The Lurid Sea

by Tom Cardamone

  But it looked so different. Of course, the cataracts of thirst had been washed away, and for the first time, I could see the Baths of Caracalla for the palace of wisdom it was.

  What marvelous halls. The marble just polished, the gleam of sunlight off the floor was striking, with additional starlight captured and stored in the cornices to illuminate midnight discoveries. The columns hung majestic, upholding a place of peace and contemplation. There were a few others here, but everyone seemed to be at a distance, lost in their own contemplation. My nakedness went unnoticed as I strolled familiar yet alien corridors. The double doors I remembered so well swung open onto a large library. The shelves held the philosophies and poetry of generations, past and future. Maybe it was time to reread Lucretius, Hesiod, Ovid. I knew where all my favorites were, and this time each page would be a lush honeycomb of words, ideas, truths to be rediscovered.

  I pulled down a scroll and unfurled its wings of poetry and understanding. After hours of reading and losing myself in clouds of script and ink, I took a soak in the tepidarium and let the heat tickle my feet. Perhaps I will find a man, but my mind is on the kind merchant Odoacer, forever smiling, bald and squinting within his reliable poolside booth. He sells the most exquisite stylus and fine Egyptian papyrus to boot. It is high time I tell my story. From the pool’s edge, as my feet dangle above placid waters, I can see the bluest sky, and can see that for now, the sun will never set.

  Moreover, when said stylus starts to run dry, a knowing flick of my tongue will certainly excite a hitherto unknown reserve of the whitest, most pure and milky ink.

  Surely, I will like the taste.

  Postscript

  A Note to Readers and Recommended Readings

  I wish I could tell you an additional tale of scholarly research, of hours poring over rare texts late at night in prestigious libraries. However, it is probably better that I apologize to any randy academic or armchair archeologist who raised an eyebrow now and again at wild inaccuracies or historical liberties that rubbed them the wrong way. Or maybe not. After all, my challenge here was to run through an erotic journey, not teach class. My love for and fascination with the classical world has been one of the most enduring relationships in my literary life as both reader and writer. It has never been a marriage, however, but rather an affair conducted on the fly.

  This all started my last semester of graduate school. I had put off the required classics course until the very end—and it blew me away. From Homer to Virgil to Tacitus, I was hooked. Tacitus, in particular, struck a chord. The Annals of Imperial Rome presented a parallel world that is also the progenitor of our Western reality. It quickly joined my list of favorite books, which at the time was mostly novels. Now that I read mostly nonfiction, I look back and wonder if this was one of those books on which the crux of such a big change turned? Every used bookstore, which I had previously haunted for obscure science fiction and fantasy titles, suddenly opened up to an unknown attic of ancient history.

  I devoured these texts for about a decade, filling my shelves with cracked and mottled Penguin Classics bookended by brittle copies of Loeb Classical Library editions. I also absorbed fiction concerning the era. Robert Graves, of course, but also less obvious work, like John Hersey’s epistolary novel about an attempted assignation of Nero, The Conspiracy (that, so many years later, influenced my story, “The Love of the Emperor Is Divine,” found in my second short story collection, Night Sweats: Tales of Homosexual Wonder and Woe). Coming out of the closet switched my attention to all books gay, and the titillation of so much bawdy, off-the-cuff gay sex found in Roman writing was definitely an important step for me in that direction. Still, I read a novel or nonfiction book of the Roman Empire each year: the biography of an emperor that challenges preconceived notions, or a book on ancient architecture. Really, whatever strikes my fancy. And not necessarily a new book. The discovery of something out of print or off-kilter has a special allure.

  Let me take this moment to recommend a title from our Most Imminent Mother Superior, Gore Vidal. His novel Julian, about the last pagan ruler of Rome (and post-Constantine at that), is an absolutely fantastic read. One of the very few books I have read twice. I don’t recall any specific gay content, though the death of paganism kind of covers that, eh?

  * * *

  The thing with The Lurid Sea is that I’d told the story to friends several times over dinner or drinks when answering the question, “So, what are you working on?” And now I needed to capture it on paper, this being the first book I wrote under a contractual deadline. I decided that erotic energy would carry the story to the date in question, that research would mean a lot of digressive reading, and that I would be chasing historical accuracy rather than steamy necessity. Not that I couldn’t have done both, but that’s when you spend years on a writing project, and I have convinced myself to write fast as a way of actually staying alive. It’s how I breathe. I have always been influenced by the (hopefully not apocryphal) story that Anthony Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange and maybe two other books—including possibly The Wanting Seed—thinking he had a deadly cancer (he had been misdiagnosed) and wanted to leave something behind to generate royalties for his then young family. So I was halfway through the manuscript, with all the major points plotted out (mostly fill-in-the-blank writing, which is the most fun until you are down to the last two blanks, as no one saves the easiest stuff for last) when I decided to do some minor research. I wanted to confirm some hunches on Roman sexuality and basically just check in with an era that had captivated me for the entirety of my adulthood.

  I instinctively knew from my readings that the Romans did not suffer our current rigid dichotomy when it came to sexuality, so I picked up the now indispensible Roman Homosexuality: Second Edition, by Craig A. Williams (Oxford University Press). I can’t recommend this book enough. Obviously, it was useful informing the context of all the fuckery I was creating, but the absolute wealth of source material made reading it the literary equivalent of discovering Pompeii. Additionally, after starting The Lurid Sea, I became aware of the Japanese manga Thermae Romae. I knew this comic book contained a time travel element dealing with a bathhouse in ancient Rome as well as a modern Japanese one. Since I did not detect any gay content—and I absolutely love and collect gay Japanese comics—I didn’t pay it much attention other than to post it on the Roman mystery writer Steve Saylor’s Facebook page, where he absolutely flipped, not having previously known about it. Fun fact: he is the pseudonymous author of Slaves of the Empire, a totally hot, brutal gay gladiator romp, published under the name Aaron Travis. Then, while in Japan on vacation, editing The Lurid Sea most mornings over coffee, I was surprised to discover that Netflix changes content in other countries, and I found the film version of Thermae Romae. It is a fun flick, and its lead actor is a hottie.

  Of equal influence to the historical antecedents are the erotic books that absolutely turned me on. First and foremost, Samuel R. Delany’s Hogg grabbed me by the horns. In terms of strict erotic writing, I have found the opening chapters to be a constant go-to when I’m looking to get off. As much as I am attracted, in reading as well as writing, to exploring the meanings and permutations of extreme violence, I have yet to finish Hogg. I find the rest of the book just so disturbing. What I have completed, over and over, are several of the collected works of Boyd McDonald. His Straight to Hell chapbooks were formative texts in my commitment to sexual honesty. Early on, one of my first lovers kept all of his gay contraband stuffed into a rather ridiculous-looking red suitcase under his bed. It was a treasure chest for me. Slippery dildoes and other implements aside, I still have the two volumes of Boyd McDonald’s Straight to Hell series, Lewd and Scum, stored within, gifted to me when he downsized apartments. Bibles both. McDonald led a monastic life in an SRO compiling erotic compendiums in the ’70s and ’80s, with men from all over the world mailing him their sexual confessions: raw moments that had never before been so publicly revealed. He made physical truths accessible,
valid.

  This book is dedicated to Boyd McDonald.

  Another important window into gay bathhouse culture, serving as both a work of art and a historical document, is Michael Rumaker’s 1979 book, A Day and Night at the Baths. This autobiographical account of his visit to the infamous Everard Baths in Manhattan (nicknamed “Ever Hard” back in the day by cheeky New Yorkers in the know—the same bathhouse featured in Andrew Holleran’s classic Dancer From the Dance) is a brilliant poetic letter in a bottle, preserving a moment in gay culture while expounding on the psychological and sociological beats entering such spaces meant to gay men at that time (and now as well, depending on where you live). I was fortunate enough to be invited by William Johnson, the editor of Mary: A Literary Quarterly, to interview Michael about the formation of his book, then coming back into print. Highly recommended for readers who crave even more steamy journeys.

  Additional influences: as I was making my way into the world of gay letters and getting published for the first time, I was fortunate enough to be introduced to Wayne Courtois’s My Name Is Rand, a genuine new classic of erotica, an intense tale of kidnapping and tickle torture. For a fledgling writer, it was an important lesson in how to follow an extreme idea to its natural conclusion in a satisfactory manner. We became buddies, and he blurbed my first published book, appropriately enough an erotic novel, The Werewolves of Central Park. I am also glad I read John Rechy early on. I happened to have devoured City of Night while on my own tour of New York City’s nocturnal piers and weird video stores, so it was an organic, timely read. Whenever I was hungover, marking out foggy, next-day scratches in spiraled books, I felt like a novice comparing notes with the master. I also thoroughly enjoyed the heightened immediacy of his novel Rushes—reminiscent of A Day and a Night at the Baths in how it takes place in real time, but it is a much starker book, if memory serves.

  In getting to know some of the writers I was reading and finding that many of the books they were recommending were out of print, I took it upon myself to edit a collection of essays along this topic: The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered. I asked writers I either knew or was reading to pitch in and to invite compatriots. Wayne contributed a piece, and of course several of the titles dealt directly with bathhouses. One of my good friends from the Velvet Mafia (an online magazine of gay fiction and reviews, very left-of-center, down-and-dirty, and importantly, just plain fun), Ian Titus, wrote about Vanishing Rooms by Melvin Dixon. The book features fantastic scenes in the Paradise Baths, likely an amalgamation of several Manhattan saunas and sex clubs. Unfortunately, Vanishing Rooms has slipped back out of print after surfacing again in the early 2000s. It is unlikely that Saul’s Book, by Paul T. Rogers, reviewed by Paul Russell, will see the light of day again. Rogers was brutally murdered shortly after its publication by the lover he attempted to immortalize in said book, one that runs the gamut of Times Square sex clubs and bathhouses. Another gem I was introduced to in assembling The Lost Library was Child of the Sun. Reviewed by gay literary historian Michael Bronski, this randy novel about the Emperor Heliogabalus was a fun, pulpy read. The authors, Kyle Onstott, known for writing Mandingo, and Lance Horner, deliver a campy, fictionalized version of the young gay emperor, complete with gay marriage and a shameless approach to smut.

  Not every out-of-print gay book that crossed my path made it into The Lost Library. One that I wished someone had covered was Jay B. Laws’s Steam. An AIDS horror novel written and published during the darkest days of the plague, a bathhouse is central to its dark action. As with many gay writers taken too soon, very little information about him is available. You could say the same thing about the multitude of bathhouses shuttered during the plague years. Even now, our stories remain on the margin, ephemeral. One corrective is the documentary Continental, about the Continental Baths and its important role in gay sexual liberation during the early ’70s. I attended a screening at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and it was wonderful to have the story of this iconographic venue shown in a large theater before a rapt, appreciative audience, with many of the players present to take questions after the film.

  So this postscript turned out to be overlong, and probably of interest to only a few, but if you’re like me, talking about books can be almost as fun as reading them—and certainly writing them. I certainly enjoyed imagining and then writing this book, as well as sharing a bit of the backstory with you here. Notice that I didn’t mention anything about the in-person research. That’s a story for another day, another book, perhaps.

  Or maybe I’ll just write Boyd a letter.

  About the Author

  Tom Cardamone is the author of the Lambda Literary Award–winning speculative novella Green Thumb and the erotic fantasy novel The Werewolves of Central Park as well as the novella Pacific Rimming. His short story collection, Pumpkin Teeth, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and Black Quill Award.

  He has edited The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered and the anthology Lavender Menace: Tales of Queer Villainy!, which was nominated for the Over The Rainbow List by the LGBT Round Table of the American Library Association.

  Lambda Literary Review described his 2016 collection, Night Sweats: Tales of Homosexual Wonder and Woe, as “a heady mix of subtle, understated wonder, unmitigated horror, and powerful eroticism, with each story working its individual magic on the reader.”

  Books Available From Bold Strokes Books

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