The Passionate Attention of an Interesting Man

This is a collection of five stories, each treating the relationship of the dominant and the submissive male. Or, you could say, the daddy and his "boy." Or just the top and the bottom. Each of the five relationships is completely different from the others. In one story, two straight men fall in love with each other. In another, a nerd picks up a dangerous black sailor and takes him home--but there's a classic twist at the end. A third story presents the growing animosity between two roommates that culminates in a rape. For variety, each story is written in a different style, almost as if in an anthology by different authors. One story, a comedy, is narrated by two old friends, a cheerfully raving showbiz queen and a low-key "masculine" type, quibbling over the narrative while they take turns running it. It's high and low camp at once, filled with familiar gay references from Bette Davis to Colt models As the flamboyant narrator puts it, defining the sacred mission of the raving queen, "Watch. Report. Exaggerate." By contrast, the tale of the two straights is "arty" in flavor, with a large cast of characters, a sprawling plot, dreamily poetic sex scenes, and the central symbol of a model train layout the two men plan to build, a metaphor for the devotion they cannot articulate. This story, called simply "Tom," anchors the collection as the longest and most detailed of the set, virtually a novel with all the excess cut away as it explores the question of whether heterosexuality is fixed or simply the base camp of a climb up Mystery Mountain. More contrast: the roommates story is set in the future, when industry-leading companies enclose their workforce in a cocoon of high-tech luxury that's like a combination of Mad Men and Metropolis, where physical beauty is a prerequisite for employment and Speedos are business casual. As a main selling point, all five of the stories are brand-new and not available elsewhere. This includes one tale using the characters of my popular Buddies series, about a New York actor desperately caught between "playing" his life as the aggressor and the victim.