His Brother's Keeper

Rick Tulane
Trojan Classics/GX Inc., 1977? (undated)

Today's word is "twincest," the subject of this good-natured – in fact, positively breezy (breezy, not sleazy) -- novel about 16-year-old twins Barry and Gary, separated when they were barely a year old and raised on opposite coasts. Each is vaguely aware that he has a brother he's never met, but neither has any idea he's a twin. What happens when they finally meet is a riff on the subtly (all right, none-too subtly) salacious observation that gay couples often look sufficiently alike to be brothers.

Surfer-boy Barry Richards lives in Laguna Beach with his hunky dad, Kyle, wonderful stepmother, Mirium, and cute, 14-year-old half-brother, Kirk. Barry is a good kid who has plenty of friends and isn't prone to serious trouble – Mirium and Kyle can barely keep a straight face when they have to give him a talking to after a silly prank involving masturbation on a surfboard within full view of a public beach. Of course, Kyle and Mirium have no idea that Barry's started fooling around with other boys, including his best pal Billy and not-so-little Kirk who, believe me, didn't have to be asked twice.

But they're not hopelessly lax parents, either: After Barry gets caught at a pot party, Kyle pulls some strings without letting his son entirely off the hook. Barry won't have to be remanded to the juvenile authorities (thank goodness the chief of police is a pal!), but he will have to spend his summer vacation at Nevada's Mark Faire Summer Academy for Boys. On the plus side (make that the other plus side, since the whole thing is shaping up to be a win-win), Kyle is willing to let Kirk go along – he and Mirium couldn't be more delighted that their sons are so close.

Meanwhile, in Manhattan, Barry's brother Gary is getting into his own scrape. His puritanical stepfather, Tony, catches Gary and his tall, dark and handsome stepbrother, Ashley, going at it great guns and reacts, shall we say, badly… so badly that he has a stroke and nearly dies. Nearly, but not quite, and when he recovers sufficiently to tell Gary's mom, Nan, what he saw, well, that's the end of Gary and Ashley's smoking hot summer plans. Worse still, 18-year-old Ashley tries to paint Gary as the natural-born fag and himself as the chump who just went along for the ride. Bitch.

The upshot: Ashley packs his bag and hits the road, while Gary gets packed off to, yes, the Mark Faire Summer Academy for Boys to straighten out his head. The thing is, it really isn't a good place for anyone to get anything straightened out. But for gay teens looking to get some below-the-belt action in between swimming, horseback riding and other wholesome fun in the sun, well, it's just about perfect. And for Gary and Barry (plus sweetly precocious Kirk, who's determined not to miss out on what the "big boys" are getting up to), it's sheer, unadulterated nirvana.

It doesn't take long for the twins to find each other; after all, aach is stunning and together they're heart stoppers… it doesn't take long for word to get around about dreamboats like that, especially dreamboats with 11-inch cocks and fewer inhibitions (not to mention sweeter temperaments) than the average Tijuana whore. It's head-over heels love at first sight for the boys, and yet they're still sufficiently considerate to keep Kirk looked after and make sure Kirk's new little friend, Roger Wentworth, isn't left out in the cold. My God, these boys are shining saints in some heaven of gentle, all-inclusive, guilt-free underage fucking and sucking. And the minute meet they vow that they'll never, ever again let anyone separate them.

The story's only complications, such as they are, come straight from the Hayley Mills playbook: Before Barry and so each can get to know the parent he doesn't, which works out fabulously for Gary – Kyle needs little persuasion to succumb to his hotsie-totsy son's advances – while a few hours with the homophobic Tony and high-strung Nan make it clear to Barry that there's no place like home…. his laid-back SoCal home.

To recap, it's all so wrong and yet it feels so right, because there isn't a mean bone in His Brother's Keeper's body. No one is heart-broken, shamed, cast out or tarred with the white-hot humiliation of sexual self-doubt. Not only are Barry, Gary and Kirk nice kids with healthy, benevolent libidos, but they're surrounded by horny-yet-sympatico adults perpetually prepared to share their hard-earned experience but always careful not to pressure or coerce their teen charges into anything for which their unprepared.
As sexed-up, fundamentally verboten fantasies go , His Brother's Keeper is astonishingly sweet, driven by the promise that doing lewd things doesn’t have to put you on the express ramp to hell. What matters, it suggests, is how you do those things you do, and that entering the garden of earthly delights with a fundamentally generous spirit and unsoiled mind is the key to walking out unsoiled and with head held high.

This may all sound mighty airy fairy, but step back and have a think on this. What is it that separates filthy smut from classy erotica? The answer is nothing more or less than tone… it's less what your characters do than how they do it, and Rick Tulane's trampy teens rush in guided by open-hearted curiosity and knee-jerk mutual respect: They’re game for anything, including folks who aren't quite as game as they are. So in the end, what can you say but 'God love 'em?'

The Male Maulers

Lawrence Leclerc
1971, PEC/French Line

Twenty-two-year-old American art student Carl Hume loves everything about studying in France -- his instructors, fellow students, the beauty of the countryside -- everything except the fact that he can't walk down the street without being visually groped by men of every kind. Apparently La Jolla wasn't quite such a hotbed of homos, and Carl just isn't used to feeling like a Christmas ham in a kennel. In fact, the whole business is so embarrassing that he's rethought his decision to spend the holidays alone in Nice rather than at home and returns to his hotel to pack. Won't his parents be surprised and delighted!

And they no doubt would have been, had Carl not been drugged and abducted from his room at the charmingly shabby Hotel Hermitage the night before his intended departure. He wakes up bound to a bed in a country house he later learns is in Cannes, where a man who introduces himself as Rouge (and yes, he's a redhead) explains gently that Carl was kidnapped on the orders of Le Cartouche d'Acier ("tool of steel"), a procurer who runs a chain of brothels and occasionally fills special orders for super-rich clients with very specific tastes. Carl, says Rouge, has been sold to a sleek playboy with a yen for pretty virgins.

Carl can't believe what he's hearing: He's a human being, not an object. The hotel staff will call the police when they realize he's disappeared… so will his family when they fail hear from him. He's American, God's sake – things like this don't happen to Americans. In Europe, yet. Rouge leaves it to the boss to set Carl straight on all counts: Flesh is a commodity like any other, says Le Cartouche. He has an inside man at the hotel who carefully removed all traces of Carl; the gloomy little letter Carl wrote to his parents and decided not to mail – the one that could be taken for a suicide note – has been posted; things like this do happen to Americans and this thing has happened to him. If Carl has any sense at all, he'll do as he's told sooner rather than later.

Which Carl does – having seen the scars crisscrossing Rouge's back, he decides that being raped and degraded is better than being raped and degraded after being lashed within an inch of his life. And to his utter humiliation, Carl discovers that he kind of likes it… in fact, after two weeks he's stopped worrying about whether he's turning into a "real and true fag," and made his peace with the fact that he's pretty into sex with other men. Which is a good thing, because once Carl's playboy is done with him, Le Cartouche puts him through a couple of weeks of additional "training," bleaches his hair, rechristens him "Sandy" -- no doubt for the name's all-American, sun-and-fun loving connotations -- and puts him to work in one of his whorehouses.

Over the course of the next year, Sandy-Carl is moved from one French Riviera brothel to another for various reasons: Regulars get bored with l'Americain blonde, staffers take a dislike to the golden boy, petty jealousies ruffle the house hustlers' feathers. And then, a couple of days after Carl-Sandy has been installed in Le Cartouche's house in Nice, he spots a familiar face among the customers: Chet Barnes, a yacht crewman he knew slightly back in the US. Though Carl-Sandy briefly considers trying to contact Chet and plead for help, his hand is stayed by the sudden, devastating understanding that he can't go home again: The Carl Hume who left Southern California for a continental art school education is well and truly gone, his body snatched by a dead-eyed whore. Sandy-Carl even goes out of his way to inform Le Cartouche that he almost crossed paths with someone who knew him in the previous life that seems so impossibly long ago.

Sandy's loyalty gets him nothing except another transfer, this time to Menton, where he's assigned a series of clients who want special services (no doubt by way of reminding him that things can always be worse). Sandy-Carl does what he now knows is the only thing he can do. He rolls with the punches, the last of which is being sold to Yugoslavian pimp Petro Bosansko, whose Italian Riviera brothels are a step down the ladder from Le Cartouche's: The accommodations are less luxurious, the clients rougher and the hours more punishing.

Bosansko starts him off in a bordello in Ventimiglia, then moves him to San Remo, Imperio and Savona before finally putting him on a boat to La Spezia, home to what's rumored to be the wildest house in the Yugoslavian's chain. And it's during the trip that Carl-Sandy surrenders to the muted despair that's become his default state of mind and quietly throws himself into the inky water. But even suicide can't free him from whoredom: He's picked up by an Italian smuggling ship and raped by a hunchback who nearly bites his dick off, thrown overboard to drown and "rescued" yet again, this time by a Tunisian ship whose crew is itching for some entertainment. Or maybe it isn't Tunisian… it doesn't matter: "Well Carl," he whispers to himself as he assumes the position, "you wondered how you would end your days."

Wow. Who'd have guessed from the cover copy – "Passion bound by ties of silk – a new twist on Gay Paree!" – that what waited inside was a descent into the maelstrom, chronicle of ever-escalating misery that isn't even driven by the punitive cliche that there are no happy endings for queers, because Carl isn't even gay. He's just a sexually inexperienced kid whose decision to study abroad was clearly less about schooling than the desire for experience.

And for that naive hubris he's raped, forced into prostitution and conditioned to pretend he enjoys sex with the men who buy him, the alternative being brutal punishment. Placed in that context, Carl's "revelation" sounds more like a desperate psychological defense mechanism than a blinding moment of self-awareness, a retreat from the daily miseries of a situation he's powerless to change and one of his temporary keepers says as much (if only to himself):"Sandy's lovely brown eyes, one of his most attractive assets, had contained glints of bright intelligence when he arrived. [Now] they were more like the eyes of someone whose mind was constantly preoccupied by matters of very little importance." I don't know who Lawrence Leclerc was or is, but that's a sharp bit of writing, albeit a real downer in a porno novel -- nothing ruins a good sexual fantasy like being reminded that happy hookers are vastly outnumbered by exploited teenagers, desperate drug addicts and brutalized victims of sex trafficking. It's also truly remarkable in a book written at a time when "openly" gay men kept one foot in the closet, the 19th-century belief that prostitutes were nymphomaniacs (hence the term "daughters of joy") was still widespread and everyone knew it was impossible to rape a man.

The larger point is that like many other novels published by gay-porn houses (including the equally misrepresented Hot Asset!), The Male Maulers is a more complex and sharply observed piece of writing than it needed to be... in fact, its complexities are at odds with its apparent intentions. For all the frequent and graphic sex scenes, it's anything but a cheerful celebration of homosexual pleasures. But it's also not a finger-wagging warning that the express lane to hell is marked "Man Love;" Carl is less a martyr to his own deviant desires than a little American lamb beset by decadent foreign wolves. Change some pronouns and do a pair of global find and replaces (Carla for Carl, "cunt" for "cock") et voila: You have "The Female Maulers," a cautionary tale about the perils awaiting incautious coeds far from home and parental oversight.

Chamber of Homos

Guy Fawkes
PEC French Line, 1970

A gay gothic in the tradition of Peter Tuesday Hughes' far superior Master of Monfortin, Chamber of Homos deposits sexually naïve male nurse Sander Beach, desperate to raise $25,000. to keep his wastrel brother, Martin (a hospital administrator caught with his hand in the till), out of jail, into the lap of the wealthy, perverted Kratzner family.

It probably goes without saying that the Kratzners – from recently crippled, tranquilizer-dependent patriarch Matthew to his brood of squabbling legitimate and not-so-legitimate sons, are demanding, selfish and driven by the ever-corrupting love of money. And sex, of course, which provides the slender story with plenty of…. shall we say oomph.

Poor Sander – inevitably known to all as Sandy – of course has no idea what a testosterone poisoned quagmire awaits at the Kratzner estate on Bald Mountain (which seems to locate the story in northern Oregon… not that it especially matters). And don't think "Bald Mountain" as in Fantasia; think "bald mountain" as in smutty dick joke. Sander reports for duty shortly before Christmas, only to have Kratzner inform him that for the next week or so he won't have his own room – he'll have to bunk in the old gaming room because Kratzner's sons will be visiting for the holidays, along with the various boyfriends Kratzner neglects to mention but who considerably increase the head count. Once the brood flaps off back to the misbegotten caves in which they roost for the rest of the year, Sandy can have his pick of bedrooms. That doesn't sound so bad, right?

Well, enter the heirs apparent. Julius is a compulsive drinker and ass-grabber built like a college athlete fast running to fat, and his friend Gene; Julius is despised by all his brothers because he has a knack for wheedling extra money from their dad. Julius is convinced that Gene has hot pants for his lean, white-haired brother Manny, who arrives with his lover, plump bottle-blond Monty, but is always up for some side action, in part because Monty is given to drinking himself into a stupor on a nightly basis. Hans, the chubby brother, shows up with hunky boyfriend Carl, whose hair is a deeply unnatural shade of black, while surgeon Bernie, a broad shouldered drunk with "a shock of salt and pepper hair," turns up alone – his boyfriend, interior decorator Dion, is due to blow in later.

Fritz, who has a startling white buzz cut, is with his red-headed boyfriend Gerald (another one who's no stranger to hair dye); black-sheep Max parachutes in with a bleeding shoulder wound, apparently having busted out of jail, and is followed by Don, the last of the brood; he's a slender redhead (presumably real) in a leopard-skin coat and has an ugly sense of fun. Whew! Given that one of the boys eventually confides to Sander that they all learned the ropes of being homos by spying on their dad's liaisons with sundry servants, Matt appears to have risen to his conjugal duties with admirable vigor. The contingent is completed by family attorney Morris Blount, a tall, handsome, lanky fellow with curly grey hair who immediately finds himself on the horns of a dilemma: His first loyalty is to the Kratzner family, but if Max really is a fugitive, Morris stands to be disbarred if he fails to turn him in. So yeah, it's a full house: Seven brothers, five brides and an attorney, in addition to Matt, his "colored retainer and bodyguard" Nicholas, butlers Peter and Rube (occasionally Ruby; whether that's a typo or an inconsistent alternate term of address I couldn't say), chauffeur Herman, factotum Silas, cook Marvin and his assistant, Andy, and God knows who else – the Bald Mountain house is vast.

Not that the details matter: The gist is that everyone is after man-sex newbie Sander, and most of them aren't very nice about it. None of the Kratzner boys likes being thwarted and some – like Don, who half-seduces/half rapes him within hours of his arrival (the lesson apparently being that you underestimate mincing queens in leopard coats at your virtue's peril) – are downright nasty. Don is also of the kiss-and-tell persuasion (of course he is), so by the time Sander comes downstairs for breakfast the next morning, is reputation is in roughly the same condition as his sheets. Manny sagely remarks, "Christmas just gets merrier every year," while Bernie quietly suggests that Sander should keep his door locked and bolted from now on, and should never, ever let his guard down.

Good advice that Sander quickly has occasion to put to use: Don, who's been drinking since before Sander crawled out of bed, attempts to assault third-floor butler Rube, and when Julius intervenes, Don turns on Sander. This time Sander manages to flip Don over his shoulder, then returns to his room, locks the door, has a slug of bourbon – it isn't noon yet, and to all appearances he's the late starter -- and prepares to take a shower. Once again, probably needless to say, he isn't even undressed when he overhears something going on in the room next door. Turns out that jealous Julius called the Manny-Gene situation right, and since Gene is quite the talker, Sander learns all kinds of interesting, if not necessarily useful things, notably that what God gave Man o' War had nothing on what He saw fit to bestow on Manny. No wonder the cleansing power of hot water proves insufficient to wash away Sander's dirty thoughts about the handsome Rube. And then the storm to end all storms blows up, stranding the whole hissing, spitting, clawing kit and caboodle of them on Bal Mountain until further notice.

Fortunately, Sander has now gotten the lay of the land (in all senses of the phrase), and wastes no time getting to know poor Rube, who turns out to be the good time who's been had by all the Kratzner brothers and not because he wanted to – old man Matt told him in no uncertain terms that refusing any of them would mean his job. And if he loses his job the next stop will be prison – Nicholas was railroaded by a previous employer, and Matt got him out to serve as a diversion for his boys. The only person who's ever stood up for him is Nicholas, probably, Rube says, "because we're both colored." Sander is appropriately horrified, and so is Bernie, who's shaping up to be the black sheep of the Kratzner clan, which is to say that he's the only one with some kind of conscience and rudimentary empathy.

Soon after, Sander has the misfortune to hear Matt abusing Nicholas and threatening to get rid of him and find a new nurse who isn't such a stuck up prude. That doesn't sound good, and it takes on a distinctly ominous cast the next morning, when the storm knocks out the electricity. Next thing you know, Sander is fending off Gerald – who, taking a cue from Don, is hammered before breakfast – and Hans. A little party strikes Manny and Gene as a good idea, as it does lat(ish) arrivals Monty, Morris, Fritz and Julius. Eight to one being bad odds in any game, Sander's soiled virtue is once again at risk. "You dirty, filthy beasts," he wails as they have their way with him. This time Sander is rescued -- a little late, to be sure, but long before the Kratzner pervs are done – by Marvin, who gently walks him to the kitchen and rustles up good slug of apricot brandy. Bernie meanders in and advises Sander to get the hell out while the going is good – or at least not so bad – but then Peter suddenly falls ill and dies, Rube disappears and it's too late for goodbyes. Oh, and Marvin drops another bombshell: There's a monster in the basement, and if that's where Rube is, then it's time to start cutting losses. Marvin isn't the only one who knows about the monster, either. Or at least, not the only one who knew. A couple of years ago, Monk, yet another butler, heard him shuffling around in the boiler room; but Monk burned to death while smoking in bed, so there's no asking him now. And there was a college kid named Bill who worked at the mansion for a while and took off like a shot after he saw something in the basement.

That night, Sander drifts into a troubled sleep, and is awakened by Matt's voice ordering Nicholas to tie him up. Nicholas rapes him, and then reties him back to back with the battered Rube – the Kratzner boys are going to have fun tonight! But before they do, Rube spills the whole story of what's going on. Rube, it turns out, is the only child of the late Erna Kratzner – Matt's fair-skinned boys, all seven, are his, but not one was Erna's ad the family's millions were hers. Matt thought he was the only one fooling around with servants – like Peter's mother, a maid named Emerald – but Erna was a nymphomaniac who got busy every time he was out of town. She left everything to Matt, but stipulated that he could only leave it to his children. And that means Rube is the only legitimate – albeit illegitimate – heir and all the other bastards want to kill him, though not until after they're done screwing him and that nosy nurse, Sander. And just when just when it looks as though things can't get worse, in comes the monster, his face hidden within the kind of hood that 40 years later would have gotten him shot on sight in Florida. Except that he's not a monster – what monster wears sneakers? He's the missing Monk, who unties Rube and Sander – he's going to have to retie them, he says; he can't protect them physically because the untreated burns he suffered two years earlier have left him "like a steer with its hide ripped off," but he can give them some time together. And so Rube and Sander wash up, enjoy a couple of hours of warm, sweet passion, and wait for Matt and his buggering brood return to torture them. Which they due, only to be stopped in their filthy tracks by the arrival of the naked, burn-scarred monster of Bald Mountain, who wraps up the sturm und drang with a snub-nose revolver.

Well, that was a little somethin' somethin.' Not sure what, but something both kinda sorta gothic and sorta kinda creepy --- all that raping -- and seriously, major league silly. Oh, and the "monster" is a horribly burned black man – suck on that… all you gimlet eyed eviserators of hackneyed cultural tropes: We're doubling down on the monstrosity hand because Monk is both African-American and handicapped. Let's just say that Chamber of Homos is no Master of Montfortin, by pasticheur extraordinaire Peter Tuesday Hughes, a writer who really knew how to grab genre tropes by the balls and squeeze 'em till they sang.

Which isn't to say it's uninteresting: Killer-queen Don is a nice subversion of the sissy stereotype: He may be slim and partial to femmy fashions (come on – you want that leopard coat, even if you'd never buy it for all the right reasons), but in bed he's all butch – Sander crawls away from their encounter like someone who's just been rolled over by an asphalt spreader. Neither Rube nor Nicholas has an ounce of either Stepin Fetchit or noble negro in him; they're no better or worse than anyone else caught up in the Kratzner-family maelstrom of monstrosity. They're just who they are; their faults and virtues are their own. Ditto Sander and Rube's relationship: It's not fetishistic – Sander is too new to having sex with other men to have started fixating on things like screwing black men – and it isn't rooted in master-slave clichés: It's pure attraction sparked by mutual adversity, and the book's brief epilogue makes it clear that their bond has staying power. It's not the stuff of conventional happily ever aftering, but it's resilient and satisfying, a nice little surprise at the end of a novel that isn't exactly trying to excel.

Hot Asset!

George Kiva
Surrey Press, 1974

WARNING: The last few paragraphs include photos of another edition of Hot Asset! that features hardcore images. If you're reading this blog, you can probably deal with it, but I mention it in the interest of not catching you by surprise.

"Hot Asset! is the story of Terry's hot ass, and how completely he used it for fun and games," promises the meretriciously misleading one-page introduction to this novel by George Kiva (Things Never Went Right…). Suffice it to say that, like Things Never Went Right…, it's more on the order of a sexually explicit Book of Job than a cheerfully smutty one hander: In his search for love, 14-year-old Terry Brunner – the story's first-person narrator -- is sexually assaulted, humiliated, taunted, shunned and tortured. All he wants is a relationship -- he's not a shameless little boy hussy -- and he's used and betrayed at every turn.

It's hard to imagine anyone wanting to do anything but cry for young Terry when he's finally delivered into the hands of the monstrously misguided Dr. Stone for behavioral modification by electroshock aversion therapy, Terry's brave, unspoken declaration that he's finally learned he can take anything the bastards dish out notwithstanding.

Reprint: American Art Enterprises, 1991
Back to the beginning: The last paragraph includes Terry is an ordinary kid; nice looking – nothing special, but clear-skinned, mop-haired and slim – lives with his parents, grandmother, bratty younger brother, Cleaver, and brainy older sister, Gladys. After an off-putting bit of childish experimentation within the cozy confines of a closet when Terry was seven – his little friend Toby urinated in his mouth while they were playing doctor – Terry has had no interest in fooling around with other boys.
But that changes the afternoon a sudden downpour drives Terry and his friends Paul and Ronnie into the "clubhouse" -- an unused garage Paul's older brother, Charlie, has accessorized with movie posters, playing cards and scratchy, red-velvet sofa – and Paul suggests a game of strip poker. Scrawny, risk-averse Ronnie bails when he's down to his shorts, but Terry stays and gets his introduction to a brave new world of blow jobs and mind games.

Paul soon persuades Terry to take a day-trip into Philadelphia and let his pal Mr. Feldman snap some porno pictures of them together; they're just for pervy Mr. F's private use, Paul promises, and Feldman won't show either of their faces. Plus he'll pay them $100.00 apiece – that's a lot of money for young teen in the early '70s.

Paul also lets Terry in on a secret: He's part of the "T Club" – six boys, including his brother and classmates Joe Getty, John McPhillips, Larry Turpin and Jim Russell – who meet on Tuesdays and Thursday to have orgies in the clubhouse, and Paul promises to recommend Terry for inclusion as soon as one of the existing members drops out. Terry toughens up enough to arrange a little accident (a tripwire is involved) for Joe Getty in hopes of filling his slot in the T Club, but his little ploy backfires – Joe spots him lurking near the scene of his accident -- and Terry is instead blacklisted by the very renegades who are his best chance of acceptance.

Someone more experienced and less emotionally needy than Terry would have pegged Paul for a manipulative user in a minute, but it takes Terry longer. Even when everyone from Principal Vearling to the Reverend Watson starts pawing Terry's hot assets -- for one awful moment it even looks as though his own father wants a piece, though that turns out to be a false alarm – it doesn't dawn on Terry that Paul might have something to do with it.

It's only when he learns that he's on the cover of a glossy porno magazine called The Suckers -- as is Paul, his face as carefully obscured or cropped out of every shot as Terry's is front and center -- that he realizes Paul is s manipulated, selfish little creep. And by then he's acquired a nickname – "Coverboy" – and been handed over to Dr. Stone, who believes that heavy-duty meds and aversion therapy (think Alex's "treatment" in A Clockwork Orange) can teach the gayest little gay boy to get it up for girls.
Eventually driven to attempt suicide, Terry finally flees and – once again putting his trust in Paul -- makes his way back to Mr. Feldman. The deal Paul has brokered: Terry will star in a porno movie for free and Feldman will get him a houseboy position with Eddie Leiber, and enthusiastic buyer of his wares. At first it looks as though Terry is once again getting screwed in every way: Making the movie is agonizing, Feldman shoos Terry away with nothing but the bus fare needed to get him to his new employer's home – a downtown hotel -- and Leiber turns out to be a cripple.

But surprise, surprise: Leiber – left paraplegic by a wound sustained in Vietnam -- is also handsome, greets Terry like a genial host rather than an entitled buyer, and overall seems pretty decent -- even allowing for the fact that he knows Terry is chicken, and desperate chicken at that. Leiber is paying for sex and doesn't pretend otherwise: He has a maid to clean, a nurse to bathe him and hotel kitchen to deliver meals. But he also wants friendship and knows that to get thatyou have to give it; Eddie in fact turns out to be the one good thing that's happened to Terry in the last year: He talks to him like a person, rather than handling him like an object.

And Paul manages to ruin that as well: When he learns that the Brunner family is offering a reward for information about Terry's whereabouts, he narcs on him.So that's how Terry winds up strapped into a monstrous, 20th-century medical excuse for a chastity belt, heavily medicated and locked in a miserable psych ward run by Dr. Stone. Pretty much the ultimate downer (anyone who managed to get a thrill or two from Terry's more lurid sexual adventures no doubt by this point feels as though submerged in a metal tub of ice.

So let's call it resolved: Hot Asset! is no cheap thrill. But having persevered with Terry through the tortures of the beautiful and the damned, it's hard not to rally around his declaration of self: Terr's circumstances could hardly be worse, but his resolve is awe-inspiring. He's been guilty of naivte, to be sure, but only because he leads with his heart and trusts in the kindness of strangers, a trust whose repeated violation fails to make Terry cold or cruel or opportunistic.

"That night as I lay in my new bed by the window, I tried to see stars in the sky but could see nothing but blackness," Terry says as Hot Asset! draws to a close. "I tried to move my body, to get my hand down under the shield, to pull the corset away… but I was unable to accomplish anything.

"Feeling highly frustrated, I thought of Eddie Leiber paralyzed in his wheelchair and suddenly realized that this was the way Eddie was, that he felt the same way, that he was incapable fo satisfying even the most basic urges. Just as suddenly I began to cry, not for myself, but for the Eddie Leibers of the world.

"I knew than that I could stand anything Dr. Stone had to offer, however horrible, because I had to get back to Eddie somehow. I had to tell him that I knew how he felt, and that I had felt the same, however briefly.

And that's the Hot Asset! sucker punch, the icy-hot dagger straight to the heart that transforms a kind of mean, kitchen sink saga of blue-collar, queer teen misery into a rallying cry as at odds with the book's cover photo of some dishy bleach-blond trash reclining on a gravel-topped roof as it is with the 'step right up for underage thrills and chills' intro.

Like Kiva's relentlessly grim Things Never Went Right…, Hot Asset! is anti-porn, a coming-of-age story in which life runs vicious roughshod over a boy four years too young to so much as drink, vote or be drafted… hardly a far-fetched observation given that the Vietnam War was still raging when Hot Asset! was written and it's mentioned explicitly in the text.
But its vivid potency is undeniable: Terry Brunner's story is a tragedy lightened with a spark of hope and his personal trials speak to the experiences of a generation of gay men who fought for the little shots of happiness that came effortlessly to straight couples.
Unlike Kiva's vivid but hopeless Things Never Worked Out Right… , Hot Asset! ends on a hopeful note: Terry has been disappointed, betrayed and brutalized, but he never for a moment doubts that he's a gay boy on his way to being a gay man. And when every hand seems raised against him, Terry stands fast. His last words are these:
"…I had to tell [Eddie Leiber] that I loved him and if he would let me, I'd spend the rest of my life sucking [his] magnificent cock."

Set aside for a moment your personal feelings about cocksucking (note that I'm not asking you to forget, a far more difficult thing): The sheer power of Terry's resolve to be true to his desires and devotion to those who love him freely and without reservation is a powerfully liberating thing, a force to be celebrated rather than censured.

And in a brutally conflicted book like Hot Assets!, it's little short of a miracle, a flower on a dung heap.

Hot Asset! has proved to have remarkable staying power for such a remorseless downer of a book. In addition to the original Surrey Press edition -- which I've never seen but would love to own -- and the 1991 edition pictured at top, there was a third in 2000. Published by Tri-cite/Star Distributors' baldly named "Gay Erotica" line, now priced at $5.95 to the second edition's $3.95 (I'm guessing the first probably set readers back $1.75, the average for an adults-only paperback in the early '70s), with a cover that renders the title without an exclamation point. The punctuation is back on the first inside page... not that anyone who happened to catch sight of it wherever it was being sold a mere 12 years ago is likely to have noticed, any more than they would have the fact that the next page claims it was reprinted with the permission of "Surry" House, Tri-cite/Star's photo cover being what it is.

The legal disclaimer regarding the age of the cover models -- they're "18 years old or older" -- seems rather sanctimonious in the context of a book bulging with ads for phone-sex lines where you can chat one-on-one with sexy she males or get double-teamed by frat brothers like the ones on the full-color back cover. Between the lucky lad whom someone probably thought vaguely resembled Risky Business-era Tom Cruise perched uncomfortably on what night be a headboard, with a giant bar-code block printed over his fully clothed crotch, and the naked "frat boys" by whom he's flanked, clearly ready to fulfill a promise sufficiently obscene that I'll leave it to your imagination, the image is utterly and I assume unintentionally hilarious.

The HIS 69 Artist's Sketchbook

Adam
Surrey House, 1972

Though labeled "Volume One" on the inside, I've never seen a trace of a "Volume Two," which surprises the hell out of me, since one-name artist Adam's covers for the HIS 69 line -- then only a year old -- appear to have been hugely popular. So what reader wouldn't have wanted an oversized (8"x11") collection of frontal nudes, many variations on those cover images? And for $3.00, when the price of a single novel was $1.95?

Beats the hell out of me, but poor sales is the only reason I can think of, unless Adam -- who alludes to an upcoming second volume in his one-page intro -- had some kind of quarrel with Surrey House. And that seems unlikely, given that he continued illustrating for them through the '70s.

To be fair, there was a lot of going on going on in New York in those days. But still, isn't the Adam story just too porno perfect? He also purportedly thinks "one of the best phrases of his day is, "Let it all hang out!" I've always been curious about Adam's identity, and haven't been able to find out a thing about that, either. Except of course for the aforementioned intro, which sounds roughly as plausible as most HIS 69 plot lines.

Adam claims to live in Greenwich Village (of course, because that's where artists live), and says that if he weren't so serious about his work, his studio "could easily turn into nothing more than another New York City Action playhouse." He's "built up a really fantastic photo and sketch collection of some of the greatest studs on the East coast," and okay, he isn't so serious that his studio doesn't turn into a New York City playhouse some of the time.
Of course, if it weren't for time-lapse shutters that collection of photos would be considerably less robust, because, yes, "it isn't unusual for yours truly to get a bit carried away and join the fun."

But to give Adam his due, he's a terrific artist and his pencils are actually much more appealing than the versions that made it onto books, in large part because of the endless variety of sickly pinks, greens, tans and blues used on HIS 69 two-color covers. This (right) is one the line's two house formats; if you're curious, you can see the other here, on the unexpected genre-twister Boys Behind Bars.

Unlike many of the artists hired by adults-only publishers, Adam's anatomical rendering is excellent and he can actually draw faces, which is more than can be said for the much-collected Tom of Finland. In all, The HIS 69 Artist's Sketchbook is an attractive adjunct to any collection of '70s gay porn... would that you could still buy it for $3.00. And if anyone has a lead on the elusive Adam, I'd love to know.

Boys Behind Bars

Benjamin David
Manhard Books/Surrey House, 1973

Sluts in the slammer stories are the sugar cookies of smut: Dependable, basic gratification. When you buy a book called Boys Behind Bars, you know what you're getting, even before the back-cover blurb spells it out: "Take one detention cell and fill it with horny boys and something is going to happen… fast! As quick as his faded uniform was stripped from his body, he was thrown face down, and held there… until every boy in the cell had it!" Except when you don't… Benjamin David's apparently formulaic adults-only pulp is something altogether stranger and more moving than you'd have any reason to expect.

Sweet-faced, 16-year-old Tod Custis, a math prodigy from Champaign, Illinois, wafts into Dorm 3-C, St. Elmo's Reformatory (named for the 3rd-century martyr associated with luminous electrical sparking) on a cloud of sleazy tabloid celebrity: The smart money says this slim, brainy newbie, convicted of killing his parents, is no match for eleven hardened delinquents aching for a piece of his famous and no-doubt cherry ass.

The smart money, however, is wrong. Custis is tougher than he looks -- way tougher – along with more ruthless, disciplined, devious, sex savvy, manipulative and image conscious, which is where self-taught rocker Billy Joe Winslow, a handsome blond with violet eyes and a knack for tailoring prison rags so they show off a fellow's manly assets, comes into the picture.

Within weeks, Custis is in a position to do cushy time: He's got power, privileges and Winslow, a great lay, good time and kindred spirit. But staying isn't an option: Born into poverty, incest and abuse, Custis caught a once-in-a-lifetime break when a teacher spotted his gift for math and lost it to his degenerate biker dad, Rod. Rod caught his wife with her lover, beat them both to death and staged the crime scene to implicate Custis. Smart by nature and brutalized from birth, Custis has been plotting revenge for a long, long time, but Winslow has thrown him for a loop. Blindsided by something that seems an awful lot like love, he lays his cards on the table – he doesn't want to leave St. Elmo's without Winslow. Common sense says that smalltime offender Winslow should stay put, serve his penny-ante time and walk away free and clear. But it's not about logic for him, either, so that's that.

The escape goes smoothly until their getaway car blows a tire, but fate is in a benevolent mood: A silver Mercedes materializes out of the two-lane darkness, with rich, horny, drug-addled hippie poet Yseult Homann-Potter at the wheel. She not only gives the lost boys she dubs her "lambs" a lift to Chicago, but installs them in the deluxe digs she shares with her twin brother, Tristram (how creepy is that?) and introduces them to life in the divinely decadent lane.

And this is where Boys Behind Bars takes an unlikely detour, leaving the high-octane, couple-on-the-run highway for the thorny back roads of relationship work. It's going to take a whole lot of negotiating if the fairy tale romance that blossomed in the hothouse of St. Elmo's is going to survive in the real world. Who'd have seen that coming?

Custis and Winslow are no strangers to using what they have to get what they want: When Yseult puts the Eastern sex-as-divine-ecstasy moves on Winslow in the car, he figures he's paying for the ride. Custis picks up the rent by indulging the besotted Tristram – a luxury apartment overlooking Lake Michigan is the last place anyone will be looking for a pair of underage fugitives – always figured finding his father would involve screwing his way through the kinky local biker scene for as long as it took.

But damned if love doesn’t turn out to be a game changer and double damned if Custis and Winslow don't rise to the challenge. They drop the depersonalizing reform-school convention of last names for Tod and Billy Joe, and when jealousy threatens to drive a wedge between them, they talk it out; mutual vulnerability replaces the cock-driven one upmanship that used to get them hot and they escape the numbing effects of selling themselves to strangers by retreating into the piercing intimacy of cuddling. Can you say "world-class WTF?"

Except that in retrospect, author "Benjamin David" plays fair. Instead of trying to sell the idea that love transforms the Custis of Dorm 3-C – to all appearances a sociopath who uses sexual humiliation to establish authority, keep would-be alpha dogs in line and get his rocks off in the process – David transforms the reader's perception of Custis. The turning point is during Winslow and Custis' escape; Custis steals a terrified Baptist boy's car and stashes his bound, naked and whimpering hostage on the back-seat floor of his own vehicle. What he doesn't do is abuse the vulnerable youth, because the fact is, Custis was never a sociopath... just a pragmatist tempered in a particularly hellish fire: He lies when there's no upside to telling the truth – no one will ever believe he didn't kill his parents, so why bother – uses sex as a weapon because it delivers maximum return on minimum effort and exploits weakness to further his own ends. People get MBAs for mastering the same skill set in graduate school. The kid on the floor is naked because Custis needed a change of clothes and tied up on the floor because as long as he's back there he's not siccing the police on Winslow and Custis' asses. When the lovers are forced to ditch the car for a new ride. Custis' last thought is that Duane's junker will stay warm long enough that he'll be found before he freezes.

That's kind of subtle for porno, and makes you feel okay about being glad the boys get a happy ending. They may not wind up being happily ever after, but once Tod has had his face-to-face with his dad – whom he chooses not to kill – he and Billy Joe walk away from the fancy digs, perverted bikers, lost souls and wealthy wastrels willing to do anything to feel something and hit the road, heading West to face the future together.

I've never run across another book by "Benjamin David" and have no idea who he is or was. But anyone who can stir together couple-on-the-run clichés, vicious vivisection of '70s-style let-it-all-hang-out self-indulgence (a mere three years into the decade, remember), hellbound nihilism a la Jim Thompson, raunchy sex and the conviction that love can motivate a pair of throwaway teens to transcend the kind of deprivation that grinds strong men into the dirt to produce a thoroughly readable pulp novel is okay by me.

Two, the Hard Way and Murder 0ne

One could easily mistake this pair of hard-boiled mysteries by Sydney Harper for the start of a series distinguished by gimmicky numerical titles. Well think again, babe.

First, Murder One and Two the Hard Way are essentially variations on the same story, a minimalist mystery in which a handsome, rugged detective with obvious but unacknowledged sexual-identity issues catches a nasty gay-related murder in a cold, outdoorsy city -- Minneapolis and Denver, respectively – gets in touch with his inner homosexual, meets his equally manly soul mate, has sex with underage hustlers and discovers that his case hinges on the victim's fondness for very young boys. Reading them back-to-back reading multiplies the creepiness factor exponentially, for reasons to be discussed in due course.

Two, The Hard Way
Blueboy Library, 1976

Two, the Hard Way opens in the lavish but tastefully decorated Denver apartment of 38-year-old businessman Harold Deter, as he's being serviced by underage hustler Billy Marsh, already an eager and seasoned pro at the age of fifteen. Neither hears the front door open or notices the approach of a stealthy gunman who kills both with a shot to the head.

Some time later, movie-star handsome homicide detective Larry Baldwin, 32, is dragged out of bed for a briefing about the double homicide. Not that he's sorry to leave this particular bed, which belongs to the hot cocktail waitress who picked him up a couple of nights ago and probably wishes she hadn't, given that he's proved a non-starter in the sack. Maybe Larry could have risen to the occasion had her bathroom not been a filthy tarn of damp stockings and half-used cosmetics... or maybe not. In any event, the vicious murder gives him an excuse to both clear out and stop thinking about the whole business.

The cops know when the crime occurred – Deter's nosy neighbors put the time at 4:11PM – and have a suspect in Deanna Baldwin (everyone calls her DeeDee, she purrs), the victim's beautiful business partner and in-name-only wife. Four years earlier, she claims, Deter suddenly turned gay, but they stayed together because divorce is bad for business and their business – Deter Electronics – was thriving. Unfortunately, Deanna has a solid alibi for the time of the killings: She was luxuriating in the building's deluxe, well-staffed spa. And she professes ignorance of the underage hustler stuff; as far as she knew, her late husband favored men like hunky, Denver-based country-rocker Bruce Tallman.

Larry, one month away from embarking on a new career as a lawyer and already burdened with plenty of cases he'd like to close, wants no part of the Deter homicide: It was all the earmarks of a sordid, time-consuming quagmire. But the department is short staffed, so he's stuck with it: The only upside is that it's a perfect excuse to blow off Laura, and so what if the bitch calls him a "goddamned fairy?" Without any real leads, Larry decides to interview Tallman, but like DeeDee, the singer has an ironclad alibi: He was in Aspen doing a live TV appearance. Tallman also turns out to be a hell of a nice guy and a great host, assuming you can overlook the fact that he plies Larry with hashish-laced hot chocolate and then takes sexual advantage of him.

Fortunately, Larry emerges from the experience positively glowing -- even longtime colleague Sid notices when he stops by the office for an update – and bearing the names of two persons of interest: Realtor Clark Cavanaugh, who had a brief fling with Deter, and engineer Bert Johnson, who was apparently trying to sell Deter some new invention. Sid's news, by contrast, is all bad: The murder weapon was wiped clean and the rent boy had no criminal connections – he was just a spoiled rich kid who hung out with "a group of fags" at a notorious queer cruising place. Huh… Larry realizes that Sid always talked about homosexuals that way, but he's suddenly bothered by it.

Cavanaugh turns out to be a penny-ante creep, but Johnson went missing several days earlier, which is suggestive but of no immediate help. So while Sid looks into Johnson's background, Larry heads out to interview Billy Marsh's best friend, Bobby Larson. He finds the truant teen home alone, and learns that the Billy and Bobby were lovers who hustled for walking-around money: Bobby is poor and Billy's homophobic dad was a skinflint. Deter propositioned both boys the day he was killed, but Bobby begged off to go fishing with his dad. And then next thing you know, hot-eyed little Bobby has his hands down Larry's pants and isn't taking "no" for an answer... not that Larry is actually saying no to the little nympho's eager ministrations, even though he knows Bobby is only 14 and has the rounded, baby-fat body and "cute little cock" of a boy several years younger. Let's pause for a recap: Billy is seriously underage, Larry is old enough to be his father, an officer of the law and doesn't even have the excuse of being drunk or high, but he just can't help himself and eaderly agrees to come back for more. Your tax dollars at work.

Sid, meanwhile, has located Johnson, who admits that that Deter Electronics optioned his design for a revolutionary remote control but says the deal stalled so he started secretly shopping the device to other companies, which puts him out of town when Deter was killed. DeeDee, on the other hand, is looking more and more guilty: Filing a claim way in excess of the insurance coverage she led Larry to believe her husband was carrying makes her a liar, and if she'll lie about money who knows what else she's lying about. But there's still the matter of that alibi…

Larry needs a break and jumps on Bruce's invitation to spend some quality time in his weekend cabin; they run into Bobby along the way and take him along. Larry once again gets his erotic horizons expanded, starting with a three-way shower grope. And amazingly enough, he still has the energy for a brainstorm: A little highly illegal breaking-and-entering later, Larry has proof that DeeDee staged her alibi using cutting-edge electronic equipment. The case is closed and Larry leaves the force for a new life as a happily gay man with a new career, well-hung lover Tallman and, presumably, little Bobby to warm up those cold, dark Colorado nights.

Nice gay-positive ending and all, but there's no getting around the Bobby problem…
I mean, we're not talking a "high school hotties" novel in which humpy youngsters under the age of consent fool around together. Narratives dealing with mutual sexual exploration between teenagers may be aimed at horny older readers, but are by their nature less tainted by highly-charged issues of power, authority and meaningful consent than novels like Murder One and its follow up, Two the Hard Way, which blow past issues of significant age difference (20-some-odd years), economics (rich dilettante vs. poor scrambler) and social standing (cop vs. underage hustler) as though they didn't exist. And we haven't even gotten to the matter of tone, which counts in a big way.

Two,the Hard Way fairly reeks of predatory self-justification: Oh, no, it's not the 32-year-old cop or the hunky, middle-aged celebrity in charge here: It's the insatiable, hypersexual child ("child" being the noun most often associated with Bobby) who makes the first move and directs the carnal circus. Add the fact that Harper describes Bobby in a way that suggests someone even younger than 14 and there's no getting around it: Larry and Bruce are screwing a kid, which is both unsettling and puzzling, in that by 1976 most porn professionals had figured out that the business was all about niche appeal, in that most people's erotic triggers are fairly specific and what doesn't appeal often actively repels. So titles generally made clear what the consumer should expect -- if you never imagined that Fathers and Sons and Lovers or Basket-Kissing Cousin involved incest, well then, more fool you. But running smack into pedophilia in the hard-boiled Murder One, well, that could be a shock to the system.

Blueboy Library actively solicited reader feedback, encouraging them to write in "about any subject, likes and dislikes, concerning our books" and promised that "all suggestions are weighed when making editorial decisions." I'd love to know what kind of correspondence they received concerning Two, the Hard Way, because I can't help but think that some readers would have preferred their neo-noir sex fantasies without the side of child molestation. Blueboy published Harper's Murder One the following year (which means it was almost certainly in the pipeline when Two, the Hard Way came out), and as far as I can tell, that was the last of Sydney Harper.

Murder One
Blueboy Library, 1977

Set in freezing, snowy Minneapolis, Murder One begins with blond-haired, blue-eyed, 32-year-old homicide detective Bert Sonderstrom watching a gay stag movie recovered from the apartment of middle-aged murder victim Mel Aanerud. It gets Bert to idly reminiscing about his first sexual encounter, when he was 11 and his best friend, Jimmy, was 14. Not that he's gay or anything. Bert is dating a girl named Betty and has even thought about proposing, though he liked her a lot better when she was a trembling virgin... Maybe sweet talking Betty into bed wasn't such a great idea, because she took to sex like a tigress to raw meat and Bert just isn't into sexually aggressive women.

Anyway, back to the crime: Aanerud, a quiet, well-off financial consultant, was married, but his invalid wife has been in a Maryland convalescent home for years. His upscale apartment is tastefully decorated (too-chic '50s Paul McCobb moderne, if you please) and "neat as a pin," a dramatic contrast to Aanerud's messy corpse. The dead man was both shot in the head and castrated, though oddly enough, the castration occurred several hours after death. Bert's partner, Barney, cleverly pegs it as "a fag murder," but the only clue is a receipt from a gas station in semi-rural Anoka, some 35 miles north of the city and not exactly Greenwich Village's contry cousin. Bert checks it out anyway, and the chatty station owner not only recognizes Aanerud's photo but directs Bert to his isolated weekend house and volunteers that Aanerud never had visitors, but local kid David Martin looked after the place during the week.

Bert is checking the place out – making careful note of Aanerud's substantial collection of gay porn -- when who should show up but pretty little David, who quickly reveals that he and Aanerud liked photographing themselves recreating poses from a favorite porn book. The snapshots are nowhere to be found, but just thinking about them excites David, who proves well trained (Harper prefers the word "conditioned") in the art of servicing adult men and had Bert's repressed number at hello.

Bert knows fooling around with an 11-year-old is 100 different kinds of wrong, but -- like Larry Baldwin -- can't resist the aggressive child's hairless body ("covered with a layer of delightfully plump baby fat") "cute little penis" and insatiable lust for cock. David proceeds to blow Bert's, um, mind six ways to Sunday, and several hours later the dazed cop has gone from same-sex virgin to master of the gay Kama Sutra thanks to the tutelage of a precocious pre-teen (it's surely no coincidence that Bert was Bobby's age when he dallied with Jimmy, though he's apparently so stupefied that the whole business has abruptly slipped his mind). Everything is downhill from there: Someone tries to run Bert off the road as he drives back to Minneapolis and Betty is just plain nasty when he isn't in the mood for sex, accusing him of being queer before throwing him out on his ass.

The next day, Bert pursues David's casual remark that Aanerud had a friend named Jerome who ran a gym, eventually locating the Roman Palace Heath Club and its owner, Jerome Whitman. Jerome swears that Aanerud had no enemies and has an airtight alibi for the time of the murder: He was in jail on a DUI rap. He also knows all about the dirty photos and is puzzled that they weren't at the house – that's where Aanerud kept them. He suggests that Bert check up on a coke-addicted lowlife named Carter Duncan, with whom he and Aanerud briefly fooled around. The well-endowed Jerome also applies himself vigorously to furthering Bert's sexual education.

Duncan turns out to be a fat creep who frequents porn theaters, but he also has an alibi and anyway, Bert is convinced that the missing photos are the key to Aanerud's murder. He heads back to the house, where Jerome has promised to meet him later, but first makes a detour to the Martin farm on the chance that David's dad, taciturn patriarch Harvey, might know something useful about his late neighbor. He doesn't, but promises to send his son over after school. By the time little David arrives, Bert and Jerome are sick of searching for the still-missing photos and primed for some seriously orgying, though they first have to listen to the child's assertion that his father would kill him if he knew what he was up to… Not that David cares, since he and Aanerud once saw the oh-so-righteous Harvey having carnal knowledge of a sheep.

When Jerome and Bert finally tear themselves away from David's pliant young flesh and head for their cars, someone runs Jerome down and barely misses Bert, who suddenly realizes who the killer must be. He asks Barney to meet him at the Martin farm, where old man Martin, ranting wildly about sodomites, tries to kill them but accidentally shoots his wife instead. Barney kills him, and he and Bert deliver the remarkably untraumatized Bobby into an uncle's care. But Bert has an idea: What if he were to adopt David; you know, give the boy a fresh start in a loving and understanding home? The end... or the beginning?

Having tested the child-diddling waters with Two, the Hard Way's 14-but-looks-younger Bobby, Harper abandons all pretense in
Murder One: Natural-born exhibitionist David Martin is barely old enough to come and yet too avidly aggressive for grown men to resist.

Granted, this particular brand of boy lust is nothing new -- you have to turn a very blind eye indeed not to see it in the slyly sensual putti that litter the work of painters from Annibal Carracci (1560-1609) to Leon Bazille-Perrault (1832-1908) – but that doesn't make it okay and may well why Mr. "Sydney Harper" -- whom I have no reason to believe is in any way connected to the numerous singers, artists, ad marketers, athletes, police officers, crafters and students, almost all women, named Sydney Harper who crowd the web -- quietly left the stage after writing these two books.