Yep, innocence to experience via punishing and brutal sex made MUSCELBOUND the first book of mine ever mentioned in academia.
No less a figure than Will Roscoe, one of the major voices in gay men’s spirituality in the United States, anthropologist and winner of the Margaret Mead Award, devoted a neat chapter to Muscle Bound in his book Queer Spirits.
Roscoe seems delighted to find that my little porn novel fulfills the requirements of a mythic story; he writes about how my hero Tom relates to the story villain with “fear and attraction based on a sense of lack, (that) all too often characterizes how we as gay men relate to our fathers.” He talks about the “initiatory themes” of the sex scenes, and how Tom grows with the transformation of his body, “a common feature of tribal rites.”
Truth is, I did write it that way. I took my years of study of literature, anthropology, sociology, sexuality and, well, the mythic archetype, and added brutal, sweaty gay sex. I figured I couldn’t mess up my first novel if I just told The Story. And here, this guy saw it and wrote about it, probably never dreaming this story was written by 1) a woman, and 2) an academic drop-out with too much useless information to sit around and not use it from time to time.
And now, I'm delighted to be working with Sizzler Editions to bring MUSCLEBOUND back to print. Well, to e-book format anyway!
