I’m about to give up for the night when I pass by a derelict tavern and notice that there are lights on inside. The door is open. I walk in and am immediately greeted, “Steve!” A gay submariner recognizes me from a book reading.
The Crow’s Nest dates back a century. Knowing that Bremerton is too small and too working class to sustain a gay bar, the new owner aims for an unobtrusively gay-friendly mixed bar. Reopening night, the crowd is engagingly motley. There are more gay submariners, there are Bremelos—and on the barstool to my right there is a drunken bug-eyed misfit who announces that he is self-publishing a chapbook of poems about crossing Bremerton ferry.
“Steve writes about fairies too,” remarks my submariner friend.
The DVD plays George Michael’s “Outside” video. Just below the monitor, an old wooden placard reads: WELCOME ABOARD.
THE LORD TAKES CARE OF DRUNKS AND SAILORS.
I find myself making eye contact with a sailor. When he goes to the men’s room, I follow. But I don’t get to stand next to him at the awkwardly intimate urinals—someone else beats me to it. Peeing next to the sailor is a thirtyish man sporting short hair and a golf cap. With aching clarity I overhear him inquire, “So…are you in the Navy?”
When the sailor leaves the bar, I somehow feel obliged to sidle up next to the luckless chaser.
He’s startled, even shocked that I’ve pegged him. Buddy tells me that he doesn’t like gay culture, he just likes guys. I mention an English writer friend who’s edited a book called Anti-Gay and his invitation to take me to Plymouth.
“Oh. I’ve been to Plymouth. It’s like Bremerton. I mean, it’s a lot bigger. But,” Buddy shakes his head, “they’ve got the same Bremelos.”
I become a regular at the Crow’s Nest. A sailor I meet there becomes something of a boyfriend. When he’s out to sea, I hang out with Buddy. By summer we’re drinking pals.
And what a summer it is. Weekend nights the bars are packed with sailors off the USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier in town for a six-month overhaul. Buddy and I make a game of compiling weekly top-ten lists of our favorites. Even though—he is anxious that I understand this—he cannot himself be termed a military chaser. He’s not a predator. “And,” he reasons, “I also like firemen.”
I don’t disabuse Buddy of his conviction that he doesn’t fit any stereotypes. And indeed, it seems that the only people who perceive Buddy as stereotypically gay are visiting urban gays.
I accompany Buddy on his nearly nightly rounds of the roughest dive bars on the waterfront. Buddy plays pool with sailors. I sit on bar stools and listen to career Navy alcoholics’ sea stories.
These guys tend to come from small towns in the southern United States—or neighboring Idaho. Young men who never once jump on the ferry to Seattle by themselves, because they never have. Instead, they booze and brawl alongside the Bremelos.
Buddy takes to introducing me to local people as a “famous author”—a title that calls for too much explanation. One night I adjure my drinking pal, “Don’t tell people I’m a famous author. Tell them I’m a famous photographer.”
I’m half-joking. The only photos I’ve had published are in my own books. But among the thousands of Lincoln sailors, a half dozen or so who have become “downtown” regulars exude indisputable star quality, and one night it becomes more than I can bear.
We’re in Buddy’s favorite bar. I’m entertaining an out-of-town dignitary, a professor at one of the military academies. The prettiest of the Lincoln boys is there—drinking Bud by the pitcher, playing pool, and stealing the hearts or at least admiring glances from everyone present. He’s winsome beyond measure, from his disarming constant grin to his tight Wrangler jeans to the heavily autographed cast on his broken arm. An inscription jumps out at me: DON’T JERK OFF SO HARD
Buddy and the professor are merely charmed. And as for me….
When yet another young sailor staggers in, spots Castboy, and with unstudied passion immediately throws his arms tightly around him, I get all misty-eyed, struggle to recite Whitman, and drunkenly vow that I will not return to this bar without a camera because “That picture would have been worth more than all of my books put together.”
Buddy is keen on the idea but cautions me that before I start taking any pictures of sailors in the bar a protocol must be devised. I should wait until the hour when everyone is a little drunk but not yet sloppy drunk. The first pictures must be of people we know—say, Buddy and a woman, and then with some other guy. And only then take pictures of a sailor, but still only with a girl.
“If anybody gives you trouble, I’ll back you up.”
There was trouble, all right. But not like Buddy expected.
The first night I worked up enough nerve to pop my electronic flash in a waterfront pool hall a sailor angrily confronted me: “Why are you taking pictures of him instead of me?”
Of course I obliged him. But this angered the sailor I had been taking pictures of. Losing the spotlight, he sulked. Seeing this, I reassured him, “Well, don’t let it go to your head, but you definitely have the most potential as a model.” That was Mike, the sailor with the cast on his arm.
When his best friend from the ship walked in, Mike proudly repeated my appraisal.
This sailor in turn took me aside and demanded, “Him? You’re wasting your film. Dude! His ears are too big!” And that was Packard, the sailor who would end up starring in Out of the Brig, the porn video I made by accident.
Bremerton, Washington—Summer 1999: Trouble Loves Me
As with any accident, memory blurs. This much is known:
That summer Honcho ran an interview with me to promote Military Trade. When I e-mailed the editor my thanks, I attached some JPGs of sailors drinking and playing pool. Doug McClemont wrote back that he liked the pictures. He invited me to shoot a few rolls of slide film for publication in his magazine.
At the time, I didn’t own any strobe lights (much less any video equipment).
Of the three USS Lincoln sailors who’d fought over who was the most photogenic, one was in the brig and another was in a military treatment center for substance abuse. When I relayed Honcho’s invitation to Packard, he expressed skepticism. “Yeah, but how much would it pay?”
I told him how much.
Packard may or may not have dropped his pool stick. It seems like it was only a matter of hours before I’d shot enough rolls of Kodak EPP to FedEx to New York and woke up to a voice mail from Doug telling me the pictures were okay—only, “They’re a little dark. If you can, try to get just a basic monolight.”
For once, I wasn’t “in between books.” I had the money, but what motivated me to spend $1,000 on basic studio lighting equipment was not the promise of selling more layouts. I wanted to spare my models the shame of telltale amateur shadows.
That summer the (beefy but reclusive) Navy master-at-arms living next door to me vacated his one-room apartment. I toyed with the extravagant idea of renting the “studio,” but not seriously—until the building manager accepted a rental application for the unit from a Bremelo with two small children.
“Well, I’ll have the linoleum replaced for you.” My landlady was perplexed but also impressed at my renting two apartments. “And about the cracks in the walls—”
She didn’t argue when I told her I liked the room exactly as it was.
I had sense enough not to gush about how especially fond I was of the vintage Murphy bed and its stained mattress. Instead, I asked her what she knew about how the building had been furnished during World War II when it served as officers’ quarters.
After I dragged up from the basement a battered chair and matching nightstand, my studio was ready. In the thirteen months I rented it I didn’t change a detail.
That summer I was prescribed Paxil (paroxetene), an antidepressant /anti-anxiety drug in the same family of selective serotinin reuptake inhibitors as Prozac. Overall, the medication made me more self-assured and confident. Bold, even. I would not h
ave dived into neophysique photography without it.
Paxil also abated some of my anxieties about turning into David Lloyd.
But one side effect of Paxil resulted in a new and unwelcome physical resemblance to David. From my first video recording made in the new studio: PACKARD: I can see why you like the “steady shot” feature so much.
ZEELAND: [mock confrontationally] So what are you trying to say?
PACKARD: I can see your hands shaking right now.
ZEELAND: [Remains silent]
PACKARD: [Coughs and looks away]
The camcorder was an impulse purchase, prompted by cues from sailors I spoke with about modeling. The most succinct and memorable:
“So…you only take still pictures?”
It was in answer to another magazine editor’s invitation that I became acquainted with videomaker Dink Flamingo of ActiveDuty.com. At the close of my interview with him for Unzipped Dink confided that he’d never aspired to become a pornographer. His ambition had always been to be a journalist.
We agreed to “trade places for a day.” Dink promised to contribute some authentic accounts of erotic liaisons with “barracks bad boys” to Alex Buchman’s nonfiction anthology in progress. I pledged to try my hand at playing auteur in his scandal-ridden, sordid “adult amateur video” subgenre.
After patiently bearing with me for nine long months, Dink breathed satisfaction and relief upon receipt of the labor of love I finally delivered.
My timing, however, could not have been worse. The scheduled release date for my video celebrating real-life military deserters coincided with the bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Still, my three masturbating sailors cannot really be accused of “disgracing the military.” The title Out of the Brig is no fantasy; it’s documentary. The sailors in it are real-life tattooed Navy “bad boys” who really have broken the rules, have done their time, and are no longer on active duty—are no longer answerable to anyone. (Even if at the scheduled release date one of them had not yet turned himself in. Had Congress officially declared war, and had he been arrested, he could have faced the firing squad.)
Barracks Bad Boys: The Movie
The style of my directorial debut is a cross between early Dirk Yates and early Andy Warhol. With, I’d like to think, a human face.
But not mine.
FIRST SAILOR: Approximately three minutes into the opening sequence, which stars Packard, you can hear me say: “You know, you could even sort of self-direct this” (as I hand him a second remote, and flip over the camcorder viewfinder so that he can zoom in and out to…self-direct).
SECOND SAILOR: After a short introductory scene (unscripted and shot in one take at a retro adult video arcade just outside the shipyard), I don’t do much “directing.” This one stars Pro. He masturbates watching DVDs on my living room TV.
THIRD SAILOR: The first two sequences are exactly twenty minutes long. The closing sequence is a film within a film, and a full hour long. It’s an essay by itself, too. For my purpose here, it’s enough to tell you that I miscalculated in thinking that for this shoot I had an assistant who would effectively play “Steve” to my “David.” But when the door to my own studio slammed shut with me locked out, I was surprised but not altogether displeased.
And when an hour and a half later I was allowed back in the room and rewound through some of the tape, I knew that this was it. My “sailors gone bad” had given me enough “raw footage” to meet the basic requirements of the amateur military porn video idiom. Now I could give myself over to endless hours lovingly editing.
Bremerton, Washington—January 2003
By the time you read this I will no longer be in Bremerton, Washington. Every last one of the active-duty sailors I photographed has long since departed. Two or three of them transferred to distant duty stations; two or three received honorable discharges. Between twenty and thirty were kicked out of the Navy for “unauthorized absence” and/or drug use. In February 2002, the Navy announced that all of the ships currently home-ported in Bremerton would be moved elsewhere. Also, that the block of 100-year-old buildings adjacent to the Navy shipyard—including the historic Crow’s Nest tavern—would be demolished to provide a “security buffer” against terrorist attack. But the bar shut down even before the wrecking ball hit, after the thirty-seven-year-old owner was found dead under mysterious circumstances.
Pro has long since moved back to Texas. But he’s kept in touch. And at one point when I was too long in replying to his e-mail he left me a voice mail:
“Steve! Come out of your fucking Pax-hole!”
Actually, I’d quit Paxil and sworn off maintenance drugs of any sort just before September 11, 2001.
“Are we still friends or what? Dude! I shot my seed on your TV!”
It isn’t very often I turn on my TV, and almost never when I’m alone. But one special occasion was the day I opened a package from Dink Flamingo, stretched out on the couch, hit the remote, and watched Out of the Brig.
And noticed I had missed a spot when I cleaned the monitor.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
SHANE ALLISON is the editor of Hot Cops, Backdraft, College Boys, Homo Thugs, Hard Working Men, and Black Fire. His stories have graced the pages of several Cleis Press anthologies, including four lustful editions of Best Gay Erotica. His first book of poems, Slut Machine, is out from Rebel Satori Press.
RALOWE TRINITROTOLUENE AMPU (ralowesconfusedsuburbanlaughter. com) is an annoying black homosexual asshole living in San Francisco. When not cruising bathrooms at chain department stores and on college campuses, or watching porn, she raps, kind of, and was an instigator, back when, of Gay Shame.
DRUB (drubskin.com), an illustrator of erotica for more than fifteen years, has displayed in galleries in Europe and North America and published in Gay Amsterdam News, Blue, Freshmen and S.M.U.T.; his art has promoted the 2006 Seattle Erotic Art Festival, the Tom of Finland Art Festival and Folsom Street Fair ’07.
TIM DOODY (timdoody.me) has had work published in various journals, among them Brevity, The Brooklyn Rail, and Word Riot. ABC-TV’s “Nightline” included Doody in a national list of “particularly troublesome, even dangerous, anarchists,” and Rush Limbaugh made fun of him and his last name on the air.
TREBOR HEALEY (treborhealey.com) is the author of the Ferro-Grumley and Violet Quill Award-winning novel, Through It Came Bright Colors, as well as a collection of poems, Sweet Son of Pan, and a short-story collection, A Perfect Scar & Other Stories. He lives in Los Angeles.
ARDEN HILL is an all around queer who bends genera and gender. Hir erotica has been published in Best Gay Erotica 2008, Boys in Heat, and loveyoudivine.com. In the fall ze will begin a PhD program for English and Creative writing at The University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
LEE HOUCK (grammarpiano.com) was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee and now lives in Queens, New York. His first novel, Yield, was published by Kensington in 2010. His writing appears in several anthologies and in two limited-edition chapbooks, Collection (2006) and Warnings (2009.) He is at work on a new novel.
DALE LAZAROV (dalelazarov.tumblr.com) is the writer/editor of gay erotic comics such as STICKY (drawn by Steve MacIsaac), MANLY (drawn by Amy Colburn) and NIGHTLIFE (drawn by Bastian Jonsson), all published by Bruno Gmünder Verlag. He’s collaborating on several new gay erotic comics projects and lives in Chicago.
DAVID MAY contributed to Drummer and other gay skin magazines in the 1980s, published two classic story collections in the 1990s (including Madrugada: A Cycle of Erotic Fictions, reprinted in 2009 by Nazca Plains), and his work has appeared in many anthologies. He lives in Seattle.
ANDREW MCCARTHY (notshadyjustfierce.com) is a New York City multidisciplinary artist. He cofounded, designed, and wrote for a number of defunct gay publications, including Glamma and Clikque. His work can be found in Best Gay Erotica 2008, Sticker Shock and Reproduce & Revolt.
ROBERT PATRICK makes a meager living reviewing gay male adult mov
ies, and though he would rather make gay male movies or at least gay males, he is happier than he was writing and directing a thousand stage productions from Anchorage to Capetown, and he was pretty damn near blissful then.
SIMON SHEPPARD (simonsheppard.com) is making his seventeenth appearance in the Best Gay Erotica series. He edited the Lambda Award-winning Homosex: Sixty Years of Gay Erotica and Leathermen and wrote In Deep: Erotic Stories; Kinkorama; Sex Parties 101, and Hotter Than Hell. His work has appeared in nearly three hundred anthologies.
CHARLIE VÁZQUEZ (firekingpress.com) is a criollo warrior of Cuban and Puerto Rican descent. His work has appeared in several print and online publications, and he hosts a reading series in New York that features queer fiction and poetry. His second novel, Contraband, was published by Rebel Satori Press in 2010.
ALANA NOËL VOTH’s stories have appeared in Boy Crazy, Oysters & Chocolate, Best Women’s Erotica 2009, and Best Gay Erotica 2008. One of her prized possessions is a first edition copy of Naked Lunch. She loves spicy tuna rolls and red wine, and is working on a novel.
THOM WOLF (myspace.com/thomwolfspace) has published two erotic novels, Words Made Flesh and The Chain, and collaborated with Kevin Killian on “Too Far” for Frozen Tear II, funded by the Arts Council of England. He lives with husband Liam in northeast England, where he studies creative writing and dabbles in gay porn.
STEVEN ZEELAND (stevenzeeland.com) is the preeminent chronicler of homoeroticism in the U.S. military. His books include Barrack Buddies and Soldier Lovers, Sailors and Sexual Identity, The Masculine Marine, Military Trade, and the forthcoming photo collection SEADOG: Navy Town Nightlife. He lives in Bremerton, Washington.
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