“Blue Light” was originally published in an obscure gay rag called Malebox, July 1980, which had just been acquired by the publisher of Drummer. Malebox almost immediately went belly-up, and then “Blue Light” was quickly reprinted in Drummer.

I remember, when writing it, thinking about the Head of Mimir from Norse myth, the Head of Misery from James Branch Cabell’s novel Figures of Earth, the blue glow of the electric pentacles from William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost-Finder.

The story’s unconscious elements have deeper roots—and when others go poking about those roots, they reveal more about themselves than about Aaron Travis.

“It’s archetypal; haven’t we always wanted to be women?” Sam Steward (aka Phil Andros) told me. The artist Charles Musgrave remarked that the most fitting reward for writing such a story would be the chance to actually live it—an appalling idea, I thought. Why insist on reality when you already have metaphor?

My partner Rick Solomon (still hitched after thirty-one years) was the first to read the story, in manuscript. He was up in the loft reading it while I was downstairs, eagerly waiting for his reaction. Eventually, I heard him call to me, in a spooked voice, “I’m not coming down!”

End-of-the-World Sex

Tsaurah Litzky

My friend Carri tells me that since the disaster her Dom won’t let her out of bed. The minute he gets home from work he grabs her. It was like a second honeymoon at first, she says, but now she is exhausted, worn out, her Jezebel always sore and aching. I tell her she is free to experiment with my collection of lubes; lately I hadn’t had much use for them. She says thanks but she had better get her own.