bobby (Joyboy) Baynes
[ A Sand Fortress |
Christy Dancing | The
Smile of Eros | Of This World and the
Other ] [ Unzipped (entire volume)
]
[ Dream Stud and Other Stories |
Country Boys ] [
Aristocrat | The
Destiny of Bobby (Joyboy) Baynes ]
I, as ‘John Coriolan', wrote A
SAND FORTRESS in 1967, based on a Fire Island event I'd heard about,
and in defiance of the ‘decencies' which Rechy's popular novel about
a gay hustler, CITY OF NIGHT, had not flouted.. It took my agent a
year to find a publisher bold enough to publish my thoroughly explicit script
but when A SAND FORTRESS was put out in1968,with ‘the
most penetrating and perceptive novel ever published' on its cover, it sold
two hundred thousand copies—in bus stations, drug stores, supermarkets
and Barnes and Nobles book stores. Meanwhile, Richard Amory's idyllic SONG
OF THE LOON about Indians and white pioneer-males and explicit, too,
and Sam Steward's hustler ‘Phil Andros' explicit but literary stories
were being published. The next year, 1969, Gordon Merrick's explicit THE
LORD WON'T MIND, which , like my A SAND FORTRESS, was about
gay life in New York before the Stonewall Riot, and the epic madness of the
Woodstock week-end, came out—in hard covers! and it made the official
Best Sellers List!
I had known Merrick for years; I became friends with
Steward and ‘Amory' (we were never a self-conscious Lavender Quill Group)
and, in the early '70s, with fellow Olympia Press authors, Carl
Flinders—who wrote a series of popular "Twelve Inches" novels—and
Marco Vassi, who wrote lyrically of his bisexual experiences. Olympia published
my story-collection SEVEN WAYS FROM SUNDAY just as they went
bankrupt. At the adjudication, a man bought the Olympia warehouse and burned
the books stored there for distribution; he just wanted the space.
Ex-Olympia editor Frances Green, as Renaissance House,
put out a 1000 copy edition of my new Fire Island Pines-in-1973 novel,
THREE WEEKS IN JULY; it was reprinted by Grey Fox Press of
San Francisco in 1984, as CHRISTY DANCING. When Black friends
ask why I never write about Black characters, I remind them that the Krishna-like
central character ‘Christy' is black, a popular gay novelist and a
ex-Broadway star-dancer. My private life has been quite "inclusive"; so have
my fictions. Physical variations are seldom made remarkable—except for
cock-size; there's an XXL cock central to every novel and story I write;
they interest me and my readers know to expect finding one or several big,
enticing ones in any ‘Coriolan opus'. Their action is set in a wide
variety of places and the changes Time brings are duly noted too, I hope.
Winston Leyland of Gay Sunshine Press published—and
distributed!—my second story-collection, UNZIPPED, in
1983, with seven of Tom of Finland's most popular drawings in it, uncropped,
and on its cover, cropped. I'd corresponded with ‘Tom'-Touko for years.
I sometimes sent him sketches of men I thought interesting and he sometimes
produced drawings based on these sketches in this unique style. He'd even
given me one of his drawings; a copy of it is among those in the book, the
one with the cop. UNZIPPED included the novella "The E-V,"
which I suspect helped make male stripping not just a popular gay-voyeuristic
pleasure but a semi-legitimate business. A major character in it is black
factory-boss and super-hung show-off "Carl Whitney" whom the narrator loves,
‘appreciates' ecstatically. As who would not??
UNZIPPED also offers the story of a Great Beauty who tires
of being a Famous Gay Lust-Object; also, the case of a merry and generous
employee making life lovely for several less lucky fellow-workers, and the
case of a Special Male allowing a friend to do what he so enjoyed doing once
before. I enjoy telling about odd but credible psychological twists, especially
those anyone may encounter and find mystifying.
In 1984 Leyland published THE SMILE OF
EROS. my ‘romance-novel for gay males', which was set in some
large US city, but not in a metropolis like New York, L.A., Boston,
Chicago—perhaps in Indianapolis, Kansas City, Denver? and not in a Gay
Mecca. After all, lasting liaisons between married men of forty and charming
young males of twenty-two do happen there, too…even if the older man
is not super-endowed and the younger is not an artist. And a local professor
doesn't get together occasionally all the biggest-hung males he knows for
a private frolic. Which frolic includes of course several black males and
a porn-star on acid.
Leyland followed it with reprint of A SAND
FORTRESS, for which I wrote an additional chapter which brought it
up to date…expectably but amusingly, I presumed. One of gorgeous-hero
"Mike Kincade's" college-roommate-lovers has married and has a grown son,
who, with his father, his mother, and his fiancée, goes to see a touring
production of Noel Coward's giddy comedy, "Design for Living". In it, Mike
and another actor gaily strip bare, with big ones a-flopping. When they all
meet backstage, the son is not turned on, and neither is his father! More
human psychology: one fervid gay romance does not a Committed Queer make!
Change happens. Get used to it!
In 1985 Leyland also published another volume of my stories,
DREAM STUD, eight stories, two of them set in New York bars,
others in a Deep South used furniture store, in a Key West restaurant, in
a L.A. motel, a college dormitory-room, a Long Island Railway car, a New
York opera-house dressing-room. One had a woman as a major character, three
others had women as minor characters. All the males involved were gay or
probably gay but one was ‘straight'—he just enjoyed showing off
and even jacking off for an excited admirer of it. A few of the males
were ‘African-American'; several were Latino; two were Hungarian. Inclusive,
but ‘as needed.'
For several years, a new, young and I supposed ‘hungry'
agent misrepresented me and failed to show several of my ‘cross-over'
scripts to anyone—scripts for four novels in which overtly gay characters
mingled with adamantly straight characters—erotic activities seldom
a major issue…as in Iris Murdock's novels and as in almost no US novels,
not even Roth's, Bellow's, nor Faulkner's. Strangely perhaps, Hemingway did
include gay characters in at least two of his novels, and Thornton Wilder,
in his early "Bridge of San Luis Rey," at least hinted broadly. Yukio Mishima
was one of the few highly respected authors of the 1980s who made explicit
his characters' same-gender erotic interests, as, in films, did Pasolini,
Fassbinder, ‘Rosa Paulein' and Greenaway. Three ‘romance pot-boilers'
that I submitted directly to an editor-friend at Harlequin Books were refused
‘because the heroes were not perfect from the first page'! I swore off
writing! For years.
Recently, Bill Warner of GLB Publishers has begun offering
many of my novels and stories, including a new one DANCING ON THE
BARRICADES, about a ‘mostly-gay' dance troupe touring the US
and into Mexico and Canada, who find that they are being used to ‘cover'
fund-raising for an ambitious professor-politician who hopes to be the first
President of the Planet. Does this suggest anyone to you? Each episode of
the tour is told about by a different member of the group. It's odd but FUN!
This book is available both in print and as an e-Book. Although some of the
early books may still be available in print editions, they are being revived
by Warner as e-books on this web site as well as at
< www.GLBpubs.com >.
and as Collection
e-Book)
6 Short Stories as e-Books)