About the Authors

DIMITRI APESSOS, a freelance writer, keeps his stuff in New York but lives on Amtrak, in an attempt to confuse evil spirits. It is not working. He is writing three novels, all of them queer replicas of the work of James Joyce, though he has yet to read Finnegan’s Wake. Dimitri lives vicariously through his e-mail address, TilApplesGrow@yahoo.com.

 

PANSY BRADSHAW is co-author of the best-selling Betty & Pansy’s Severe Queer Review of San Francisco (now in its fifth edition) and was a contributing editor to Scott O’Hara’s Steam (A Literary Queer’s Guide to Sex and Controversy). Born to poor white trash more than half a century ago, he was wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger…the rest is history. He now lives in rural Montana, where he writes, teaches and nannies, and is at the center of an active queer community.

 

KEN BUTLER grew up in the Bible Belt but managed never to feel guilty about being queer, perhaps because he figured out early that many of those farmers and miners liked getting their cocks sucked by another guy. He has a degree in music and works in theatre administration. He’s been happily ensconced in an intergenerational relationship of very long standing.

 

JUSTIN CHIN is the author of two books, Bite Hard and Mongrel. His poetry and prose have appeared in several magazines, including ZYZZYVA and The Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly, and several anthologies, including A Day For A Lay, The World In Us and Male Lust. He lives in San Francisco.

 

M. CHRISTIAN has been called “one of the finest living writers of erotica” by Pat Califia and “today’s premiere erotic shape-shifter” by Carol Queen. The author of more than one hundred published short stories, his work can be found in previous volumes of Best Gay Erotica, Best American Erotica, The Mammoth Books of Erotica and many other books and magazines. He’s the editor of several anthologies, including The Burning Pen, Guilty Pleasures, and Rough Stuff (with Simon Sheppard). A collection of his short stories, Dirty Words, is forthcoming from Alyson Books. He thinks WAY too much about sex.

 

CORNELIUS CONBOY, SF Leather Daddy XIII, has been called a natural-born sadist. He has written for Oblivion and Drummer magazines, and spoke on “family values” at San Francisco’s 1996 Pride celebration. Prior to his relocation to Los Angeles he was a sought-after emcee within the San Francisco leather community. He celebrates change, growth and the spiritually transformative nature of radical sexplay whenever he can.

 

JORGE IGNACIO CORTIÑAS’ fiction has been awarded first prize in the 1998 Bay Guardian Fiction Contest, and the 1999 James Assatly Memorial Prize. His plays include Maleta Mulata (Campo Santo Theatre Company, San Francisco) and Odiseo, could you stop for some bread and eggs on your way home? (INTAR, New York). His most recent play, Sleepwalkers, recently completed a two month run at the Area Stage in Miami. It was awarded a Carbonell Award by the South Florida Critics Circle in the category of Best New Work.

 

JAMESON CURRIER is the author of a collection of short stories, Dancing on the Moon, a documentary film, Living Proof, and a novel, Where The Rainbow Ends, which was awarded a fiction grant from the Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation and received a 1999 Lambda Literary Award nomination. His short fiction has been anthologized in Men on Men 5, Man of My Dreams, All The Ways Home, Men Seeking Men, The Mammoth Book of Gay Erotica, Best American Gay Fiction 3, and several editions of Best Gay Erotica.

 

GRIGORAKIS DASKALOGRIGORAKIS was born in Crete, grew up in the Rocky Mountains, lived a while in Manhattan and now lives in Los Angeles, where he sees a lot of movies.

 

JACK FRITSCHER is a San Francisco humanist writer/photographer /videographer who in 1967 introduced emerging gay culture into the new American Popular Culture Association. With a doctorate in American Literature and Criticism from Loyola University, Chicago, he was founding San Francisco editor-in-chief of Drummer magazine. Some Dance to Remember, his epic novel of gay history in San Francisco (1970-1982), will be released as an Alyson Classics Edition in 2002. His nonfiction titles include his memoir of his scandalous lover, Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera, as well as Popular Witchcraft: Straight from the Witch’s Mouth, which in 1972 was the first book to address gay wicca. Not a prisoner of gender, he is also the author of the humanist novel about young lesbians in the 1950s South, The Geography of Women: A Romantic Comedy.

 

KEVIN KILLIAN is a poet, novelist, critic and playwright. His books include Bedrooms Have Windows, Shy, Little Men, and Argento Series. With Lewis Ellingham he has written Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance (Wesleyan, 1998), the first biography of the important U.S. poet. “Heat Wave” became a chapter in a novel, Arctic Summer (New York: Hard Candy, 1997). Kevin lives in San Francisco.

 

MICHAEL LASSELL is a poet, writer and editor and the author of five books, the most recent a collection of short stories titled Certain Ecstasies (Painted Leaf Press). His poems, stories, and essays have been included in scores of anthologies and textbooks, including High Risk, New York Sex, and The Mammoth Book of Gay Erotica, and translated into French, German, Dutch, Spanish and Catalan. He is the editor of Men Seeking Men: Adventures in the Personals (Painted Leaf) and five additional books of poems and essays, including Two Hearts Desire: Gay Couples on Their Love (with Lawrence Schimel) and, with Elena Georgiou, The World In Us: Lesbian and Gay Poetry of the Next Wave (St. Martin’s Press, 2000).

 

AL LUJAN is a San Francisco-based visual artist, filmmaker, performer, writer, lover, bastard, liar and backup singer/mudslinger for the all-girl post-punk ranchera band “Las Cucas.” His writing has appeared in numerous anthologies, most recently Virgins, Guerillas and Locas edited by Jaime Cortez (Cleis Press), Too Sexy edited by Antonio Cuevas (North Atlantic Press), Besame Mucho edited by Jaime Manrique (Painted Leaf); and Best American Erotica edited by Susie Bright (Simon & Schuster). His first film, S&M in the Hood was picked up for distribution by Frameline. He recently received the Nuevo Potrero grant to complete his upcoming film Corn in the Front Yard. He also has performed at Highways, the late Josie’s Cabaret, Somar, Theatre Rhinoceros, BRAVA, Glaxa, Build, Intersection for the Arts and the Mission Cultural Center. He founded Latin Hustle, a queer Latino comedy troupe, in 1997 with Lito Sandoval and Jaime Cortez, which received a San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity grant to mount its first show Full Frontal Nudity, at Theatre Rhinoceros.

 

SCOTT O’HARA remains rentable at your local video store in about two dozen skinflicks; he also founded and for three years edited Steam (A Literary Queer’s Guide to Sex and Controversy) and edited the anthology Stallions and Other Studs. His erotic fiction was published in 1996 by Masquerade/Badboy Books in Do-It-Yourself Piston Polishing (For Non-Mechanics); essays and memoirs appeared in Autopornography: A Life in the Fast Lane (Harrington Park Press, 1997) and Rarely Pure & Never Simple (Harrington Park Press, 1999). He died in 1998.

 

IAN PHILIPS is an unassuming abomination who lives in San Francisco. This story along with other pieces of literate filth he’s penned appear in a first collection of short stories titled See Dick Deconstruct: Literotica for the Queer in the Head, due in the fall of 2000. He can be reached at iphilips@aol.com.

 

ANDY QUAN’s first piece of published smut was “Six Positions,” written in London, England. It appeared in Quickies and Best Gay Erotica 1999. New erotica has since appeared in Quickies 2, Best Gay Erotica 2000 and Carnal Nation: Writing Sex in New Canadian Fiction (Arsenal Pulp Press). Less spicy writing credits include Gay Fiction at the Millennium (Alyson) and Take Out: Queer Writing from Asian Pacific America (Temple University). He is the co-editor of Swallowing Clouds, an Anthology of Chinese Canadian Poetry (Arsenal Pulp Press). Currently working as the international policy officer for the Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations, Quan was born in Canada of Cantonese origins. He is a singer-songwriter, poet and voyager, currently landed in Sydney.

 

CAROL QUEEN has a doctorate in sexology, which she uses to impart more realistic detail to her smut. She is the author of The Leather Daddy and the Femme (from which “Ganged” is excerpted), Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture, Exhibitionism for the Shy, and co-editor of Best Bisexual Erotica, PoMoSexuals, Switch Hitters, and Sex Spoken Here. She lives in San Francisco (where else?); come visit at www.carolqueen.com.

 

KIRK READ grew up in Virginia, where he was the editor at Our Own Community Press in Virginia. His writing has appeared in over seventy-five LGBT publications around the world, including Philadelphia Gay News, Washington Blade, Frontiers, QSF, and Lambda Book Report. His work appeared in the anthology A Day for a Lay: A Century of Gay Poetry and can be seen at www.temenos.net/kirkread. As a volunteer, he is on the organizing collective of the Gay Men’s Health Summit, helps with a weekly homeless feeding in the Castro, and is an intake counselor at the St. James Infirmary, a free health care clinic for sex workers. He can be reached at KirkRead@aol.com

 

PAUL REED is the author of more than a dozen books, including the novels Facing It and Longing and the memoirs Q Journal and Savage Gardens. His work has appeared in The Advocate, The San Francisco Chronicle, Honcho and Drummer, and his short fiction has been anthologized many times, including in the Best American Erotica 1995 and in Noirotica 2, where “We Own the Night” first appeared. He lives in San Francisco and is working on a novel.

 

MATTHEW RETTENMUND, a magazine editor living in Manhattan, is author of the novels Boy Culture and Blind Items: A Love Story, plus the nonfiction books Totally Awesome 80s and Encyclopedia Madonnica.

 

MICHAEL ROWE, born in Ottawa, Canada and raised in Beirut, Havana and Geneva, is an award-winning journalist and essayist, author of the critically-acclaimed Writing Below the Belt, and co-editor of two Lambda Literary Award-nominated anthologies, Sons of Darkness and Brothers of the Night. His journalism has appeared in The National Post, The Globe & Mail, The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, The Body Politic and Torso, among others, and he was founding senior writer for FAB National, where he was a finalist in 1997 for a Canadian National Magazine Award. Some of his essays and journalism are collected in Looking for Brothers (Mosaic Press, 1999). He can be reached at Mwriter35@aol.com.

 

D. TRAVERS SCOTT is the author of Execution, Texas: 1987, editor of Strategic Sex: Why They Won’t Keep It in the Bedroom, and had a blast as guest judge for Best Gay Erotica 2000. Trav currently lives in Seattle.

 

LAWRENCE SCHIMEL is a full-time author and anthologist, who’s published over forty books, including Switch Hitters: Lesbians Write Gay Male Erotica and Gay Men Write Lesbian Erotica (with Carol Queen; Cleis Press), The Mammoth Book of Gay Erotica, The Drag Queen of Elfland, Boy Meets Boy, Food for Life and Other Dish (Cleis Press), and PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality (with Carol Queen; Cleis Press), which won a Lambda Literary Award.

 

SIMON SHEPPARD is the co-editor, with M. Christian, of Rough Stuff: Tales of Gay Men, Sex and Power. His work appears in dozens of anthologies, including four editions of Best Gay Erotica and two of Best American Erotica. His collection Hotter Than Hell & Other Stories will be published by Alyson Books in 2001. And his column, “Sex Talk” appears in queer publications and on Websites nationwide. He just loves writing about dick.

 

DON SHEWEY has published three books about theatre and written articles for the New York Times, Village Voice, Esquire, Rolling Stone and other publications. His essays have been reprinted in such anthologies as Contemporary Shakespeare Criticism and The Mammoth Book of Gay Erotica. He grew up in a trailer park on a dirt road in Waco, Texas and now lives in midtown Manhattan.

 

JOHN TUNUI is a co-founder of Tatau, a writing group of Polynesians in San Francisco, and a member of UTOPIA (www.polyutopia.com), which is a social group for Queer Polynesians from around California. He lives with the love of his life, Kiwi, in the Castro.

 

EMANUEL XAVIER got his start in Best Gay Erotica 1997. He is now author of the poetry collection, Pier Queen, and the Lambda Literary Award-nominated novel, Christ-Like, featuring the character of Mikey X, who first made his debut in the short story, “Motherfuckers.” Winner of the Marsha A. Gomez Cultural Heritage Award, his work has also been published in Men on Men 7, James White Review, Virgins, Guerillas and Locas, and Urban Latino Magazine.