From Fear of Flying to Drawing Blood

May 9-12, 1975 I read:

Fear of Flying, Erica Jong

This was, if you'll excuse the pun, a seminal work for me. Funny, sexy, engaging, occasionally self-reflective, a good story. A major bestseller and just a fun read. It captivated me so much that I tried to imitate it in my own novel writing for about five years.

One of the things Jong did in her book that it's taken me 30 years to realize, is to draw in male readers by playing to their fantasies. Her heroine, Isadora Wing's quest for a "zipless fuck" definitely got some men's motors going, and it didn't hurt that Jong was a shapely blonde who knew how to wear suede boots and makeup. I have actually seen some of her later work used by leering bosses as a kind of aide de harassment (is there a French word for "harassment"? Never mind.)

As in: "Here read this--you women really want no strings, anonymous sex don't you?"

Um, no, it was equal pay for equal work that we wanted.

Try as I might, my own humorous inclination went in a totally different direction than Jong's graphic, confessional sex scenes. I don't share her admiration for, or desire to emulate Henry Miller. It just wasn't natural to me.
However, I do keep my early manuscript in the closet in case I ever want to remember who I slept with in the '60s.


Fast forward to May 7-12, 2005, I read:

Drawing Blood, Poppy Z. Brite

The haunted house aspect of this story interested me. I've never read Brite before and I heard she was "very, very, very, very dark." But what I found instead was a bohemian love story with supernatural overtones. The lovers are gay men, very wounded souls, and the female character helping them is hopelessly in love with one of them--who is supposedly bisexual, but frankly most of his affairs appear to be with men. I thought I might call this Women Who Love Gay Men Too Much, but it appears this is a sub-genre of its own called, in its Japanese manga form yaoi.

The Wikipedia goes on about it at some length at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaoi

Complicated creatures men and women. Complicated business sex and storytelling. What I found most interesting in thinking of my own journey from reading Fear of Flying to reading Drawing Blood, is that one of the gay lovers in the latter book, after years of promiscuous, unprotected sex, demonstrates his dawning maturity and responsibility by determining to get an HIV test. A modern Isadora Wing would have to consider that.