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My Name Is Rand
This novel was published by Suspect
Thoughts Press in February 2004.
It’s an intensely personal work that, to be honest, I never
thought would see the light of day. Here is the blurb I wrote which
appears on the back cover:
 “Mapped out on a playing field of ticklish male flesh, My
Name Is Rand follows a young man on his search for the ultimate
erotic adventure. Betrayed by his own skin into a helplessly eroticized
state, he becomes a captive of The Compound, a bizarre torture
camp
where men practice extreme tickling. After several near-death
experiences, he stumbles upon a hiding place where a band of desperate
men plot
escape while taking physical solace in each other. Sweatily detailed
in its depiction of men driven over the edge, this nightmarish
novel is a bondage epic, a horror comic, and a totally original
speculation
on the nature of time and consciousness.”
A touchy subject, to say the least. Here are some blurbs that the
book inspired:
“I can’t remember when I’ve been so disturbed
and turned on at the same time. If a writer has ever more successfully
put Eros and Thanatos in the sixty-nine position than Wayne Courtois,
I want to know who it is.”
-
Marshall Moore, author of The
Concrete Sky and Black Shapes in a Darkened Room
“[A]s far as I know this is the first full-bore novel to
detail the power of being tightly bound and tickled to the point
of orgasmic madness. Courtois's prose is dark, nightmarish, unrelenting,
and—for some—even unsettling, in its depiction of
coercive sex, forced bondage, and near-torture as a pathway to
pleasure. More.
No more. Yes, more."
- Richard Labonté, Books to Watch Out For
“Courtois's technique, style, and plot are truly visionary
and all his own. With its submissive concept, My Name Is
Rand could surely top the best gay fiction of the decade.”
- Andrew Wolter,
X-Factor
“[A] novel this finely crafted isn’t just about tickling.
The subtext is about how we connect with each other—or fail
to—skin to skin.”
- David Stein, All American Kink
You can read excerpts from My Name Is Rand at:
Velvet Mafia: Issue
#1 & Issue
#10
My Friend’s
Feet
J/O Alert: A slightly edited version of Chapter 1 of My Name
Is Rand appears in The
Best Gay Erotica 2005, edited by Richard
Labonté and guest editor Thomas Mann.
Frequently Asked Questions:
 Are those your feet on the cover?
I wish
they were, they look good enough to eat. But no, those aren’t
my feet. The cover design and photography are the work of the brilliant Shane Luitjens.
I understand that he lives and works in Rome, so those may be some
young Roman model’s feet that leap out at
us from the cover. If you really want to see a picture of my feet, click here.
Now that you’ve had a book published, are you able
to quit your day job and write full-time?
It’s surprising how many people believe that having a book
published puts you on the gravy train. In reality, there are only
a handful of people who are able to make a living writing fiction,
and I am not one of them…though I’d like to be. How is the book doing?
I guess it’s doing all right. I haven’t been pestering
the press for sales figures. This is really the kind of thing that
you don’t want to think about. It’s bad enough that I
find myself checking the Amazon.com sales
ranking every day—though
I’ve heard other writers confess that they do the same thing.
Um…are you serious about the time-and-consciousness
thing?
Absolutely. For someone with a hypersensitive
heart and mind, life itself is state of overstimulation. The passage
of time and the experience
of consciousness can feel very much like being pinned down and savagely
tickled, with no hope of escape….
Oh. Thanks for sharing. So are you working on another weird-ass book?
Funny
you should ask! I have a link just for you... click here.
"A Report From Winter"
Walking
Higher: Gay Men Write about the Deaths of Their Mothers
Edited by Alexander Renault
This anthology, published by Xlibris Books, was clearly a labor
of love for its editor, and has a very special place in my heart.
Here is an excerpt from Renault’s introduction:
 Walking Higher: Gay Men Write about the Deaths of Their Mothers is
a collection of 30 voices dedicated to exploring their relationships
with the women who gave them life, and managing the aftermath
of their mothers’ passing. Ten to twenty years ago, gay sons
were pre-deceasing their mothers in alarming numbers as out-of-sequence
deaths from AIDS ravaged an entire generation. Now that AIDS
is a
treatable disease, more gay men are surviving their parents.
Hence, it seems timely to offer a series of reflections on the
special
and unique relationship of mothers and their gay sons from
the perspective
of the surviving sons.
The joys and gifts our mothers brought to us, as well as the trials
and sorrows, are never as clear, focused, or poignant as after
she leaves us. The death of a mother changes a person on a fundamental
level. There are no handbooks for walking through this particular
grief, no condolences having the power to fill the new empty space
inside you. It is a solitary and intensely personal journey.
Walking Higher is a tribute both to motherhood and to memory as
it reaches across varying cultural boundaries in its honest exploration
of the experience of loss and bereavement.
I’m thankful that
my contribution to Walking Higher, an essay entitled “A Report
from Winter,” doesn’t look like
the Frankenstein’s monster that it really is, having been
cobbled together in bits and pieces from a much longer work. In
order to
for it to be included in this volume, I had to boil a 100,000-word
manuscript down to 10,000. Fortunately I didn’t know how
difficult it would be, or I would have been discouraged at the
outset. It’s
still on my “wish list” to have the whole manuscript
published someday, but in the meantime I’m overjoyed to be
part of this wonderful book.
Here is how my essay begins:
A Report from Winter
My mother dies, January 1998
My
mother’s name appeared on a crisp, laser-printed card posted
outside her door: Jennie Courtois. As I entered I saw her printed
name again, on the dresser, on the closet. The labels seemed to stake
a small, final claim in this nursing home room, the last space she’d
ever know. When I finished staring at the cards there was nowhere
else to look but the bed, where she lay, yes, taking up less space
than I’d have thought, her hair a careless white streak,
her toothless mouth puffing out snores.
Louise had tried to prepare me; she had said things like, “You
wouldn’t know your mother if you saw her.” Lying awake
the night before, in the unfamiliar darkness of my bed-and-breakfast
room, I could only think how wrong my aunt must be. Take my left
hand, for example: it could be mutilated, burned, or painted purple,
but I’d still know it was my left hand. The same was true
of my right hand, or right nut, or any other part of me. It was
what
any relationship came down to, a kernel of knowledge impenetrable
to outside eyes. I could picture my mother ravaged by illness,
I could let my imagination thrash and plunge; but even as a skeleton,
even as a bit of ash clinging to a sheet, she would still be
my mother,
recognizably so.
Now I could see I was right about knowing her anywhere. That
was her face, even with her teeth out—the high cheekbones,
the round forehead. Flushed-looking, as her face had always been,
with
small burst capillaries along her nose and cheeks. That was
good, much better than the paleness of death.
Everything was okay. Somewhat
okay. At least bearable, at least so far.
Click
here to find out more about Walking
Higher, read another excerpt,
and purchase a copy.
Alexander Renault has written a fascinating article, “Stumbling
Forward,” in which he gives more of the background history
of the book and insight into the highs and lows of the editing
process. The article appears in the Independent
Gay Writer newsletter,
and you can read it HERE.
Life on
Planet Earth: I Do/I Don’t
 I
Do/I Don’t:
Queers on Marriage, edited by Greg Wharton and Ian Philips and published
by Suspect Thoughts Press, is an astonishing record of queer consciousness
at this peculiar point in time. In these essays, stories, and poems,
some 132 authors raise their voices and fists and hearts and genitals
in ways that are ironic or sincere, humorous or angry, or maybe all
of these at once. Just holding this generous volume in my hand gives
me a queer kind of vertigo.
This is not the book I thought it might be, one that I could pass
on to straight friends who might appreciate having a new window on
our world. Maybe it’s because I live in the Midwest, but I’m
afraid I don’t give straight people very much credit for being
able to deal with the realities of being gay; and these works are
far too visceral, too down-and-dirty—physically and emotionally—to
be borne by the average heterosexual. 99 out of 100 hets won’t
be able to get through the very first piece, by Dorothy Allison,
without feeling faint.
So what we have, then, is a book that is primarily by and for the
GLBTQ community, and that’s fine with me. (Did I get that right?
GLBTQ? Or has the alphabet soup morphed again within the last few
minutes?) Given our diversity, there’s plenty of need to talk
amongst ourselves, and I Do/I Don’t will serve as a jumping-off
point for diatribes and discussions in all of the venues of Planet
Earth, from bars and coffeehouses to workplaces to bedrooms.
Click here to read more about I
Do/I Don’t: Queers on Marriage
Note: My own essay in this collection, entitled “Sometimes
a Queer Notion,” is a rather experimental piece written in
three narrative voices. This makes it virtually impossible to excerpt;
otherwise I’d put a sample here. It doesn’t matter, because
you’ll want to purchase the book anyway, I’m sure!
An Excerpt from "Ten Apologies"
Nothing is easier than getting lost in a strange city. It
might begin with a view from above, through a break in the clouds:
unfriendly
towers nestled in a loop of highways. From there it takes you down
to the ground, carries you through an unfamiliar airport along with
the black carry-on bag that is your only anchor to the life you’ve
known. Outside, the street smells of burnt rubber and exotic sweat.
You haven't traveled that far but you might as well be in a foreign
country, or on another planet.
The cab will take you to the appointed corner, you don’t have
to worry about that. Yet the ride is disturbingly long; you sit for
what seems like many miles, staring through the abused back window
at block after block, each one identical to the last. How does anyone
find anything here?
Read the full story on suspect
thoughts: a journal of subversive writing
An Excerpt from "Taurus"
“We’ve only been here two minutes,” Quinn says, “but
already I know what just about every man in here looks like.” He
leans against the bar, lights two cigarettes and puts one in my mouth. “Can
you say the same?”
I can barely hear him over the sounds of frantic conversation, disco
from the jukebox, the clack-and-rumble of a pool game in the rear,
the tinny crunch of beer cans popping open. My eyes haven't adjusted
to the dimness and smoke, can't sort through the crowd the way his
do, like a machine sorting mail. See him craning his neck, lifting
his body like a shadow from a larger shadow—black sneakers,
black corduroys, black t-shirt. I've often wondered if his underwear
is black.
“If you know what everybody in here looks like,” I tell
him, “it's because you've slept with most of them.”
Read the full story on suspect
thoughts: a journal of subversive writing |
