Chapters Twenty-Three through Twenty-Five of sLAsH by Bill Berry
Mieke's Ladder: Gabriel Ricard reviews the book and interviews author A. R. Lamb
Unlikely's Musical Year-End Review
Five Photographs by Peter Schwartz
Six Digital Paintings by Jeff Crouch and Diana Magallón
:the game: by Nicklaus Liow
The Printable Version of Anonymous Gun by Kurtice Kucheman
Sam Vaknin on the role of central banks in banking crises
Is There Such a Thing As Society?: by Aseem Shrivastava
Robert Weitzel on Focus on the Family's description of Obama
Elisha Porat remembers starting out as a poet
Jonathan Penton compares Hannibal to Tom Bradley's Lemur
Poems in Amsterdam by Louise Landes Levi
Beside the Grave Hole where We Laughed in the Sand: Poetry by Goitsione Mogomotsi Mokou
Two Poems by Anthony Liccione
Two Poems by Nathaniel Ogle
Three Poems by Lyn Lifshin
Three Poems by J. D. Nelson
Three Poems by David McLean
Two Poems by P. A. Levy
Rabbit Stew: Fiction by Rainbow, Jonathan Simonoff, and Dirk van Nouhuys
The Burial Case: Fiction by Peter Schwartz
Prune Hands: Fiction by Sally Weigel
An Evening with Somatotax: Fiction by Ryan Undeen
An Excerpt from Love Spell by Marie Kazalia

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I met Mary Scriver here at Cinematheque Films in Paris, via the Internet. We have one intern, Kilian Sullivan, who does nothing outside the context of his art but answer email. We can be scattered all over the planet and Kilian is Cinematheque central. He had been corresponding with Mary Scriver for a while. I saw her book, Bronze Inside and Out, on Kilian's desk, and he loaned it to me. I had to get in on this and started corresponding with her myself. Ironically, when I first met Timothy Patrick Barrus, it was in a way not entirely unlike the way I met Mary.

I was involved with a repeat trick at the small hotel where I was living in a tiny room. My room was crowded with cameras and computers because I love cameras and computers and because I was an Internet whore. My bed was an Internet chat room. I was a little famous. I know a tiny bit about that underground world Scriver and Barrus speak about. What the Internet did was take me off corners of Boulevard de Clichy. I used to have this wild fantasy about how glamourous it would be to be chased by paparazzi but meeting Barrus dashed that one high and dry on rocks like a shipwreck.

I had this thing, maybe it was a fetish, for older tricks. For one thing, they could afford me. But I'm real clear about the attraction. My dad abandoned us and at least for me everything begins and ends there. There are a ton of guys out there like me. I am not alone, though I felt very alone. I had a booming business and I am painfully aware of the dangers of becoming too close and too involved with tricks. This trick's name was Paul and he was everything I could have wanted. He had a wife and children. My fantasy was that he would adopt me and I could live as a member of this family. But it was a fantasy. I was used to tricks falling in love with me. It could be annoying. But I was not so used to falling in love with tricks.

I think I scared the hell out of Paul. "There are alternatives to this life you lead, you know," he said. But I did not know and if I had I would not have believed any of that would mean me. Paul was in real estate and handles leasing a lot of property in Paris. "Tim Barrus is in town," he told me. Paul had leased him a loft.

If Tim is notorious in the straight world, he's way more notorious in the gay world. The irony is that he does not live in either one. His books are literally collector's items. Not all of it is porn but the porn is infamous. My Brother, My Lover is a book no one gives away. If you can find a decent copy, you keep it. Forget about a signed one. He won't sign books anymore. The most famous Barrus book is Mineshaft. It describes a pre-HIV world I never knew. My world has always lived in the shadows of the disease. Then came Genocide and Tim was the first to connect government policy to the AIDS horror. I did not know Tim Barrus but I certainly knew of him. I started buying his books on my first trip to Amsterdam. You couldn't buy them in Ireland then. I never thought we would meet.

Paul connected us through Skype. Tim is very careful about outsiders knowing his exact whereabouts because the death threats against him are so intense. His film crew was shooting La putain folle dans le Pigalle in Place Pigalle and he said we should meet. I tracked him down the next day.

He doesn't just take anyone into Cinematheque's inner circle. He has to know you and he takes his time. He doesn't take on vampires and there are a lot of people out there who take and never give. La putain folle dans le Pigalle would become — like the typical Barrus book — tinged with controversy and when that happens, and it happens a lot, Tim simply walks away. Most people only know him through the work. So they make this connection to sex that is more mythology than reality. It took me another year to actually make the move to the Cinematheque loft where I live with the rest of the film crew — people who are not all that much unlike me.

"Life is way too short," he says. "I'd read Mary Scriver's Prairie Mary blog before. Mainly because I wanted to steal the name. It's a great name — Prairie Mary. It conjures up a vision of Laura Ingalls Wilder's great mad aunt emerging from a sod house early in the morning with her apron and her hands bloody from just having butchered a buffalo. It is so American. She's the only American writer I didn't scare. I had gone out of my way to scare everyone at a perfectly ridiculous art blog called Flyover. If the name is a problem, chances are good that so is the content. The name implies that you might want to fly over, but the content advertises art in this part of America more breathlessly than the Junior Chamber of Commerce. Prairie Mary was there. She was sort of standing back in the shadows listening. But I saw her eyes sort of roll upward a couple of times at some of the inane stuff at Flyover so I thought — this woman sounds smart and interesting and she's better than this blog. So I wrote to her. I found out that one of the things we shared was a history of teaching. Teachers are so not valued in Western culture. They make no money yet we need them badly. Again, I had this vision of Laura Ingalls Wilder's great aunt in a one-room school with a Franklin stove and a woodpile in the back. Which is about as silly as Tim Barrus having orgies with boys. Once you get beyond the mythology the name conjures up, you find a rich life far more interesting than the mythology. And you know, that's exactly the sort of person I want my students to be able to communicate with. Someone who is more real and bigger than the myth they arrive with. You guys at Cinematheque find everything American intriguing. You've seen a little of it but you don't know America yet. Prairie Mary's take on art has a lot to do with work and sweat if you read the Scriver book. Personally, what I think it does is something no book is ever allowed to do, and I don't know that Mary would agree with this, but I did put it into the video we made, and that was about a stripping away of myth to reveal a reality that contained a love story richer than any myth could make. That's very difficult to do in publishing because it's not marketing and it would scare most publishers into running. Anyone who can do that has my vote for President."

Mary calls the way in which this interview took place an "organic" process. I am pounding my head against the wall with this interview stuff. It seems so effortless for two writers like Mary Scriver and Tim Barrus to describe themselves. But for me to describe myself is a can of Irish snakes. And not the fictional St. Patrick kind but the real kind, like the ones at the bottom of this Connemara dam.

When asked what sort of feature film he'd make if he could, Barrus goes immediately to Mary Scriver's life. "Both the lives and the art jump out at you from Bronze Inside and Out. Cate Blanchett would be Mary. Tommy Lee Jones would be Bob. Ronnie Howard would direct."

Mary and Tim are the real writers. What I am is a whore who is trying to reinvent himself. I have always wanted to be a writer but being a whore is easier. A fictional whore would have more talent than I do. This is work. Let me be frank. I am a junkie and a whore. I am a junkie who isn't doing drugs and a "sex worker" who isn't turning tricks. Not anymore. I left Ireland at the age of thirteen. I ended up in London turning mostly Brit tricks. A French trick brought me to Paris and his promises of a life together turned out to be just that: empty promises. So for the past five years I've been working Place Pigalle which is the red light district of Paris. I was hardly the only kid doing this in the Pigalle.

In the Pigalle, the Internet is used like a pimp. The Internet allowed me to become a web-camera whore (I was a "model"). By the time I found the program Tim Barrus was creating —CinemathequeArt, a place for at-risk boys — I was so strung out I was almost dead meat. But that's another story.

There are a lot of programs that will get you off the street. But finding one that can do that and replace that life with one that has a focus, not on culture, not on just some low-rent job, but on you, is easier said than done. I have a long way to go and a lot to learn. But I have left Place Pigalle and I don't miss it anymore than I miss Ireland.

Place Pigalle is not a place of pretend. It has a hard edge. It is a hard place and you would find addiction there as easily as the sex work. You would find a lot of art, too. As a sex worker, I learned how to worm my way into people's lives. I have wormed my way into Tim's and Mary's lives and I am getting a real taste for how difficult the writing life really is. But I am doing what I always wanted to do and I am doing it every day. I would not call myself a writer yet. But I have high hopes I am on my way.

Eavan O'Callaghan is a struggling writer who lives in Paris where he is currently writing a screenplay, La nouveauté étrange des garçons, being produced by Cinematheque Films.