I went back to my room and tried to stay there. But I had to know.

I crept up the stairs to the trapdoor. Heart pounding, I opened it a few inches, turned my head sideways, and peered in.

Michael was seated in his throne. He was wearing only his white tank top, stretched tight across his pecs and loose over his flat stomach. His half-hard cock rested like a club on the chair between his thighs.

The blond was kneeling naked before Michael, his back to me.

“Not tonight, Carl. I’m bushed.”

“Please, Michael, I need it. Now. So bad. It’s been so long.” He was rubbing his hands between his legs shamelessly.

“I said, not tonight.” Michael’s voice was hard.

The blond leaned forward and licked Michael’s cock with long strokes. He was sobbing.

“Oh, all right.” Michael pushed him aside and walked to the dresser, his pale, fat cock swaying. He opened a drawer and took out something wrapped in blue silk. “Just a simple fuck tonight,” he said. “Nothing fancy.”

He returned to the kneeling blond and unwrapped the object. It looked like a big, stiff dildo. I knew it was not.

“Stand up and face me, stupid.”

Carl stood and turned. I could see between his legs now. I saw the smooth, sexless flesh there.

I closed the trapdoor, ever so slowly. The blood pounded in my head like thunder.

That night, under cover of darkness, I moved my things out of the house on Beauchamp Street and went to a motel. Occasionally I have felt an urge to see Michael again—a glimpse of his broad shoulders, from a safe distance, would do. But I have never returned.

STEVEN SAYLOR

on Aaron Travis’s “Blue Light,” first published in 1980

I had an observation recently—the observation of a fifty-year-old, retired pornographer, looking back on his early work….

Lawrence Schimel recently reprinted my novelette Eden in The Mammouth Book of New Gay Erotica. I wrote Eden about twenty-five years ago, about a guy just out of high school, hitching across the West with a sexually ambiguous truck driver.

I reread the story for the first time in many years, just to see how it stood up, and I was blown away by the experience.

It was hot. It was surprisingly literate. I can remember coming up with every metaphor and image, every twist and turn—and yet there is such a distance between me and the author. He was so young! The story captures something authentic and obsessive and romantic that I could not duplicate now.

I’m proud of young Aaron Travis. Because he’s so much younger, and will stay that way forever, Travis seems almost to be my son instead of my alter ego! He’s so fearless to me! He didn’t realize it at the time, he just followed that muse….