A Pardoner’s Tale

A forty-five-year-old gay man, Paul Lavarnway, finds himself in a “reparative therapy” program for homosexuals, lodged in a gloomy old house by the sea…and he’s not quite sure how he got there.

Paul and four other would-be ex-homos share stories, rant and rave, cry and confess, and have…uh…certain physical encounters, even as Paul pieces together his recent life with his husband and other lovers.

What is this novel? Satire? Allegory? Nightmare? Or is it just a box of rocks?

It really was a box of rocks till I started dumping subplots, of which there were far too many. I’d put too much work into the novel, over the course of seven years, to scrap it entirely. And what do you know, in its more streamlined form it came to life again.

If I were to compare Tale with another novel, it would be Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, which I read when I was 16. Even then I could see that Roth was up to something more than just writing a strokebook: he was exploring, in the most explicit terms, how an individual’s erotic life fits (or doesn’t fit) into his superficially polite life outside the bedroom.

This is one of the few works I’ve written that have “being gay” as a major theme. And for me, part of being gay is that I feel I have to apologize for choosing this theme, when there are more “important” or “universal” things to write about. This self-oppression and self-censorship get programmed into us at an early age. So my response develops, over time, into this kind of book, where scenes of slamming-door bedroom farce mask a barely-controlled rage, even as they celebrate the sweet rewards of following one’s sexual destiny. I wonder if it’s true that sometimes the wildest exaggeration can lead to the truth….

Read Chapter One of A Pardoner’s Tale

Hands of Stone

Writers are always coming up with this kind of anecdote, and it always sounds phony to me, but I swear in this case it’s true: this novel came about because of just one sentence that suddenly popped into my head one day. It went like this:

“Warren Stone was a big boy, with big hands.”

That was it. I had no idea what it meant. But as the sentence continued to haunt me, I recalled that when I was a kid I’d had a friend named Warren, and he was kind of like that—one of those big, awkward kids that are always tripping over their own feet. His clumsy energy was dangerous; you felt that he was forever just about to break something.

As the novel began to develop, it became the story of Warren Stone and Bobby Hendricks, who become friends in grade school. Though they’re the same age, Bobby is much smaller than Warren, who finds that he can render Bobby helpless by tickling him. The two boys enter into a kind of BDSM relationship that lasts through grade school, high school, college and beyond, with Warren’s tickle-torturing of Bobby becoming ever more imaginative.

Hands of Stone, which is narrated by Bobby, interests me because of its theme of gay subordination/friendship, and because it covers a span of time that includes the nineteen-sixties, seventies and eighties.

Frequently Asked Questions

You received some criticism for writing about sex between teenage boys in My Name Is Rand, and now you’re doing it again. What’s up with that?
While it’s not my mission to offend anyone, I believe that teenage boys really do have sex, and I have to represent that reality.

Reality? Dude, your writing is full of all kinds of crazy shit, and you’re talking about reality?
It seems to me that readers, particularly gay male readers, have a keen sense of when you’re being honest or not when it comes to sexual issues. It’s obvious when you’re avoiding something because you’re afraid you might offend somebody, or because you might even be uncomfortable about it yourself. In my view—to use Marianne Moore’s famous analogy—you can create any kind of imaginary garden you want, but you’d better have at least a few real toads in it.

Click here to read an excerpt from Hands of Stone