RP Andrews is the author of two pieces of serious erotic gay fiction, Basic Butch, published in the spring of 2008, and Adrift in the Land of Plenty, scheduled for publication this fall. Basic Butch is a book-length collection of edgy contemporary tales of deceit and betrayal, set in some of America’s leading gay venues, including Fort Lauderdale’s Wilton Manors and Sebastian Beach, New York City’s West Village and Chelsea, Chicago’s Halstead, Seattle’s Capitol Hill and Pike Street, Houston’s Montrose, and San Francisco’s South of Market. All feature characters – gay men and women – whose arrogant, aggressive natures lead them down life paths they wished they had never explored. Adrift in the Land of Plenty, a short novel, is a tale of deception, death and discovery as told through the eyes of Josh, a young South Florida drifter, whose body, brains, and cocky attitude are all he has to offer the world. It is Bishop, a successful Wall Street exec, who convinces Josh to come away with him and who introduces him to the good life of Manhattan and all Manhattan money can buy. Yet for Josh, sex remains a momentary pleasure or, more often, a commodity for sale, and killing – beginning with his own parents – an easy way to make problems go away. And when fellow loner Hylan finally enters his life, Josh realizes killing is only way for him to hold on to what matters most.
Available at www.amazon.com and other web outlets. |
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Basic Butch
Basic Butch, a collection of edgy, serious erotic gay short stories, follows characters whose aggressive, egocentric natures lead them down dangerous life paths they wished they had never explored. ...
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Adrift in the Land of Plenty
Adrift in the Land of Plenty is a tale of deception, death and discovery as told through the eyes of Josh, a young South Florida drifter, whose body, brains, and cocky attitude are all he has to offer the world. I...
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Sebastian Beach: Sand, Sun, and ... Part I
Ah Sebastian! Named for the street it butts against (appropriate choice of words, wouldn’t you say?), Sebastian Beach is sandwiched between two long strips of Ft. Lauderdale straight beachfront. In fact, it’s only a block or so long but remains, reputation wise, as one of America’s quintessential gay beaches, next Will Rogers Park in L.A., Rehoboth in Delaware or Riss Park in Queens. Ironically, it is at its busiest October through May when other beaches are deserted and America’s sun-hungry, straight and gay, flock to that alien planet known as south Florida, the warmest spot in the continental U.S. in the winter. Period.Gay advocates will wax on how we are discriminated against by straight society, but take a gander at Sebastian on a typical Saturday afternoon and you will segregation alive and at work, gay style. Most obvious is the fact the beach is 97% male (at least anatomically). Do gay girls have a higher rate of skin cancer than gay guys or something? Or like I’ve said before, women in American society are far more mature than men and may have more productive things to do with their time than lay virtually naked on a beach and get fried.Most of the interior of the strip spreading to the shoreline is usually populated by tourists glued to their fellow buddies from Boston or L.A. or Omaha (how ya gonna meet anybody, guys, if you stay together?), or by twinks and, in a few cases, their girl friends. Towards the back under the palms by the wall adjoining the sidewalk and AIA are the May/December couples, you know the old retired guys who can hardly stand up (rich dentists from Chicago or doctors from Butte, Montana) with their 35 year old power paramours. True love – sure. Or may be they’re their private duty male nurses. Hope I got the dough when and if I get to their age. Lastly, on the left hand fringe (if you were facing the ocean) jammed against the lifeguard station are the juiced up muscle men and the bears, fur optional. Maybe that section of the beach just looks more dense because they’re all so BIG. More Next Time
Posted on 7/2/2009
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Me and My Friend Frank
No, we didn’t meet at The Clubhouse II or one of the gloryholes at Slammers. It was at the much more conventional, sorta straight LA Fitness Health Club in Lauderdale on Federal Highway. Strikingly handsome for an older guy with wavy salt and pepper hair and a nice tight body, he reminded of a bouncer I once knew in New York and who for a moment I thought it was. Our eyes met for just a second, he smiled, I smiled weakly back, but we both moved on. Then that Friday night, who do I see at Bills Filling Station than my gym mate. He quickly came up to introduce himself – “my name’s Frank” – and in the conversation that followed over my three beers and his bottle of spring water– Frank didn’t drink or smoke - I soon realized we had a lot in common. We were both educated professionals ( he was an accountant, I a professor), and both of us were New York transplants. I had been down from Staten Island since 2002, and he was a snowbird from Suffix County, Long Island, from a town just a few miles from where my sister lived. My house and his condo were just a few blocks apart. We were almost about the same age – Frank was two years older than me - and we were both vain fucks interested in attempting to look good as long as we could. The only minor difference was I was a purist gay with a partner in PA who only had sex with me when the Mets won the Series, and Frank – well, he was married – to a woman - with two teenage boys, one a senior in high school, the other a freshman, pre-law at NYU. (I did have two daughters, but they were my mini-doxies, Bebe and Annie.)Frank had come out relatively late in life – in fact just six months before – and had bought the condo here as his own getaway place. (Lucky for him, his wife was a high powered corporate attorney wedded more to her career than she was to her marriage.) He was eager to know more about “The Life,” and who better to teach him than a career fag like me. Those two weeks he was down on his own in Whore City, USA, I showed him everything – every bar for every taste, Slammers, Sebastian, the websites (I took pix for his profile with my cheap Walgreen’s digital camera). To me, Frank was the sudden splash of cold water in my face that this jaded homo had needed for a long time. He was even the first to drop his bikini when we made our pilgrimage to Haulover, South Florida’s nude beach. Forty nine going on 18, he ate it all up like a kid in a candy store with a pocket full of money. Most of all he was a buddy without sex getting in the way. But as you will see in our continuing adventures together, it wasn’t long before Frank was teaching this old dog some new tricks.
Posted on 6/26/2009
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"Seeking LTR:" You Sure About That? Part II
I really think many guys bullshit themselves into thinking they want a partner, but guys who may truly be ready for an LTR, let alone those of us just in it for the dick and ass, are intimidated by some of these “walks on the beach” profiles on the gay websites because the guy’s expectations sound too high. Who could meet them?Nor are Manhunt, Bear411, DaddyHunt with their provocative pix and explicit sexual habits rap sheets e.harmony.com’s. For a lark, I checked out match.com which, unlike its competitor, offers gay listings. It was somewhat comical, guys talking about their spiritual side or whether or not they ever wanted to have children. Nice virtues to consider but, come on now men, do we initially connect discussing world religion?When we think of an LTR we think of commonality in thinking and style, and commitment to another human being emotionally. But in the end the only way any relationship will last is if both parties are ready to let go and compromise. Every LTR is different – some are as tight as threads on a screw, others as loose as a fist fucked ass, but hey, it’s whatever works that counts, as long as the guys know they’re willing to bend for one another (figuratively speaking). Without that flexibility, LTR’s can’t happen, I don’t care how great the sex is and how much you both like film noir. That’s why I’m convinced the older we get, the less we’re open to giving in – no matter what we say or even feel.You also have to be ready to deal with for a lot of mental angst. My partner and I have been together longer than most American marriages have lasted and in those decades we’ve buried over a dozen family, a dozen pets, shared health crises and fought over the stresses of two high powered careers. And yes, there many times when we thought it was time to call it a day.So ask yourself, when you idealize those “walks on the beach” you have stuck in the fantasy lobe of your brain: are you really ready?Will you ever be?
Posted on 6/18/2009
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"Seeking LTR:" You Sure About That? Part I
Right off, this sermonette is for gay guys. I really think you gay girls are wired differently and take relationships seriously from the first peck on the cheek. As a lesbian faculty member once said to me after we had come out to one another, “When two guys hit the sack, it’s all about sex. When two gals hit the sack, they’re married.”Yet for all the fancy-free, free-as-a-bird frivolity and non-discriminate fucking this lifestyle purports to offer, more guys than may even admit it to themselves are desperately hunger to get off the whirling gay merry-go-round and settle down for a quiet boring existence with a life partner, soul mate, or whatever hackneyed phrase popular culture chooses to use at the moment. Not a series of bed-hopping two month flings so you can boast about your string of “ex’s” - I mean something solid.I can sense that desperation in the profiles I scan on the countless gay websites, some that go on for paragraphs on what the profiler is looking for in another man, way beyond dick size and tits. I see that same desperation in the tired, expressionless faces of guys in the bars on a Saturday night, still hanging in there at 1:15 for more, I think, than just a quick fuck – even if they’ve fooled themselves into thinking that’s the only reason. But “The Life”, with its non-stop emphasis on physicality and sex, sets the odds against us right from the beginning. How can you expect most guys to buy into another person’s likes and dislikes when they’ve never romped in bed? Straights, certainly not always, can make it on personality and security planes. But when it comes to man-to-man connections, sex, whether we like or not, is the almost always the first ingredient. Guys who say they want to “get to know you first” often don’t stand a chance at getting to first base. After all, if the lust isn’t there, how can an LTR ever take root? More next time ...
Posted on 6/11/2009
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The Sleaze Factor
You know what’s disappearing big time in today’s scene? The sleaze factor. Today, too many bars are interior designer sparkling. Christ, you can even smell the fresh coat of Sherman Williams. One famous leather bar in a minor league metropolis, which once had the S factor, lost it recently to a mutilating redo, and now sports perfect purple walls and nicely stained railing straight from Home Depot. No, no no! I want the smell of piss to savor, cheap yellow lights to leer under, peeling black paint to smudge against my torn T-shirt, scraped, crumbling concrete under my boots, pool tables stained by old beer and semen and lube. And though only a few dared to sport them, backroom dark corners where shadows sucked and fucked in porn brazen brilliance. I want the real raw deal, the kind of dark, dank atmosphere that made your dick quiver even before your first grope of the night. There was a sign stenciled in white on the black wall of the tight john at one of NYC’s sleaziest West Village bars, the Spike. “Don’t Flush for Piss.” That sign said it all. True, you can still find “S” at Lauderdale’s Ramrod and Slammers (though the S factor is more a recreation like the Wild West in Disneyworld) and echoes of the glory days at Philly’s Bike Stop, D.C’s Eagle, Chelsea’s Rawhide, and Christopher Street’s Ty’s. But for real authentic sleaze you would have to take a time machine back to New York City’s West Village sleaze alley threesome, the Spike, the Eagle and the Lure. For anybody in the leather/levi scene those days, visiting these bars on a Friday and Saturday was a given. You wouldn’t just visit one of them even if essentially the same guys frequented all three. You’d have your early evening beer at the Rawhide in Chelsea (for those of us who came in from the ‘burbs parking in the West 20’s was saner). But by 11ish you were trotting your levied ass (or bare one if you were wearing chaps under your trench) down to West Street. The streets were dimly lit and kinda scary to be honest, but you didn’t care. You were butch (with no shirt under your leather jacket on a 10 degree NYC January night so your tits were all perky for your grand unveiling) and about to enter NYC’s Butch Zone. The S bars were all within walking distance of one another so making the circuit was easy even with the wind blowing in your face. What separated these places from today’s S wanna-be’s? Dress code. You didn’t see any polo shirt types with $100 designer jeans. Or flip flops or Bermuda shorts. The ragier the better. At the Lure, it didn’t matter what you looked like; if you were wearing sneakers or – God forbid – after shave or cologne, Mr. Bouncer would turn you away. Wall-to-wall men. There was no place – I mean NO PLACE - to move except against another sweaty body in bars the size of the men’s section at any Macy’s. Show me how many bars that size are that crowded on a weekend night today. The smells. Sweaty arm pits and chests, beer-laden piss, even caresses (The Lure, in the heart of the Meat Market, was once a meat packing warehouse).Cruising. Big Time. You walk into a bear bar today shirtless and no one gives you a glance. Then, that was the ONLY reason you were there. A sense of history. Even if it was more illusion than reality, these holes had the dingy, dreggy look as if they had been there from the early days of NYC’s pre-gay liberation days when being queer meant belonging to some truly secret society of men, not a sub-cultural demographic dissected by Congress and wooed by Corporate America. And on Summer Sunday late afternoons from 4 until about 8, the Sleaze torch was handed over to the Dugout at West and Christopher where sweaty men, half naked men flooded the corner, searching for the one last fling – or two – of the weekend before Monday morning reality came crashing down on all our respective little shitty worlds. If they hadn’t become victims of the real estate boom of the last decade that transformed this abandoned sector of New York into a chic new Soho, NYC’s gay sleaze alley might still be with us. But alas, that was not to be. While City dwellers and tourists can still point to places like the Rawhide and Ty’s, (sorry, guys I don’t put the new Eagle in that league) it just ain’t the same without the West Village threesome, smelly corners of the world that every leather/levi bar today – whether it realizes it or not – is seeking to emulate, replicate, recreate. I’m just hoping some gay historian had the smarts to save that “Don’t Flush for Piss” sign before the wrecking ball moved in.
Posted on 6/4/2009
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