1. Tell me about a piece of yours that you’re particularly proud of/didn’t get the attention you feel is deserved…
None of my pieces are getting the attention they deserve, of course, although my first full-length novel, Green Eyes; an erotic novel (sort-of) was shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award in the category Gay Erotic Fiction. I’m possibly proudest of a short story that I wrote two summers ago for a Cleis anthology themed on (gay) warriors. The project fell through but the piece got published by an Irish Webzine, Bear Review.

Well, warriors. It’s the fictional back-story of the Jet d’Eau of Geneva: my unreliable narrator John Lee, the (anti)-hero of the Green Eyes, has just arrived in the Swiss city with Alex, the love of his life (and title character of said book)—on honeymoon—finally—and they hit upon a certain Richard Zugabe, librarian of Geneva’s city archives, who appears very eager to give our boys the (otherwise top-secret) lowdown on this fountain:

He sits down, a middle-aged gentleman equipped with a Swiss-Swiss watch, watches his watch, studiously, and finally says, briefly lifting his gaze: “Two minutes.” We return his gaze, he says: “One minute.” Alex grabs my wrist, says: “Relax.” The guy keeps his eyes on his watch, then says: “Voilà.” And voila, the lake gulps, spits, and ejects a gushing column of jizz, a thick white jet rising high into the sky and beyond and back into the lake again. “Hundred thirty two gallons of water per second,” he says, “reaching 140 meters into the sky. The Fountain of Geneva. The planet’s most spectacular ejaculation. Since 2000 years.”

It turns out that the fountain was built by the Roman Emperor Hadrian—the gay ruler of Antinous fame—“to commemorate the most spectacular event of his love-live.” That’s one reason I like this story: it’s classical in its design. The reader is asked to expect the impossible, and he/she shall not be disappointed.
Namely: A Nordic tribe (called the Muttoni by the locals) has settled in a remote valley up in the mountains and is making a big nuisance of themselves:

Not content to follow the sheep-raising, cow-milking example of their Celtic neighbors, the Muttoni spent their time on raids. They would maraud through the region and misappropriate everything not nailed down, including human beings—and in particular adolescent males.

We’re in 131 AD now, Antinous has famously drowned during a pleasure cruise on the River Nile, and Hadrian—roaming the empire to meet new people and get over his loss—has just arrived in Geneva and is kindly asked by the locals to do something about this situation.

What would you expect the emperor to do? Set up a punitive expedition and subdue the unruly proto-Vikings? Well, Hadrian—the wily, resourceful, over-sexed tactician—has a better idea. He invents the X-factor. He puts out a call for an I-have-erotic-talent contest—because—yes—because we’ve learned in the meantime that the Muttoni tribe appears to consist solely of males—nobody has ever seen a female Muttoni, and the theory is that the tribe survives by secondary reproduction: stealing adolescent males to fill the ranks of the next generation.

Hadrian’s call is a big success, of course (“what do you expect, most Roman careers involved the casting couch,” Zugabe explains), and soon the reader has ample opportunity to observe the educational doings of “exactly fifty specimen of the finest proto-erotici ever gathered in one place.”

There you have more reasons why I like this story. Hadrian is doing something clever and unexpected, and it suggests the graphic sex which is exactly NOT cheap because it’s motivated by the story. An example (the erotic talent has been sworn in under the name “Antinousians,” or “Guard of Antinous”) (Zugabe speaking:)

“So, Hadrian would inspect his Antinousians lined up and fitted in Praetorian garb—the spectacular helmet with a feathered, Cherokee-like crescent fitted to the top, the breast-plate of chased bronze molded to the perfect fit of toned pecs and rippled abs, and the humble belt with a loop for the scabbard and a notch to rest the shield. If the belt was not in place, everything else would fall apart, creating ample opportunity for quickies behind or in front of the bushes. 

“Newly imported slaves would see to the maintenance of the bespoke outfits. Hadrian, by the way, had by now been in residence for several months, and his entourage had grown considerably with the addition of specialists from all walks of court life: spokespeople, equerries, not to mention personalized assistants who would handle Antinousian emails.” 

“Huh?”

“Just to see whether you were still with me. So Hadrian would now select one or more of his pupils, meaning they were to join him on a dais fashioned for group activity—tiger skins, couches, cushions, ancillary toys—but the account I’m referring to is about a one-on-one from the early days of the program. The elected youth, Anaximandrius, takes Hadrian’s hand—it is his task now to seduce the Emperor—and lead him to the dais. He invites Hadrian to recline on a couch, then unties his sword. Next comes off the helmet. The now bare-headed youth tosses his hair—hair-tossing is so important—and then unbuckles the belt. Everything drops. There he stands now, naked, his genitals sparkling in the morning sun, and—apologies—his penis at rest. It was axiomatic that all Antinousians exerted erection control at all times—unless they were given leave (wait)—the willing and unwilling of erections had been an important criterion during the talent contest. So, now, Anaximandrius wills his erection, gently, gently, the rod rising counterclockwise fromsix o’clock to one o’clock, expanding, bulging, the foreskin retracting under the pressure of the shiny glans (few people were circumcised in those days), until the whole thing stands to the emperors undivided attention, all of its splendid eight inches, the cock lips kissing the sunlight…”

You see it coming, don’t you? Hint: the Antinousians are fed ever-increasing amounts of a mysterious drug (“Megalopeos”) and will develop a solid tolerance for what turns out to be a potent aphrodisiac. And—yes—spoiler alert—they will eventually set out and fuck the Muttoni to death. But—of course—in the meantime Hadrian has found his new love in the person of Lars-Lars, the lover of Muttoni-king Kodranson, and the most commemorable event of Hadrian’s love live—that’s his first time with Lars-Lars. Hadrian takes Lars-Lars back to Geneva and a happy ending ensues, including the construction of the fountain.

That’s another reason I like the story: the happy ending. I love happy endings. I love watching cinema audiences leaving the duplex, everyone with the same proud grin of the TAH (triumphant action hero) on their face. I’m a feel-good person.
Anything else? Yes, sure, I like the ironic anachronisms and am proud of the irreverent interpretation of Geneva’s foremost tourist attraction. Plus, there are a few literary asides—we have, for example, the American author David Foster Wallace in a cameo appearance.

2. Recommend me a novel/short story/poem/collection by someone else that you think everyone should be reading… 
David Foster Wallace’s magnus opus, of course, Infinite Jest.

1. Tell me about a piece of yours that you’re particularly proud of…
I’m fiercely proud of my novel, Parade. The religious and spiritual content reflect my own beliefs and the manner in which I try to govern myself on a daily basis. The message is: “Just try to be good and try to be better. This is all conveyed through the protagonists, Reggie and Elmer. Also, there’s lots of cocktails, dancing, high heels and senior citizen spaghetti suppers. It’s sort of a book within a book. After accidentally burning down a church and hitting the lottery, Reggie and Elmer escape to Jupiter, Florida. Here, Reggie begins to craft his own version of the bible, The Cookbook. I’ve spent so much time with these characters and this story. I believe that it’s fun. I believe it has so much heart. I really love the shit out of it.

​2. Recommend me a novel/short story/poem/collection by someone else that you think everyone should be reading… 
You should certainly check out Tom Cardamone’s collection, Night Sweats. Not only is he my pal, but he’s such a talented writer. His fiction is quirky, naughty, moody, weird. All excellent qualities. He’s a terribly funny person. Being with him, through his words or in real life on a Saturday night, is an adventure. You should also check out Bud Smith. He writes a majority of his work on his phone while working construction in Jersey. His work wreaks of maleness. I listened to an interview with him and he was asked about his goals as a writer. He replied, “I just want to make cool shit.” He’s kind of a literary super hero.

1. Tell me about a piece of yours that you’re particularly proud of…
About two years back, I published A Country of Ghosts with Combustion Books. It’s an anarchist utopian novel, set in a 19th-century alternate world, and follows the adventures of a gay journalist sent to report on the empire’s war of colonization on the eastern front.  It’s not really been discussed as a work of gay fiction—at least not anywhere I’ve seen—but I’ve been particularly proud of how I handled the character’s sexuality in that one.

Around the time that the novel was off at the printer, I had a health scare and was about halfway bedridden. One night, I got it into my head that I was going to die—a combination of generalized anxiety and the flu will do that to you. But it didn’t matter if I died, I realized—A Country of Ghosts—was about to be published. I could die if not happy, then at least knowing I’d said something I’d wanted to say my entire adult life.

I didn’t die, which was certainly for the best, and I wasn’t really in any mortal danger in the end. But it was interesting to have such simple clarity as I’d found that night. And I’m proud as hell of that book.

​2. Recommend me a novel/short story/poem/collection by someone else that you think everyone should be reading… 
There’s a whole wealth of anarchistic / anti-oppression fiction out there, and of course the best of it is written by people who really do take the craft of writing as seriously as they take social struggle. My favorite stories, though, challenge not only the status quo but the assumptions about how best to supplant the status quo. Ursula le Guin probably does this better than any other author living or dead. But the best short story along these lines I’ve read recently is “The House of Surrender” written by Laurie Penny and published in English by the German-language magazine der Freitag. For full disclosure, Laurie is my partner. She’s also a talented writer. In “The House of Surrender” she describes a stateless future in which jails are places of voluntary asylum. The story follows a time traveler from our time—the distant past—whose incredibly naive assumptions about sexual consent and patriarchy force him to take refuge in such a place.

1. Tell me about a piece of yours that you’re particularly proud of…
I’m having trouble finding the right publisher for my short horror story, “Monster Party.” One good friend who runs a payment-in-copies magazine told me he’d absolutely take it for publication, but that it’s so good I should try for a paying market. Other writer friends assure me it’s well written and striking. It may be a little too striking; the narrator is a rapist, and while I have little interest in reading stories that exploit rape as a plot device, I wrote this one for the challenge of writing non-supernatural horror, which I had never done before. As a gay genderqueer feminist, I also wanted to see what it was like inside the logic/ethics of a heterosexual rapist. I thought, What do I find most horrifying in all the world?The answer is human sex trafficking. So, I now have a fine story about human trafficking with a complicated and charismatically horrible narrator, and pro-rate publishers have given me feedback that it’s too intense or that they won’t publish rape stories. I respect the publishers, and I’d also like to get this story finally into the world.

​2. Recommend me a novel/short story/poem/collection by someone else that you think everyone should be reading… 
I was awestruck by Nadia Bulkin’s story “Red Goat Black Goat” published in Innsmouth Free Press and anthologized in Lovecraft’s Monsters. The story brings us an Indonesian take on Shub-Niggurath, and it is gorgeously diabolical. I need to read more Bulkin, and so do you. I don’t always write in the same richly poetic and surreal style as Bulkin does here–it depends on the story–but if you love my story “The Moon and the Devil and the Ace of Wands” in The Myriad Carnival, I think you’ll shit the bed when you read “Red Goat Black Goat.”

1. Tell me about a piece of yours that you’re particularly proud of…
 Of all my novels, I am most proud of my ninth one, Fate. Here’s a little blurb to wet your whistle:

Eddie is in love. The problem is, Eddie’s in love with four men… four men simultaneously, that is. But who does Eddie love more? And can the heart feel for that many men equally? Ah, but it does have four chambers, so four seems the most logical choice… at least, of course, to Eddie. 
    Paula is Eddie’s famous mom. One by one, each of his lovers comes to work for her, their lives so connected that if one of them itches, another one scratches. But who will wind up with whom in this comedic tale of life and love and friendship? In the end, it’s up to fate to decide what none of them could possibly have seen coming.
 
And here’s what some of my fellow author’s had to say about Fate:
 
“All the perfect kisses, love and laughter, sex and happily-ever-afters of a great romance novel, times four.” — Martha Davis, author of Dirty

“Fate asks provocative questions about the nature, and capacity, of love. A thought-provoking, tears-and-laughter gem that deserves a look!” — Rick R. Reed, award-winning author of Dinner at Home and Blink

“Don’t even try to resist diving head first into Rob Rosen‘s latest novel, a witty, wonderful ride through the chaos of friendship and family. ‘Gayer than Oprah,’ as his protagonist quips, Fate is ripe with fearless joy as only Rosen can write it.” — Salome Wilde, editor of Shakespearotica: Queering the Bard

“Sensitive, touching and often uproariously funny, with a style that makes it feel like an American Notting Hill, Fate keeps you guessing and introduces a fresh, quirky set of characters.” — Riley Shepherd, author of The Last Paltry Drops and The Boy He Left Behind

“As fate would have it, Rob Rosen has written another screamingly funny novel exploring the foibles of gay romance.” — Jonathan Asche, author of Kept Men and Other Stories

And here’s what I have to say about Fate:
 
I remember starting the book, knowing that the concept of fate would play a major role. Little did I know how just major a role it would eventually have, the entirety of the book centering around this mesmerizing theme, tying all the characters together… not to mention, tearing them apart.
 
I, like my main character, Eddie, have always been fascinated by fate. Does it exist or do the people we meet in life, the situations we find ourselves in, well, is it all just dumb luck, chance? Me, I believe in fate. Too many of my relationships, the friends that I’ve met, the places I’ve been, have been unlikely ones, with one in a million odds or more against them happening.
 
With Eddie, the same can be said. And that’s why I fell in love with him, with his family, with his friends and lovers. Fate brought them all together, and I was rooting for fate to keep them that way, knowing that it frequently doesn’t work in our favor, just like it wouldn’t always work in Eddie’s. Friends come and go, family as well, replaced by others, many of them fated to be in our lives, fated to eventually leave our lives, but fated just the same. Not chance. Not dumb luck.
 
For Eddie and me, fate shaped our lives. And if you didn’t believe in it before, I hope you do after you read my book.
 (Find the book here: Amazon / MLRBooks / AllRomanceBooks / B&N)

2. Recommend me a novel/short story/poem/collection by someone else that you think everyone should be reading… 
If you’re looking for a unique erotica collection, look no further than Not Just Another Pretty Face. I’m proud to say that I’m a contributor to this anthology, featuring some of today’s best and brightest authors:
​
The stories, poems, and essays in this collection have a single common element uniting their wide range of literary styles and genres: they all spring directly from photographs of go-go boys. 
 
The ideal go-go boy is the perfect erotic object. We imagine him as lost or broken so that we might rescue him, or as potent and aggressive so that we might be the focus of his desire. But the images captured here suggest deeper, more complex realities. These dancers are whimsical, haunting, satiric, playful, ominous. They are not objects, not icons, but stories waiting to be told.
 
Not Just Another Pretty Face plays with the interface of projections: what these young men project in their poses and expressions, and what we project on them in return. It explores assumptions, prejudices, fantasies, and revelations. It looks beyond the archetype, beneath the skin.

1. Tell me about a piece of yours that you’re particularly proud of…
Well, this is a really easy question for me, as so far, I’ve only had one piece published under the name Chris Colby, which I used for romance/erotica. Fancy Dress is a story set in a college dorm, the tense friendships within and the unlikely threesome that occurs. It also has drag queens dancing with superman, erotic viking dreams, drunken bets and some one time only shagging! I’m hoping to do more as Chris – I’m currently working on a novel, a romance between a private investigator and a computer programmer, set in San Antonio, Texas. I have two follow-ups planned too – it’s just getting the time to write them is the main thing!

2. Recommend me a novel/short story/poem/collection by someone else that you think everyone should be reading… 
Return on Investment by Aleksandr Voinov. This comes to mind because I’ve recently just read the sequel, Risk Return. Aleks has written lots of m/m romance, solo and a good few with another favourite of mine, L.A. Witt, but Return on Investment is less romance and more of a gay financial thriller. Which is not something that I thought would be “Oh My God Amazing” but it was. Be warned, it’s darker than most romances but the story is tightly plotted and the characters deftly drawn. And, I’ve just finished the sequel which is very different but just as good.

1. Tell me about a poem of yours that you’re particularly proud of…
I’m going to cheat and talk about two, one that I’m most proud of and one that’s the most recent.

​The first is a poem which I’m very proud of that was originally featured in a magazine called Glitterwolf. The poem, Night Sweats, is taken from this big long epic I’ve been writing for a few years, and will probably be writing for the next decade. The whole thing is called American G.I. and it’s three full-length books of poetry that are novels in verse, all about one character – Tommy Martin’s – life. The first, Circumference, is about the town he grew up in in the late 1930s/early 1940s, the boy he fell in love with and returning to the town almost twenty years later when he finds out his father is dying. Night Sweats is set in 1939, when Tommy is 14 and realising that he really is gay. The poem was later reprinted on The Good Men Project and can be read here.

The second is a poem called Gown recently published as part online at HIV Here + Now, Michael H. Broder’s stunning poem-a-day to 35 years of AIDS (June 5, 2016). It’s autobiographical and based around a scary hospital visit I had a while back. The poem can be read here. There are currently 326 (!) contributions, with a print anthology of selected works to follow.

2. Recommend me a novel/short story/poem/collection by someone else that you think everyone should be reading… 
Breaking the rules again, I’m going to recommend two things, a collection of poems and a novel.

After much anticipation, I finally got my hands on D.A. Powell’s epic Divine Comedy trilogy, Tea, Lunch and Cocktails, which was recently collected together as Repast, which is great because both Tea and Lunch are out of print. Repast is very much that; a big, filling meal of a book. His way with words is a sheer joy. Powell’s work is funny, sexy, breathtaking, sensual, modern, difficult, perfect – it’s everything I want from a poet, and of the books of his I’ve read, this collection is my favourite by far.

​The novel I’m recommending is mostly because I’ve just finished it – What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell. It has been such a long time since I’ve read such beautiful, considered, deft and at times even profound prose. Telling the story of an unnamed American living in Bulgaria, and his relationship with a rentboy called Mitko could’ve been clichéd but Greenwell’s handling of it is perfect. It’s one of those books that I can’t adequately describe at all because it’s just so good. It’s the type of fiction that I’ve always hoped to write myself, once I managed to clear all the projects I’m working on at the moment. I read a library copy and I’m going to have to buy my own copy so I can highlight passages when I re-read it. If you like literature, at all, read this, seriously. You won’t regret it.

1. Tell me about a story of yours that you feel like shouting about today…
I have a story called “DST (Fall Back)” that just came out in Autumn Cthulhu (Lovecraft eZine Press), edited by Mike Davis. It’s about a 40-year-old man who is summoned to a quaint town in Pennsylvania by the lover of his old college boyfriend, and all is not as it seems.
There were a few things I tried to accomplish in this story, either by design or in retrospect. First, I had to fit the theme of the anthology, which actually didn’t have a Lovecraftian or Mythos-related mandate per se, but the story did have to be weird/horror/etc. In other words, heavy on the Autumn, light on the Cthulhu. When I first think of the season I think of the leaves changing, and in fact my husband and I had recently taken something of a fall foliage trip to Milford, Pennsylvania.

One of our weekend activities was visiting Grey Towers, a stunning mansion and grounds once owned by the governor and now managed by the U.S. Forest Service. Fittingly, the property is veined with hiking trails. Not terribly far back in the woods, we came upon a large and mysterious structure, wooden and canted with a rusted ladder leading up into its occluded interior. I immediately though it must be some kind of immersive observatory– in the story I refer to it as a cosmoscope– though when I enquired the structure turned out to be an old water tower that had been out of use for decades. But my imagination had already decided otherwise…

So I had my theme and setting, and I had the beginning of a mystery to unravel (one that goes on to include a twenty-year-old Keoki album, the echoing realms of macrocosm and microcosm, and my longtime fascination with the origins and effects of daylight savings time). I still needed to develop my protagonist, however, so I took a page from my literary hero Elizabeth Hand. Her anti-heroine Cass Neary is a kind of dark mirror version of Hand, what they author might be like if– as she’s been known to put it– she had her brake lines cut at twenty years old. I wanted to try that in miniature, what I might be like if I’d never gotten over having my heart broken in college, the way our unnamed hero has never gotten over his ex. He forces himself to hide away his excruciating loneliness, and by suppressing it he lands up being haunted by it. And then I was off to the races.

2. Recommend me a novel/short story by someone else that you think everyone should be reading… 
The best thing I’ve read recently is “The Haferbräutigam” by Steve Berman in the new issue of the online magazine The Dark. It’s a deliciously eerie tale told from the point of view of a sexual predator in fin-de-siècle Germany, and centers on a disturbing encounter he has on a train with the title character, an attractive young man and would-be victim who turns out to be nothing of the sort. I’m not going to give anything more away, except to say that what you think is going to happen doesn’t, one of the many appeals of this nightmarish story (truly nightmarish, as it follows its own distorted kind of dream logic). Highly recommended– and free to read online!

1. Tell me about a novel of yours that you are the most proud of…
 Like most writers, our first novel is usually a labour of love that takes many years to write. My first, Drama Queens with Love Scenes took ten years and nearly as many drafts.
One reviewer made a point of saying he didn’t like my titles. In hindsight, I kind of get why. This title sounds like it might be about prissy queens in a bad love story.

The drama queens are thespians in my tale, dead ones at that. Allan and Warwick find themselves in the Limelight Quarter, the theatre district of the Afterlife, with no memory of how they got there.

Allan also doesn’t remember if they were lovers, but he does recall he had a crush on his friend, and still has those feelings. To his dismay, Warwick starts an affair with a talentless playwrite at the end of the first chapter.

As a debut novel it was well received, with everyone falling in love with my insecure angel character, Guy. His popularity surprised me, and while there is also a blonde 1950’s bombshell and a 19th century dame of the London stage, it’s the angel that captured readers’ hearts.

And it’s a tale which many reviewers put off reading at first, but then ‘got into the zone’ of my catty ‘hollywood style’ eternity.

2. Recommend me a novel/short story by someone else that you think everyone should be reading… For a short time there was a publisher I was courting for my first novel, and although that publisher is no longer with us, their first book is.

Morse Code for Cats is a coming of age story with an urban edge by Tom Conyers. It follows Sam who leaves his country roots after accidentally being discovered in the arms of one of his fellow cricket players.

He moves to Melbourne to find himself. I related to this because I moved to Sydney from a coastal town for the same reason. I attended similar parties and had nights out where the friends that I met in my twenties, ended up being remembered as the supporting cast of my early adult years. And as with Sam, I recalled see how these experiences shaped me.

​When the relevance of the title was revealed, my heart sank, and although gay lit has moved beyond coming out stories, this one will appeal to those who grew up before an internet age.