Tangled Sheets

Putting down his beer, the man on the street crosses a few feet to the car, stopping when he is in front of the door. He kneels between his friend's legs, one large booted foot on either side of him. Trying not to look his friend in the face, he puts a hand on each knee, his hands gripping them lightly.

“Yeah, that's it,” the man in the car growls. “Help me out a little bit like a good buddy.”

A hand moves up to touch one bare thigh, hesitating momentarily as the fingers move from the rough blue jeans to the smooth feeling of flesh on flesh.

With this new turn of events, I want to get a closer look. Climbing onto the windowsill, I crawl out onto my fire escape, making as little noise as possible. The night air surrounds my naked, sweating body as I sit on the stairs going up to the next floor and position myself so that I can see what is going on below me. The two men have not heard or seen me and I have a perfect view of the car and what is happening in it.

The man in the car is gripping the other one's neck firmly with both hands, pushing him down and then releasing him. He stands up and steps away from the car. For the first time, I see his face. He is very handsome. Not pretty like the men I see in the bars, but rugged and somehow more real.

Bending down, he unties his boots and pulls them off, following with his pants. He stands barefoot and naked on the sidewalk beside the car.

“Now you,” he says to the other man, who is leaning against the car, watching him. “Strip.”

It is a command, not a request . . .

—from
Wednesday, 2:00 A.M.

 

 

LAST SUMMER

 

LOOKING FOR IT

 

TANGLED SHEETS

 

 

Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

tales of erotica
tangled sheets

MICHAEL THOMAS FORD

KENSINGTON BOOKS
www.kensingtonbooks.com

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

Table of Contents

I
n the fall of 1993 I became a pornographer.

don't remember what prompted me to write that first stroke story—probably I was avoiding some other, less appealing, deadline—but I do remember receiving a letter a week or so after I mailed it off to the editor of
Blueboy.
He couldn't, he apologized, pay me anything for the story, but he'd be happy to print it. Thrilled that someone actually liked my writing enough to publish it, I agreed (it would be the first and only time I worked for free).

After that, writing porn became a regular part of my routine. Every week I'd crank out something and send it off to one of the many men's magazines that published such things. Before long, copies of
Honcho
,
Torso
,
Mandate
,
Indulge
,
Advocate Classifieds
,
Men
, and
Freshmen
began appearing in my mailbox, each one featuring one of my stories amidst the pictorials of men with hard cocks and spread ass cheeks.

The name I used on those early stories was Tom Caffrey. The Tom part is easy enough to figure out. Caffrey I stole from actor Stephen Caffrey, best known for his roles in the television show
Tour of Duty
and the film
Longtime Companion
, where he played the role of Fuzzy. Stephen, with his hairy body and rugged good looks, was a favorite fantasy of mine. I decided to model Tom after him, thus making it easier to describe Tom when he was one of the characters in a story.

Why the pseudonym, or nom de porn as I called it? At the time, I was primarily writing books for young readers. I'd recently published a book on AIDS for teenagers and was becoming well known in the world of children's literature. I was already feeling some heat for being a writer who wrote about gay topics and who wrote for young readers, and I thought adding to that by putting my name on sex stories wouldn't be the wisest career move. I suppose I could have used Mike Ford (which many people have said sounds like a porn star name anyway) but there was something intriguing about hiding behind a totally new identity.

To my surprise, Tom quickly became a favorite with readers of erotica. He was helped, in part, by having his stories included in John Preston's enormously successful Flesh and the Word series of anthologies and in one of Susie Bright's Best American Erotica collections. He also became a regular in the pages of
Advocate Men
and
Freshmen
, thanks to then-editors Fred Goss and Gerry Kroll.

Eventually I had enough stories to make a collection of my own, and in 1994
Hitting Home & Other Stories
was released by BadBoy Books. A second collection,
Tales from the Men's Room
, followed in 1996. In addition to writing my own stories, I also began editing various anthologies under my real name. I approached Cleis Press about launching a series of Best Gay Erotica titles, the first of which I edited with my friend Scott Heim (the usual “artistic differences” between myself and the publisher led me to leave the series after that initial collection, and it is now edited by the wonderful and skilled Richard Labonte). I also edited two collections of erotic fairy tales, one for women (
Once Upon A Time
) and one for men (
Happily Ever After
), which were published by erotica champion and unforgettable character Richard Kasak of Richard Kasak Books. These collections featured work by some of the most innovative voices in queer literature, including Dorothy Allison, Francesca Lia Block, Carol Queen, Pat Califia, Jennifer Levin, Heather Lewis, Linda Smukler, Cecilia Tan, Laura Antoniou, Bruce Benderson, Michael Lassell, Poppy Z. Brite, Thomas Roche, Lev Raphael, M. Christian, Larry Townsend, William J. Mann, and D. Travers Scott. To date they remain two of my favorite books, and I wish they were still available.

Eventually I got a little bit bored with the Tom stories and began to branch out, trying my hand at stories featuring women. For these I used a variety of pseudonyms, the most frequent of which was Lily August. Like Tom before her, Lily also developed a large following, and like Tom she appeared in the pages of the Best American Erotica series. Sadly, the market for lesbian erotica is not nearly as large as that for men, so Lily's output remained relatively small. But the experience of writing from that vantage point was a lot of fun, and the Lily stories are some of my favorites.

Like all good things, my pornography career finally came to an end, mainly because I became more involved in writing the books that became the Trials of My Queer Life series. I put Tom, Lily, and my other alter egos behind me and moved on. But to my surprise, they continued to live full and happy lives all on their own. When I started touring to promote my first essay collection,
Alec Baldwin Doesn't Love Me
, I found one or two people at every reading who wanted me to sign copies of
Hitting Home
or
Tales from the Men's Room
(word had gotten out about me and Tom being one and the same). When BadBoy ceased operations and the books went out of print, I received hundreds of e-mails to my website asking where copies could be purchased.

So here, for the first time, I've collected my erotic stories. This book contains the material from those first two collections, as well as stories I wrote for other anthologies, stories written for magazines under the Tom Caffrey name and other pseudonyms, and pieces that haven't been published anywhere at all.

Ten years ago, when these first stories were written, the gay erotica field was just beginning to explode. Writers and editors such as M. Christian, Laura Antoniou, Thomas Roche, Michael Rowe, and Pat Califia were releasing wonderful, groundbreaking work. We all grew up together and saw the world of sex writing change, moving from magazines to books to websites and then back again. We saw the market become glutted with badly conceived, badly written, and badly edited material. Most of us went into hibernation for a time, waiting for it to get better. Some of us are still in hibernation. But none of us will ever forget the fun we had.

I once received a fan letter, written to Tom Caffrey, that said, “I love your writing because it's so much more literary than the other erotica out there. But when are you going to write a real novel?” Well, I have written real novels. And in most of them there's sex. Why? Because writing is about capturing life on paper, and sex is a part of life. I started writing porn for fun and money. I kept writing porn because these stories gave me an opportunity to explore different types of writing, to play with creating scenes and moods and situations. I saw them as exercises of sorts, much as a pianist might practice scales or a pitcher might throw balls through an old tire hung from a tree branch. Some began with a single image I wanted to capture, while others were about confronting the characters with challenges and forcing them to make decisions. Yes, some of these stories are “just” about sex. But others are about much more.

One final note: Everyone always wants to know how much of a pornographer's work comes from real-life experiences. The answer is, not much, at least in my case. The majority of these stories are complete works of fiction, and even the ones that
are
based on real events or real people have been changed in some way. Tom is not Mike. Nor is he always the same Tom. (Although the fictional Mr. Caffrey, like his inspiration, tends to be dark-haired and hairy-chested, he has occasionally gone blond and shaved himself smooth when the plot has required it.) And the Mikes in the stories aren't me, either. The fact is, there are only a handful of good porn names—Mike, Jack, Scott, Jake—and they all get used here, much as they get circulated among every new generation of porn stars. So please, don't read too much into these. Just enjoy them.