Skip to main content"Gay men are the new puritans," says Dan Cullinane. "We've spent so much time trying to convince straight people that we don't have sex, we've become completely terrified to admit it--even to ourselves."
Cullinane says he finds public portrayals of gay people really boring. Which is particularly interesting, considering his job as the marketing manager for Alyson Books, an L.A.-based queer publisher. "What separates the gays from the straights is our sex," Cullinane says. "People have forgotten that."
Well, not if Straight? Volume 2 can help it.
The marketing guy calls his company's new anthology what it is--porn--while a more PC term might be "erotic anthology." Whatever it's called, the anthology slashes its way through a Penthouse Forum-style collection of short stories, fictions in which dudes who don't identify themselves as homosexual end up having sex with guys who do. Like all the best gay literature, the book is sex-obsessed--and it couldn't have been published at a better time.
After a summer of televised homo hoopla, SV2 revels in the dirty little secret that lies just beneath the surface of the season's sanitized hype. Truth is, gay and straight men hit it off long before the Queer Eye guys got their hands on anyone. And even back then, homos weren't just helping straight guys organize their sock drawers.
In this town, like in most towns, there's a long history of gay and straight men having sex. As far back as 1912, Portland was rocked by a gay scandal at the local YMCA, according to Peter Boag's Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest. Today, you only have to look as far as your local adult bookstore to find plenty of so-called straight guys--married, with children--testing the same same-sex waters.
Taking a page from real Portland life, that's where Portlander Charlie Vazquez sets "Angelic Snot," his first-ever publication. Flip to page 156 of SV2 to read Vazquez's story, which takes place almost entirely behind the closed doors of an adult-bookstore video booth.
I won't reveal what the "snot" refers to, but I will say that Vazquez's story touches upon almost every stereotype in queer culture, including drugs, drag queens and tattoos. All the while, his story plugs away at the ultimate gay guy's fantasy: having hot sex with a straight man.
After all the work of gay men everywhere to come out of the communal closet, reading this story raises an important issue, one queers rarely acknowledge to outsiders. The gay men in these fictions seem more than happy to jump out of the closet and into the porn booth.
Vazquez seems to understand this cultural taboo. The 32-year-old self-described computer nerd and part-time club photographer says his story was based on his own experience. In the "real" version, though, the story takes place in an apartment, not in a bookstore. Even a budding porn writer, it seems, has problems admitting that he might frequent those places.
"I think the whole experience is a raw sexual fantasy come true," Vazquez says. "I think it's every housewife's nightmare and happens a lot more than people actually admit."
The writer believes this book will appeal to straight men as well. "I could see lots of straight guys getting off to it," he said. "A mouth is a mouth." Gulp!
Edited by Jack Hart
(Alyson Books, 246 pages, $13.95)
WWeek 2015