Story: Excerpts from 'The End of the World Book' by Alistair McCartney

Among many other things, the ficsucker is a sucker for metafictional encyclopedias. Isn't everybody?

A

Abercrombie and Fitch

Surely there is nothing more melancholy than the thought of a dead Abercrombie and Fitch model! Except perhaps the thought of one dead model and one living one, best friends since childhood, the model still living plagued with guilt—he must be responsible for the death of his friend—digging a grave, getting dirt all over the butt of his jeans.

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Story: Portrait of a Bad Night (with Ale)

Portrait of a Bad Night (with Ale) by Deborah Rosenblum is one of those stories, with one of those protagonists, sitting in the blurry spot between two cultures. Homosexuality isn't exactly equal to "gay," you know: "gay" came about under very particular circumstances, in a very particular set of places, as a way to explain homosexuality and give its practitioners a role in society. It's true that, as the product of a very powerful culture (the urban middle class of the United States) "gay" has moved into a bunch of cultures outside its point of origin, where it often stands alongside and (maybe) in opposition to older and more traditional ways of functioning as a homosexual.

If that makes any sense. Or maybe not.

Anyway, go read and come back, tell me what you think. Maybe I'm making too much of this. Maybe I'm just having flashbacks to my days in college and whatever.

Story: 'Excessive Disclosure' by Randy Ramano

Excessive Disclosure by Randy Ramano, which is about childhood sexual abuse, could have been either sentimental or pornographic, or both, easily, if the author hadn't got the voice and the tone just right. Its pretty rough going, though, by definition, so dont click if you cant handle uncomfortable subject matter.

Otherwise go, read!

Resource: The Still Blue Project

The Still Blue Project is an online continuation of the print anthology Everything I Own is Blue, a collection of stories by and for working class queers. I like the idea of putting out a print book and continuing it online -- I've seen that happen a lot with, for example, technical books and other reference works. I've never seen it with literary fiction. But maybe I'm just out of touch. Anyway, here you go:

http://stillblueproject.wordpress.com/

'One Door Closes' by Charlie Anders

The idea that being gay might be genetic horrifies me. I'm speaking as a happily gay man here. You see, I cut my reading teeth on "New Wave" science fiction dystopias, while living in the Born Again South, where any excuse to hate on a queer was a good excuse -- so to my mind, it's easy to jump from "people are born gay" to "being gay is a birth defect" to "let's cure them, or at least abort them as soon as we have the technology to identify them in the womb." You think that the fundamentalists won't abandon their anti-abortion rhetoric when it comes to the little queers in their bellies? Maybe they won't. Maybe. I've seen them contradict themselves too many times to believe that anything -- anything except their homophobia, that is -- means anything.

But that's just me. I'm just a pessimist.

Charlie Anders' story, "One Door Closes," covers some of the same speculative ground that my paranoiac imagination just did up there -- probing at the possible genetic basis of homosexuality, and imagining how technology might come into play in the future to manipulate same -- only with a much less, shall we say, apocalpytic result.

Have a read ...

Story: "Lowest of the Low" by Keith Banner

Today's find: "Lowest of the Low" by Keith Banner, from The Still Blue Project, "more writing for or about working class queers," an online continuation of the Everything I Have is Blue print anthology. I suspect you can like this story even if you are a Richie or a prep or whatever they call them these days. Posh?

Hell I don’t know. Barney’s gone. I just heard his car door slam. I stick a frozen pizza in, I go out on the patio, smoke while it nukes. There’s that March sky with cottage-cheese for clouds and bony trees around the half-frozen field and beyond that the backs of a McDonald’s and a Walgreen’s and the United Dairy Farmers where I work.

Read the rest: http://stillblueproject.wordpress.com/fiction/banner/

Story: 'Godoy Lives' by Daniel Chacón

Nobody is gay in Godoy Lives, by Daniel Chacón, except maybe -- maybe -- the dead guy in the first sentence. But it's as gay a story as I've ever read. You want to know how it feels, and what it means, to live in the closet? Here you go.

Juan's cousin wrote what he knew of the dead guy. He was from Jalisco. Not married. Some called him maricón because they suspected he was gay, but no one knew for sure.

The age of the man was the same as Juan's, 24, and the picture on the green card strikingly similar, sunken cheeks, small forehead, tiny, deep-set eyes that on Juan looked as if everything scared him, but that on the dead guy looked focused, confident. "You could use this to come work here," his cousin wrote.

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