Yes. Gay sex is good here.
Reflections on the life and legacy of John Preston

I’ve been intrigued by John Preston since the City of Portland adopted the title of one of his essays as its marketing slogan two years ago this month: “Portland, Maine: Yes. Life’s good here.”

I was among the majority of Portlanders who thought the new motto sucked. It’s too vague, too bland, and clunky, to boot. If there’s any redeeming value to this drivel, I opined in my column for the Bangor Daily News, it derives from the possibility the quote will conjure Preston in the reader’s mind, thus associating Portland with a great author and activist. That possibility, however, seemed remote.

It’s time we changed that. Though the slogan is already fading from the public’s consciousness, Preston’s life and work deserve to be rediscovered and celebrated in his adopted hometown.

To tell us about Preston, I tapped one of his devoted friends, Al Diamon, and one of his devoted fans, Linda Hollander. (Al was my mentor during my days at Casco Bay Weekly, a paper Preston also wrote for [years before I arrived]. Linda also has a connection to The Bollard — she’s the mom of Emma Hollander, our advertising director.)

For the photographs, I turned to Robert Diamante. Diamante, then a student at Portland School of Art (now Maine College of Art), was introduced to Preston by the writer Agnes Bushell. He worked as Preston’s assistant, helping to research facts for The Big Gay Book, an encyclopedic manual Preston authored that’s subtitled, A Man’s Survival Guide for the 90’s. This was shortly before Plume, an imprint of Penguin Books, published Hometowns: Gay Men Write About Where They Belong, which Preston edited and to which he contributed an introduction and two essays. The cat in the photograph of Preston seated in his Park Street apartment is sitting on the finished manuscript of that book, Robert recalled.

After assigning the essays, I set out to find some of Preston’s work. Having read that most of his titles are out of print, I headed to two secondhand bookstores on Congress Street.

At Yes Books, proprietor (and legendary local poet) Russ Sargent told me I was maybe the second person in 10 years to ask about Preston — which is depressing, given that the shop’s in the midst of the author’s old stomping grounds. Nevertheless, Sargent had two copies of Hometowns (I bought the paperback) and a copy of Preston’s second novel, Franny, the Queen of Provincetown (which I also snapped up). This edition of Franny was reissued by a Vancouver publishing operation and GLBT bookstore, named Little Sister’s, that won an important legal challenge to Canada’s “obscenity” laws with Preston’s assistance and inspiration.

Down the street at The Green Hand, owner Michelle Souliere also had a copy of Hometowns, and she thought she had a few of Preston’s campy, gay action-hero paperbacks, though a young couple had recently been in to look at them. Turned out they hadn’t bought the first installment in Preston’s Alex Kane series, Sweet Dreams, so I snapped that up, too.

As soon as I got home, I opened Hometowns, eager to read Preston’s take on Portland during the Reagan Years. I wasn’t disappointed.

Preston moved here in 1979 for many of the same reasons I did two decades later: though it’s a small city, Portland is packed with cultural amenities — good restaurants, arts venues, bars. Those same attributes continue to attract new people to Portland, so Preston truly is an appropriate ambassador for the city’s marketing efforts.

Among the many notable anecdotes in this essay is Preston’s description of a bar on Cumberland Avenue that had a secluded room in the back for dancing. “Whenever a policeman or an unknown visitor came into the front, the bartender would press a silent button that would make the lights in the back room flicker, a warning for all the same-sex couples to stop touching one another and sit down, so they wouldn’t be arrested,” he wrote.

As the ’80s progressed, gay bars that were “much less circumspect” opened downtown. Preston was thrilled to have encounters with gay men who worked construction or waterfront jobs. In Greenwich Village and on San Francisco’s Castro Street, he noted, white-collar professionals would dress up as construction workers or fishermen to look sexy in the clubs. The guys in Portland were the real deal.

“I had worried that my sexual fantasies wouldn’t be possible in a small place like Portland,” Preston wrote. “[I]nstead I discovered them being lived daily by all the men with whom I came in contact.”

The straight Portlanders Preston encountered were, for the most part, tolerant of his lifestyle. Episodes of perceived intolerance often turned out, in retrospect, to be about something else. For example, the copy shop manager who angrily told Preston his business was no longer welcome there was actually being ripped off by her numerous gay employees, who were making copies of Preston’s work on the sly to share with their friends.

Franny was the first book Preston wrote in Portland. It’s less a proper novel than a character sketch celebrating the humor, wisdom and resilience of the queens he knew in Provincetown. It’s a very heartfelt and touching book, one Preston shed many tears over during and after its writing. There’s really nothing pornographic about it at all, a fact that angered many fans of his earlier work (including a writer for the Maine Sunday Telegram, which cancelled an interview with Preston and then published a brutal review of the book after realizing it was PG.)

From Franny I turned to Sweet Dreams, the first of the six “Missions of Alex Kane,” published in 1984. There’s plenty of porn in this one, sandwiched (sometimes awkwardly) in a plot that follows Kane as he rescues a hot young gymnast from the clutches of criminals preying on gay teens in Boston. I’m not a fan of the action genre, but it’s easy to see the appeal of this series to gay readers hungry for a hero they can identify with. (No offense to Wonder Woman or Robin.)

At first I figured I’d have a hard time tracking down Preston’s infamous BDSM books, and began trying to summon the courage to walk into Video Expo or The Treasure Chest to inquire about them. Then I thought to check Nomia, the classy sex boutique on Exchange Street. And, sure enough, there was an entire shelf of them, in new paperback editions published by Cleis Press, in San Francisco.

I began with Mr. Benson, Preston’s most celebrated work. Pardon my French, but holy shit! Reading Mr. Benson is like riding a literary roller coast — simultaneously scary and thrilling. Though Preston was, famously, a leather-clad S&M master, the book is told from the perspective of the title character’s willing slave, Jamie. For most of the book, the gripping suspense is based on the reader’s wonder whether Jamie can or will endure the sexual tortures and other mistreatment Mr. Benson heaps upon him. The extent to which you can understand why he stays is the extent to which the book is disturbing.

The plot turns more than a little hokey at the end, which I won’t spoil here — suffice to say that Alex Kane and Mr. Benson both have a penchant for daring rescues — but Mr. Benson is as compelling for today’s readers as it was to those during the Disco Era.

Porn isn’t a genre I read, either, so I doubt I’ll delve into the rest of Preston’s hardcore oeuvre. But from what I’ve sampled of the other Preston classic I picked up at Nomia, I Once Had a Master, it’s clear his writing is several cuts above the schlock one’s likely to encounter in dirty magazines (though, by his own admission, Preston wrote plenty of that crap, as well).

My curiosity about Preston is now appreciation for his talent as a writer and his courage as a human being. I’ll let Al and Linda take it from here, but again, I urge anyone with even a passing interest in gay life and literature to take a fresh look at Preston’s work. It’s a hell of a lot better than that stupid slogan.

— Chris Busby

John Preston’s Dirty Stories
The contradictory life of a writer and pornographer

by Al Diamon

Back in the 1980s and ‘90s, John Preston showed Portland a few things this stodgy old town hadn’t seen before. Portland appeared to be embarrassed and looked away.

When Preston died in April, 1994, the Portland Press Herald eulogized him as “a celebrated anthologist, novelist, short-story writer and journalist.” A bit later in his obituary, the paper added that he was also “a respected gay-rights activist, teacher and Maine AIDS counselor.”

That’s a bit like sending off Hunter S. Thompson by only mentioning that he wrote a few freelance pieces for Sports Illustrated and Rolling Stone.

As Casco Bay Weekly made clear in its farewell to a man who’d been a frequent contributor to its pages, Preston was all the Press Herald said he was, as well as an “unrepentant pornographer.” He was also a proponent of sadomasochism, bondage and smoking in public places. He thought sex with multiple partners defined much of what it meant to be gay. As I once noted in a review of one of his books, “Preston never makes it easy for the armchair gay rights supporter.”

Truth be told, Preston was a lot more revered elsewhere for his writing and his outspoken activism than he was in his adopted hometown. Here, he was less noted and more notorious, at least until he achieved national recognition near the end of his life for editing a series of anthologies on such issues as AIDS and the gay perspective on family and hometowns. These books got reviewed in the New York Times, USA Today and other publications acceptable to Portland’s uptight elite, allowing them at last to acknowledge his existence.

The literary part of it, anyway. They still pretended they didn’t know about the porn stuff.

A couple of months before he died, Preston told me he’d recently run into an old friend from the 1980s porn scene at a prestigious publishing event. “I told her it was inconceivable that we would ever have made it into the mainstream,” he said. “My head has always been swimming as to whether I’m perceived as a pornographer or a major writer.”

Not that it mattered much to him. He was equally proud of his work in both areas. In fact, he became upset in the midst of the anthologies’ successes when he noticed he no longer attracted the black-leather crowd to his book signings. Worried that he’d lost what he’d always considered his core audience, he was delighted when a publisher, appropriately named Badboy, contacted him and offered to reissue his earlier porn works in new editions. He just wanted to be sure they wouldn’t be marketed as erotica.

“[E]rotica is what rich people buy,” he told USA Today in 1992. “Pornography is what the rest of us get.”

Still, Preston’s elegant prose elevated his porn beyond the level of mere dirty stories. “Traveling from my youth with its clandestine homosexuality to my middle age with its public announcement of my gay life has been a trip that was aided and abetted by pornography,” he wrote in the introduction to Flesh and the Word: An Anthology of Erotic Writing.

Or, as Preston told me shortly before his death, “I write porn the way other people consume it.”

I first encountered Preston in the ‘80s through essays he wrote for the long-defunct Portland Chronicle. These pieces were notable for their blunt and concise explanations of the issues facing gay people in Maine. I later met him when I covered a press conference held by gay rights advocates. I was struck by how, unlike most of the speakers, he seemed unfazed by revealing himself before the TV lights. While other gay men and lesbians were hesitant to go public – Preston often recalled seeing gays on local TV shown only in silhouette, to protect their identities – he was all about getting in the hetero majority’s face.

At a time when the memory of a gay man being murdered in Bangor was still fresh, that took courage.

One morning in 1987, I received a notice from Preston announcing a press conference at his Park Street apartment. But when several other reporters and I showed up at the appointed time, there was nobody home. We departed, more than a little annoyed. A few days later, Preston sent out a half-hearted apology, but offered no explanation for his absence. It would be more than a year before I discovered the reason.

I’d barely seen Preston for months when he sent me a copy of the first of his anthologies, Personal Dispatches: Writers Confront AIDS. Casually thumbing through the introduction he’d written for the collection, I came upon this passage:

“The tightening circle of AIDS finally came too closely into my own life. In 1987, I received my own positive test for HIV antibodies; I learned that I was infected with the disease myself.”

That diagnosis, he later told me, had happened the very day he’d scheduled the press conference.

In 1988, getting AIDS was a death sentence. There were no drugs to control the disease. In addition, being HIV-positive was a social death sentence. The stigma associated with the so-called “gay plague” defied medical science and common sense. Preston and the other writers in the anthology took on those issues and many other discomforting topics in ways only those directly affected could manage.

I read the book in one sitting and called Preston the next day to set up an interview. That turned out to be a grueling experience, trying to maintain journalistic detachment while discussing his impending demise. As Preston put it in his book Hometowns: Gay Men Write About Where They Belong, “The interview was hard for both of us.”

When the piece aired on Maine Public Radio that evening, the whole town knew his secret. Preston braced for the backlash, but it never came. Even casual acquaintances expressed sympathy and understanding. The city that had wanted nothing to do with the pornographer embraced the anthologist with AIDS. Go figure.

Preston and I became friends. In large part, this was because he got a dog, a Vizsla named Vlad the Impaler. Preston, Vlad, my dog and I would spend hours each week walking around Western Cemetery. We discussed politics, literature, sports and writing. He also talked about the loss of his first lover and his subsequent work as a civil rights campaigner in the South.

“One had to be an agent [of change],” he once told me, “not just in one’s life, but in society. … I was an agent. After [my lover’s] death, it was a matter of self-survival.”

He liked to talk about how he’d managed to earn a living as a writer. He’d written straight porn pieces for Penthouse, although never under his own name. Also using a pseudonym, he’d authored a series of adventure paperbacks featuring bands of well-muscled heroes. All these books carried an undercurrent of homo-erotica. And his gay porn, whether in books or serialized in magazines, literally drew crowds of readers. He summed up his writing career in an autobiographical compilation called My Life As A Pornographer & Other Indecent Acts.

“What I had to write in the beginning was porn,” he told me. “I polished my writing with the adventure novels. And I made my name with the anthologies.”

If Preston’s name endures, it won’t necessarily be because of those books or even the phrase – “Portland, Maine. Yes. Life’s good here.” – taken wildly out of context from one of his essays by the city of Portland in 2013 for use as a marketing slogan (an irony Preston would have enjoyed, I think). His legacy is his final book, the posthumously published Winter’s Light: Reflections of a Yankee Queer, in which he celebrates “the often-conflicting identities I strive for.”

It’s his most powerful statement about how he came to be a part of this community and apart from it at the same time.

Before his death, Preston arranged his funeral, a high mass at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church. That came as a shock to many of his friends, who had always regarded him as nonreligious, an atheist even. I wondered if Preston had planned it as a final demonstration that he couldn’t be pigeonholed – even by those who knew him best. But now I think there might have been another reason.

When I listened recently to the aging cassette tape of my last interview with Preston, done just weeks before he died, I came across a brief reference I’d forgotten about. Speaking about his youthful civil-rights work in the South, he said, “I began it all with a deep religious faith. I don’t have one today. But I will always thank the Episcopal Church. They financed my work.”

A pornographer, sure, but with class.

Al Diamon writes the weekly column Politics & Other Mistakes for several Maine newspapers and websites. He can be emailed at aldiamon@herniahill.net.

 

A Rose for the Master

by Linda Hollander

Back in the ’70s, during my misspent youth in Boston, my friends in other cities and I would mail one another articles we came across in the alternative press. It was sort of a proto, paper version of Facebook. I particularly loved The Advocate and Screw. For one year, in 1975, the former was edited by a contributor named John Preston. Little did I know at the time that I would follow his career for the next two decades, and follow him (albeit not literally) to the city of Portland.

Open, out sexuality was very important to Preston, evident in his journalism, his fiction, and his work as an anthologist. He never accepted the closet and didn’t want anybody else to be stuck in there for one more minute than necessary.

The scene that begins Preston’s second novel, Franny, the Queen of Provincetown, expresses this guiding belief. (In a letter to a friend, Preston called the scene “my entire statement about gay life …. [I]t is my story.”) The title character speaks of being accosted by homophobic “little punks” while walking the streets of Boston in her new pink angora sweater:

“I could have died,” Franny says. “I wanted to rip the thing off myself and hide where no one would ever find me again.

“And then I snapped.

“I had worked my ass off hustling tips to buy that sweater. What the hell was going on that I was gonna let a bunch of shitheads that couldn’t even shave tell me I couldn’t wear it? Fuck that shit. So I just put my head in the air and walked past ’em. I ain’t never looked back.”

Among many other things, Preston’s work is notable for its efforts to bring gay life closer to the mainstream.

OK, maybe not all his work. Novels like his breakout debut, Mr. Benson, and the Master series, the subject of which is BDSM (bondage-and-discipline sadomasochism), are still not ready for primetime, though they did help bring this aspect of gay subculture out of the dungeon and into the light of day. Flesh and the Word, a series of anthologies of gay erotic writing Preston edited in the early 1990s, had considerably more mass-market appeal.

But I’m mostly thinking about his nonfiction, works like the essay collections My Life as a Pornographer & Other Indecent Acts and Winter’s Light: Reflections of a Yankee Queer. These books are full of thought-provoking insights into gay life before the turn of the century, and their lessons still apply today.

For example, one essay in My Life expresses Preston’s strong belief that older gay men have a responsibility to help younger gay men come out, especially in small towns and rural communities. Where the straight world may see a “criminal pederast,” Preston sees a “mentor.”

This belief was surely inspired by experience. Born in 1945, in the small town of Medfield, Massachusetts, Preston’s first sexual tutors were the traveling salesmen who picked him up when he was a teenage hustler hanging around the Greyhound bus station in Boston’s Park Square. He later expressed relief and gratitude that these men were gentle and compassionate people. Fictional works like Mr. Benson and the Alex Kane series of action paperbacks describe the dangers that await unwary young men picked up by predators.

As an activist, Preston felt strongly that sexual-education materials should be factual, well written, and available to everyone. In an article titled “Gay Men’s Sexual Health,” he stressed the importance of having the gay community control sex-ed programs for gay youth and adults. He noted that gay men had not developed a viable form of sex education before the plague of AIDS struck, and most medical professionals had little understanding of the dynamics of gay sexuality.

“Rather than declaring that sex is something simply to be avoided,” he wrote, “sex-positive materials [must] try to show gay men how to integrate sex … in a more holistic fashion.” Decades later, educators are still reluctant to take a sex-positive approach to teaching health, for gay or straight students.

Gay erotic fiction, which Preston insisted on calling pornography, has a crucial role in this effort. It provides frameworks and models that can inform young gay men’s understanding of their sexuality in ways no other literary genre can.

“Pornography holds a rather unique place as a vernacular literature in the gay world, more so than elsewhere,” Preston wrote in the epilogue to I Once Had a Master. “[W]riting about sex is one of the best ways possible to inform the gay world about itself, including issues with which it should be concerned and potential problems it might face.”

Preston considered himself a sexual outlaw. His BDSM stories were informed by plenty of personal experience, and he was proud of the exalted status in the scene that his books gave him. Before it was compiled into a novel in the early ’80s, Mr. Benson was serialized in the magazine Drummer, and it caused a sensation akin to the craze Fifty Shades of Grey sparked three decades later. Fans lined up at newsstands to await the next installment, and formed reading groups to share the tales. T-shirts that declared the wearer to be “Looking for Mr. Benson” became popular (as did a variation implying the wearer’s fitness to play the title role — “Looking for Mr. Benson?”).

There’s clearly a lot of curiosity about the BDSM world — especially among middle-aged, straight women. Many people who would never even dip their toes into this realm are eager to dive into books about it, whether they’re gay, straight or somewhere in between. Preston recognized this. “Straight today does not mean straight tomorrow,” he once famously declared. “Gay today does not mean gay tomorrow.”

Psychologists tell us that for all the sexual freedom we think we have, when it comes to sexual behavior, there’s a script, there’s a contract between participants, and there’s a transfer of power. This power relationship varies from person to person, encounter to encounter, and it may or may not be conscious, but it is always there. The primary difference between the way this works in the BDSM world and the “vanilla” world is that, in the former, the relationship is well defined, and there are clear consequences for transgression.

Preston was a master, a “topman,” and a member of what’s known in the BDSM world as the “Old Guard” — a courtly group of learned practitioners dedicated to preserving the culture’s traditions. His membership in that group accounts for some of the intense friendships he formed and maintained in life, especially with younger fans and protégés. The same details about Preston surface repeatedly: he was courteous to the point of gallantry and a profoundly loyal friend. He was also, at his core, a romantic. (I describe him to the uninitiated as “Jane Austen for Gay Guys.”) He loved the same comfortable New England existence we all cherish — dogs and cats and fireplaces on snowy evenings.

Several years ago, I discovered the address of the apartment on Park Street, in Portland’s West End, where Preston lived for most of his time here. I called Portland Landmarks and told them I thought the city should put a plaque there to honor him. They laughed heartily. (In their defense, the city doesn’t have such a program for famous renters; only old captains of ships and industries, who had historic homes built for them, get that kind of recognition.)

So I hung up and did what any sane person would do: I walked to Preston’s old townhouse and placed a rose on the doorstep. I’ve kept that tradition every December 1^st, World AIDS Day, in recognition of his life and all the work he did to save others from that disease.

Guess I’m a romantic, too.

For more about John Preston’s life and writing, I recommend Looking for Mr. Preston, a collection of interviews, essays and remembrances by his friends and colleagues, edited by Laura Antoniou; and Topman: Online Writings By and About John Preston, a site maintained by Dusk Peterson at duskpeterson.com/preston.