Tag Archives: Gay/Bisexual Fiction

The Strange Haunting of Johnny Feelwater

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The Strange Haunting Of Johnny Feelwater

An excerpt from chapter 19 . . .

Johnny was aware that Brian was looking at him.

“Shame you’re not bisexual,” said Brian, a sudden and unexpected whispering of his thoughts.

Johnny turned his head and their eyes met.

“Forgive me, my friend, but I’m no longer inclined toward the fairer sex, even to these frequently available young girls.  I would consider myself inappropriate for them anyway.  But now I’m in bed next to a man, quite an attractive man I might add, and it occurred to me that a little mutual affection is nourishing for the soul.”  Brian shifted to his side and faced Johnny, bracing himself up on an elbow.

Caught off guard, Johnny glanced down at his companion’s torso, a candlelit display of shoulders and a chest thick with muscle, of dark hairs mixed with gray that curled about a pair of nipples and ran a wide path toward a sunken navel.  The glance ventured downward, over strong hairy legs, then upward, fixing on genitals flaccid in the warm air, dropping with generous weight from a dense swath of salted pubic hair, fleshy and splayed atop a muscular thigh.  It was no more than a glance, the entirety of which lasted the bat of an eye, though it sparked the fires of adrenaline.

Oh, the power of such a visual to set one’s imagination stirring, Johnny realized, not much to his surprise as he twisted his head upward and returned his gaze to the shadows.  It all came rushing back as if the image had opened a floodgate of memories from his confused youth.  Those fleshy organs—were they not an anomaly of the male form, peculiar in shape and so much darker than the rest of the body?  Were they not an inconsistency in the fluid contours of muscle and limb, hanging from the body at the apex of one’s legs like something alien by virtue of their odd design?  Perhaps it might seem, but for that inborn consciousness of their purpose, and in being male with the same fragile effects, accompanied always with that sublime awareness of their ever changing weight.  Oh, those daunting colors, dark and purposeful, like magnets drawing one’s eyes, like streaking meteors that suddenly exclude all other thoughts.  And those masculine odors lingering in the air with his own, born of errant drops of urine and yesterday’s sweat and last night’s involuntary seepages from that tiny hole, mingled with those living with aromatic vibrancy between damp gluteal cheeks.  He was thinking about all of this as he stared at the ceiling, his face fixed with a dreamlike gaze, thinking there was even more to resist: the warmth of a man lying so close, the warmth he could feel on his face, the feel of that same man’s breath on his ear.  What was it, but a universe of two men, a symphony of maleness within the parameters of a small space, offensive perhaps to some, though more akin to euphoria for two certain men on a warm Kenyan night.

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Review of THE PARTISANS

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The Partisans: A review on Amazon by R. Herron

I just finished ready this novel and it was the most enjoyable reading experience I’ve had in a long time. It was brilliant the way Mr. Brant weaved an interracial gay love story and a war. As an African American gay man, it was great to find characters that embraced each other’s diversity and found they were more alike than not. This could be a great movie if someone was courageous enough to make it. The Partisans is truly a treasure. I’m recommending it to all of my friends. I’m looking forward to reading other books by this author.

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From Chapter Three

“I understand,” said Jhan, producing a sympathetic smile.  He looked back at Ethan.  “My father’s an SS officer.  He’s always been ruthlessly autocratic.  Now he’s a brutal tyrant.  My older brother is an ambitious bureaucrat, callously ambitious, and far removed from the intellectual he thinks he is.  My lifelong best friend is a Jew, or should I say was a Jew, I wouldn’t know.  Our friendship goes back to grade school, where we practiced the art of mischief together.  My own brother turned him in to further his career.  He laughed at me when I attacked him because of it.  My mother is a nervous rabbit, ruined by an abusive husband and the effects of the Reich.  So to answer your question, I’m not motivated by my moral objections—I’m driven.”

From Chapter Seven

Golden brown in the soft light, powerful and muscular, Jhan wondered how a man like Ethan managed to look submissive.  But he did, with his hands up behind his head, body exposed, legs parted.  It struck Jhan that something not so easily found would have seemed impossible just a week earlier; but right here in this remote barn, two men’s lives were changing.  His gaze lingered, just to assure himself that this was for him, that it was real, that just now nothing else mattered.  A gaze—quiet, contemplative, though more than enough to set the urges welling.  How like a summer storm these things come over a man.  Now, after so many years of loneliness, here was a man willing and waiting for his touch, someone like himself who understands the ache.

Available on Amazon in paperback or Kindle versions.

Women Who Read M2M Fiction.

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Some of the most interesting and intriguing emails I get come from the women who read my novels.

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I hear from women of all ages, backgrounds and circumstances, and I hear from them for different reasons.  It goes beyond the fact there are strong female characters in all of my novels: the wives in Five Married Men; a sister and a nurse in A Song in the Park; a colleague in The Partisans; a wife and a seductress in The Strange Haunting of Johnny Feelwater; characters women relate to or sympathize for.  But the two main reasons seem to be: women readers are touched by human romance and intimacy, no matter the characters gender or sexual orientation; or they have found themselves in similar circumstances (their husbands, boyfriends or brothers are gay or bisexual).

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Women also want to know what goes in inside a man’s head.  Stories that involve his sexuality are intriguing.  Some women are intrigued by the notion of intimacy between two males; there are some female fans who read one novel after another that involve male relationships.  It’s everything from simple curiosity to the pursuit of a fantasy to full blown fascination with male physical interaction.

Five Married Men inspires most of the e-mail I get from women, often a wife who just found out and is looking to understand and cope with her new dilemma.  She reaches out for a sympathetic listener, a neutral third party that might offer insight on what she might expect to happen next.  Given the fact she has an otherwise happy marriage, I’m honored to be able to offer words of encouragement.

Actually I’m honored to hear from all the women who contact me.  I’m often thinking about them when I write.  Simply put, no matter how attracted to men he might be, women are important factors in every man’s life.

I received the following e-mail just recently:

HI , I WOULD LOVE TO THANK YOU FOR 2 WONDERFUL HELPFUL BOOKS.  FIVE MARRIED MEN AND A SONG IN THE PARK. MY LIFE UNRAVELED 4 YRS AGO WHEN I DISCOVERED MY HUSBAND OF 17 YRS WAS HAVING SEX WITH MEN. HE IS BISEXUAL. IT WAS THE MOST DEVISTATING EXPERIENCE OF MY LIFE. I AM SLOWLY RECOVERING. WE ARE STILL MARRIED. BOTH WORKING ON PUTTING THE PIECES BACK TOGETHER. I AM DOING MOST OF THE WORK BY MYSELF. HE DOES NOT LIKE TO TALK ABOUT HIS BISEXUALITY. HE IS NOT COMFORTABLE WITH THAT PART OF HIS LIFE YET. YOUR BOOKS SHOWED ME HOW THE MALE MIND WORKS. THAT IT IS POSSIBLE TO LOVE A WIFE AND WANT SEX WITH MEN. HE IS NOT HAVING SEX WITH MEN AT THIS TIME. NOT FOR THE LAST 2 YRS TO MY KNOWLEDGE. TRUST IS NOT WHAT IT USED TO BE. I AM ALWAYS ON GUARD FOR ANY SIGNS. I DISCOVERED HIS BISEXUALITY WHEN HE HAD LEFT HIS EMAIL UP AND I SAW HIS POSTS TO MEN. IT WAS EYE OPENING. MY WORLD WAS FOREVER CHANGED. ONLY A HANDFUL OF PEOPLE KNOW. THIS IS HARD TO DISCUSS WITH PEOPLE WHO HAVE NOT LIVED THIS. YOUR WRITING HAS THE ABILITY TO HIT THE NAIL ON THE HEAD. YOU CAN GET DEEP INTO MY FEELINGS AND HELP ME TO UNDERSTAND THEM. I AM GRATEFUL FOR THAT. THANKS FOR THE BOOKS. KEEP WRITING ON THIS SUBJECT. YOU ARE TRUELY A GIFTED AUTHOR. THANKS, (name withheld to protect her privacy)

The Jew and the German

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The Jew and the German

We rounded up one hundred and sixty Jews today.  The rifle shots that ended their lives had stopped less than an hour ago.  I had witnessed it all, standing among my German comrades, not twenty meters from the edge of the trench that served as a mass grave.

Men, women, children; it didn’t matter as long as they were Jews, or gypsies, or suspected Bolshevik sympathizers.  I had seen the increasingly higher pile of naked bodies at the bottom of the trench, watched the officer go down among them and blow out the brains of those still moving.  I had listened to them moan and beg and pray, and watched as they somberly removed their clothes, then stood shivering at the edge of the trench, not allowing their eyes to fall below the eastern horizon.  I had felt my stomach roil with bitter acid, felt my teeth hurt from clenching them so tightly.  I had been part of it, me, a draftsman just out of college.  I had been conscripted into the SS, assigned to the ranks of Sonderkommando 4a, one of the outfits designated to address the Jewish question, currently operating in Ukraine.  My group had been ordered to clean out the surrounding villages around Kiev.  The day would come I would be chosen to man one of the rifles.  I still could not comprehend why we were doing this.  I had not figured out what had happened to my homeland.  My breathing had been labored since my first day in Ukraine.  I could not imagine pulling the trigger.

Now, as the gloom of night cast the first shadows over the long weary day, I stood a few yards outside of camp, leaning against a tree, taking long draws off my third consecutive cigarette, staring absently across the vast steppe.  Sonderkommando 4a was following the wehrmacht as it plowed through Russia.  Setting up command centers in the cities and villages behind the front line, our objective was to round up and eliminate German enemies.  Of course this included the Jews.  My small group, part of the central group in Kiev, had been sent southeast to clean out the small villages.  It was horrifying, merciless, carried out with ruthless detachment.  I would never adjust to this manner of thinking.  I had known many Jews in my hometown in Germany, neighbors, chums I had gone to school with.  Why were we killing them?

From the corner of my eye, I saw an approaching prisoner, a young man in tattered peasant clothes assigned the chore of picking up the trash and cigarette butts littering our camp.  I watched him, his cautiousness as he got down on his knees to scour the ground, glancing at me, most likely fretting over every tiny scrap and every last cigarette butt, trying to avoid a beating.  I felt ashamed of my uniform.

Eventually he stared at me, the look in his eye chilling; more than hostility, analytical perhaps, a look that almost seemed to suggest pity, though not quite masking his hatred and contempt.  Moving forward on his knees, likely resigned to his fate, his courage seemed to gather, reflected in the expression of defiance on his face.  When he got to his feet, he glanced behind and saw we were alone, then fixed his arrogant, scornful eyes on me.  “You think you’ll get away with this, with what’s going on here,” he said bitterly, staring fearlessly like a man with nothing to lose.

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Johnny Feelwater’s Sexual Revelation

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The Strange Haunting of Johnny Feelwater is a story about a thirty-two year old man who realizes, during a onslaught of astonishing circumstances, he has set his stride on the wrong path.

james-wu-sashaLike countless men like him, another man lives inside his head, a man he can’t allow himself to be, a confused identity shunted into the darkest corners of his consciousness.  He had married Marrilee, started his career, took on a mortgage–he was normal.

Then, one morning he innocently steps into another world, Cassandra and Julian Mott’s world, and everything begins to unravel, his career, his marriage, his peace-of-mind.  He comes face-to-face with the other side of his sexuality.  After lifting his legs and resting them on another man’s shoulders, nude and vulnerable, he realizes, if he is to get his life back, he needs help.

Johnny knows that a man called Dr. Brian Fowler is the one who can help him, the one man that can deal with Cassandra and Julian Mott; but Fowler is in Africa, where he goes every summer to donate his time to the people of Kenya known as the Maasai.  For Johnny, there’s no choice other than to exhaust what remains of his finances and journey to Africa, where he finds answers to his unmasked questions.

Johnny’s senses are overwhelmed during his stay with Bryan Fowler in the Maasai village, the human smells and visuals, humanity’s oneness with the earth.  His imagination is set ablaze and his self-recognition begins to blossom as he lives among these dynamic people and sleeps so close to Brian in the tiny confines of a Maasai hut.

One day he and Brian attend a traditional ceremony, where the two of them sit on a knoll with the village elders, watching the festivities.  Here is what he sees:

(From The Strange Haunting of Johnny Feelwater)  . . . It was a time of waiting.  Puffing their pipes, Johnny and Brian continued to observe the activities from their positions on the knoll.  Johnny’s reprieve held.  There were no omens in his hands.  Locking his fingers around a knee, he sat comfortably, the pipe clenched in his teeth, his shoulder and neck muscles tension free.  While the elders next to him spoke among themselves of their important concerns, Johnny continued his private study of Maasai contentment.  He watched young mothers with newborn infants at their breasts, tiny babes engulfed within loving arms and gazes.  A toddler emerged from a forest of long legs, wailing.  So distraught was his small face that Johnny’s heart felt a pang.  The child had lost his mother, not yet old enough to know there was no safer place on God’s earth he might be.  The younger men, the warriors, stood in small groups, conversing and comparing adornments and body paint.  From them came no shortage of teasing; for it seemed where go the warriors, so go the girls and the catcalls and flirting.

Johnny had been watching one of them in particular.  A young man who would be king, Johnny surmised as he leaned forward and stared, resting his forearms on his knees, letting his hands hang limp.  The warrior, shouldering no more than twenty-five years of life’s trials, stood an inch or two taller than his companions; a stature enhanced by a magnificent, horseshoe-shaped headdress, feathered with stuffed orioles and kingfishers.  Flaring nearly as wide as his shoulders, he wore it like a crown.  Chalky white paint formed a raccoon-like mask around his eyes and strands of beads crisscrossed his forehead.  Set in the perfect symmetry of a longish, oval-shaped face, his eyes shone with self-confidence and arrogance, his nose long and broad with large nostrils, his lips a voluptuous, omnipotent smirk.  Tied at the back of his neck, a bright red cape draped down over his torso to his knees.  It hung loosely open down the back, which allowed shadowy hints of rich black skin and the masculine contours of his lower back and buttocks. Continue reading →

The Kindly Ones by Johnathon Littell

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‘Schindler’s List’  gave you a look at the Holocaust from a benefactor’s perspective.  This book will give you a look from the diabolical mind of an SS officer.

It will also give you an insight into the marrow of human evil that you want to pretend does not exist.  But it does, and it can be found, given certain circumstances, in any society in the world.  The following review sums this book up accurately.

I read this in French when the reviews started coming out raving about it. I dont intend to read the English translation: once in any language is enough. But I found that I could not put it down once started. It is astonishing, compelling, revolting and, alas in all too many places, boring. As I was reading it, I was constantly reminded of Daniel J. Goldhagen’s reminder of the physicality of the Holocaust: blood and brains spattering all over the murderers: you get the point. It struck me that this is where Littell is taking the reader: into the physicality of the heart of darkness. And there is a lot of that in this novel: too much, or just enough? I guess it depends on how you take it. Kakutani in the NYT didnt take it at all well. But I think still there is merit in Littells approach: this is perhaps the thing that art can do best, deliver a whalloping punch to the gut. And that the novel certainly achieves. On the downside, it does tend to go on and on; there are long passages describing Aue’s dreams or hallucinations or whatever that dont succeed well at all, IMHO. I found myself skimming these passages after close reading of the first one. They dont seem to add much insight into Aue’s character, psychology or motives.
The Kindly Ones will certainly not be to everyone’s taste and Littell took a huge risk in tackling such a sensitive and explosive topic in the way he did. I have been haunted by this novel from time to time since I read it, but I dont regret it. There is a case to be made that it’s garbage, but in the end, for me, I found it deeply illuminating in places, and ultimately satisfying as art. Human evil remains a mystery here and that is as at should be.(A reader review on Amazon.com)

Johnathon Littell

Johnathon Littell

The author gives Dr. Max Aue, the main character (and the narrator), a unique twist: he’s bisexual.  I am delighted about this.  I feel enlightened.  Here we have a masterful author writing an epic novel that sells copies in the hundreds of thousands, delivering an amazing story told by a bisexual man, and who relates his same-sex exploits in graphic detail.  What might be called a mainstream novel.  At long last.  Rest assured I’ll do my part to keep them coming, perhaps not on the scale of ‘The Kindly Ones.

If you have the stomach, plenty of time, and feel like indulging certain passages with tempered patience, I highly recommend this book.