The swinging sixties, the Sunset Strip a smorgasbord of horny Marines, looking for a little action before heading off to Nam. A queen’s delight, and it’s all too easy for a guy to fall in love with these brave, young warriors. But some of those shipping out won’t be coming home, and not all of the wounded wear uniforms.

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The Swinging Sixties. To some, that conjures up images of The Haight in all its flower power glory, before the lilies festered. To others, it was Greenwich Village and that heady period leading up to the events at Stonewall; or the love-ins in Griffith Park.

For me, it was The Strip. Sunset Boulevard. Not the Norma Desmond Boulevard, of flame red Maseratis and grand hotels and pink mansions with heart-shaped swimming pools, but the hurdy-gurdy strip of once-elegant-now-sleazy clubs, discount record stores and gay bars.

And Marines. Scores of them, hundreds of them, flocking there every weekend from Camp Pendleton down the road, strolling about wide-eyed in twosomes, three-four-and-more-somes. And some of them alone. On the prowl. Happily, because these were the ones a gay man like me looked for. (continue reading…)

The Little Lost Lamb(da)s

Some thoughts from Victor J. Banis

The recent brouhaha regarding submissions for the Lambda Literary Awards had my computer smoking for a day or so, with posts back and forth, some of them reasoned and some silly, some of them angry and some of them, frankly, downright ugly. Now that the dust has settled a bit, I want to take a further look at the subject and at some of the points that were raised.

First, for those of you who weren’t in on the follies, word got around that the Lambda folks had changed their submission guidelines to exclude submissions from heterosexual authors—a move interpreted by many (I suspect correctly) as an attempt to bar the women writers of today’s M/M fiction. A number of these women announced that henceforth they would not be submitting nor in any other way supporting the foundation.

Fair enough. I certainly wouldn’t expect Laura Baumbach (MLR Press) to continue to support this organization the way she has in the past, which is certainly generously, though I confess to be dismayed to think that she will not be submitting either the I Do anthologies or the soon upcoming The Golden Age of Gay Fiction. In the first case, I think even the Lambda people would have to give it a nod, it’s in such a great cause. In the second instance, that Golden Age doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in a Chinese kitchen, I just think it should go in on general principles. But, maybe the editors can submit these books? I’ll pay the fees, if you do the paperwork, fellas.

Some of the posts I got were funny, if bitterly so. One individual who described himself as “in gay publishing in NYC” and whose name I won’t divulge, was surprised to realize that there was so much ill-feeling abroad toward the Lammies. Uh huh. Welcome to the real world, Mr. When Did I Fall Asleep and Where Did I Wake Up.

And in his innocence lies a problem that afflicts the world of gay publishing muchly. If the New York publishing world is a small town (and it is, very small), the gay publishing establishment is more like a Native American village. These people haven’t a clue what lies beyond their tent poles. (continue reading…)

The House of the Dead: a mortuary whose directors are drop dead gorgeous and terminally horny-and one of them up to mischief. Stanley and Tom try to separate the naturally dead from the murdered dead and find themselves awash with coffins-until they come to the one Stanley’s name on it.   Deadly Slumber indeed.

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Chapter ONE

The House of the Dead.

He hadn’t known, when he made the appointment, how appropriate that old sobriquet would be before the day, before the hour, even, was out.

That’s what they had called Bartholomew’s Mortuary when David Solomon was growing up just a few blocks from here—never dreaming that one day he would be standing outside like this, looking up at the pseudo-Italian palazzo, and summoning his courage to go inside for a job interview.

“You’re going to work at the House of the Dead?” his sister Rose had asked, laughing.

“I hope. And live there too, if I get the internship.”

“Won’t you feel, you know, icky? All those dead people?”

“Dead people are just dead, Rosie. You want icky, I’ll take you to a gay dinner party or two. You’ll come to welcome a non-bitchy corpse.” (continue reading…)

A painful past. A mysterious stranger. Footsteps vanishing in the fog. All Stanley wants is just to hear Tom say, “I love you.” All Tom wants is Stanley safe. And the stranger? Ah, there’s the rub–what exactly is it that he wants? Be careful what you wish for, fellows. You may get it. Dreams can be deadly.

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Prologue

“Gone?” Her voice went up on an ascending scale, like an opera diva’s in full song. “What do you mean, gone? They took him?”

He shook his head, trying to get his mind clear. Too much pot, and he was pretty sure the last joint had been laced with something, PCP maybe. His thoughts refused to settle, drifting like the acrid clouds of smoke that swirled in the room’s cold drafts.

“It must have been them. The baby was right there when I went into the john.” He pointed at the crib. You could see, or certainly imagine, the indentation where the baby had been. “And when I came back, they were gone, and the baby too. I ran outside but their taillights were clear down to the crossing, and then they disappeared. Just…” he shrugged, and finished lamely, “gone.”

She stared at the crib, empty now of even the blankets the child had been wrapped in, and lifted a hand to the bottom of her throat, as if choking off the anguish rising up in her. “The woman,” she said. “Delia, her name was. She said what a sweet baby he was.” (continue reading…)

How do I kill thee?

Let me count the ways.

There are few sights more awesome than flying into Los Angeles at night. You’re high above a pitch-dark desert and then, it seems to happen all at once, you are sailing over a carpet of sparkling jewels. The plane slows, time stands still, and the glittering lights go on and on, as far as the eye can see. Could anything, you wonder, really be so vast?

Yes, it is. And therein lies a problem when one tries to write about the city, and particularly when one wants to write about the mysteries of the city: which city, exactly? Because there are a myriad of L.A.s, encompassing both time and space, and all of them steeped in mystery, murder, violence.

There’s the split personality L.A. of the thirties and forties, rigidly conservative on the outside, wildly bohemian on the inside (for inside, read: the film set); there’s the noir L.A. of the forties and fifties; the suddenly sophisticated L.A. of the eighties and nineties, the jam packed road rage city of the new century. (continue reading…)