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So Many Ways to Sleep Badly
by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
City Lights Books
How to order Leathermen: Gay Erotic Stories
edited by Simon Sheppard
Cleis Press
How to order

On the last page of Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's compelling and alarmingly funny new novel So Many Ways to Sleep Badly (City Lights Books, 256 pages, $15.95), the narrator continues what has essentially been a 250-page monologue: "I pick up the phone: static. Everyone knows that opportunity knocks even if there's someone on the other line doing lines. Listen, Mr Cointelpro, a windy tunnel is always different than a tin funnel. Dry your eyes honey — it's only my demise."

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Taken out of context — or for that matter, in context — this quote embodies the nitty-gritty of Sycamore's sensibility: quick, playful, disarming, literary, hip, deadly serious, and decidedly provocative. In some ways So Many Ways to Sleep Badly is a continuation of Sycamore's debut novel Pulling Taffy, but it builds on that earlier work and goes gonzo on it, transforming it into a near-surrealistic montage of contemporary queer life in San Francisco and, really, all of American culture.

Sycamore's mordant sense of humor catches us off-guard, but not enough to alienate us: "Voicemail on my cell-phone: we met on bareback city or bareback — whatever. You had it. I wanted it. I'm calling to tell you it finally took." Sycamore then writes "It's hard to stay present in so much helplessness, I mean way more then the usual despairƒ." and indeed, So Many Ways to Sleep Badly balances on a fulcrum of moving on and suicide, but in a compulsive, funny sort of way. It's tempting to see Sycamore as a queer Samuel Beckett crossed with Woody Allen — both of them chart the pointlessness of making sense in a senseless world, though Allen has better jokes then Beckett. And though Sycamore does resonate with both, his world view here is more dire.

Toward the end of the novel Sycamore writes: "At one point he says something about June Cleaver, and later in the week, I'm going to see Kathleen Cleaver speak — I thought she was married to Eldridge Cleaver and they were in the Black Panthers together, but maybe that was June. Oh wait, June Cleaver is on The Simpsons." After another paragraph or so the narrative figures that June is on Leave It to Beaver and Marge is married to Homer and Kathleen was married to Eldridge and they were Black Panthers. But this culture clash — actually myriad culture collisions — is at the heart of how Sycamore sees the world: horrible, confusing, funny, fucked-up, and so pointless that there is nothing to do but move on.

So Many Ways to Sleep Badly's stream-of-consciousness plot works — it's Ulysses, but on too much crystal and a hard prick up its ass and set in San Francisco not Dublin — but it makes us work as well. Sycamore is not an immediately accessible writer (although he's compulsively readable) but the intellectual and emotional work here is well worth it.

Collect them all!

Leathermen: Gay Erotic Stories, edited by Simon Sheppard (Cleis Press, 213 pages, $14.95) is a terrific collection of SM-fueled short stories. There are some standards here — like "Exposed" by Aaron Travis — and some new work (at least to me), such as Xan West's violent and sweet "Willing."

The last decade and a half brought us a plethora of queer erotic anthologies that have mapped out ground that was unthinkable 25 years ago. These anthologies have become increasingly repetitive — there are, apparently, just so many queers who actually write publishable stories — and often lackluster. Leathermen manages to stay fresh and emotionally cogent. Sheppard's own story here, "The Village Person," is sexy, savvy and surreptitiously sentimental in the best sort of way. It's a model of what stories in erotic anthologies might and should be.

Sean Wolfe's Taboo (Kensington, 352 pages, $15) follows on the path set by his earlier collections of stories Aroused and Close Contact and is as smart and literary as its predecessors. Wolfe is that odd hybrid — the erotic writer who crosses over into the realm of the literary, and there's no doubt that he manages well in both categories. The press material for Taboo compares Wolfe to Christopher Isherwood and that is not quite correct. Wolfe has none of Isherwood's internal emotional narrative. I think it's more accurate to say that he resembles a slightly less gothic James Purdy or a more domestic Paul Bowles. While he is certainly not yet at the height of artistry both of these writers attained, he exhibits firm, sound beginnings here. Stories such as "My Brothers Keeper" (surprise: the taboo here is incest) are smart and saucy, while "The Back of the Bus" (taboo: interracial sex) is disarmingly funny. There is nothing here that is terribly surprising, and you have the feeling that Wolfe is often torn between being more outrageously smutty and more consciously literary. But Taboo ends up a nice compromise between the two and won't disappoint anyone looking for either.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com