Salon Urge | Two hard men are good to find

T H E_.H O T_.S P O T
Solitary pleasures
By Susie Bright
Why I should use my vibrator more often
(09/02/97)

R E C E N T L Y
The bridegroom stripped bare
By Daniel Reitz
A gay man discovers that the goings-on at a straight male stag party are kinkier than he could have imagined
(10/22/98)

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TWO HARD MEN ARE GOOD TO FIND | PAGE 1, 2
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If Hardy's novels seem awash in cucumbers and candy bars, it's because he writes about the lives of gay black men and they're the only ones who get to have any of the sex. Yet booksellers around New York City have become aware of a peculiar trend: Despite the incidental presence of women in Hardy's novels, large numbers of his books have ended up in the twitching hands of female readers.
The same is true of E. Lynn Harris' buttery romances about bisexual black men. The departure from traditional romance has not deterred thousands of women who eagerly await Harris' new novels, and have helped to make three of his books national bestsellers. Women, it appears, have a smutty little reading penchant -- they've been happily slurping down gay male romances and heaving at all the good parts.
Statistics indicating book buyers' gender, race or sexual identity don't exist, but anecdote insists that black women especially have taken a shine to Harris and Hardy -- both of whom are black men who write about the lives of middle-class black professionals. But to say that race alone dictates which women pick up the books conflates what is actually a more layered cultural phenomenon, because it is not just black women who are reading these authors.
Harris' style is a little more demure than Hardy's -- Harris' characters retire to the bedroom with little panache and lots of cliché -- but his books still include flickering tongues and (ever so delicately named) "members":
"Everything in my head screamed no! Yet my body was saying yes ... I felt Kelvin's hands touch my sex and then, with a single motion, his hands unzipped my jeans releasing my throbbing penis."
In Harris' soap-operatic novels, the plot sweeps back and forth between love and lies and marriage and addiction. His characters tend to be more confused (gay? straight? bi?) than Hardy's proud men-loving men. And some of them date women but sleep with men on the down-low, which is, naturally, cause for more hairpin plot twists.
And women love it. Virtually ignored by publishers when he shopped around his first book, "Invisible Life," in 1992, Harris began selling the books to women in beauty parlors in the deep South. He quickly developed a loyal following, and shortly after, Anchor Books swooped in and signed him to a three-book deal. To this day, the majority of his readers are women.
"You gotta hear the sisters talking about it, 'Excellent, this that.' I'm saying, 'Wait a minute,'" said Laolu, a bookseller who declined to give his last name. He said Hardy and Harris novels are immensely popular with female customers at the Brooklyn-based bookstore Nairu.
"When the books first came out I was like hmmm-mmm," said Keston John, letting out a long, low rumble. Keston, who works at A & B Books in Brooklyn, described Harris' appearance there last year as their best event of the year. Women comprised nearly 80 percent of the crowd, he estimated.
All over New York City, from Bronx Book Place to Shakespeare & Co. on the Upper East Side, bookstore employees repeated the same thing. Women don't seem to care that the books describe sex between two men, that anyone in the store can see they're buying a book that has two half-naked, entwined men on the cover or even that the blurb on the back of "B-Boy Blues" says that protagonist Mitchell Crawford always longed for his very own "hip-hop-lovin', street-struttin', cool posin', crazy crotch-grabbin' brotha."
Hardy blamed homophobia in the black community for the chilly treatment he received in the black media when "B-Boy Blues" was published. But in bookstores where the majority of customers are black, books by these two authors are often among the very top sellers. "Harris is by far the most popular author in the store," said Glenderlyn Johnson, the owner of Black Books Plus on the Upper West Side.
One obvious explanation for black female readers' zeal is that they are starving for fiction that features any multifaceted black characters. The book market isn't exactly flooded with literature about well-adjusted black lawyers and writers and artists like those featured in Harris' and Hardy's books. Because the pickings are so slim, some black readers in search of fictional characters that look or act like them may be subtly coerced into being open-minded about those characters' sexual proclivities.
But this can't account for the whole phenomenon, since women of all races have been blithely ripping through the books. Richard Serrano, who recently taught a gay and lesbian literature seminar at the University of California at Berkeley, said he couldn't decide whether to include "B-Boy Blues" in the syllabus. Ultimately, he jettisoned his fears that it would be too steamy and taught the book at the end of the semester, after the class was broken in, and after the fundamentalist Christian had come out of the closet. He ditched the plan to write out the page numbers of the explicit parts to warn the faint-hearted. His friends convinced him that including a sex index would surely have the opposite of its intended effect. As expected, the students didn't need a guide. Men and women of all races went around their dorms reading the good parts aloud with the relish of flat-chested, teenage girls hunched over Judy Blume at summer camp.
Women readers say that in certain respects homoerotic fiction is better than old-fashioned romance -- saying they find man-on-man sex as titillating as any bodice-ripping anything. If you like one penis, the logic goes, the odds are you'll also like two. An orgasm is an orgasm, and good sex is a universal turn-on.
"At certain times, I'm reading it on the train and end up smiling and look up to see if anyone's looking at me," Cerisa Pickett, 27, a black reader said about "B-Boy Blues."
One attraction is that Hardy pays a great deal of attention to the male body, as is evidenced by exuberant references to "chocolate joysticks" and "Ball Park franks." He describes chests and booty and the rest of the package with the sort of loving detail that's rare in straight romance. At last, women readers say, the flip side of heaving bosoms and creamy thighs.
"It's sexy because of the way they talk about Raheim," said Pickett, referring to the sex object of "B-Boy Blues." "His build, his complexion, the way he walked around at Gay Pride in his thong. Mitchell likes the way he looks in his Lycra. And they're always at it."
(Raheim is the sexy b-boy -- "banjee/banji/banjie boy, or block boy, or homeboy, or homie" -- of the title. When the narrator, Mitchell, first encounters Raheim, the reader is privy to a full body tour starting with his protruding nipples, and ending with his baggy khakis, which he is, reportedly, wearing well. "I wanna talk to you," says the scrumptious-lipped, basketball-bootied Raheim without too much ceremony. "Gimme yo' phone numba.")
"It's objectification in the best sense of the word. It's not turning men into a thing, but a pulsating thing," said Kathie Kaufman, 36, a Hardy fan who is white. "Romance novels written by straight women are very different in the way they eroticize men's bodies. You don't hear about it until they go to bed. Even then it's diffuse."
Constance Penley, a film and women's studies professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, suggested that women are "rejecting their own bodies" when they read romance that features few or no women. But she doesn't find women's attraction to male homoerotic fiction surprising, considering the impossibly high standard of beauty to which women's bodies are often subjected. "I completely understand," she said. "I live in one of these bodies."
Penley has written extensively about a phenomenon known as "slash": a sprawling network of women who write, read and distribute homoerotic stories that usually star male heroes from a variety of television shows. She said certain social realities -- for instance, that women have less power than men -- can poison conventional romance. However, readers in search of escapist fiction where the whine of inequality is obviated might be more likely to find it in male-male love stories. Although Hardy addresses class in his books, at least sexism seems to disappear.
In addition, unlike gay men, women readers have the advantage of being safely removed from the stories. Kevin Anderson, 26, said he and all his gay friends read "B-Boy Blues," but it gave him a stomach ache. "I didn't believe a word. It was too fairy tale," Anderson said. Because he identified so strongly with the characters and the fantasy of the ultimate b-boy, the book left him with a sinking feeling about his own b-boy-less life. "Even their problems were perfect," he grumbled.
Women, however, don't suffer from "My life sucks, this will never happen to me" syndrome. Of course it will never happen to them! Excused from comparing themselves with the characters and feeling hopelessly inferior, they can sit back and surrender completely to the fantasy.
Another way to understand women's taste for gay love stories is simply: It's fiction. People don't just want to read about themselves. They read to escape, have exotic journeys and gain access to new, forbidden or unattainable worlds.
"Why wouldn't people want to read those novels?" said Wayne Kostenbaum, an English professor at CUNY and a star in queer theory circles. "Basically, there are two kinds of people, men and women, and men and women are very sexy." Which is why niche marketing, he added, is so suspect. "In an ideal world," he added, "people's tastes are not legislated by niche."
Not that women are flipping through the books just to get to the good/dirty parts, since in reality, there are often only two or three really hot sex scenes per book. Women really do read the books for the stories and emotional content. They say they relate to the characters and the situations, and the fact that the romances are between two men often just dissolves into an unnoticeable background hum as they're reading.
"Homosexual sex is basically the same as heterosexual sex. It's not as totally different as society makes it seem," said Lillian Lewis, 24, a Harris devotee who is black. "They go through the same problems that heterosexuals go through as far as love. I was like, 'OK. This is the same shit I go through with my husband.'"
Love is love, say the women readers of these books, a mantra they repeat with an offhandedness that would alarm many a minister of family values. These are not the sentiments of sex radicals. These women do not read to prove a point, and their tone is amazingly free of righteousness or moral superiority. They are just women who like romances and want to read a good story: women on the subway, women in bookstores, cashiers and maintenance workers. The books appeal to them for the same fundamental reason that literature can be so satisfying -- because in some way it sheds light on the reader's life. In a culture where we are increasingly defined by the various identities we inhabit, it's funny to find this insouciance here, amid the grunts and moans of naked, writhing bodies.
SALON | Nov. 5, 1998
Rona Marech is a writer living in Berkeley, Calif.


T H E_.H O T_.S P O T Solitary pleasures By Susie Bright Why I should use my vibrator more often (09/02/97) R E C E N T L Y The bridegroom stripped bare By Daniel Reitz A gay man discovers that the goings-on at a straight male stag party are kinkier than he could have imagined (10/22/98) - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Urge archives S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.		TWO HARD MEN ARE GOOD TO FIND \| PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - If Hardy's novels seem awash in cucumbers and candy bars, it's because he writes about the lives of gay black men and they're the only ones who get to have any of the sex. Yet booksellers around New York City have become aware of a peculiar trend: Despite the incidental presence of women in Hardy's novels, large numbers of his books have ended up in the twitching hands of female readers. The same is true of E. Lynn Harris' buttery romances about bisexual black men. The departure from traditional romance has not deterred thousands of women who eagerly await Harris' new novels, and have helped to make three of his books national bestsellers. Women, it appears, have a smutty little reading penchant -- they've been happily slurping down gay male romances and heaving at all the good parts. Statistics indicating book buyers' gender, race or sexual identity don't exist, but anecdote insists that black women especially have taken a shine to Harris and Hardy -- both of whom are black men who write about the lives of middle-class black professionals. But to say that race alone dictates which women pick up the books conflates what is actually a more layered cultural phenomenon, because it is not just black women who are reading these authors. Harris' style is a little more demure than Hardy's -- Harris' characters retire to the bedroom with little panache and lots of cliché -- but his books still include flickering tongues and (ever so delicately named) "members": "Everything in my head screamed no! Yet my body was saying yes ... I felt Kelvin's hands touch my sex and then, with a single motion, his hands unzipped my jeans releasing my throbbing penis." In Harris' soap-operatic novels, the plot sweeps back and forth between love and lies and marriage and addiction. His characters tend to be more confused (gay? straight? bi?) than Hardy's proud men-loving men. And some of them date women but sleep with men on the down-low, which is, naturally, cause for more hairpin plot twists. And women love it. Virtually ignored by publishers when he shopped around his first book, "Invisible Life," in 1992, Harris began selling the books to women in beauty parlors in the deep South. He quickly developed a loyal following, and shortly after, Anchor Books swooped in and signed him to a three-book deal. To this day, the majority of his readers are women. "You gotta hear the sisters talking about it, 'Excellent, this that.' I'm saying, 'Wait a minute,'" said Laolu, a bookseller who declined to give his last name. He said Hardy and Harris novels are immensely popular with female customers at the Brooklyn-based bookstore Nairu. "When the books first came out I was like hmmm-mmm," said Keston John, letting out a long, low rumble. Keston, who works at A & B Books in Brooklyn, described Harris' appearance there last year as their best event of the year. Women comprised nearly 80 percent of the crowd, he estimated. All over New York City, from Bronx Book Place to Shakespeare & Co. on the Upper East Side, bookstore employees repeated the same thing. Women don't seem to care that the books describe sex between two men, that anyone in the store can see they're buying a book that has two half-naked, entwined men on the cover or even that the blurb on the back of "B-Boy Blues" says that protagonist Mitchell Crawford always longed for his very own "hip-hop-lovin', street-struttin', cool posin', crazy crotch-grabbin' brotha." Hardy blamed homophobia in the black community for the chilly treatment he received in the black media when "B-Boy Blues" was published. But in bookstores where the majority of customers are black, books by these two authors are often among the very top sellers. "Harris is by far the most popular author in the store," said Glenderlyn Johnson, the owner of Black Books Plus on the Upper West Side. One obvious explanation for black female readers' zeal is that they are starving for fiction that features any multifaceted black characters. The book market isn't exactly flooded with literature about well-adjusted black lawyers and writers and artists like those featured in Harris' and Hardy's books. Because the pickings are so slim, some black readers in search of fictional characters that look or act like them may be subtly coerced into being open-minded about those characters' sexual proclivities. But this can't account for the whole phenomenon, since women of all races have been blithely ripping through the books. Richard Serrano, who recently taught a gay and lesbian literature seminar at the University of California at Berkeley, said he couldn't decide whether to include "B-Boy Blues" in the syllabus. Ultimately, he jettisoned his fears that it would be too steamy and taught the book at the end of the semester, after the class was broken in, and after the fundamentalist Christian had come out of the closet. He ditched the plan to write out the page numbers of the explicit parts to warn the faint-hearted. His friends convinced him that including a sex index would surely have the opposite of its intended effect. As expected, the students didn't need a guide. Men and women of all races went around their dorms reading the good parts aloud with the relish of flat-chested, teenage girls hunched over Judy Blume at summer camp. Women readers say that in certain respects homoerotic fiction is better than old-fashioned romance -- saying they find man-on-man sex as titillating as any bodice-ripping anything. If you like one penis, the logic goes, the odds are you'll also like two. An orgasm is an orgasm, and good sex is a universal turn-on. "At certain times, I'm reading it on the train and end up smiling and look up to see if anyone's looking at me," Cerisa Pickett, 27, a black reader said about "B-Boy Blues." One attraction is that Hardy pays a great deal of attention to the male body, as is evidenced by exuberant references to "chocolate joysticks" and "Ball Park franks." He describes chests and booty and the rest of the package with the sort of loving detail that's rare in straight romance. At last, women readers say, the flip side of heaving bosoms and creamy thighs. "It's sexy because of the way they talk about Raheim," said Pickett, referring to the sex object of "B-Boy Blues." "His build, his complexion, the way he walked around at Gay Pride in his thong. Mitchell likes the way he looks in his Lycra. And they're always at it." (Raheim is the sexy b-boy -- "banjee/banji/banjie boy, or block boy, or homeboy, or homie" -- of the title. When the narrator, Mitchell, first encounters Raheim, the reader is privy to a full body tour starting with his protruding nipples, and ending with his baggy khakis, which he is, reportedly, wearing well. "I wanna talk to you," says the scrumptious-lipped, basketball-bootied Raheim without too much ceremony. "Gimme yo' phone numba.") "It's objectification in the best sense of the word. It's not turning men into a thing, but a pulsating thing," said Kathie Kaufman, 36, a Hardy fan who is white. "Romance novels written by straight women are very different in the way they eroticize men's bodies. You don't hear about it until they go to bed. Even then it's diffuse." Constance Penley, a film and women's studies professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, suggested that women are "rejecting their own bodies" when they read romance that features few or no women. But she doesn't find women's attraction to male homoerotic fiction surprising, considering the impossibly high standard of beauty to which women's bodies are often subjected. "I completely understand," she said. "I live in one of these bodies." Penley has written extensively about a phenomenon known as "slash": a sprawling network of women who write, read and distribute homoerotic stories that usually star male heroes from a variety of television shows. She said certain social realities -- for instance, that women have less power than men -- can poison conventional romance. However, readers in search of escapist fiction where the whine of inequality is obviated might be more likely to find it in male-male love stories. Although Hardy addresses class in his books, at least sexism seems to disappear. In addition, unlike gay men, women readers have the advantage of being safely removed from the stories. Kevin Anderson, 26, said he and all his gay friends read "B-Boy Blues," but it gave him a stomach ache. "I didn't believe a word. It was too fairy tale," Anderson said. Because he identified so strongly with the characters and the fantasy of the ultimate b-boy, the book left him with a sinking feeling about his own b-boy-less life. "Even their problems were perfect," he grumbled. Women, however, don't suffer from "My life sucks, this will never happen to me" syndrome. Of course it will never happen to them! Excused from comparing themselves with the characters and feeling hopelessly inferior, they can sit back and surrender completely to the fantasy. Another way to understand women's taste for gay love stories is simply: It's fiction. People don't just want to read about themselves. They read to escape, have exotic journeys and gain access to new, forbidden or unattainable worlds. "Why wouldn't people want to read those novels?" said Wayne Kostenbaum, an English professor at CUNY and a star in queer theory circles. "Basically, there are two kinds of people, men and women, and men and women are very sexy." Which is why niche marketing, he added, is so suspect. "In an ideal world," he added, "people's tastes are not legislated by niche." Not that women are flipping through the books just to get to the good/dirty parts, since in reality, there are often only two or three really hot sex scenes per book. Women really do read the books for the stories and emotional content. They say they relate to the characters and the situations, and the fact that the romances are between two men often just dissolves into an unnoticeable background hum as they're reading. "Homosexual sex is basically the same as heterosexual sex. It's not as totally different as society makes it seem," said Lillian Lewis, 24, a Harris devotee who is black. "They go through the same problems that heterosexuals go through as far as love. I was like, 'OK. This is the same shit I go through with my husband.'" Love is love, say the women readers of these books, a mantra they repeat with an offhandedness that would alarm many a minister of family values. These are not the sentiments of sex radicals. These women do not read to prove a point, and their tone is amazingly free of righteousness or moral superiority. They are just women who like romances and want to read a good story: women on the subway, women in bookstores, cashiers and maintenance workers. The books appeal to them for the same fundamental reason that literature can be so satisfying -- because in some way it sheds light on the reader's life. In a culture where we are increasingly defined by the various identities we inhabit, it's funny to find this insouciance here, amid the grunts and moans of naked, writhing bodies. SALON \| Nov. 5, 1998 Rona Marech is a writer living in Berkeley, Calif.