Legal Page
Title Page
Book Description
Dedication
Trademarks Acknowledgement
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Part Two
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Part Three
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Epilogue
New Excerpt
About the Author
Publisher Page
Saving Julian
ISBN # 978-1-78651-570-4
©Copyright Mason Stokes
Cover Art by Posh Gosh ©Copyright April 2017
Edited by Shannon Combs
Pride Publishing
This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher, Pride Publishing.
Applications should be addressed in the first instance, in writing, to Pride Publishing. Unauthorised or restricted acts in relation to this publication may result in civil proceedings and/or criminal prosecution.
The author and illustrator have asserted their respective rights under the Copyright Designs and Patents Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book and illustrator of the artwork.
Published in 2017 by Pride Publishing, Think Tank, Ruston Way, Lincoln, LN6 7FL, UK
Pride Publishing is a subsidiary of Totally Entwined Group Limited.
SAVING JULIAN
Paul believes that homosexuality is an illness. But when he tries to cure himself, and others, he learns just how stubborn desire can be.
Paul Drucker has made a name for himself telling young gay men that he can cure them of their ‘sinful desires’. Trouble is, he’s all too familiar with those desires himself, which leads him to Julian Evans, a male ‘escort’ he finds online. Paul tells himself, and Julian, that he simply needs an assistant, someone to help him on an upcoming lecture tour. The reality, of course, is quite different, and when the media discovers them together, Paul tries to straighten up his image by starting an ex-gay group at his church.
Which is where Julian’s roommate, Aaron, comes in. Eager to expose the ex-gay movement for the sham that it is, Aaron goes undercover in Paul’s conversion group, posing as a gay man hoping to be ‘cured’. However, things get complicated, and more than a little strange, when Aaron meets the other members of the group—a motley assortment of queers struggling to reconcile their desires with their faith, and with their families. Will Paul’s techniques, which include group showers, lessons in manly walking, and something called ‘holding therapy’, lead to newly created heterosexuals? To tragedy? Maybe even to love?
Dedication
For those who know this story all too well
Trademarks Acknowledgement
The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:
Disney World: Disney Enterprises, Inc.
Atlanta Braves: Atlanta National League Baseball Club, Inc.
Discovery Channel: Discovery Communications, LLC
Suave: Conopco Inc.
Pop-Tarts: Kellogg North America Company
Country Crock: Conopco Inc.
Atlanta Constitution: Cox Enterprises, Inc.
Google: Google, Inc.
Boy Scouts: National Boy Scouts of America Foundation
CNN: Cable News Network, Inc.
Amazon: Amazon Technologies, Inc.
Chuck Taylor: Converse, Inc.
Timberlands: TBL Licensing, LLC
AARP: AARP Non-Profit Organization
Village People: Can’t Stop Productions, Inc.
Will & Grace: NBC Universal Media, LLC
Band-Aid: Johnson & Johnson Corp.
Calvin Klein: Calvin Klein Trademark Trust
Lubriderm: Johnson & Johnson Corp.
The Little Mermaid: Disney Enterprises, Inc.
Crate & Barrel: Euromarket Designs, Inc.
Olympics: United States Olympic Committee Corp.
Wii: Nintendo of America, Inc.
How I Met Your Mother: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.
Glee: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.
Ronald McDonald: McDonald’s Corporation
J.C. Penney: J.C. Penney Company, Inc.
Smithsonian: Trust Instrumentality United States
Wonder Bread: Wonderbread Five
Buddig Meats: Carl Buddig and Company
Juicy Juice: Harvest Hill Beverage Company
G.I. Joe: Hassenfield Bros., Inc
Barbie’s Dream House: Mattel, Inc.
Twinkie: Continental Baking Company
Homer Simpson: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.
The Gap: Gap Stores, Inc.
Dancing with the Stars: The British Broadcasting Company
Burger King: Burger King Corporation
Project Runway: Miramax Film Corp.
Jim Beam: Jim Beam Brands Co.
Home & Garden TV: Scripps Network, LLC
Lifetime Movie Network: Lifetime Entertainment, Inc
YouTube: Google, Inc.
Starbucks: Starbucks Corporation
The Three Stooges: Moe Howard, Shemp Howard, Larry Fine, Curly Howard
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial: Melissa Mathison
The 40-Year-Old Virgin: Judd Apatow
Formica: The Diller Coporation
Grand Theft Auto: Rockstar Games
Gone With the Wind: Margaret Mitchell
Dr. Phil: Philip Gavin Degraw
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality: Sigmund Freud
Atlanta Constition: Cox Enterprises, Inc.
Google: Google, Inc.
Froot Loops: Kellogg North American Company
Boogie Nights: Paul Thomas Anderson
A Woman Scorned: The Betty Broderick Story: Amy Walllace
Family Ties: Gary Daivd Goldberg
She Woke Up Pregnant:Michael O’Hara
House: David Shore
Twilight: Stephanie Meyers
The Housewives of New Jersey: Bravo TV
Close Encounters: Stephen Spielberg
Village People: Casablanca
The Breakfast Club: John Hughes
The Catcher in the Rye: J.D. Salinger
Blockbuster: Wayne Huizenga, David Cook
The Wizard of Oz: L. Frank Baum
The Towering Inferno: Richard Martin Stern
We May Never Love Like This Again: Al Kasha, Joel Hirschhorn
The Poseidon Adventure: Paul Gallico
Man in the Mirror: Michael Jackson
Bad: Michael Jackson
Smooth Criminal: Michael Jackson
Part One
Chapter One
Aaron
The first time I saw him, I felt like little birds were pecking at my scalp. My feet started to sweat. My tear ducts jiggled a bit.
And as he looked at me, just stared without saying anything, I became acutely aware of what I must look like to someone like him. The ears that seem more inclined to hang-gliding than hearing. The whole ET head-neck problem. The glasses, oh, the glasses. The chest that wasn’t. The legs that no skinny jeans could redeem. And those ridiculous feet, miles and miles of them, unfurling in boat-sized Converse.
In my experience, it’s rare for people like me to come into contact with people like him, and this was probably for the best, given the foot-sweating and the bird-pecking. Sure, I’d seen people like him in movies and on television, but I’d never really been up close to this kind of beauty—the kind that changes the air in the room, that seems to make things vibrate. I first noticed his eyes, an unreal sky blue. I could have sworn I heard some sort of offstage ping as one of them sparkled like in a cartoon. His lips looked painted, but they weren’t, adding a feminine touch to a face that was all twentysomething Hollywood homage—Efron, that middle Jonas, the Twilight boys, with some Bette Midler thrown in as an aesthetic complication. He was wearing a low-cut T-shirt, and I immediately wanted to put my tongue in the hollow of his neck—if I were the type of person who would do a thing like that, which I wasn’t. But still.
His name was Julian, Julian Evans, and he had answered an ad I’d placed seeking a roommate. I was twenty-seven at the time, working on a PhD in American Studies at Emory, and budget cuts had cost me my funding, which meant I was no longer able to swing full rent on my two-bedroom apartment. I’d placed an ad in the local alternative weekly, figuring I’d get either a post-college slacker or a grad student nerd, neither of which would threaten the rhythms of my quiet academic life. Instead, I got Julian, whose email said that he owned his own business. What kind of twenty-one year old owns his own business? I wondered. But not for long.
“I’m what they call an escort,” he said in our first getting-to-know-you chat. We were sitting on the couch, and I was trying to pay attention to what he was saying. I found this difficult because of the way his knee poked through a rip in his jeans. Once I got finished with the knee, I was going to start thinking about his ankle bone, which protruded adorably above some sort of hipper-than-thou sneaker. I must have muttered something in response, because he kept talking.
“Yeah,” he said. “Basically, guys call me up and we pretend that we’re gonna go to the movies or something, but mostly we go right to the fucking. As near as I can tell, escort’s just a fancy word for hooker. It’s a pretty good gig, though. The money’s decent and I get to sleep late.”
This was enough to wake me from my knee reverie.
“What kind of guys hire you?” I asked, trying to sound like I talked to male prostitutes all the time, that this was a typical Tuesday night for a grad student.
“It’s mostly sad married guys,” he said. “They all say they’ve never done anything like this before, that they’re just curious, but you can tell that’s bullshit once they get started in on the peen. These are not first-timers, if you know what I’m sayin’.”
“The peen?” I asked.
“Yeah, the peen. Dick. Cock. I’ve got a beaut. I call it Walter.”
“You’ve named your, um, your, um…” I asked, pointing in the vicinity of his ‘um’. If I had tried to say cock, I would have passed out.
“Yep,” he said, “after my Uncle Walter. He’s a big, tall guy, with a big head and wide hips. Seen from the right angle, there’s definitely a resemblance.”
“That’s nice,” I said. “Your uncle must be very proud.”
“Anyway, most of these guys are pretty gross, but I’m hoping to break into the next level, where it’s mostly gay businessmen who need some eye candy for their charity dinners. The money’s better and so is the food, and I imagine they smell nicer than some of this current crowd. Kinda stinky, if you wanna know the truth. You don’t have to worry, though. I never bring guys home. Anyway, what’s your deal? You’re a ’mo, right?”
“Mo?” I asked, hoping he had some sort of kinky Three Stooges roleplaying in mind.
“Yeah, ’mo. As in homo. You’re gay, right?”
“What makes you think that?” I asked.
“Well, first of all, duh. And second, your neck and face lit up like Christmas when I started talking about Walter.”
“Well, a lot of people would have been somewhat discomfited by the Walter talk,” I said, “but yes, I’m gay. I came out three years ago when I started grad school. I made a pretty big production of it. Wore the shirts and the buttons and went to all the meetings. I even marched in a parade or two. Otherwise, not much has changed. I wasn’t having sex then, and I’m not having sex now. My dissertation is actually gayer than I am. I’m writing about same-sex eroticism in the movies of Judd Apatow. I’m currently working on a chapter about the fetishism of male genitalia in The 40-Year-Old Virgin.”
Julian looked at me like I was from another planet, where people kept their shirts buttoned up to the top and didn’t have names for their penises. He wasn’t wrong.
“Dude,” he said, “you really need to get laid.”
He wasn’t wrong about that either, but he didn’t seem inclined to offer a solution to my problem. I guess he was trying not to bring his work home with him. So considerate.
We spent the next few weeks falling into a pretty comfortable roommate rhythm. The ‘we’ being me, Julian and Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln was Julian’s cat. His previously unannounced cat. He was a tabby with bad teeth and he loved to lie belly-up in the circle of sunlight that landed on the kitchen counter each morning. Apparently, Julian’s mom had named him, following a family tradition that required naming animals after presidents. Abraham Lincoln had been preceded by Grover Cleveland, who had been eaten by a possum, and George Washington Pussycat, a randy beast they called ‘The Father of our Neighborhood’. Of course, I was allergic, so I complained a bit about Abraham Lincoln, but I actually liked having him around. Seeing him in his spot of sun, legs up in the air, made me think of Julian, who I didn’t actually see that much of.
He was out just about every night, and I was usually asleep by the time he came home. He didn’t wake up until around noon, leaving my mornings free and quiet to think about the ways in which Judd Apatow seems more obsessed with penises than vaginas, which, I was trying to argue, reveals that at the root of every heterosexual narrative lies an unspoken but bursting-at-the-seams same-sex eroticism. I liked thinking about these things, but the writing wasn’t going well.
Everything I put on paper was so tired, so obvious, so ultimately pointless. Who cared, really? Newsflash—straight guys think about dick, too. Big surprise. But my proposal had already been approved, and I owed my advisor a chapter before the fall semester started. It was already July, so I kept pretending to write it. I’d sit dutifully at the computer, cursor flashing, but then lose myself and the morning reading Entertainment Weekly online recaps of The Housewives of New Jersey and trying to get Abraham Lincoln to chase a rubber mouse.
This was the problem with American Studies, but it was also the lure. I got to ponder the dense patterns and structures of pop culture and not feel like I was wasting time. In college, I had been an English major and pretty sure I would pursue a PhD in literature, but at some point during my senior year, it had dawned on me that I didn’t really like literature that much. Paying so much attention to novels that no one ever read anymore felt masturbatory, and not in a good way. As I struggled to write my senior thesis, ‘The Chimney in the Lesser Novels of Thomas Hardy’, I procrastinated by watching hours of reality television, which seemed much more urgent, more full of meaning to me than Hardy and his chimneys. What did the sixth-season removal of Project Runway to Los Angeles tell us about Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis? What role did the raced bodies of Randy and Paula play in the consolidation of Ryan and Simon’s homosociality? Here, I thought, was true significance, as a nation of millions huddled around collective, ongoing narratives, which got invented and reinvented for each new moment and each new need.
So, when I received a brochure from the graduate program in American Studies at Emory, with its lurid list of courses devoted to deconstructing the contemporary American psyche, I was sold. It went well in the early years. I loved my coursework, delighting in the opportunity to apply neo-neo-Marxist logics to the reality TV spectacle of New Jersey. What fun.
And yet here I was, with Apatow and his weewees and peepees, and I wondered if maybe the bloom was off the rose. Was all of this just too ridiculous to be taken seriously?
Of course, it didn’t help that I was becoming more interested in Julian than film, more invested in his stories than in Apatow’s.
Julian would usually emerge from his room when he caught a whiff of the bacon I was microwaving for my then-favorite sandwich—turkey, brie, bacon and honey mustard on toasted Italian. I tend to ride a sandwich until I can’t stand the thought of it, and this was a good one, likely to last me another couple of months at least. Julian would shuffle into the kitchen, eyes cloudy with sleep, hair a mess, wearing pajama bottoms with little penguins on them and no shirt. He’d drink his coffee while I ate my lunch, though eating lunch while sporting an erection is harder than you’d think. It’s a crisis of dual and conflicting aims.
I looked forward to these moments, in part because of his nipples, but mostly because he’d tell me about his previous night’s work. The kid had no shame and would happily recount, in great detail, the men he’d met and the acts they’d asked him to perform. He made up names for them to keep them straight in the telling. There was Pig in the Blanket, Moley, The Great Assless Wonder—Assless for short—Johnny No Grip, Winnie the Pooh, Beer Can, This Al-Gore-Lookin’ Motherfucker—Al Gore for short—Toe Bitch, and my favorite, Big Gassy Baby, a two-hundred-fifty-pound man who dressed up like a doll and paid Julian to burp him.
His on-the-job experiences made my own desires seem quaint by comparison. I simply wanted to cuddle with him and watch home improvement shows. Maybe later we’d have time for other stuff, but for now I just wanted to rescue him from his world of complicated peens and big gassy babies. I wanted to give him a space free of desire, even as my own desire was at full tilt.
Because while he told his stories with a kind of smirky pride, making himself the whimsical hero in a postmodern sex farce, I had the sense his pride was mostly bluster, mostly show. His left hand gave him away. I didn’t notice it the first few times we hung out, and I’m not even sure he was aware of it, but when narrating his series of perversions for hire, his left hand was in constant motion, each finger touching his thumb in rapid and ongoing succession, and then his thumb touching the palm of his hand. He was counting his fingers with his fingers, over and over again. One two three four five. One two three four five. One two three four five. If it was a relief to discover that, yes, they were all in their proper positions, it wasn’t enough of a relief to keep him from starting over. The counting continued even when his stories ground to a halt, as they inevitably did. He’d just sit quietly staring at the Formica tabletop, counting his fingers. Those fingers made me realize I loved him. Not his eyes, or the perfect planes of his face. Not the way his bare shoulders caught the light from the kitchen window. Neither knee nor ankle bone. Not even Walter, or the hope of Walter. No, it was his fingers, desperately counting, searching for calm in a world that must have seemed anything but.
Then came a period when the stories stopped. I’d sit down with my sandwich, eager for that day’s dose of nipples and debauchery, and nothing. Well, I still had the nipples, but no tales of the sick and twisted. No Al Gore. No Big Gassy Baby. Just Julian, quieter than usual, deflecting attention away from his nighttime adventures by asking me questions about myself. I was happy to oblige. Anything to keep him looking at me, anything for the occasional eye contact.
When he did start talking again, a few days later, things were different. No more invented names, just someone called Paul.
“Paul?” I asked. “Not Stubby or Droolie or Crack Whore?”
“Yep, Paul,” he said. “Just Paul.”
“What makes him so special?” I asked, more than a little jealous.
“Nothing, really,” he said. “He’s just different. He’s older than the other guys and less grabby.”
“He’s paying you to talk?” I asked, wondering if this meant I had been on the clock all this time.
“He’s not paying me anything yet,” he said.
I could tell he didn’t really want to talk about this. He used to love nothing more than piling detail on detail—mouths and asses and penises and warts and scars and unfortunate danglers. But he was tightlipped about this Paul guy. Wouldn’t give him up. So, I let it go.
A few days later, Julian told me he was going out of town, but he wouldn’t tell me where, or who with.
And about a week after that, all hell broke loose. I was reading on the couch, with the local evening news on mute, when I caught something out of the corner of my eye. Julian was on television. It was a video of him at the airport with some older guy who looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him. The crawl at the bottom of the screen said, Anti-Gay Preacher Caught with Male Prostitute.
That was how it all started.
Chapter Two
Julian
I was never that good with the books, but I sure can work the peen. I can flat-out work it. I wield it, really. When guys see me starting to wield it, you can tell they’ve never really had one wielded on ’em before. It’s a revelation to them, the wielding. I know what the Bible says, but I don’t see how the kind of peen work I’m capable of isn’t beautiful in the eyes of the Lord. That just doesn’t make sense to me.
The sad thing is, it’s like the peen is all these guys see. They get so jacked up about the peen that they can’t see the forest for the trees, if you know what I’m sayin’. The forest is like something you’d see at Disney World, full of every kind of plant and animal from all around the world. What was that word Mr. Linseed taught us? Biodiversity. Yeah, biodiversity. And that’s me. My bio is diverse. Only these guys don’t see it because of the peen. That’s sad. That’s a goddamn tragedy.
But this new guy, Paul, was something else. He wasn’t interested in the peen. In that first week I knew him, I offered it up on more than one occasion. But he always found a way to change the subject, to shift the conversation from Walter to me—my family, my past, my ‘hopes and dreams’.
Still, I couldn’t imagine that dick wouldn’t come up at some point, so when he hired me to lift his luggage on a trip he was taking, I just figured that was what old guys called it, luggage, and I was willing. I was ready to lift it, do whatever with it, but apparently, he meant actual suitcases and shit, which seemed a waste of what I had to offer, but whatever. It’s your dime, dude.
But he sure did get his money’s worth on those massages. Never seen a guy so into naked rubbing and yet so awkward around the peen. I thought I’d seen it all, but this thing he called ‘the long stroke’, like he invented it or some shit, required some pretty delicate maneuvering around complicated areas. I had a knack for it, though, and he was happy with it. ‘Happy as a sissy with a bag full of peens,’ as my mom used to say.
So yeah, a whole lot of peen went to waste with this guy, but at least he was actually interested in me as a person apart from the peen. He was always asking me questions. Stuff about my daddy and whether he ever hugged me. Lots of stuff about my relationship to Jesus.
When I talked, he actually listened instead of just waiting for me to stick it in him like the rest of those assholes. It was nice. We had some good talks. Naked talks, which was kind of weird, but real talks. I couldn’t figure this one out, but his avoidance of the peen was no skin off my back. I was all right with it. It was nice for a change. It was a breath of fresh air.
Walter had been hogging all the attention as far back as eighth-grade gym class, which was the first time we had to shower with other guys. I didn’t know what I was walking into, since I didn’t really have anything to compare it with, but me and Walter caused quite a stir that first day. Eyes were poppin’! Asshole football players who wouldn’t be caught dead staring at another guy’s dick couldn’t get enough of mine. They were pointing, crowding around like it was a prize pig at the county fair.
‘Damn, boy! Somewhere there’s a horse missin’ his pecker!’
‘Um, dude, you and your dick should join the circus.’
‘You’re screwed, buddy. Ain’t no girl in the eighth grade gonna stand a chance with that thing. What a waste.’
It made me kind of famous for a while. Kids I didn’t know would shout things in the hall—Firehose, Redwood, King Dong. But eventually the peen business wound down and things got back to normal, which in my case meant a bored fourteen-year-old living in Jasper, Georgia, with no real interest in anything at all and with no one much interested in him either. I had Walter, and I wasn’t bad to look at, I guess, but I didn’t know how to be around people. Which didn’t really matter, since I wasn’t that sure I wanted to be.
I spent a lot of time by myself, watching television when my mom wasn’t home, which was most of the time, and hiding in my room playing video games when she was. She’d get home from work and be all eager to talk to me, to see how I was doing, make sure I was okay, but I couldn’t take it. It was too much somehow, too much attention, too much need for me to be happy so that she could be happy. I think she was trying to make up for my dad not being there, but she didn’t need to. You can’t miss someone you never really knew, and I sure didn’t miss him. But Mom seemed to feel pretty guilty about everything, and I couldn’t take it, so I’d tell her I had homework to do and disappear into hours of Grand Theft Auto.
Eventually I realized I was being left behind somehow. Other kids were moving on, dating, hooking up, bragging about who did what with who over the weekend. I’d hear guys talking about their pathetic attempts to somehow maneuver their girlfriends’ hands nearer and nearer their lesser Walters, but I couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for getting involved myself. I had a couple of friends who were girls. Losers like myself, they were shunned by others and not particularly bothered by it, but they were just friends. Occasionally one of the popular girls would come up to me and ask, ‘Is it true? Can I see it?’ But the minute I went for my zipper, they’d scream and run away, which was the only reason I was brave enough to reach for my zipper in the first place.
But when I was seventeen, things changed. I first noticed it in the mall. I was walking around, killing time, and I started to notice the way guys were cruising me. Older guys. They’d make eye contact and hold it, then let their eyes slide down toward Walter. Then they’d slide back up again and give me half a smile. A weird little grin. Like they knew something about me that I didn’t know.
The more I noticed this, the more it seemed to happen. At the mall. At the movies. Hell, when I was in the grocery store with my mom. One guy followed me around the produce section fondling every fruit and vegetable that looked like dick. He’d grab a banana and smile at me. He was especially interested in the cucumbers.
How could a small town produce so many perverts? It was like that movie about that kid who sees dead people. I see fags.
Thing is, I started to like it. The attention. It became a game I knew I could win. I didn’t plan to do anything about it. These guys were gross, but I liked being looked at. I liked the hunger I could cause just by being there. I liked the power it gave me, a power I’d never felt before.
Then one day, I was back at the mall and I needed to pee. I found the men’s room and pulled up to a urinal. I was staring at a booger cluster that had been left over the urinal when I heard somebody come out of one of the stalls behind me, and he took the urinal next to mine and unzipped. He gave me the look. Then he looked down at Walter then back at me, and he did some weird thing with his eyebrows, which I took to mean ‘Damn, kid!’ When he started waving his around and stroking it, I found myself staring at it and doing the same to Walter. And what I really remember—the thing that got me—was his breathing. His breathing sped up and got kind of heavy, like I was doing something to him that he didn’t like, but he wanted me to keep doing it anyway. He seemed in some kind of pain, and when he nodded back toward the stalls behind us, I let him take me into one. And when he got down on his knees and took Walter in his mouth, I loved it. The combination of what it felt like, and what he looked like doing it—hungry and desperate and a little scared. I didn’t even mind when he came on my shoes.
But then he zipped up and was gone without saying a thing. Just gone. And I told myself, no. Fuck no. Never again.
But a week later, I’d be back at it. Same bathroom, different guy. It kept happening. Every so often, I’d get sick of myself and call it quits. But a couple months later, there was the look again, and I’d cave. Sometimes a guy would take me back to his place or to a hotel, and that was when things got interesting. Turns out the bathroom stall hadn’t provided the proper stage for my abilities, but I was a star in a hotel room, and it didn’t take long for me to figure out what kind of effect Walter and I could have on someone. Whatever problems I had with people in the real world, they disappeared there because I was in control. I had the power. I knew exactly who I was and what I was supposed to do.
I still remember the first time a guy paid me. I’d peened him good, and after we’d gotten dressed, he came up close, kissed me and tucked something in my front pocket. When I checked later, it was just a couple of twenties, but it changed everything. It made the sex more exciting, but more important, it gave me the thing my mom was always telling me I lacked—ambition. Well, I had it now, and my mom was right. It gave life meaning and purpose. It gave me self-respect. It gave me a reason to get out of bed in the morning.
Looking back, though, I hate the time I wasted in those next couple of years. I was eighteen, nineteen, and I was meeting guys pretty regularly in addition to the job at the quicky mart that I took to keep my mom happy and off the real trail. But the guys I was meeting and the way I was meeting them were low rent. It was still all bathroom hookups, occasional encounters in the park, and, if I got lucky, a guy who could afford me in a hotel room. Even then, the buzz from the money began to wear off because it wasn’t enough. Forty bucks here, sixty there. It felt cheap, and I felt cheap. I needed to figure out a better way to put me and Walter on the market. Then this one guy told me that I was way hotter than the guys he found on Escort.com, which I had never heard of. So I did some investigating and discovered what I had been looking for. The thing that would make me a professional.
I put up an ad, and I didn’t have to lie in it, since Walter pretty much told his own story. I decided to move out, so I told my mom I’d been promoted at the quicky mart, and that it was time to be on my own. She didn’t put up much of a fight.
Since the Escort.com thing hadn’t really gotten rolling yet, I decided I needed a roommate, which was how I found Aaron. When I first saw him, I knew he’d be safe. He and his apartment would be a kind of peen-free zone, a place that was home, not work. And he was nice, though he was pretty weird. He spent all his time watching Judd Apatow movies and thinking about dick. If this was what higher education had come to, we were all in serious trouble. But what did I know? It wasn’t like I had ever been to college, so maybe he was on to something.
At any rate, he was a good roommate, and I did what I could to spice his life up a bit. Told him some stories, kept him entertained. Dude needed a serious fucking, but I wasn’t going to be the one to give it to him. Still, I put him on my list of things to fix. Maybe I could help him, get him out of the house, point him toward a dick that wasn’t in the movies.
Before too long, Escort.com was keeping me busy, but not in the way I had hoped. I still hadn’t tapped into the class of guys I was looking for—guys with money, lives and apartments like you see in those magazines Aaron is always drooling over.
But then I met Paul, and I thought, Jackpot.
Chapter Three
Paul
Campus had always been difficult. It was replenished each year, as if from a never-ceasing stream, with a new crop of the young and the supple. I got older, but the boys never did. No, always in bloom, always shiny with need. I could barely bring myself to walk across campus on a warm day, when it was nothing but flesh, flesh, flesh—shoulders and feet, necks and collarbones.
They’d sit in my Intro to Psych, shorts and sandals in the early weeks of the fall semester, sometimes a sleeveless tank, and I could almost see steam rising off them. Like their heads and shoulders were hot. Boys. Boys on the verge of manhood. Almost men, but still children, really, with their myriad confusions and uncertainties. There were girls, too, wearing their trashy tops with rhinestone sparkles. The boys fell for it, this ridiculous performance of their availability. I would be lecturing on individuation, and I’m sure the boys were trying to hide their erections. Erections caused by those sad little things in their glittery tops and their painted toenails. The boys would shift uncomfortably in their seats, cross and recross their legs. The auditorium throbbed with a collective and urgent need for release.
Campus was difficult, but the pulpit wasn’t. Standing above my small but committed flock on a Sunday morning, I felt sure of purpose and intention. It was the emptying out of one thing and the rushing in of another. God’s love filled the room and our hearts. It cleansed and purified. ‘Trust in the Lord with all your heart,’ the Bible tells us, ‘and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight.’
It wasn’t simply the relative absence of college boys that made church a safer space. In fact, a few were in the congregation, though more fully clothed than their secular brothers. No, the safety came from being wrapped in the embrace of people of faith and purpose. It was the protection of community. I might have been their shepherd, but I knew they were watching out for me as well. To be pure of heart was to be pure in the eyes of others, safer because of the watching. Less lost.
My colleagues in the psychology department at the university wondered how I lived, as they put it, ‘in two worlds’. They could not fathom the unity I found between God’s teaching and more secular theories of human development. They saw only contradiction and tension, science versus religion. But God teaches wholeness, and what are psychologists investigating if not a striving for wholeness, for a successful integration of parts and impulses? Too much of one keeps us out of balance. Too much work or too much pleasure. Too much of the body, and not enough of the heart. God knows what happens in such people, torn asunder by their conflicts, incapable of resolution. God’s plan for us is unity. The pages of our textbooks tell essentially the same story.
But unity isn’t a given. You have to earn it. And there are so many ways to stumble. I had helped a number of young men in the congregation, and I always knew who was in trouble.
I could see it in their faces during the sermon. I knew it from their twitching. It was as if everything on them itched, including their eyes. When enough of them had the look, I’d convene an accountability group, because the only way to get through this was with a band of brothers. They’d be reluctant to talk at first, too embarrassed by the thing they were struggling with. I always shocked them when I talked so openly about masturbation, but that was the only way I knew how to get them. To say, yes, let’s admit we’ve all done it, but let’s also admit that it’s a kind of sickness, no less an addiction than alcohol, or heroin, or pornography. It saps the strength and pollutes the brain. After a few weeks, they’d feel comfortable enough to tell their stories, their bouts with temptation, their successes, their failures. It was so moving, seeing these young men wrestle with something bigger than them, knowing that they could beat it with my help. I loved them for their struggle.
They were so different from the boys at the university. To the pure, all things are pure, and despite what these boys were doing at home—their guilty rubbings, their furtive excretions, their guilt, their repentance—each and every one of them was pure. They were pure because they hated themselves and wanted to change. They had hope for something cleaner, better, less divided. And in the fountain of their hope, I replenished my own.
Things went less well at home. Jacob was trouble from the day we adopted him. His social worker came to see me when Jacob was nine, said she had this beautiful troubled kid who needed the kind of good Christian home Margaret and I could provide. We had done this before on a short-term basis, fostering boys whose families had given up on them. We’d take them for a year or two, sometimes three, and it filled our home with something other than ourselves. Jacob felt different to us, though. Special somehow. He had this glow about him. So we opted for a more permanent commitment, despite his history. He was so angry, but I immediately recognized the source of that anger. I could see the shape of his lack, an exact picture of his need. This boy needed a father and I knew I could show him the love he had never had. I would prove to him that all things are possible in God’s eyes, and all of us are wanted.
At first, it seemed to work. The stability we offered made him more stable. The love we showed made him more loving. He relaxed into us, and we were a family. But even then, Margaret and I noticed something in him that worried us. He had trouble with other boys, but not the kind of trouble boys are supposed to have. He seemed afraid of them, unsure of himself around them. With girls, he was lively and gregarious, but with boys he shrank into himself. And he developed a way of carrying himself that—yes, I’ll say it—that repulsed me. He was so fastidious, so refined in his gestures, as if everything was calculated. Even at twelve, he reminded us more of a Hollywood starlet than a normal boy.
It was textbook, and I should know, because I wrote the textbook, Saving Our Boys from the Gay Menace. Back when I was working on the Effeminate Boy Project, my publisher suggested that I write a manual for parents dealing with gender-variant youth, and it came easily to me. I knew the steps that boys needed to go through. I knew the pitfalls they had to avoid. It was all about rewarding them for the right deeds and punishing them for the wrong. The most effective punishments were easy to teach, though not always so easy to implement. The parents had to be firm. They had to know what was right in the eyes of the Lord, and they had to trust that it was possible.
For younger children, this involved withholding attention. A mother who saw her boy playing with dolls simply had to refuse to acknowledge him, no matter how upset he became, no matter how he cried. She had to freeze him out. For older children, you could implement a reward structure using poker chips. The child would get red chips for gender-appropriate behavior, and these could be cashed in for candy, or for toys. He’d get blue chips for nonconforming behavior, and these would earn him a swat from his father. In the cases we saw in our clinic, the results were amazing. In most cases, the child was back on the right path after two years. We were literally making men.
But it didn’t work with Jacob. Maybe we got to him too late, when his girlish ways were entrenched, or maybe his resistance was too strong. Either way, we couldn’t make any progress, couldn’t see any signs of change. All our efforts simply pushed him further toward the person he was so bent on becoming. You could hear it in the infuriating upward intonation of his voice. You could see it in the way he sat, legs crossed at the knees, arms crossed at the wrists, head cocked up at an angle. So superior. But mostly you could see it in the way he looked at you. Once, he had said something particularly sassy, something about what I was wearing, I think, and I was so angry with him that I shook. And he just smirked at me. Looked me dead in the eye, and smirked. With an eyebrow raised, he purred, ‘Did I make Daddy angry?’ It made my flesh crawl.
I waged a multi-front assault. I gave him books to read, books that I knew had helped other young men in their walk with God. I established Man Days, Sunday afternoons when I’d make him watch football with me. I made him attend the young men’s group at church, which was run by Rich Aiken. Rich was a former high school quarterback, and I figured he was just what Jacob needed, someone to show him what a real man was. But it turned out that Jacob was skipping the meetings, smoking cigarettes behind the church with a trashy punk rock girl.
And yes, I’m aware of the irony. How could I not be? A nationally recognized authority on curing gender-variant boys, and look what the Lord had given me, this faggoty son. But he was my cross and I bore it. I loved that boy. I really did. No matter what people might tell you.
Maybe I couldn’t help Jacob, but he helped me. He was the one who told me the truth about myself, if only indirectly. Despite what those boys on campus did to me, I wasn’t like him. Not a bit. Would a homosexual find another homosexual so repulsive? Would one homosexual make another’s flesh crawl? I hated the queer in him, which made it clear there wasn’t any queer in me. This problem with my male students was different. It was a test from the Lord, not some ‘marker of identity’, as they call it over in the sociology building.
How do you deal with a test? You take it. And you pass it. It’s the only way to know what you know. The timing was right. I had a series of speaking engagements coming up that would take me to several cities in the Midwest, but I had recently had abdominal surgery and I wasn’t supposed to lift heavy objects. Margaret couldn’t go, since leaving Jacob home alone was not a good idea. At any rate, I needed some sort of assistant, a traveling companion.
And that was how I found Julian.
Chapter Four
Julian
It was pretty weird that he responded to my Escort profile. I mean, it wasn’t subtle.
Perfect 8-inch cock (cut). Ass like a bubble. Up for anything, as long as you pay.
The picture I posted was pretty great—me, shirtless, one hand on my junk. I was doing this thing with my lips that I had been working on, a half lick, half pout that took me a while to get right. In a few of the early shots I looked like one of those Down’s kids—great pecs and a nice little six-pack, but kinda drooly. But eventually I was able to let the tongue hang a bit without it looking like a slab of bacon, and the effect was exactly what I wanted. Sexy, but a little shy. Approachable, but not like I’d talk to just anybody.
Paul’s subject line, Nice man seeks companionship, was so different from the others. Ziggy needs to fuck, stuff like that. I felt bad for Ziggy—I’m sure it was true about Ziggy—but Paul’s more G-rated plea was refreshing. The email itself was a nice change of pace.
Dear Julian,
I’m seeking a nice young man to spend time with. I’m not asking for much. Just some conversation, and maybe the occasional massage. Do you like to give massages? I find they’re so relaxing, and provide such an opportunity for two men to bond on a deeper level, to reaffirm and celebrate their masculinity.
I think you could be someone special. Would you be willing to meet? I would love to take you to lunch.
Please write back. I look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Paul
p.s. I have attached a picture. I hope you like it. I know I’m no Brad Clooney, but not bad for an older gentleman, I think.
He had a walrus face, but the rest of him looked about as good as you could at that age. What was it about older gays that turned them all into walruses? What made them think that a bushy mustache was a dick magnet?
But he had kind eyes, and his needs seemed pretty low impact, so I figured I had nothing to lose by meeting him. It wasn’t gonna happen at lunch, though. I hate lunch dates, all fidgety bullshit over weird salads, so I suggested he buy me a drink at this downtown hotel I sometimes take my clients. The place was full of out-of-town business dudes, so no chance of running into people he knew.
I got there early and tucked myself away in a corner behind the big fake ferns so I could scope him out first. I always gave myself a chance to escape if the dude showed up and didn’t look right—dirty or high, or just weird. Paul looked like his picture and I recognized him immediately. He looked nice, actually. He was wearing khakis, lame shoes and a blue blazer over a shirt that had little palm trees on it. You could tell he considered the shirt something special, the kind of shirt that made him seem younger, made him ‘hip’. It just made him look like a fruit, but I appreciated the effort.
I let him get settled, then I pulled up next to him at the corner of the bar so I could work the eye contact and the knee touching. I put my hand on his arm and introduced myself, and for a second, he seemed paralyzed. He couldn’t speak and he looked like he suddenly had to go to the bathroom. But he pulled himself together.
“Hi, Julian,” he said. “It’s so nice to meet you. Your picture doesn’t do you justice.”
There are two kinds of gay voices. The first is basically a male version of that chick from Gone with the Wind. The second—and this was Paul—sounds like the guy is trying to keep something from sliding out of his ass while he’s talking. It’s the voice of someone afraid to let go.
“Neither does yours,” I said. “I like that shirt. Very cool.” This did the trick. He relaxed a bit.
“Thanks! My wife’s always telling me that it’s too ostentatious, but I think it suits me.”
“Your wife’s wrong,” I said. “Don’t listen to your wife.”
I couldn’t tell if his sudden mention of his wife was planned or not, a way to let me know that he wasn’t really a fag, but he seemed flustered by it and changed the subject.
“What can I get you to drink?” he asked. “I rarely drink. I don’t even know what to order. I’d like something sweet.” When he said this, he looked me in the eyes and blushed. He was trying to flirt. It was so cute.
I got the bartender’s attention and ordered a beer for myself and a piña colada for Paul. After about fifteen minutes of fake chitchat—‘Where are you from?’ ‘Do you like dogs?’ ‘How ’bout those Braves?’—the piña colada seemed to kick in, and Paul suddenly couldn’t stop talking.
“I’ve never done anything like this, you know? I don’t even know what that means, ‘like this’. What is this? It’s not what you think it is. I can only imagine the kinds of men you deal with, the things they must want. The things you must do. I’m not like that. That’s not what I want or why I’m here. Does that make sense? I mean, I’m not a homosexual. I’m married, I have an adopted son, I preach on Sundays. I was drawn to your ad because you’re not a homosexual either. I’m not talking about what you do. I know what you do. I’m talking about what you are. Who you are. You seem like a nice, normal young man who’s probably doing things he doesn’t want to do. And maybe I can help you. Maybe we can help each other. Do you understand?”
“Of course I do,” I said, having no idea what the fuck he was talking about. Guys only hire me for one reason, and it was time to get moving. “I can tell you’re different,” I said, looking him dead in the eye and moving my leg up against his. I started slowly stroking my neck with my right hand. I saw a show on the Discovery Channel once that was all about the mating rituals of birds. Birds really get a hard-on for neck displays, apparently, and guys aren’t that different. I learned pretty early that adding some finger stroking to it seals the deal, since it suggests other kinds of stroking.
But Paul broke the eye contact and pulled himself away.
“Julian,” he said, “you don’t have to be like this.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like you are with your other men,” he said. “Like you’re working. You don’t have to work with me. I like you, and I want to spend time with you, but it’s going to be clean.”
“Clean?” I asked.
“That’s right,” he said. “Something we can both be proud of.”
“What about those massages you mentioned?” I asked. “Will those be clean, too?”
“There’s nothing wrong with men touching each other,” he said. “What matters is what’s behind the touch. My guess is that you’ve touched a lot of men, and that a lot of men have touched you. And I bet they’ve enjoyed it. But I don’t think you have.”
He was wrong, of course. I did enjoy it. Even with the ugly guys, the fatties, I could find something to enjoy. The look in their eyes when they first saw Walter was worth the occasionally smelly dude, or a guy who wouldn’t shut the fuck up. So, yeah, Paul didn’t know what he was talking about. And his thinking he could save me was starting to piss me off. I didn’t need saving. I was fine.
“Let’s go upstairs,” I said, “and I’ll prove you wrong.”