How's Your Romance?: Concluding the "Buddies" Cycle Read Online Free PDF

one.”
    “What else is a fantasy but he looks like one? I really need to introduce you to some nice gay attorney, some … stockbroker or something. Someone you could have gone to high school with.”
    “Introductions are inconclusive.”
    Suddenly gathering up all the Kodak to drop it back in the box that had held it lo these many years, Dennis Savage proposed to tackle the photo album project another time. “What we mainly should do is consider my outfit for the Black and White Party. Do you think I can get away with this?”
    “This” turned out to be a stoker’s mesh top over the kind of black leather britches favored by men whose workplace is a torture chamber.
    “You really ought to stop attending Gilles de Rais’ garage sales,” I observed.
    “But what footgear goes with it?”
    “Boots, surely?”
    “I can’t dance in boots.” Moving to the mirror, he held the outfit against himself. “I know it isn’t me. Just tell me I’ll look good.”
    “You’ll look terrific.”
    “Kenny Reeves is going in white ducks and a striped T. So sensible, he says. But won’t everyone come that way? How do you make an entrance dressed off the rack?”
    “Carlo would.”
    “Oh, her,” he said, moving into the bedroom.
    Following him, I said, “You know, the key thing about us runaways is that we can all come to Stonewall not because of our education but because of our hunger for freedom. Gay life isn’t about class. It’s about feelings. We enter it to be obliged not to people we resent but to people we adore.”
    He was rooting around in a drawer of his bureau, and he may not have heard me.

1
    T ELL T HEM A BOUT THE F LIP
    T WICE A YEAR, EACH of my publishers mails a financial statement, indicating how many copies of each title have been sold and including a royalty check—that is, my percentage of the gross.
    These checks can be pathetically small, yet they arouse Cosgrove’s interest. As he cannot absorb the concept of royalties, he believes that somehow, somewhere, somebody is accidentally paying me for work that was compensated for years ago. And as this is clearly found money, Cosgrove feels that we should bank it in a special “rainy-day fund.”
    “Meaning,” I said, as he handed me the mail, containing two pieces of what he has come to recognize as publishers’ accounting department communication, “you want to use it to buy CDs.”
    He said nothing but sweetly whistled “We’re in the Money” as I opened the envelopes and examined the statements.
    “One of these checks is for twenty-eight dollars,” I told him. “You want it? It’s yours.”
    He clasped his hands at his throat like an opera diva going for high C as I endorsed it over to him.
    “What’s the big deal?” I said. “You don’t even have a checking account.”
    “I know someone who will cash this for me,” he explained, tucking it into his wallet.
    “If you really want extra money,” I said, filing the bills and dumping the junkmail, “why don’t you write porn stories like J. and sell them to the slicks?”
    “Would they publish my stories?”
    “Here’s a secret that was confided to me some years ago by the porn king himself, John Preston. One day a month, an editor assumes control of the pile of submitted manuscripts and makes the following deductions: everything handwritten, out; everything on both sides of each page, out; everything with no margins, out; everything entirely in capital letters, out; and so on, till three stories are left. The editor accepts those three stories.”
    “But how do you write porn?” Cosgrove asked, following me into the bedroom.
    “By idealizing. Bring together two hot men of a very disparate type who in real life would never meet, much less have sex.” Changing my clothes for some imminent socializing, I went on, “Banker’s car breaks down near farm, farmer invites banker to spend the night, both go whee! Or: high-school teacher meets former student, the two repair to