Author Spotlight and Giveaway {Looking After Joey a Novel by David Pratt}

From the author of Bob the Book -- a funny, fast-paced, touching tale of love, laughter, family of choice and fabulousness!
Wouldn’t it be great if a porn character stepped out of the TV, into your life? Well, be careful what you wish for, because that’s how Calvin and Peachy end up looking after Joey. And teaching him everything he needs to know to be be a gay man in New York City. The big test? A fabulous party on Fire Island. But first, they have to get invited. This will involve a rogues’ gallery of gay Manhattanites, including portly, perspiring publicist Bunce van den Troell; theatrical investor Sir Desmond Norma; priapic publisher Stuart Bergman; and lubricant king Fred Pflester. Tender, witty and utterly deranged, Looking After Joey will make you wish that you, too, had a porn character at your kitchen table asking, “So, when can I have sex?”

"Read Looking After Joey with the expectation of laughing throughout, but there’s more to it than that. The social commentary is razor sharp, and the ultimate destination is surprisingly moving." - 'Nathan Burgoine, Out in Print

David Pratt is the author of the Lambda Award-winning novel Bob the Book (Chelsea Station Editions) and a new novel, Looking After Joey, from Wilde City Press. His short stories have been collected in My Movie, also from Chelsea Station. He has published in several periodicals and anthologies. He has presented work for the theater in New York at HERE, Dixon Place, the Cornelia Street Cafe, the Flea Theater and the NY International Fringe Festival.

Want to watch the book trailer for Looking After Joey? {click here}

And now, a special sneak peak at the story behind the story from author David Pratt...

First of all, I’d like to thank Tammy very much for having me as a guest today. M/M romance bloggers have offered my new novel, Looking After Joey,  a home all over the Internet, and I am very grateful!

Nate Klarfeld of the radio program Stonewall Live! recently interviewed me about Joey. He asked me if Joey—the porn character who pops out of the TV into the life of a New York City accountant—is my own fantasy. I said yes, he is. But not as a lover. (Already got one, and a very nice one, too!) But as a son.

I have had paternal fantasies all my life. In the beginning I did not know that’s what they were. In junior high I had a friend a bit behind in his development, stepping into the shower  little and pink but with a toughness and a sweetness, too. A few years later, in high school, he shot up in a matter of weeks. I remember this in the boys’ locker room: suddenly he was making some joke that involved pulling his underpants up so his now-mature package showed in distinct outline. He was laughing, and I thought, I am so proud of you. Funny to be proud of someone for something nature would do anyway. I just thought how long he put up with being little and pink and called Shorty; now here was a joyous young man, showing off—with, I promise, no conscious intent of seducing me—his suddenly grown-up cock and balls. A moment so knowing yet so innocent. I did not know that what I felt was paternal. I just knew I couldn’t say it. In fact, I pretended I didn’t get the joke and was irritated. Best defense.

{"David reads from Looking After Joey at NYC"s Bureau of General Services Queer Division."}

Around the same time I had a friend from another city. He was accomplished at sports and beginning to be experienced with girls. I was the artist and intellectual, though, analyzing movies we saw, scripting our own movies for us to shoot with my Super-8 camera. (See “Another Country” from my story collection, My Movie.) I knew he had fun with me, but I thought he had so much more than I had, I could not possibly be of real value in his universe. He was “safe,” because his religious beliefs kept him from having sex before marriage, but he had the right kind of desire, so a split was inevitable. He didn’t want to hear about certain “feelings” I had—though I kept myself from feeling them for him. He began to take his faith more seriously. He was afraid I’d go to hell. I took the Huckleberry Finn route:  “All right then, I’ll go to hell!” Not in defense of any Jim, but in defense of what I still wouldn’t openly declare myself to be. I guess I knew it was coming, though, and I guess I knew this boyhood friend, whom I had sort of fathered in intellectual and artistic matters, was going. I have only seen him three times since. The last at my mother’s funeral.

In college there were several men I naively thought I might father. My impulse was mixed eroticism of course. I did not yet understand that my own love and desire could not make someone…”soft” that way. There were, especially then, two orientations, and never the twain did meet. Now we have guys who call themselves “mostly straight.” I wonder how much as changed for lonely boys looking, well, not just to father but be fathered. My RA freshman year was just the sweetest man imaginable. But I couldn’t talk to him about…you know. No. Maybe the same thing applied to that RA that applied to another college friend who told me, years later, “You could have told me. But I totally understand why you didn’t.”

I never became a real father. Of all the reasons I could give, the one that accounts best most for my not having a child, is that writers are selfish. Dickens liked to write spang in the middle of the parlor, with Heavens-knows-how-many kids swirling around him. Most of us can not do that. We resent intrusion because we are managing to steal a few precious moments because we also have jobs because we are not Dickens. We are making children on the page. My characters are my kids, and they are teaching me about life. I have learned a lot writing about Looking After Joey on this blog tour. A lot about the book and a lot about myself. I wish the outer self would cooperate with the inner. The inner has all sorts of lovely ideas about family, love and loyalty. The outer is still squirrely and angry and would prefer not to be “outer” at all. I still have so much more to write. I could spend ten or twelve hours a day doing it, if the body would cooperate. I have so many ideas, so many ways of looking at the world left. “It’s not dark yet,” as Bob Dylan sings, “but it’s getting there.”

Again, thanks to Tammy. Be sure to enter for the ebook giveaway, and if you don’t win, consider picking Joey up from your favorite evil corporate Web site or, if you are lucky enough to have one nearby, gay bookstore. Those stores have some generous and persistent dads, holding the fort in Boston, London, Milwaukee, Toronto, Atlanta, New Orleans, Ann Arbor, Vienna, Paris, New York and many other places. It’s a bit quixotic being a dad to a bunch of books—a bunch of gay books. (See my first novel, Bob the Book.) But then, no kind of love ever quite makes complete sense, does it?

A huge thank you to David for stopping by and sharing this story about Looking After Joey with us today, please be sure to enter the giveaway at the end of this post. And for more books by Pratt.. 

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