Tag: Log Cabin Republicans

Pleasant Valley Sunday

It’s Sunday morning, I overslept, Sparky is chasing a bottle cap and I’ve been watching kitten videos since I got up while slurping down my morning coffee. Kitten videos really do have a lovely effect on the soul, don’t they? I would definitely foster kittens if we had more room in the house. Humans really are not good enough for our pets and don’t deserve them (I woke up this morning with Sparky cuddled up with me on my pillow). I will never understand people who give their pets up or just abandon them to fend for themselves.

Then again, I’ve never really understood how people could abuse or kill or give up their children, either. I thank God every day for my parents, you know? I really hit the lottery with mine, despite their conservative values and beliefs because they were terrific parents in almost every metric that is measurable. I ended up taking yesterday off. We were in a heat advisory for the day, so I didn’t want to go out in the misery and I did manage to get some things done before Paul got up, and my favorite thing to do is just hang out with him in the living room watching television, which is what we did. We finished Outer Rang1e and began watching Evil, which becomes really interesting once it revs up and gets going (I particularly enjoyed the ‘ghost hunter’ episode). I also finished off one journal and began another, and most of what I scribbled in there was work on the new book–which I must absolutely 100% work on today before I go make groceries. My plan for today is to do some work in the kitchen, do some writing and then head out to the store. I don’t need much, actually, which is great for my budget, but it’s all stuff that is entirely necessary and needed. (Sparky needs treats!) It felt good not to do much of anything other than journaling yesterday. I made Swedish meatballs for dinner, and that was probably the best batch of them I’ve ever made (and sadly, will never be able to make them the same way as I do it from memory and so it’s always different every time). I’m having fun cooking again, and I’m looking forward to trying to make some new stuff and teaching myself more recipes and so forth.

I’ve also got some scanning to get done today. I also managed to get down some boxes from on top of the cabinets and got rid of two of them. I have more books to donate next weekend to the library sale (need to fill the box up first), more paper to throw away, and now I can start on the other side of the kitchen cabinets. Once the tops of the cabinets are cleared, I can start taking things down from the attic and getting rid of/going through those boxes. I’d like to be able to move all my own books up there and get them out of the way–which would open up an entire bookcase, which would help the books stacked on the floor situation, which would be super nice. I am determined to end this year completely decluttered and a former packrat. Stranger things have happened, after all.

I’m going to try to avoid the news and social media today. All it does is enrage me, and I can’t afford to waste that much energy on things I cannot control. My identity as a gay male pretty much decides my politics for me, and for the record, I am far more socialist in my beliefs and values than we are even remotely close to as a country, but I am also pragmatic, and my own brush with the world of politics back in the aughts only served to reaffirm that stance. I don’t think it speaks well of the wealthiest country in the history of the planet that we do not care about the most vulnerable citizens and don’t care if children go to bed hungry. I’ve never understood the vicious, selfish mentality of punishing children for the sins of their parents, and poverty isn’t a crime in this country yet; neither is mental illness. We should as a society be far more concerned with helping the less fortunate…but then we’d be a Christian nation, and despite all claims to the contrary we are most definitely not a Christian country–because the best measure of a truly Christian nation is how we take care of the poor and the sick and we definitely fall down in that respect…but ironically the Nat C’s are, as always, only interested in symbols and ideas, rather than actually living a Christ-like life. I don’t know how anyone can read the New Testament and come away from it not caring about the sick and the poor. It’s pretty clear.

But then, the Nat C’s aren’t big on reading comprehension.

Glancing at my Substack, I see yesterday’s post there (“Tell Me Why,” an entry I posted yesterday about art v the artist) apparently cost me a subscriber. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. This is one of the reasons I never wanted to do a newsletter in the first place; having people unsubscribe made me self-conscious about what I say in one if I can see those numbers either going up or down, and obsess about them. I don’t want to censor myself. I’ve censored myself for so long…but seriously, if you don’t support my values and my beliefs, or understand how my sexuality colors those, why are you even here? Not everyone agrees with me, not every queer agrees with me, and certainly not every white cisgender gay man does, either (Log Cabin Republicans do exist, after all). There certainly are plenty of gay men who are transphobic or racist or misogynist (or any combination of the three), which I don’t understand and will never understand how the cognitive dissonance doesn’t drive them mad, but here we are.

And I am done censoring myself to coddle the feelings of people who think I’m a disgusting pervert pedophile? They can fuck right off. They don’t care about my feelings, why should I give any of my time, brain space, or energy worrying about theirs?

And on that defiant note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a terrific Sunday, Constant Reader, and remember–under Project 2025 everything will be closed and nothing will go on other than spending time with loved ones, most likely at church (but hey, doesn’t the preacher work on the Lord’s Day? Maybe he shouldn’t get paid…) on Sundays, and no more NFL. What a glorious future.

NOT.

I’m not really sure about this pose, to be honest. It just looks weird and not sexy at all. Not sure what they were going for here, frankly.
  1. Really enjoyed this show’s second season, and not sure if there’s a need for a third, even though a lot was left up the air and it was never fully explained other than “time is a river.” Okay then, but it did feel rather satisfying when it ended. ↩︎

Miss Americana and The Heartbreak Prince

One question that always exasperates authors is the old standard, where do you get your ideas from?

I get why it annoys writers to be asked this; who wants to be psycho-analyzed on a panel or at a reading? It’s a process, of course, and one that cannot be distilled into a quick, witty, quotable sound bite–and the ultimate truth is, it’s almost always different in every case–whether it’s a novel, an essay or a short story; I certainly have not gotten inspiration the same way every time. A lot of the Alabama fiction, for example, that I have written/am writing/have thought about writing, comes from stories my grandmother told me when I was a child about the past–mostly her family’s past, and certainly those stories were self-aggrandizing and self-serving, and still others were apocryphal: the ancestress, for example, who killed a Yankee soldier come to rob her during the Civil War? Yeah, that one was almost certainly lifted from Gone with the Wind–but I have since come to find out that Mitchell probably took the story from legends as well–that story seems to exist everywhere in local legend throughout the former Confederacy (I mention this in passing in Bury Me in Shadows, which also originated in one of my grandmother’s stories).

A while back, I started thinking about doing period novels centering gay male characters and telling their stories about the times when prim-and-proper society swept all things gay under the rug and homophobia was king (or Queen, I suppose). I had already come up with a great idea for a gay noir centered around a health club that operated as a money-laundering front for the local mob in a city in Florida called Muscles, which I hope to write at some point…I cannot recall exactly how or why Muscles led into thinking about other one-word titled gay noir novels set in different periods of the twentieth century; but there you have it. I think Muscles led me to think about setting one in a gay bar in the early 1990’s, built around the time gay porn star Joey Stefano was arrested while performing at a Tampa gay bar for public indecency; Indecency was such a great title that I couldn’t forget it–and I also figured I could link the two books, the way I always link my books together in an Easter eggy kind of way that the majority of people don’t notice but pleases me immensely. Right round that same time a gay man who was very active as a fundraiser and a donor for political causes died; he had started out owning a company that published gay-interest magazines with nude models and had been arrested, and served time, for using the mail to deliver pornography; I wanted to write about him and the rise of gay porn films in Southern California and call it Obscenity. So there it was: a trilogy of loosely connected gay noirs I hoped to write someday…and then one day, as I was blogging–I think maybe two years ago? I don’t recall–my mind was wandering (as it is wont to do) and I started riffing about an idea that was forming in my head as I wrote the entry for a book set in 1950’s Hollywood, dealing with the underground gay community, McCarthyism, and scandal-mongering that would open with a gay movie star’s body being found naked in the surf at the beach…only the autopsy found that the water in his lungs actually contained chlorine…so he hadn’t drowned, he’d been murdered and the body moved. I called it Chlorine; and that was, for me, kind of the end of it–I wrote the idea down, created a folder for it, and posted the entry.

So, I am sure you can imagine my surprise when I checked Twitter a few hours later and had a ridiculously high amount of–what do they call them? Mentions? Anyway, I had no idea what had triggered this–I rarely get much interaction there–and so when I went to check…some people had read my blog and were all about Chlorine–and the more they tweeted about it, the more people had gotten drawn into this conversation. I was thrilled, to say the least, to see so much attention on-line for something that was really just an amorphous idea…and then a great first line occurred to me: The earthquake woke me up at nine in the morning. So I opened a new Word document, typed in that line, and next thing you know, I had an over 3000 word first chapter written, and the entire plot was forming in my mind already. I took voluminous notes, and decided that, once I got finished with everything I was in the midst of writing already, I would give Chlorine a shot.

And in the meantime, I could start reading up on the period, gay Hollywood, and root myself firmly in the period.

Which is how I came across Robert Hofler’s The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson: The Pretty Boys and Dirty Deals of Henry Willson.

On November 29, 1954, The Hollywood Reporter’s gossip columnist Mike Connolly wrote about the proud, happiest day of Rock Hudson’s life. The movie star had just been cast in George Stevens’ cattle-and-oil epic Giant, and Connolly’s one-line blurb commemorating Rock’s celebration party was as cryptic as it was pumped with news ready to break: “Saturday Mo-somes: Phyllis Gates & Rock Hudson, Margaret Truman & Henry Willson.”

In one of his rare acts of discretion, newshound Connolly dispensed with the ampersand that should have wedded the names Rock Hudson and Henry Willson. Fifty years into the future, “Mo-somes” could be read as slang for the two men’s sexual orientation. But not in 1954. Back then, “Mo” meant something far less provocative but nearly as colorful

“Mo” was short for the Mocambo, the Mount Olympus of Sunset Strip nightclubs. Pure tinseltown fantasy, the Mocambo was an over-heated study in contrasts where oversized tin flowers and humongous velvet balls with fringe festooned flaming candy-cane columns that framed a dance floor designed to induce claustrophobia when more than two couples got up to fox-trot. The tables were equally miniscule, making it possible for the establishment to charge lots of money for not much food, which nobody could see. Overhead, rococo candelabras gave off so little illumination that revelers kept bumping into each other by mistake, and sometimes now, as they tried to check themselves out in the flecked mirrors that recast everybody’s reflection in tones of warm, flattering, fake gold.

I had a vague idea of who Henry Willson was before I read this book–he appeared in the Rock Hudson bio I read a few months ago as well as in Tab Hunter’s memoirs–and of course, Jim Parsons played him in the Ryan Murphy alternate-history Hollywood. I was also vaguely aware–my memory is a lot dimmer than it used to be–of the gay Hollywood underground; the Sunday afternoon pool parties at George Cukor’s, for example–and I had read some gay Hollywood histories (the ones by William J. Mann are particularly good), but I knew my main character in Chlorine needed a Henry Willson-like agent, and so I needed to research Henry Willson. Willson was, of course, notorious in his time and the passage of time since his heyday has done nothing to soften that image. He was the definitive “casting couch” agent–and per this book, which is very well written and very entertaining–men who wanted to be movie stars (whether gay, straight or bi) were more than willing to service Henry if it meant a leg up in the business. And Henry did work very hard for his clients, polishing rough material into diamonds for the camera. He taught them how to speak, how to walk, the proper silverware, how to behave in public; manners and etiquette. Henry believed that talent wasn’t as important to being a movie star as having star quality–the indescribable something that all major stars have, that is impossible to describe–and he knew what he was doing. He also frequently renamed them–hence the proliferation of the one syllable first names with the two or three syllable last names: Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter, Troy Donahue, Chad Everett, Guy Madison, etc.

This book provided a wealth of information as well as inspiration for me, as did the Rock Hudson biography I read several months ago. This period of Hollywood history is fascinating, and I love that writing this book–or rather, planning and researching, since I haven’t really started writing it–is giving me an amazing excuse to study gay Hollywood history and the post-war film industry.

Make no mistake about it–Henry Willson was good at what he did, but he was also a terrible person; trying to make it in a homophobic culture, society and industry at the time in which he lived would definitely twist a person. He was an arch-conservative; a Log Cabin Republican of his time, friends with the horrific Roy Cohn. Was it camouflage to help protect him and his clients from the Red Scare days of McCarthyism, when being queer was also just as suspect? Or was he really that terrible of a person? The author makes no judgments; rather leaving it to the reader to. make up their own minds about who Henry was as a person. As terrible as he was–and some of the things he did, like the casting couch, were pretty unforgivable–I did feel sorry for him in some ways, and in basing a character on him I kind of have to find the humanity in the monster. He was not attractive in a business that revolved around beauty; while the straight male pigs who ran the business used their power to force women to sleep with them, Henry used and abused his own power to get beautiful men to sleep with him.

My own main character–a second-tier movie star who slept his way into parts and a career–is also not entirely likable; but I think I’ve gotten deep enough inside of his head to at least make him identifiable and relatable to the reader…but I guess we will just have to wait and see.

I do recommend this book, if you’re interested in Hollywood history in general or gay Hollywood history specifically.