Writing porn isn’t my job. I’m not sure it’s anyone’s job, actually, though there may be a few lucky lechers who make it work. My day job is teaching college English. At night I write porn.
I decided to write my first story when a student in one of my classes came to my office hours to talk about an assignment. While we were discussing his paper, he started to cry. His paper wasn’t that bad, so I knew there had to be something else going on. Being the pushy person I am, I asked him what it was. He couldn’t tell me. So I asked again, in my trademark gentle, nudging, insistent way, and finally he told me.
“I think I may be attracted to men as well as women,” he choked out, then started crying again.
Now, my gaydar is, as Aunt Emily puts it in “Cupid’s Big Weekend,” weapons-grade. I saw that he was grasping for the life preserver of bisexuality, even as we both knew that he was really gay. Having been raised Catholic, he couldn’t admit it, even to himself. But the pressure of holding back his natural attraction to men had built to the point that he could no longer carry on as if it didn’t exist.
What was most devastating to him was the idea that being gay meant he wasn’t the person he thought he was. That he could never have the life he had always imagined for himself. That he could never fall in love, never have a family. That he was suddenly something completely alien to everything he had been brought up to think about himself.
As he sobbed, I tried to tell him that he was the same person now–now that he had said it out loud–that he had been earlier that day, and the day before that, and the year before that. It’s just that now, having been honest with himself, he could finally be more than he had been before. He could be happy in ways he could never have experienced while he was locked away inside his own closet. [If this sounds an awful lot like the conversation between Josh and Calvin in “Cupid’s Big Weekend,” that’s because it is. Ripped from real life, that was.]
He cried a lot that day, and so did I. We talked for a couple of hours. And what he taught me was that the biggest fear in a young closeted guy’s life is that if he admits, even for a second, even just to himself, that he is attracted to another man, then life as he has known it is over. He can no longer be the good son, the devout Christian/Muslim/Jew, the upstanding citizen. I wanted to find a way to tell people in his situation that it’s okay to be attracted to other men, even if they’re not ready to admit that they may be gay–they may not be. But they can try it out, and see if it’s for them–that’s what college is for, right? It’s a truism of our culture that all women can be lesbians for two years in college. It’s dramatically unfair that men don’t get a similar chance to explore.
That’s why I write stories about college men figuring out their relationships with other men. I want to show that love is not bound by our narrow definitions of what’s appropriate. I want to let people who think that admitting their same-sex attractions will destroy their lives see that it won’t. It just won’t.
I’m not saying that coming out isn’t hard–it almost always is. And I’m not saying it’s a perfect world to come out into–it’s not. But I know that there are many young men in exactly the same situation as my student, who are feeling crushed by the weight of attractions they refuse to admit, because admitting them means that they are not who they thought they were. And it is to these young men that I write. I want them to read my stories and see that sexuality defies labels, and love defies rules, and they should defy anyone who tells them that their feelings are wrong.
My student and I talked again every few days for the entire school year. Through his first open crush, through his coming out to his parents, through his figuring out what life after college would look like now that he didn’t have to be alone. I was the first person he told, and I was honored by his trust. I feel so lucky to have been there when he needed me.
But I can’t be there for everyone who needs to hear a kind word of acceptance and understanding. That’s why I write. And because I know from experience that even people who cannot admit their same-sex attractions during daylight hours will seek out gay erotica at night, I write porn. It’s kind of a bait-and-switch–they find my stories because of the sex, but they get a side-order of sexual identity politics that I hope stays with them longer than the sexy bits.
It absolutely makes my day when I get an email from a college-age reader who says that my stories helped him see that he could be true to himself, that there are possibilities for love on the other side of coming out, that he now knows he’ll be okay.
And that’s why I write porn.