Midnight in Savannah: Sexual Indiscretions in the Deep South

by Darwin Porter

Midnight in Savannah is the deliberately more explicit, and more entertaining alternative to the John Berendt / Clint Eastwood Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. For more than a year after its appearance in 2000, it was one of the best-selling GLBT books in the Deep South. Midnight in Savannah skillfully incorporates Carson McCullers, Pamela Harriman, Libby Holman, the City of Savannah, and references to Georgia's most famous (recent) murder into one delectable whole. This book is not altogether straight, but it certainly isn't altogether gay, either. Pan-sexual and Southern might be its best description, permeated throughout with a morality that's more than a bit untidy. But considering what tends to happen after dark in Savannah, who cares? Darwin Porter is a native-born Southerner who's also the author of two of America's best-selling travel guides Frommer's Guide to Savannah and Frommer's Guide to The Carolinas and Georgia. Midnight in Savannah evolved from his intense exposure to that city, and to his belief that John Berendt only told a fraction of the real story. Midnight in Savannah is a steamy romp that explores the sexuality of one of the Old South's most bizarre cities. ―The New York Blade. In Midnight, both Lavender Morgan ('At 72, the world's oldest courtesan') and Tipper Zelda ('an obese, fading chanteuse taunted as the black widow') purchase lust from sexually conflicted young men with drop-dead faces, chiseled bodies, and genetically gifted crotches. These women once relied on their physicality to steal the hearts and fortunes of the world's richest and most powerful men. Now, as they slide closer every day to joining the corpses of their former husbands, these once-beautiful women must depend, in a perverse twist of fate, on sexual outlaws for le petit mort. And to survive, the hustlers must idle their personal dreams while struggling to cajole what they need from a sexual liaison they detest. Mendacity reigns. Perversity in extremis. Physical beauty as living hell. Cat on A Hot Tin Roof's Big Daddy must be spinning in his grave right now. ―Eugene Raymond, staff writer for After Dark.

Genres: Fiction, Erotica, Gay, Gay Fiction

498 pages, Paperback

First published March 31, 2000

About the author

Darwin Porter (1937-) is an American travel writer, producing numerous titles, mostly for the Frommer guidebook series, over a 50-year career span.

Reviews

[Addison · Rating 1 out of 5]

OH MAN, THIS BOOK IS KIND OF AWESOME (BUT IN A REALLY TERRIBLE, GROSS AND POSSIBLY VAGUELY OFFENSIVE WAY.)

Which yeah, seems a little weird coming from someone who rated it one star but you don't understand, this book is classy as balls, you guys.

It all started when my sister-in-love Zola was reading it and was like, "Hang the fuck on, I have to read you a passage from this book."

"Let me oblige." Phil leaned over the young man's body to kiss his perfectly formed and rather full lips. They looked succulent.
But when Phil was only inches from the boy's face, his hair was yanked violently, his head forced downward. The boy pulled back the sheets to reveal a perfect golden torso.
"Not my lips, faggot," he said. "That's not where I want to be kissed. Suck my cock!"

"Give it here." was my instant reaction because I immediately began flipping through pages and performing dramatic readings* of the passages that caught my eye. Flip to a random pages and you might find something like:

With a belly full of Danny Hansford cream, Tango was ready for her day. God, that white boy tasted good. She'd been sampling the cream of white boys or whote men since she was nine years old, but nobody made cream quite as delectable as Danny's-and so much of it too.

OR MAYBE

Gin looked flustered. "No, not at all. To me, dick size is everything. I could go to bed with the ugliest man in the world if he had a big dick. I always look at the crotch first, then the face later."

OR EVEN

"Not me, sugartit. I didn't go for men who stuck their dicks in other men. With me, I wanted men to plug me. And the bigger their plugger, the better it was. It took a lot of man to fill me up."

Best part? ALL THESE QUOTES ARE FROM LESS THAN 50 PAGES INTO THE STORY.

I mean, for an "erotic" book, this one was about as sexy as graham crackers (that's an insult to graham crackers and I apologize deeply) but any book that describes someone as being an "expert sword swallower" (GET IT? WINK WINK) has my vote for sheer so bad it's goodness.

Serious review? FINE. Is this book terrible? YES. Is anything in this erotic novel sexy? NO. Does it get worse? IT CERTAINLY DIDN'T GET BETTER. Do I want to strangle every single character? YES PLEASE. Is this an insult to Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil? YOU HAVE NO IDEA. How about an insult to the South and really just to people with taste in general? YES TO ALL OF THOSE.

Should you read it? Maybe! Are you one of those people, like me, who gleefully enjoy bad erotica? Are you a member of weeping_cock? If you said yes to either of those questions, you should at least give this one a flip through because IT'S SO BAD, YET SO GOOD.

*You can totally hire me to do dramatic readings of bad erotica. I have a legitimate Southern accent that further highlights just how bad the dialogue is!

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really don't know we're to begin in describing how awful this execrable is. Darwin Porter is the author of numerous books on Hollywood and/or politics whose wild inaccuracy and unsupported allegations have at least an amusement value. Almost none of the books or their varied allegations/stories have any sort supporting references, not even the catch all 'anonymous friend/colleague/former employee'. As those who are so amusingly libeled are invariably dead he has no fear of legal come back so he invents away with a lavishness that must have suggested to him or his editors that he might usefully turn his 'talent' to fiction. So he did and the result is this novel. Unfortunately in fiction the closer your roman a clef sticks to and uses facts and reality the less likely it is to make good fiction.

If you wonder if there is a connection or influence on this novel from 'Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil' by John Brendt then the answer is a resounding yes but only in terms of how much the author and his characters in this novel are obsessed by and jealous of that book and author's success. In fact the leitmotif of this novel is jealousy. Particularly of success that brings money and media attention.

Although it is not the only plot in the novel (there are dozens) one of the more important is a character determined to emulate Truman Capote's early success with 'Other Voices, Other Rooms' and the key to his success lies in his being more 'photogenic' then Capote at the time of his early success. That so much time is spent on photographs of authors real and putative says everything about Dawn Porter's interests and concerns which include stealing characters and plot lines from Capote's story 'La Cote Basque 1965'. I think Porter's complete disregard for writing as anything but a means to gossip column fame, he clearly regards Capote's Black & White party as the most significant achievement in the author's life, as perhaps the most offensive thing in a offense packed novel.

Really I shouldn't have water so many paragraphs on this novel but it's message that celebrity of the most ephemeral sort is all that matters is so depressing even if it is so widely held. Porter could have written a marvellously camp, over the top Grand Guignol of a novel which would have rivalled and been better then Harold Robbins in the 1970s but he has forgotten what is important.

[Zola · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ugh. This book, where do I start.

I couldn't even get through the first chapter--it seemed like the author just wanted an excuse to see how outlandishly, over-the-top gay he could be. I'm no prude, but it was just ridiculous the kind of attitude that was implicit in the writing. It was reminiscent of the kind of erotica that turns me off--no thought of plot, just flat-out boning.

Also, the phrase "sword-swallower" is used. Are you fuckin kidding me?

[Gerry Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fun read about what could really be going on in Savannah. A take-off of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and just a little more gay. Many funny characters and old Southern families.......It was just plain FUN