Larry Benjamin's Blog: Larry Benjamin's blog - This Writer's Life, page 6

I Write. A Neighborhood Reacts

My writing is marked by a rawness and an honesty that I have been told is both startling and off-putting. I usually shrug off such criticism because I write not to tell a story but to make you see, to make you feel; that you feel something—even discomfort—tells me that I’ve done what I set out to do. But I try never to be mean.

You see, years ago when I young, I moved to Washington, DC. I’d never lived on my own before and I didn’t have much money but I found an apartment I could afford. It was, in a word, a dump. Soon after moving in, I discovered I had a roommate, Mouse—no that’s not a cute nickname; he was an actual mouse. I was grossed out and terrified. After weeks of terror, I caught him—in the very box my new Kermit the Frog telephone came in. Now, I knew I had to dispose of him. Terrified, I upended the box over the toilet and flushed. I watched his confusion as he struggled against the rush of water. Once he disappeared from view, I threw up in the sink. When his angry cousins showed up, I let them share my apartment. I could not bring myself to hurt another one. That’s pretty much the way I am in general. I try not to hurt anyone deliberately.

As I said, I’m used to reactions to my work but I was not prepared for the shitstorm of reaction my last blog post engendered.

As a writer, one of the first lessons you learn is the story you write is not always the story people read. Reaction to that blog post reminded me of that lesson. Reactions were split along generational lines: the younger were quite vocal in their approval; the post, which was my most read post ever, was met with stony silence from older neighbors. But whenever I ran into one of them, the language of the body—the sharp intake of breath through pursed lips, the squaring of the shoulders—said: How dare you!

Still, nothing was said until one neighbor confronted me. “I have to ask you—what did you intend to accomplish with that post?” she asked.

“Excuse me?”

“People were hurt by what you wrote.”

I was confounded. I knew people were mad, but hurt? Why? She soon made it clear why. I’d thought of that particular post as literary caricature—that is I took a fundamental truth and exaggerated it to make a point. In so doing, I, accidentally, came too near one truth. What I saw as a quick sketch, a few words to throw light on the kind of community I was describing, others saw as me passing judgment, or, worse, inviting others to pass judgment. Neither is true of my intent. Love can be messy; it can be inconvenient. What it should not be is denied. It’s too rare.

Furthermore, we cannot change the past, we cannot deny it or hope it remains behind us. I don’t believe in revisionist history. I believe we can change our story at any point—start a new chapter, if you will—but the story that has already been written, cannot be rewritten. And we shouldn’t try to. What we can and should do is own our past. That strips others of the power to hurt us, to use it against us.

With the post, I’d meant to defend the council I was a part of—the bad behavior of neighbors is not the fault of the council. And bad behavior isn’t unusual. On social media what I heard most was: you could be talking about my town. One person tweeted “You’re describing Rye, New York, aren’t you?” For me, for others, the post wasn’t only about my neighborhood; it was a story about any town USA.

This was the very reason there was a disclaimer at the end of the post. Yet the disclaimer did not stop people from taking to guessing who I was talking about, did not stop others from assuming I was talking about them.

I keep thinking about the conversation I had with the neighbor who finally clued me in about why some people were so mad. She said, "I was fond of you...” The past tense did not escape my notice. I can only assume that the idea she had of me has been replaced by the messy human truth of me.

In closing, I will leave you with a song: “I Am Not America’s Sweetheart” by Elle King , which seems a fitting ending.

Falls of Schuylkill: A Neighborhood Story

I write fiction—there’s a reason for that. I find real life, well, boring. It was for that reason I never had an interest in journalism—reporting facts and on real life? No thanks. I’m beginning to have a change of heart though—not that I’m going to start reading nonfiction or become a newspaper reporter. No, no. Somehow last fall I got talked into joining our neighborhood community council. The experience has been...eye opening, and far from boring.

First a little background on our neighborhood. It’s a former mill town, started, and stopped, by the river from which it takes its fantastical and picturesque name: Falls of Schuylkill. Sadly, since the late 1800s, it’s been known as East Falls. The new name is perfectly fine, I suppose but, I don’t know…it lacks the musicality, the romance of the original. Anyway, it’s a diverse neighborhood, in a city of neighborhoods, each with its own distinct personality. Here there are row houses , (which define the vernacular architecture of the city) in the two models: “airlight” (kitchen on the side of the dining room, and “straight-throughs” (kitchen at the back, behind the dining room), twins—large and small—and single family houses on double or triple lots, with a few bonafide mansions thrown in for good measure.

As I mentioned, it started as a mill town, but it is now, despite public housing projects at the edge of the neighborhood and a smattering of seedy bars along the railroad tracks, quite removed from its humble beginnings, being populated as it is by lawyers and doctors, and home to one of the most expensive private schools in the city.

It’s a small neighborhood which is also home to a startling number of community organizations. There’s a development corporation and given how little has actually been developed, I can’t tell if the name is hopeful or delusional. Change comes slowly here.

I’ve never been entirely sure how I came to be invited to “run” for a seat on the community council—I use “run” in italics because my nomination was uncontested, and I had no opponents—but I wasn’t entirely surprised. I knew labeled old, white, wealthy, and exclusive, the council had an image problem. They needed to freshen their image by becoming inclusive to which end, they needed to add more “diverse” members. Being Bronx-born, Ivy-league educated, black, gay and married to a white guy, I knew they couldn’t tick off more categories than if I’d also been female, Jewish, and handicapped.

Yet despite those facts, the nominating committee insisted on interviewing me. During the interview, I was asked, “What made you decide to join the counsel?” I replied, “Um, because you asked me to.” My response was greeted by blank stares. No one laughed. I watched three sets of lips fall open, forming little Os which promptly collapsed, in unison, into wrinkling lines of thin-lipped disapproval, then into those Os again, making them look surprised, then disgruntled, then surprised again.

I assumed the role of corresponding secretary in October. Since then, I have stumbled upon:

A shrill, disruptive harpy and her evil factotum who have joined forces to become a kind of toxic Batman and Robin, a decades old scandal involving a pair of librarians, an elderly tree-hugging dowager overly fond of bourbon, and a mysterious couple who run the local newspaper with their own unfathomable agenda.

As I a writer, I’m pretty observant. Here’s what I have observed after six months of attending monthly meetings:

Privilege gives rise to entitlement. People are motivated by many things but none more than entitlement. And fear.

It’s that sense entitlement that led one person at one meeting to ask SEPTA, Pennsylvania’s regional transportation entity responsible for all public transportation, to remove the bus stop in front of his house because riders leave trash in his garden, and prompted another to ask SEPTA to reroute the bus that ran down her street because the lumbering diesel drinking beasts are noisy and disrupted her sleep. Really? It’s a city neighborhood that touts among its amenities access to public transportation!

Fear, is the other motivator. A recent proposal to change zoning along on particularly dismal stretch of streets, to encourage commercial development, led to widespread panic. Panicked neighbors stormed the walls of change like paratroopers from the past, insisting that allowing commercial development where an ancient and much loved, though seldom full, church, has stood for two centuries, would prompt the Archdiocese to sell it to a developer who would promptly tear it down and put up a Walmart. The idea was absurd, and I couldn’t help but be reminded of the spinster who fears there are men hiding under her bed. Fear of change, has led many to see men under the bed, as if any change, every developer, was a horny half-man, half-beast waiting to pounce and ravish East Falls.

So there you have it—I joined a community council and stumbled on a truth, a real world, far stranger and less believable than fiction. I’ll continue to observe this strange world and report back periodically and who knows maybe this town and its otherworldly inhabitants will find their way into a future book. Maybe, I’ll bring back the Restoration Drama…

D I S C L A I M E R
The characters and events described in this blog post exist only in its pages and the authors imagination.
Or do they?

Catching Up with…Ismael Manzano

This week, I'm catching up with author, Ismael Manzano, whose debut novel, “Soulless”, will be released on March 8, 2016 by Fantasy Works Publishing. Ismael and I first met when I was asked to interview him for the Bronx Chronicle (You can read that interview here) I was so impressed with him and so intrigued with the premise of Soulless that I invited him to talk to me for this blog, an invitation he graciously accepted.

Hi Ismael. Thanks so much for agreeing to chat with me again. Why don’t we begin with you telling us a little about yourself.

I’m a husband to a fellow writer and a father to a hyper little boy, and I’ve aspired to publish my own work since as far back as I can remember, only finding success last year.

I understand your wife is an editor and also a writer. What’s that like—living with being intimately involved with another writer?

It’s been wonderful. Before I met her, I was the only person I knew who was interested in writing, so whenever I showed anyone my work they offered me nothing but praise—more because they were just impressed that I bothered writing anything than because they actually liked what I’d written. Which sounds good on the surface, but none of us are perfect and we need constructive criticism in order to grow.

When my wife began writing as well, it opened up a whole new avenue for me. One in which we could bounce ideas off of each other and critique each other’s work in a safe and honest environment. That I respect her work tremendously also helps because it means I respect her evaluation of my stories. When she says something is good, I believe it, and when she says it needs work, I take a step back and force myself to examine it objectively. I don’t think I would have ever grown as a writer surrounded by people who mean well but don’t understand the craft.

"Soulless” is your first published book, though I know you’ve been writing for a while. What was the key to your success that led to your book getting out to the public?

For me, the key was to never give up. I’ve written plenty of things in my life, some that I thought were really good and some that I thought were really bad in hindsight. Regardless, publishers rejected them. Rather than give up, I moved on to another project or went back to the beginning and took a look at the story anew, hoping to find a way to make it stand out.

I know like me, you I write everywhere and whenever you can. And that can be a challenge. How long did it take you to write “Soulless” start to finish?

"Soulless," start to finish took me about a year. That’s from the concept to the final word, but I’ve written other manuscripts in half that time.

Do you do a lot of research for your writing?

Yes. During my outlining I try to research whatever I think I’ll need to avoid any roadblocks along the way, but I leave room to do more research as I write.

Writers tend to talk a lot about whether they are plotters, those who plan their stories in detail before beginning to write, or pantsters, those who fly by the seat of their pants and write as they go letting the story tell itself. I’m a definite pantster. Which are you—do you create detailed character and plot bibles for your stories?

Actually I do both. It depends on the story. I usually write a moderately detailed outline, but as I go along, I usually find something that needs changing and that in turns changes the direction of the rest of the story. So I don’t try to write an outline so rigid that I can’t make room for changes. For "Soulless," I didn’t need a plot bible, but I had a lot of characterizations written into my master outline.

Keep reading.

Opium and The Butterscotch Prince

A few months ago, I met my friend Brenda for lunch—we’ve been friends since my sophomore year of college—we don’t see each other often but when we do, we simply pick up our friendship, our conversation, where we last left off. After that lunch, I walked her back to her car and hugged her as is my habit. Later, she emailed me, “You know,” she wrote, “After I left, I realized I could smell you and I realized you smell exactly the same.” It was then that I remembered I’ve been wearing the same scent, Cartier’s Santos for decades. It seemed to me she took comfort in that familiarity, that sameness.

Years ago when Toby, our silky terrier, had to be in the hospital over a few days, the attending vet suggested we bring in one of my worn t-shirts to comfort and calm him. Now, years later, on the rare occasions I must be away overnight for work, I leave the t-shirt I slept in the night before for Toby. Otherwise he sits by the kitchen door all night waiting for me to come home.

If you read last week’s blog post, you know I wrote about sounds, particularly the role of sound, of music, in my writing. This week, I turn my attention to smells.

When I approach a story, I try to give it dimension. I may only be writing words on a page, but I try to manifest those words corporeally in the material world. As I write, I see my settings, my characters in a movie. Perhaps, that’s not right. I see them as living. While I’m writing I live in the story. The fictional world becomes real for me. There is color and furniture and sound; often music is playing nearby or in the background. The characters have words and feelings, but they also have density, and their own particular smells.

This was perhaps truest in my first book, What Binds Us.

When protagonist and narrator Thomas-Edward first meets main character Dondi, he tells us:

“I smelled him before I saw him or even heard his voice. It was a smell that was peculiarly his own—clove cigarettes and sex. A scent that clung to him even when he was freshly showered.”

We know very little about Dondi’s mother Mrs. Whyte—we never learn her first name—but we know what she smells like. The first time he meets her, Thomas-Edward notes:

“She wore Opium. Its opulent scent wafted over me.”

When he parts from her that first summer, he again notes her scent:

“All of a sudden the steel went out of her posture and she leaned into my embrace. Her lips touched my cheek. The scent of Opium enveloped me. It was like falling into a soft-scented cloud. I could get lost in that smell. I could close my eyes and no one would ever find me.”

And when he meets her again after many years absence he remarks:

“She entered the room behind me. She still wore Opium. The smell took me back all those years to the first time I’d met her, when she’d descended the stairs so elegantly and called me Thomas-Edward.”

Thomas-Edward notices smells. A lot. Including the smell of old money:

“I ran up behind him, looking over his shoulder into a high ceilinged room. Pale sunlight filtered in through half-open shutters. The walls were lined with glass-fronted cabinets holding leather bound books; the gilt lettering on their spines gleamed dully. The room smelled of paper and tobacco and leather.”

And the smell of betrayal:

“In the breaking light I could see that his mouth was bruised and raw-looking. He smelled of sex and someone else’s cologne. I held him and watched the new day dawn.”

Thomas-Edward may have smelled Dondi, his first love, but he tastes Matthew, his endless love:

“He tasted of butterscotch. I called him my butterscotch prince. He snuck across the street and stole peonies from Mrs. Chang’s garden and presented me with a contraband bouquet. He told me I was his world.”

This last was not quite random. Research has shown that our body odor, can help us subconsciously choose our partners - read more here. Further, kissing is thought by some scientists to have developed from sniffing; that first kiss being essentially a primal behavior during which we smell and taste our partner to decide if they are a match. Thomas-Edward and Matthew are a match.

Read more about smells and emotions here.

This Writer’s Life: The Soundtrack

The death last week of Maurice White, who founded Earth, Wind and Fire, made me, like a lot of people sad. The music of Earth, Wind and Fire marked the beginning of my journey to adulthood. Their music is also inextricably tied to my relationship with my freshman roommate Yone, the first friend I ever had. For me, listening as radio stations played their songs back-to-back was more than a tribute to Maurice White, or a celebration of their musical canon. I was listening to part of the soundtrack of my life. This realization got me thinking about the role of music in my life and writing.

In my books, I use music—to locate the story firmly in time, or to express something about the characters, or their emotion or mood. In What Binds Us, the signature song for Matthew and Thomas-Edward is Randy Crawford’s “Where There was Darkness,” which describes the gratitude they feel for having, unexpectedly found each other; the song’s lyrics express what they cannot yet articulate to each other and they don’t in fact recognize the song is their shared truth.

In Unbroken, “The Morning After,” the theme song from The Poseidon Adventure informs Lincoln’s character—it’s what gives him strength and purpose. Deliberately there is no music in Vampire Rising. Taking its place is silence and the screaming of mockingbirds. Indeed, there is very little sound save the sound of hatred and violence and religious piety, and beneath that, the steady hum of love.

Growing up we listed to calypso, the Ray Coniff Singers and Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass. I remember The Mighty Sparrow’s “The Congo Man,” and “The Girl from Ipanema” which, in my memory, plays in an endless loop in the background of my childhood. Later, on AM radio, we heard Tony Orlando and Dawn’s “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree,” and Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain,” and Helen Reddy’s anthemic “I Am Woman.”

It wasn’t until college, though, that I heard R & B, soul, and funk. Freshman year, my roommate, Yone, introduced me to WDAS and Royce Rose and Parliament Funkadelic and the iconic Earth Wind and Fire. This became the soundtrack to my early college years. Later, Prince’s yearning, declarative “I Wanna Be Your Lover” became the anthem of my lonely, yearning self. Diana Ross’ “Upside Down” and Teena Marie’s “I Need Your Lovin’” echoed the sounds of my heart breaking for the first time. And later the Spanish version of Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration” reflected my head-over-heels love for Germain, the first boy who loved me back. And still later, Randy Crawford’s “Endlessly” summarized how I loved him; for years I closed every letter, every card to him with “endlessly,” followed by my name. I never knew if he ever understood what that was a reference to.

Later, after I met Stanley, “This Ain’t no Thinking Thing” by Trace Adkins became “our song.” Later it was replaced by Sam Smith’s “Stay With Me.” That was the song playing as, hand-in-hand, we walked down the aisle at our wedding. We caught some flak for that from some who said a song celebrating a one night stand was inappropriate but, for us, for me, the lyrics “This ain't love, it's clear to see,” was exactly what we gay and men and women have been hearing from our straight counterparts since time immemorial—hell Lincoln’s journey in Unbroken begins when his parents tell him he can’t fall in love with another boy—the lyrics second part: “But darling, stay with me,” for us spoke of our plea to each other. The world’s disapprobation means nothing as long as you love me and stay with me.

All of these songs—even the ones that remind me of heartbreak and an alienating, painful childhood—come together to form the sound track of my life.

So what about you? What songs are on the soundtrack of your life? Tell me in the comments below.

Check back next Tuesday for Part 2, where I’ll be talking about smell and memory.

Goodbye Saulsbury Street

The other day I opened my email ten days late and found the following note from the Judith, the woman from whom we’d rented a cottage at Dewey Beach each year for a decade:

This is so hard for me to say - we have decided to stop renting the cottage. For the past two years we have been trying to find a way to continue renting, but with our new schedules and locations, it is proving very difficult to keep up with all the duties and responsibilities required to rent Dewey. I wanted to wait until the end of the season to let everyone know - and give you all plenty of time to look for new places

We’d discovered the cottage at 109 Saulsbury Street when our friend Shirley invited us down for a few days. We fell in love with the house, and Dewey Beach, and Rehoboth. The next year we rented the house the week after Shirley. For years our routine was thus: Shirley would rent the house for 2 weeks in May, we’d rent the week after her, then we’d go down early and Shirley would stay late so our visits overlapped.

The first year we went, we drove to Cape May and took the Cape May Ferry to Rehoboth. Stanley was queasy from the boat’s motion, and I, dizzy from watching the boat rushing through the water that seem to part to make way for our passage, then closed in our wake; it occurred to me that the ocean could just as easily turn on us, closing around and over us. I held the dogs’ leashes tighter.

The next year, and every year after that, we drove directly to Dewey.

Reading over her note, I was immeasurably sad. While we were only there for a week each spring, the Cottage felt like home. It’s simple wooden furniture and bright pastels, so different from our own formal, chaotic home, reminded us each day that we were on vacation.

From the beach at Dewey we saw ships and whales, and, once, a beached baby shark, stiff and sad; from the beach at Dewey, we helped countless horseshoe crabs, stranded by the receding tide, back to their ocean home.

We walked around Silver Lake and dreamed off a house on the water. We ate at Bethany Blues and Just In Thyme, and shopped at Elegant Slumming and the Converse Outlet store, and slept in a too-small bed with the dogs, and forgot, for a week, our real lives.

It was at the cottage we assumed we’d stay when we took our nephew, Max, to see the ocean and feel sand between his toes for the first time.

In nearly a decade, we’d only missed one Spring, and that was in 2009 when, like a lot of Americans, in the aftershock of THE GREAT RECESSION, we had neither jobs nor money for other than life’s necessities such as mortgage, food, and Coco’s cardiologist.

When we knew we were going to lose Coco the only thing I prayed for was that she would get to go to the beach one last time. And she did. But between her age, her arthritis, and her heart, she couldn't navigate the sand very well so we only took her to the beach once that Spring. After that, each day, we took her to Sunset Beach, on the bay, where, despite having been carried there, she would collapse, in exhaustion and wonder, at the water’s edge. Occasionally the water of the bay would lap at her toes. She would rise with ancient grace, shake herself indignantly and retreat a few feet, before settling back into her state of dazed consciousness.

When we would take Toby down to the big beach she was content to lay in the sun on the Cottage’s screened porch and watch the world go by.

Last year we got to take Riley to the beach for the first time. It was enchanting watching him discover the ocean, and learn how to dash away from the waves when they rolled in.

There will be other houses and other beaches, I know, but the cottage at 109 Saulsbury Street will remain a treasured memory. And I remain thankful that Judith saw fit to lend us her home for so many years.

Don’t Judge a Book By Its Cover

Don’t judge a book by its cover.

We’ve had that drilled into us—at least my generation did, and, to a large extent, we believed it—I believed and I still do. At least as far as people go. And dogs—you ever meet a dog who looks mean and you want to step back but then he approaches you gently and licks your hand?

Anyway, never judge a book by its cover, unless of course, it is a book. I’ve been thinking about covers a lot lately. It started when we released Vampire Rising , my allegorical Vampire novella. It pays homage to Bram Stoker’s Dracula while reinventing the Vampire genre. In the story I tell there were certain elements that helped tell the story—mockingbirds who appear wherever Vampires gather, the iron gates that demarcates the separation between the Vampire state and the human world. And the story is described in grays and purples. So I wanted to include all of those elements that in the cover.

When my publisher notified me that they would be re-releasing the Boughs of Evergreen holiday anthology, which contains my short story, “The Christmas Present,” I jumped at the chance to change the cover. As I said, I’ve been thinking a lot about covers. With Vampire Rising, I deliberately choose not to have a man on the cover—I felt there were too many m/m romances with buff shirtless guys on the cover.

Thinking about the new cover for “The Christmas Present,” I realized what troubled me most about all the men on the covers of gay books was the fact that they are almost always white. Once I realized that, I set out on a mission to find a black guy to put on the cover. The scene below is taken from The Christmas Present and is what the cover is based on:

He erupted out of this seething, boiling cauldron of salt and water, cloaked in moonlight and sea foam like an ermine cape. He stepped out of the rioting sea with the easy sinuous grace of an eel. About Aidan’s age, he was handsome, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist. His body, well-muscled and solid, seemed to vibrate with suppressed energy, seemed to contain all the fury of the sea, tightly reined. His beryl eyes, which seemed to hold all the colors of dawn, searched the beach, found Aidan standing stock still, his long flaxen hair plastered to his skull and shoulders by the sea spray.

Then came Black&Ugly: A Tale of Men & Wheelbarrows which is a stand-alone story but also features Mama Black Widow, the old Obeah woman who appears in “The Christmas Present.” Because Ugly tells the story of a dark skinned young man who is taught he is ugly because he is dark, I knew it had to have a dark skinned black man on the cover. Deb and I discussed the title—it was originally much more innocuous—I suggested another title and Deb took it a step further and made it bold and in-your-face while also telling a story. I knew this cover was going to be special as we worked through several covers iterations. Still I was blown away by the strength and power of the final cover the designer delivered.

If someone wants to judge this book by its cover, I am good with that.

Why Queer Novels Matter & Why Diversity is Important

Having just read The Advocate article, "How The Tenth Challenges the Image of Black Queer Men," I thought I would repost the post I did for Queer Romance Month in October.

I read. A lot. And I collect books. I have hundreds. Many are classics—Fitzgerald, Wells, Dickens, the Brontés. Virginia Wolfe. But many more are contemporary gay fiction ranging from newer, lesser known writers to the literary lions of gay literature: Felice Picano, Mark Merlis, E.M. Forster, Baldwin, Burroughs (William, not Augusten), Alan Hollinghurst, William J. Mann, David Leavitt.

The first queer novel I read was Patricia Nell Warren’s The Front Runner. I remember finding it at the book store at Penn freshman year. My roommates, who were on the track team, were at an away meet that weekend. I read the entire book before they returned, barely stopping to sleep and eat. I read The Fancy Dancer, too. But it was The Front Runner that started me on the pursuit of queer fiction. From then on I read queer romance and queer fiction almost exclusively.

I was hungry for stories about people like me. In retrospect some of my choices make me blush in embarrassment—Gordon Merrick comes to mind—but back then queer books weren’t so easy to find. And I needed queer stories. Even if the stories weren’t really about me. They seldom had any people of color or anyone who wasn’t spectacularly good looking or outrageously “hung.” Reading, I would superimpose myself, my experiences, over each of those author’s texts—much like I’d done when the only GI Joe dolls available were white.

In discovering queer fiction, I had discovered I was not alone; I could finally visualize a life lived with a beloved man at my side. I was truly grateful to the gay authors who had the courage to tell queer stories. But I was increasingly frustrated with the white homo-normative narrative. Where my stories, the stories of our brothers and sisters who were other, who were outside, should have been, there was only silence.

But those queer stories also needed to be told. They were a part of our larger queer stories. We need stories that reflect the spectrum of our lives and loves. We need stories of queer men who find love and romance even if they aren't handsome or hung or white. That said I don’t believe there are black stories and white stories, there are just stories but I do believe that no one in the queer community should be marginalized or invisible—in life or in literature.

There are no black stories. There are no white stories. There are just stories. Queer stories matter because they allow us to share our lives, to show the world we are varied, we are different but not so different, not really. The value is in allowing us—each of us—to see queer selves, our differences, celebrated and reflected.

Read The Advocate article, "How The Tenth Challenges the Image of Black Queer Men," here.

Read my original post, and the resulting comments, here.

Learn more about my books here: Larry Benjamin.

Follow me on Twitter and Facebook .

A Reading Teaches Me Something

I did a reading at the Bureau of General Services - Queer Division on Friday night. My friend and fellow author David Swatling, invited me to join him, Daniel W. Kelly, and J.L. Weinberg, at the reading featuring horror and suspense fiction in recognition of Halloween.

When I arrived, late after a nerve-wracking and slow moving drive down the Henry Hudson Parkway from the Bronx, I discovered my third book, Unbroken, would be on display along with my allegorical Vampire novella, Vampire Rising. I immediately recognized I faced a two-fold challenge: how to present a horror novel that really wasn’t a horror novel at all, and, two, how to tie to very different books together.

I read third. While awaiting my turn, I wrote an intro for myself and pulled a reading from Unbroken. What follows is an excerpt from my reading.

“For me, when I think of horror, I think the true horror is how we sometimes treat each other—especially those who are different from us.

“I’ll be reading from Vampire Rising and Unbroken, tonight. These two readings focus on “first looks”—you know, that moment when we see someone and looking at them reveals something about them—or about us.”

The first scene I read was from Vampire Rising. Barnabas, a 25-year-old encaustic painter goes to a party at the home of his former teacher, Gatsby Collins, a 400-year-old closeted Vampire. In this scene there comes a moment when the closet door opens a crack:

It was in the music room, then, that Barnabas saw Gatsby for the first time since graduation some seven years before. Barnabas paused to let his eyes adjust to the room’s dimness, for his night vision was poor. It was a room of pearl grays and faded gold damask, dark wood and darker carpets, all shadowed in flickering candlelight. Gatsby was seated at an ebony nine-and-a half foot Bosendorfer Concert grand piano—the one with ninety-five keys, rather than the standard eighty-eight—which dominated the room. Gatsby himself had a pewter finish: silvery hair swept back, eyes like pieces of ice, pale cheekbones that gleamed. He was cool and pale, champagne in an ice bucket. Playing selections from “A Chorus Line” for a crowd of stalwart admirers, he was radiant in that darkened room. He was gorgeous and charismatic, a charmer of snakes and men.

He looked up and, seeing Barnabas in the doorway, gasped, for Barnabas was as beautiful as he’d remembered: his caramel skin glowed with youth and vigor. His wide, innocent eyes were clear and his dark hair was cropped short; gone was the defiant retro Afro he’d worn in high school. Staring at him, the frisson of lust and love that shot through him caused Gatsby to miss a note, and frown. He bent over the keyboard; his face dipped into shadow, dissolving into triangles of violet and purple.

To Barnabas, Gatsby looked exactly as he had when he had been his teacher seven years before, and yet he seemed more glamorous; he looked like a 1930s film star perfectly preserved on silver nitrate.

Barnabas, unsure, started to walk across the room to where Gatsby sat at the piano. Gatsby, without taking his eyes off Barnabas, rose and, closing the piano’s lid, murmured something to his audience, who turned to watch Barnabas. Keeping his gaze on Barnabas, Gatsby drifted over, bringing with him sepia tones and a martini.

“Hello, Barnabas,” Gatsby whispered. A smile, fragile as tissue paper, wrapped around his words. He offered his hand like an argentine gift of inestimable value. Barnabas took his hand shyly and murmured back, “Hi, Mr. Calloway.”

“Please! We’re no longer in high school. I’m no longer your teacher. Call me Gatsby.”

Barnabas nodded. “Gatsby.” He’d always addressed him as Mr. Calloway, but he thought of him, in his head, as Gatsby. Still, saying his name aloud sounded strange to his ears but he liked the way the syllables felt in his mouth: Gats-by.

“Ah. That’s better.” The room was cool and Barnabas shivered. “You’re cold,” Gatsby said, taking his arm. There was something antique about him. Heightening the effect was the way he treated Barnabas—with a certain genteel courtliness that in itself seemed of a different age. Indeed Barnabas noticed most of the men in the room exhibited a similar old world mannerliness. “Come, let us sit by the fire.” Gatsby gestured for Barnabas to sit. As Barnabas sank into a worn leather club chair, Gatsby placed his martini glass on a passing waiter’s tray and took from it two fresh Martini glasses. “A Vesper martini, tonight’s signature cocktail,” he explained handing one to Barnabas. “Two more,” he said to the waiter before sitting in the chair opposite Barnabas.

Gatsby smiled and it was then that Barnabas saw the canine teeth. He’d suspected it but still he jumped a little. Gatsby noticed the tremor that passed through Barnabas. He stopped smiling and stared into the middle distance as firelight played over his features, painting them now pink, now pearl. After a moment the tension passed and they continued as before.

The second scene is from Unbroken and centers on the moment in a young Lincoln’s life. An undeniable sissy, he announces at age 6 that he will marry his best friend a boy. His parents go to great lengths to “fix” him and almost convince him that he is mistaken, that he will change…

I was twelve, and in seventh grade. He was the new kid. His name was Jose Calderon. He walked into fourth period music, smiled, and changed everything. Until that moment, I had believed their lies, had ignored my own truth. I would change they told me, just wait and see. I would want to marry a girl, have children, and a dog, and a split-level house in the suburbs just like on The Brady Bunch because that’s what all boys wanted when they grew up and left childish things behind. Time, they said, would fix me, and I’d feel as other boys felt. Time had passed and I was still…broken.

As I was leaving, I was mentally going over all the things I did wrong, could have done better. I should have done a better job of setting up each scene but at the time I just wanted to plunge the audience into the middle of the story which is reflective of my books in general—I just drop the reader into the thick of things and help them piece the story together. Normally I memorize what I will read but this week I hadn’t had time and then I switched passages at the last minute. I should have been better prepared I chided myself.

Two men, also on their way out,stopped mean, and momentarily silenced the critical voices in my head. I recognized them because they had sat in the front row to my right. As I read I found myself glancing at them because they kept smiling and nodding and I felt reassured by their presence. They told me they just wanted to thank me for reading and tell me how much they’d enjoyed what I’d read. One of them said he really liked my shirt. I thanked him and confessed that I’d been upset because the valet at the garage had driven off before I could retrieve from the backseat the blazer I’d planned to wear. “Well I’m glad,” he said, “Because I got to see more of that great shirt.”

And that’s when it hit me—sometimes things don’t go according to plan, things change and the last minute and you have to adapt. It is in the adaptation that we soar.

Smile

This week I am contemplating the smile and the nature of happiness.

Sunday I was walking in Carpenter’s Woods with our two dogs, Toby and Riley. As we swept around a curve in the trail, I spotted a thin androgynous figure moving towards us. As the person emerged out of the shadows I saw it was a young woman; her hair, bleached to the color and consistency of straw, stuck out at almost right angles to the red wool cap pulled low over her forehead. On her face, she wore an expression as devastated as Nagasaki after the bombing. She continued walking towards us with heavy steps, seeming to sink further into the soft earth with every step, the weight of the world’s woes piled on her back.

She stared at us approaching through eyes dulled by the twin cataracts of sadness and disappointment. Riley, spotting her, ran towards her. Her mouth was a thin line of grim determination as she regarded him with a mixture of dread and suspicion. What new hell this? she seemed to be thinking.

Riley rushed up to her, tail wagging, his entire rear end shaking with anticipation.

She looked down at him, “Why he’s the happiest dog ever, isn’t he?” She squatted, and staring into his black button eyes exclaimed, “He looks like he’s smiling!” As I looked at her, a smile like the breaking dawn brightened her face.

And there before my eyes I saw it happen—one smile begat another.

I believe smiling is important. I smile a lot. And I’m a sucker for a man who smiles. Ok, I’m also a sucker for a man with a nice ass but that’s another post.

I’m always telling my husband to smile. I think he’s too cynical and self-conscious to smile for no reason. Often when we are out walking, a stranger, usually a man, will say hello in passing. Inevitably our ensuing conversation goes like this:

He asks, “Do you know him?”
“No.”
“Well, why did he speak to you?”
“I smiled at him.”

Years after we met when we finally started dating Stanley confessed that he thought I was young and silly when he first met me. I asked him why and he a-said it was because I was so giddily happy all the time. I don’t know why people associate happiness with a paucity of mental capacity or good sense, as if happy people are simply too stupid to see all the reasons to be miserable.

Smiles are big for the characters I create, too. I decided to do a search for “smile” in my books and look at the role they play in my stories. Below are some of my favorite smile excerpts from my books.

This scene from “The Lost Boys” a short story from Damaged Angels, is one of my favorites:

The young man looked at him in staring wonder. The trace of a smile played about his lips. His mouth twitched then began a slow upward curve. Even, white teeth gleamed. A sharp red tongue darted between full, soft lips. The smile continued to grow until it seemed to swallow up his face, then stretched to encompass The Merry-Go-Round and with it the tumultuous morning.

The smile, full-blown, touched the Lost Boy like grace. And saved the wretch.

And this from What Binds Us, when Thomas-Edward ill-advisedly hugs the formidable and distant Mrs. Whyte:

She tilted her head up and delivered a stillborn smile when my lips brushed her cheek. As my arms folded around her, I felt a tiny shiver pass through her.

In Vampire Rising, Barnabas understands how the return of a smile can invite, or repel:

When one of the men caught his eye and smiled at him, Barnabas returned the smile, with a tentative one of his own which was clearly a polite acknowledgement, but not an invitation to further intimacy.

And later, it is Gatsby’s smile that confirms Barnabas’ suspicion:

Gatsby smiled and it was then that Barnabas saw the canine teeth. He’d suspected it but still he jumped a little.

In Unbroken, it is Jose’s smile that helps Lincoln discover his own truth, and launches him on a quest to capture the heart of the first boy he truly loves:

I was twelve, and in seventh grade. He was the new kid. His name was Jose Calderon. He walked into fourth period music, smiled, and changed everything. Until that moment, I had believed their lies, had ignored my own truth.

So tell me, in the comments below, how are smiles important to you? Does happiness automatically imply a mental deficiency?