Smut Gets Smart

[May 1st, 2002] Is it true? Is a prolific writer of gay erotica (OK, porn) bored with his own "beat"?

"I guess [my sex life] is boring," said Lawrence Schimel. Calling me from an apartment in New York's Chelsea neighborhood (though this former Yale polo player spends most of his time in his flat in Spain) he wanted to talk to me about his new book, His Tongue: Stories. But since he was the first gay porn writer I've ever had the chance to interview, I wanted to talk about his sex life. And what a disappointment.

"I don't have any unfulfilled fantasies, since the kind of sex I have, and the kind of sex I write about, is real sex."

The 30-year-old Schimel says that by "real sex" he refers to the grope sessions that happen between two (or more) men in contemporary gay society; not the deep-fisted, soul-sucking fantasies that get rammed into gay men everyday via video booths and the Internet. It's hot man-on-man action that makes sure to include safety measures like condoms and long-term, monogamous relationships.

Schimel likes to call it "thinking man's porn."

Huh? When did gay porn get so "heady"?

Well, one look at Schimel's bio and you'll see that he writes about more than just hot, safe homos (my favorite, Kosher Meat, is about gay Jews). Schimel has also penned everything from science fiction to, yes, lesbian erotica.

Even though he earns a lot more moola as a
science-fiction writer, he says it's been much more meaningful for him to write his gay and lesbo stuff. For example, His Tongue was first published in Spain in 1999 and, according to Schimel, was one of the first books of its kind in Spain to include condom use. "Hopefully, I'm doing something important over there."

And even though he labels himself as a pornographer, he refuses to label his work as either porn or erotica. "It's a class distinction that I'm not going to buy into," he says. He notes that stories from His Tongue (such as "Frighten the Unicorns," in which a longtime gay couple ends up having sex in the bushes of a ex-convent, or "The Story of Eau," in which another gay couple creates a kinky sex ritual in their bathtub to help get rid of hemorrhoids) have been published in softcore men's rags like Mandate and Torso. "In those publications, people would unquestionably call it porn," Schimel says. "But in book form, the same people would call it erotica, even though I haven't changed a single comma in a story."

Ultimately, for Schimel, porn has a higher political and social purpose. "It's one of the few places where I can reach out and touch young gay men," he says. "If I write about an anonymous encounter where men treat each other with human courtesy, then I'm doing my job. If I provide a role model of hot sex between men who are already in a relationship, that's really radical for the genre. We live in a society that continues to deny us many rights. Ideally, sex is not removed from all those things. I just try to mix it all together."