Author: gregh121

I am a writer and editor who lives in New Orleans.

Speechless

Yesterday afternoon I received a text from my supervisor letting me know they’d given out all the condoms for the weekend, and therefore I do NOT have condom duty today; instead getting a lovely four day weekend. How great is that? So I can spend the day doing whatever I feel like it–although I will most likely be cleaning and organizing, maybe writing. (I did, after all, start writing Crescent City Charade yesterday…) I am also probably going to get out the good camera and take a walk around the neighborhood taking pictures of the Bead Trees. Tonight is the end of Carnival for Paul and me–we never do anything on Fat Tuesday–so with the Proteus and Orpheus parades tonight we ring down the curtain.

Pretty cool.

We also decided to spend the day yesterday in recovery mode; skipping the parades and just chilling out inside. I cleaned the kitchen and got the laundry caught up before repairing to my easy chair, where I finished reading Little Pretty Things by Lori Rader-Day, and started The Butterfly by James M. Cain (which I intend to finish today; it’s only 118 pages).

The walkie-talkie on the front desk hissed, crackles, and finally resolved into Lu’s lilting voice: “At what point,” she said, “do we worry the guy in two-oh-six is dead?”

The couple across the counter from me glanced at once another. Bargain hunters. We only saw two kinds of people at the Mid-Night Inn–Bargains and Desperates–and these were classic Bargains, here. The two kids, covered in mustard stains from eating home-packed sandwiches, whines that the place didn’t have a pool. The mother had already scanned the lobby for any reference to a free continental breakfast. We didn’t offer continental breakfast, not even the not-free kind.

I slid their key cards to them, smiling, and flicked the volume knob down on the radio before Lu convinced them they’d prefer to get back in their car and try their luck farther down the road.

“Which room are we in, again?” said the woman.

“Two-oh-four,” I said.

“And you said we could go to Taco Bell,” cried the little girl, five or so. A glittering pink barrette that must have started the day neatly holding back her corn-silk hair now clung by a few strands. She threw herself at her mother’s feet and wailed into the carpet. “But they don’t even have a Taco Bell.”

This is Lori Rader-Day’s second novel, and I bought it in Alabama a few weeks ago when I was there with her. I’d run out of things to read that I’d brought with me, and the amount of time it took me to finish reading this wonderful sophomore novel has nothing to do with the quality of the book or its writing; it has everything to do with my lack of time the last few weeks because of Carnival. It was wonderful to have the time yesterday to sit down in my easy chair with a purring kitty and finish the second half of the book, savoring the twists and turns and the writing. I do have Lori’s first novel The Black Hour in my TBR pile, and I am looking forward to her new book, coming out this spring, The Day I Died.

Rader-Day’s main character, Juliet Townsend, is the heart of this exquisitely dark novel about lost chances, bad choices, and how incredibly easy it is to spiral down into the hopeless darkness of poverty and failure. Juliet was an accomplished distance runner in her small Indiana hometown of Midway when she was in high school, always finishing in second place to her best friend and teammate Maddy. Now, years later, after they missed running in the state championship meet, Juliet works as a housekeeper at the run down Mid-Night Motel just off the highway, living with her withdrawn mother who has never recovered from her husband’s death–which also resulted in Juliet dropping out of college. And then one night–the week of their high school ten year reunion, Maddy shows up at the Mid-Night; successful and beautiful and rich–and later winds up dead.

The mystery aspects of the book are quite good, but Rader-Day’s real strength is character. The tragedy of Juliet’s life–the missed opportunities, the road not taken, the sustained drudgery of her job and the concurrent poverty, and not knowing how to get out of it–is detailed in painful precision, and echoes the situation of so many people, who once had bright futures but circumstances beyond their control dragged them down into the hell of the paycheck-to-paycheck life; the not knowing where your next meal is going to come from, the praying nothing goes wrong with your car because you can’t afford to get it fixed or to get a new one, the death grip that all the horrors of high school can still hold on to your head some ten years later…but Juliet, in wondering who could have killed her old best friend, starts remembering, starts looking into things, and starts kicking over some old stones that might best be left undisturbed.

Wonderful. I highly recommend this.

Marry the Night

Four parades today: Okeanos, Mid-City, Thoth, and Bacchus tonight. I am not even remotely as tired as I was yesterday morning; the fact Endymion takes a different route, which allowed us to take the rest of the day off after Tucks yesterday probably helped a great deal. I woke up this morning feeling rested. Spending the evening getting caught up on our television shows helped a great deal as well. And the left-over Deep Dish pizza from That’s Amore? It ensured there was no hangover last evening after the effects of the day drinking wore off, which was truly lovely. So a deep-dish pizza is definitely going to have to be on the prep list going forward.

I do enjoy Thoth. Paul wants to take the day off and rest up for Bacchus tonight; I don’t know whether I will skip any parades. We usually don’t go to any on Fat Tuesday, so that would mean all we have left to attend would be Bacchus tonight and Orpheus tomorrow. And since I am feeling rested…we shall have to see, I suppose.

Of course, I could just spend the entire day inside relaxing and reading. Maybe even doing some writing. There certainly is some cleaning necessary, I’ve let the entire apartment slide these last few days, and usually it’s the weekend where I make up for my lack of cleaning during the week, or the things I let slide. But I am going to try to get the laundry done this morning, and maybe some of the kitchen. But relaxing in the easy chair also sounds terrific. We shall see. I do want to finish my Lori Rader-Day novel, and I think I’ve chosen my next book as well. Tomorrow I am going to walk about ten miles again for Lundi Gras outreach (yay), so maybe resting today isn’t such a bad idea. I don’t know. We’ll see how I feel. But as I glance around at the mess in my kitchen, I know I probably won’t let that stand.

I have to say yet again how much I love Carnival. It occurred to me last night that probably the reason New Orleans is such a progressive city in a sea of red is because of Carnival; when you’re standing out on the parade route, you see everything: people of every size, shape, color, ethnicity, sexuality; probably the most diverse of crowds, and everyone is getting along, hanging out, talking, chatting with total strangers, hanging out and just having a good time. It’s very hard to ‘other’ people when you are around them all the time. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still possible to do so, of course; racism and sexism and homophobia certainly exist in New Orleans, but somehow it doesn’t seem as ingrained here as it is in other places.

Then again, I’m a white male, so I tick two of the boxes on the Privileged Card.

In other hilarity, one of the reasons (there are many) I’ve not started working on the new Scotty book (tentatively titled Crescent City Charade; that may not last) is because I start each Scotty book by satirizing the opening of a famous book (my favorite was Mardi Gras Mambo: “Last night I dreamed I went to Mardi Gras again.”) and I’ve not been able to figure out one that would work. Yesterday morning, as I sipped my second or third coffee and Bailey’s, it hit me like a 2 x 4 across the face, I looked it up, and it’s perfect.

So maybe this week I will get started on it. Who knows?

And now, back to the spice mines.

Here’s a shot from the parade route yesterday:

Bloody Mary

I wish I had some Bloody Mary mix in the house. That sounds absolutely perfect this morning, but alas, I am making do with Bailey’s in my coffee. It’s IRIS SATURDAY, Paul’s and my favorite parade day, and it is stunningly beautiful outside already, 63 degrees with a high of 79, not a cloud in our gorgeous sky, the sun is shining–how does it get better for standing out on the street screaming for beads while day drinking?

It doesn’t.

Last night I was so tired I almost wept out there on the parade route–despite being that deep tired you can feel in your bones and joints, I was out there till the bitter end of Morpheus last night. Despite the agony, though, I had a great time. I love Carnival, I truly do. It just amazes me that every year we have this ENORMOUS event, and even if they didn’t throw anything (as if, who am I trying to kid) it would be fun to people watch, if nothing else. And there’s no escaping Carnival; even if you don’t want to participate, it’s so ubiquitous you have no choice: you have to just give up and go with it otherwise you’ll make yourself crazy. I walked over ten miles yesterday, between going to and from work as well as walking around in the Quarter passing out condoms, and I’ll have to do that again on Monday. Sigh. At least Fat Tuesday is a holiday and I don’t have to work; and it’s a short work week. Huzzah!

I also heard from an editor this morning I submitted an essay to that she loved my essay, which was finished while I was in Kentucky and so I wasn’t sure if it was any good or not. YAY, ME! I am very excited about this, as you can probably imagine: good news about writing is always welcomed in the Lost Apartment. Being a writer is so bipolar, really; you go from highs of “wow I am really good at this” to horrifying, depressing lows of “why do I bother I so clearly suck at this.” It’s undoubtedly why so many of us drink.

Xanax is also helpful, I find.

I am going to try to get all this laundry done and finish cleaning the kitchen before Iris arrives…and I already have a lovely, pleasant buzz from the Bailey’s. Huzzah!

But I still wish I had a Bloody Mary.

Here’s an Iris memory for you:

Love Game

The streak is alive! We got another shoe last night at Muses! Although, truth be told, Paul gets the shoes for us. I don’t think, over the years, I’ve gotten more than two total, if that. Paul is a shoe monster, though, and this year’s is an LSU shoe!

It will go nicely with our Saints shoe.

It is incredibly beautiful today; the high is going to be 80, the sun is out, it’s only slightly humid and there’s a lovely cool breeze as well. There are three parades tonight, and I am doing condom duty at the table this afternoon (again on Monday; with the weekend free for parades and so forth). I hate having to walk home up the parade route; I don’t know if it’s the weather this year or what, but MY GOD is it crowded on the parade route this year. There were so many people out there last night for Muses that the street couldn’t even be cleared for the high school marching bands. I can only imagine what this weekend will be like out there; particularly for Bacchus on Sunday night. We will definitely be out there for Iris and Tucks tomorrow, and will again skip Endymion tomorrow night; I haven’t seen Endymion since we stopped walking up the parade route to the Quarter during it. Saturday night we’ll just hang out at the Lost Apartment and catch up on our TV shows and get rested for Sunday’s all day debacle.

I am so tired already.

Marathon, Greg, not a sprint.

I was so tired yesterday. I had to stock the house since I can’t use the car again until Wednesday (and won’t be able to get to the grocery store until Thursday, since I have a long day on Wednesday) and by the time I got back home I was so tired I could barely function. I did some laundry and the dishes and repaired to my easy chair, desperate to read my Lori Rader-Day novel but I was too exhausted to focus and only got only thirty pages done. Then I walked to my favorite pizza place in the world–That’s Amore in Metairie OPENED A LOCATION IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD–and got us a Chicago-style deep dish pizza…ate two pieces, and actually took a NAP before Paul got home.

But we’re almost there…the finish line is in sight.

Paparazzi

Memories lie.

There are things and moments from my childhood I remember completely differently from my parents and my sister, for example, or moments from early on in Paul’s and my relationship. My memories differ from those of kids I went to high school with, and those of my fraternity brothers. Memory and experience are always, of course, colored by our own internal beliefs, values, fears, and opinions; which is what makes being a crime writer interesting.

I remembered, for example, that we moved from the city out to the suburbs in the winter of 1969. I’ve always thought that was the truth; we moved to our house in Bolingbrook that winter and would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that was the truth. Imagine my surprise, during my recent visit to my parents, to hear both of them insist that wasn’t true and we moved out there in either the winter of 1971 or 1972; and I sat there, confused, and then a key piece of my history snapped into place in the jigsaw puzzle that is my memory: you were ten when you moved; your eleventh birthday was your first birthday in the new house so it had to be 1971. I’d always remembered that we’d lived out there for much longer than we had. We only lived in Bolingbrook for four and a half years; I was in the sixth grade when we moved and we moved to Kansas after my sophomore year ended.

Interesting, isn’t it?

I was rather startled the other day to hear that David Cassidy is in early stage dementia; David Cassidy was a part of my childhood, and it’s hard to remember the years when The Partridge Family aired without hearing their music in the echo chambers of my brain. The Partridge Family Album was, in fact, the first album my sister owned. She had one of those little portable record players that either ran on six enormous batteries or could be plugged into the wall, and she played the album over and over and over again. I didn’t mind because I kind of liked the music myself; and we watched the show religiously every week. My sister, of course, was madly in love with David Cassidy, who did nothing for me. (Even as a nascent gay child, my crush was Kurt Russell.)

Before buying that album my sister primarily bought 45’s; it amazes me that there are any number of people who don’t know what those are, or how you used to stack them on the record player, so the next one would drop when the previous one finished playing and the needle cleared out of the way, or the scratchy sounds from collected dust and/or scratches on the record that you could always hear in the background. David Cassidy replaced Bobby Sherman in my sister and her friends’ affections; Bobby Sherman replaced Davey Jones of the Monkees.

The show itself was pretty dreadful, really. The idea was derived from the Cowsills, an actual family musical group, and it was designed to appeal to young girls and hopefully sell some records; another prefabricated music group along the lines of the Monkees and the Archies. They’d never intended for “Keith” to sing lead vocals on the music, but David Cassidy auditioned and got the part and to their surprise, he could sing and had musical ambitions. (Alas for him, he became a huge teen idol but never got the rock stardom he always dreamed of.) His stepmother in real life, Shirley Jones, was cast as his mother, widowed Shirley who worked in a bank to support her five kids. (Jones was actually an accomplished singer herself, and had an Oscar for playing a prostitute in Elmer Gantry.) Even at the time, I didn’t think the show was funny, but it wasn’t as bad and corny and hokey as The Brady Bunch, which was admittedly a low bar. But I was delighted several years ago to discover that the Partridge Family’s music was on iTunes, and I downloaded some, out of a sense of nostalgia.

And it wasn’t bad. I downloaded more, and still listen to it from time to time. It’s glossy, well produced, and slick pop music, but it’s not terrible. It certainly holds up better than Shaun Cassidy’s hits or New Kids on the Block.

And am I ever glad I didn’t have to go into the office today. I am worn out, frankly, not sure how I am going to survive tonight’s parades.

Heavy sigh

Applause

So, I went to see my doctor for my annual check-up and I am HEALTHY. My blood pressure is good, heart rate good, I’ve lost a total of nine pounds since the last time I saw her (and I only started trying a few weeks ago, with time off for Carnival, of course), I’m sleeping well–everything is remarkably better than when I last saw her six months ago. She also gave me a referral to a cardiologist, since we have recently discovered, thanks to the hemorrhagic stroke my mother had just before Christmas, that a congenital heart defect runs in her family (and may be why her father died in his sleep when he was in his late thirties). If I do have it, they may have to to preemptively put a stent in to correct it and prevent me from eventually having a stroke. Yay. But hey–it’s better to know so you can do something about it rather than just having a stroke, right?

I am going to give full credit to my good health to NO DEADLINES.

After work tonight I will have to walk home up the parade route–always fun–and tonight’s parades are Druids and Nyx. Druids is kind of dull, but Nyx is usually fun. I also have tomorrow off so I can run errands and stock our larder since I won’t be able to move the car again until next Wednesday, and of course, tomorrow night is Muses, after two others. Will this be the year our shoe-streak ends? I am a little concerned that it may be. We’ve had a really great run with shoes, though, so can’t really complain too much should a drought occur. But since I can’t move the car, I took the streetcar to see my doctor and then took it all the way back to the Quarter so I could walk the rest of the way to the office. It was a lovely ride–I really should take the streetcar more and go explore, just you know, go see things and play sight-seer in my own home town–and I got to read some more of my book (seriously, peeps, I know it’s taking me a long time to finish it but Lori Rader-Day’s Little Pretty Things is REALLY GOOD), which I hope to finish tomorrow. I’m not sure what to read next; I will certainly keep you in the loop, Constant Reader.

I have been obsessed by a true crime case lately; one that I am peripherally connected to (a friend knows one of the people from the case); which is kind of weird, when I think about it–I also have a connection to the whole Bobby Durst The Jinx mess; again, through some friends. I won’t talk about the case much–it involves a closeted millionaire/entrepreneur being brutally murdered, and the police had arrested a gay porn star for the crime…only to release him recently. I don’t want to write it as an actual true crime book; I’m not a good enough journalist to do something like that. But I think it’s an interesting basis for a novel, and I am chewing around ideas on how to do that–because there are several different angles to take and all of them, at least to me now, are fascinating and interesting. I’m just toying with it for now–I have a couple of other books I’d like to write first–but this part of creating a book, brainstorming and thinking and wondering what point of view you want to have, what you want the book to say–is so much more fun than actually writing it.

Ah, well.

And on that note, back to the spice mines.

Here’s today’s hunk:

The Edge of Glory

Well, in very short order after my post yesterday, the subject not only lost his book contract but his job, so that’s something.

It rained all night last night, which meant I had trouble getting out of bed this morning, and of course I have to work late. The weather today, after the night’s rain, is absolutely stunning; that kind of spring day (yes, I know it’s February) that makes you feel lazy, the day you shouldn’t spend in the office but lying in a hammock with a good book and a bottle of wine. But that’s fine; I have a shorter work day tomorrow and am off Thursday and the parades start rolling again tomorrow night; I know Nyx is tomorrow but I can’t remember the one before it; Druids? Yes, it is Druids. Cool. I should be home before Nyx gets to my neighborhood. It’s always fun to walk homedown the parade route, and I will most definitely get my Fitbit steps in. Woo-hoo! And my favorite pizza place–That’s Amore out in Metairie–just opened a new place on St. Charles a few blocks from my house. Woo-hoo! I think I might have to go over there and get us a pizza on Thursday.

Yeah, the diet’s going well, thanks for asking.

I’m enjoying the not-writing time very much, I might add. I am starting to worry that I may not go back to writing at all.

Ha, like that would happen. I still have lots of ideas, and get more every day.

All right, that’s enough for today.

Here’s a hunk for you.

Born This Way

Monday and we survived Weekend One of Carnival Parades. *whew*. I am exhausted, though, which is never a good thing for a Monday morning of a new work week. Heavy heaving sigh.

Now I know what ‘bone tired’ means. And speaking of ‘bone tired’….

As Constant Reader knows, I taught a session on writing LGBTQ characters at the SinC into Great Writing workshop at Bouchercon this past September in New Orleans. It was an amazing experience, and it was enormously flattering to be asked to do so in the first place. I was also asked to write something for the Sisters newsletter, pretty much given carte blanche to write whatever I wanted to, and since I had an essay about being a gay writer on the backburner (I’ve been toying with it for almost a year) which I was calling “Death by a Thousand Cuts,” I said sure. As I was wrapping up deadlines and looking ahead to the glory days of NOT HAVING ANY DEADLINES, I started writing the essay again, whittling away things from the original unfinished draft that no longer fit my thesis and…I got about halfway through and stopped.

The reason why I stopped? Because it is next to impossible to write about the challenges of being a gay crime writer writing about gay characters without sounding like the biggest whiner in the world, and I don’t want to be that guy.

Then, a question posted on a list-serve I belong to for crime writers triggered some answers that were so horrific, so thoughtless, and so ignorant that I suddenly knew how to write the essay–or at least how to address it with a starting place.

One of the current ‘boiling points’, if you will, in our current society is the question of ‘cultural appropriation’ as well as ‘cultural insensitivity’, and how these questions apply in a broader sense with the American guarantee of First Amendment rights under the Constitution (without getting into the reality–which most people either don’t understand, or chose to ignore– that ‘freedom of speech’ is actually only guaranteed as a protection from persecution and prosecution from the state; not from other people, and certainly not from consequences. The example I always use is, “Well, when I worked at the ticket counter I couldn’t tell a passenger to go fuck himself, could I, without getting fired?”) Recently–I don’t remember where I saw this, but it was on Facebook; I don’t know if it was from an industry publication or a newspaper or something–I read a piece about the major publishers hiring what were called ‘sensitivity readers’ to read manuscripts dealing with characters who were out of the author’s experience to make sure the characters weren’t offensive. I am of two minds about this, and I can certainly understand why people would find this alarming/concerning; how much control/power would these ‘sensitivity readers’ have over the author’s work? Not to mention the fact that no one can speak for an entire community; what one gay man finds offensive the next three you ask may not.

So, yes, I do have a bit of a problem with the concept of sensitivity readers. However, if I were writing a character from a culture not my own; say, a New Orleanian of Vietnamese descent, wouldn’t I want to talk to a New Orleanian or two of Vietnamese descent? Wouldn’t I want my character to be as authentic and realistic as I can possibly make him or her? I’ve talked to cops, private eyes, and FBI agents to make my characters are grounded in reality as I can. So, why wouldn’t a heterosexual writer creating a gay character want to get some insight from a gay person? And so on, and so on, and so on. I don’t see a problem here, but again, that is the work that should be done before the manuscript is turned into the editor and publisher, and I’m not sure how comfortable I would be with that for myself.

Of course, there are those who, because of this, have pulled out the ‘censorship’ battleflag, thoroughly missing the point. The First Amendment does not guarantee anyone a publishing contract, nor does it guarantee a platform; if it does I’d like to be booked on both The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert when my next book comes out, thank you very much. Oh, wait, it doesn’t mean that, after all?

Blimey.

Which is my roundabout way of getting to the latest provocateur, Milo. People were rightly outraged when the conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster gave him a book deal; people were rightly outraged when he started getting invitations to speak at colleges and universities; people were outraged when he got invited to go on Real Time with Bill Maher (whom I also have problems with, but we’re talking about Milo now). As loathsome as the things he says are, I will defend his right to say them against any attempt by the state to silence him. Simon & Schuster is a business; they have a right to give a book deal to anyone they think will make them money (although I seriously doubt this book will make them any money; I see it going onto the remainder table pretty damned quickly, and not even being released in paperback; unless, of course, conservative clubs and organizations buy it in bulk at a deep discount as giveaways for fundraising drives and so forth–which is often how people like Ann Coulter wind up on the bestseller lists), and likewise, college/university groups have a right to invite anyone they want to come speak to them…but rescinding those invitations (and promise of payments and expenses) when said invitations blow up in their faces is not censorship as defined by the law and the Constitution. The same law that gives Milo the right to say what he does also applies to those who oppose the things he says.

That’s um, kind of how our country works.

Being utterly uninterested in anything he has to say (I’ve never enjoyed listening to transphobia or racism), I didn’t watch Real Time with Bill Maher, only watching the clips of Larry Wilmore telling him to go fuck himself, which I will also admit to enjoying immensely. (Of course, now that clips of him talking approvingly of sex between children and adults have turned up–and really, who didn’t think something like this was going to come up; it was just a matter of time–he won’t be getting invited to speak anywhere anymore, and I suspect S&S will be cancelling their book contract.) But Milo–like Ann Coulter before him–fascinates me. (And for the record, I use ‘fascinate’ with the old meaning of like how a snake fascinates its prey; I do think he is kind of dangerous, and snake-like.) I always wonder how people like him come to be. I wrote eighty pages of a Paige novel in which the victim was a Coulter-like character, attempting to peel back the layers and see what could create someone like her/him (that manuscript is in a drawer, as no one had the slightest interest in publishing it). Coulter apparently sees herself as a comedian/performance artist; I sadly know people who know her, and they state she doesn’t really believe what she says but it makes her money; I suspect Milo is kind of similar to her in that regard, yet at the same time…

Take, for example, his appearance on Bill Maher. Milo is precisely the kind of gay stereotype that triggers homophobic reactions from the right, and even from some gay men: he isn’t particularly masculine, and wore enormous faux pearls around his neck on the show, which he played with as he spoke (damn it, I am going to have to watch); he is an effeminate gay man (think a conservative Jack from Will & Grace, or Emmett from Queer as Folk: the kind of gay man that ‘straight-acting’ gay men loathe and despise). The loathing of homophobes for effeminate gay men (and, let’s be honest, a number of GAY MEN as well) has everything to do with the culture of masculinity and the fear of ‘not being a man’; which, really, is where homophobia and sexism and transphobia comes from.

I just saw on Twitter that Milo may lose his job at Breitbart over the pedophilia comments; I am not holding my breath, nor will I hold my breath about losing the contract with S&S. He has, always, positioned himself as a spokesperson for the First Amendment; all of this should give him more material to work with, and of course, I am sure it’s the fault of the ‘politically correct’ who ‘want to silence him.’

So, I doubt he will go gently into that good night, and he will undoubtedly continue to fascinate me the way cobras fascinate their prey before they kill and eat them.

I always am curious at to what made these types of people what they are.

Do What U Want

Day Three of Parade season. Looks to be another beauty out there today, with a high of 75 degrees (shorts and a T-shirt, woo-hoo!) and sunny with the usual cerulean New Orleans blue sky. Fabulous. Today, of course, is a shorter parade day; there are only four today, and they are pretty much back to back to back, starting at eleven: Femme Fatale, Carrollton, King Arthur, and Alla, so it will all be over by five. At that time I shall retire back to the Lost Apartment, get ready for tomorrow and a bizarre, slightly abbreviated work week, and watch The Walking Dead.

I am in a really strange place these days. As Constant Reader knows, my mind (creativity, whatever you want to call it) can go all over the place and sometimes can get out of control. This requires me to focus when I am writing; because i am constantly getting other ideas that sound better to me than what I am actually writing. So now that I have nothing on deadline, nothing under contract (edits to come, of course, on a couple of manuscripts) and am free to do whatever I want, write whatever I want…I can’t figure out what to work on. I started a short story last week, have another short story I want to write, and there are a couple that need heavy revision–as well as a couple of uncontracted novel manuscripts that also are in need of revision before sending them out into the world–but it’s also parade season, which makes getting anything done more than difficult. Yesterday I spent some time doing some on-line research about a true crime I heard about that occurred some seven years ago–and, in that Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon thing, I am only about two degrees away from–and I am trying to wrap my mind around how to fictionalize it. It’s a great great story, and the way I want to write it is how the crime affects, and brutalizes, someone who was innocent of the crime but profited from it, nonetheless…but while managing to get a substantial payday from it, also had his life ruined. It’ll probably just end up in the files and nothing will ever come of it.

I did manage to get a cozy worked on last week; maybe a series, maybe not, maybe nothing will come of it, who knows? I also started putting together ideas and thoughts and characters and scenes for a noir I’ve been wanting to write for some time. But as far as actual writing, nothing much.

As for the week, well, Monday is a normal one; Tuesday I am going in late and working late because I have to take a friend to the doctor early that morning; I am going in late on Wednesday because *I* have to go to the doctor in the morning and then walk home because of parades; I took Thursday off in order to run to Costco and the grocery store to lay in supplies; Condom Duty Friday night and Monday; and then it’s Fat Tuesday and we’ve lived to tell the tale of Carnival 2017.

We watched a wonderful documentary on our local PBS station (WYES) last night after the parades, called The Sons of Tennessee Williams, which was about gay life in the French Quarter and how the gay Mardi Gras krewes got started. It was really well done; and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to know anything about the gay history of New Orleans. I am most likely going to stream it again if it’s available anywhere; if not, I’ll go ahead and buy the DVD. Watching it last night, my legs and lower back aching from being on the parade route all day, I was getting ideas for stories…but was too tired and relaxed to make notes about anything other than the title. I also spent some time between parades cleaning and organizing, and came across another fun book I’ve not really looked at in a while: Voodoo in New Orleans by Robert Tallant.

AH, the luxury of time! I am also thinking I need to run by Garden District Books (maybe Thursday) and take a look around at their New Orleans section. I may need to add some Lyle Saxon to my New Orleans library, among other things. I love that people think of me as a New Orleans expert, but the truth is I know very little about my beloved adopted home.

And now, I am going to retire to my easy chair and read some more Lori Rader-Day.

Here’s a Carnival hunk (or two) for you:

Poker Face

So, last night I watched the documentary Author: The JT LeRoy Story. I’ve been digesting it ever since, and still am not really quite sure how I feel about it.

If you aren’t aware of the background story, essentially in the late 1990’s stories began to be published written by someone who wrote under the name “Terminator”, and they were quite good, actually. Eventually, a novel was published called Sarah; “Terminator” was now writing as “JT LeRoy.” By the time Sarah was released, I was working as editor of Lambda Book Report. We’d gotten a review copy of it along with a press release about the author’s background, and basically claiming that the novel was loosely autobiographical. JT’s mother, Sarah, had been a truckstop prostitute; and that was the world JT was raised in; JT was also very young and unsure of his gender/sexuality, and had also worked as a truckstop prostitute. It was a fascinating story, really; but at the same time it seemed kind of, well, off to me. People were raving about the book, and I didn’t actually have to assign it out to anyone: a reviewer emailed me, having just read it, and begged me to let her review it, so I did.

Hey, when someone volunteered to review, it made my life easier and I rarely said no. But I was able to keep the review copy that had been sent to us, and I read it in my spare time–when I wasn’t having to read something to review or determine whether it should be reviewed–and I was impressed. It was a very dark story, but very well written. So, I emailed JT to let him know how much I enjoyed the book, and to congratulate him as well as to let him know we were running a review of it, and since it was going to be a full page review, rather than one of the shorter ones we usually did, I needed an author photo. He emailed me back…and then another bell went off. The email was barely literate, for one thing: and while I knew editors sometimes work really hard with authors…it just didn’t seem to click for me. Something wasn’t right. And a few days later I got a letter thanking me for my interest in the book–again, a handwritten letter rife with grammatical and spelling errors.

And I recognized the author photo. It was an image that had run on the cover of a Dennis Cooper novel that had been published ten years earlier.

And since JT was supposedly only twenty or twenty one at the time…it didn’t compute. Had he been the model for the book cover image? But he would have only been ten or eleven at the time. Again, it didn’t make sense–but it was neither my place nor my job to question this, so I just let it go; and we didn’t run the author photo with the featured review.

As far as I was concerned, that was the end of it. I did get a copy of his next book, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, but it never came out of my TBR pile, and I was no longer running the magazine, so it wasn’t that big of a deal. I did occasionally see notices about readings being held of JT’s work–with big name celebrities, like Winona Ryder and Matthew Modine, actually reading the work because JT wouldn’t do public appearances and was reclusive. Which, you know, was fine–but it was also interesting. But then he started showing up in magazines and so forth–always in sunglasses, and I also wondered if he was actually bald; because he was clearly wearing bad blond wigs. Again, I arched my eyebrows, but hey, whatever works. It was revealed that he was HIV positive, one of the books was being made into a movie…and then the scandal broke: JT LeRoy didn’t exist; he was a myth, a creation, and the person who was actually writing the books was a straight lady with a longtime male partner and a child, and the partner’s sister was ‘playing’ JT for public appearances and for photographs. I didn’t really see this as a huge scandal at the time; authors always use pseudonyms, and while there was some deception there–the woman pretending to be JT, the backstory, etc.–the bottom line for me was the writing was good, and the fact that it wasn’t autobiographical after all made the achievement even more extraordinary.

But the claiming to be HIV positive…that didn’t sit well with me. It was an insult to everyone infected and living with HIV; it was an insult to everyone we’ve lost to the disease. How very dare you claim HIV positive status to lend authenticity to your fabrication. You deserve to go to hell for that.

But I wanted to watch the documentary. I knew from seeing a review of it in the New York Times that it was primarily focused on Karen Albert, why she became first “Terminator” and then “JT LeRoy”. It’s an interesting story, and while I felt like the documentary was too busy apologizing and making excuses for Ms. Albert–the way she talked about all these different personas she took on–JT, his friend Speedy (which is who she appeared as in public with JT, so she could be there at the readings and everything else public that was going on for JT’s work)–it sounded almost like there was an element of dissociative identity disorder going on there; she certainly had the kind of childhood which tends to result in that particular psychiatric disorder. But she insists that isn’t the case; but she seems to fall back on a particular writerly trope that has always rather put me off as pompous and annoying: the notion that writers have no role in their actual writing and that the characters TAKE OVER.

Um, no. I don’t know where or why that trope about the experience of writing started or even how it got started, but I’ve always felt it’s a steaming pile of bullshit and whenever I hear any writer say something along those lines my eyes roll so hard they almost unscrew out of their sockets.

Don’t get me wrong; when I am writing, especially in the first person, I have to get completely inside the character I am writing about and channel them–but they don’t take me over. I don’t BECOME Chanse or Scotty when I am writing about them. They are a part of me but they aren’t me.

The documentary, though, is fascinating, and Karen Albert is an interesting person. Do I think she set out to pull a long con? No, I don’t. I do believe that it got out of control and she didn’t know how to contain it–and there were also money issues involved; why kill the goose that’s laying the golden eggs? But I also think she doesn’t own her part in any of it; she’s so busy (in the documentary) giving explanations and justifying the masquerade that she doesn’t really feel any remorse about the lying and the fraud. She only regrets being caught.

Interestingly enough, the publisher of the JT LeRoy books have published new editions to coincide with the release of the documentary–which makes the documentary and her role in it even more suspect. Hey, here’s another chance for me to sell some books!

And she never apologizes for, or even tries to justify, the HIV lie. She makes the point that the books are fiction and they exist, so calling the whole escapade a fraud isn’t honest; she seems to think the more grandiose word “myth” is more apt to describe what she did with the creation of JT LeRoy.

JT LeRoy, though, was a fraud. The books are real, of course, and nothing can take away from the fact that she wrote two really extraordinary books. Would the books have become so successful had she not created the fraud?

We’ll never know.

And here’s a hunk to slide you into the first weekend of Carnival parades: