Skin & Ink: A Conversation with Jim Gladstone
by Jameson Currier

Jim Gladstone’s eclectic writing career includes The Big Book of Misunderstanding, a tenderly comic debut novel about gay youth’s family dramas, and Gladstone’s Games to Go, a popular book of more than fifty of the best word and puzzle games. Gladstone underwrites these publishing endeavors by working in advertising and marketing, where his work has graced tampon packages, added spice to NASCAR recipe books, detailed the use of neurosurgical hemostats, encouraged the consumption of fresh turkey products, and been declaimed by the world’s most famous talking candies. Educated at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a degree in American Studies, Gladstone’s background also includes stints as a bookseller, a librarian, a radio commentator, a writing teacher, and a leotard-clad Playboy Club dancer. He has lived in San Francisco and Paris, and currently resides in his hometown, Philadelphia. In February of this year, Jim and I chatted about his newest project, Skin & Ink, an anthology of gay male tattoo-themed fiction released in April from Alyson.

Jim Currier: Why did you chose the subject of tattoos for an anthology?

Jim Gladstone: It started with a story called “Show and Tell” that I wrote for a gay comic book, Young Bottoms in Love. It was a tattoo story that had been in my head for a long time. The more I thought about it the more I realized that I could write lots of tattoo stories and that these kinds of stories could tap into a lot of interesting ideas—issues of permanence and impermanence, issues of the inner and the outer. I felt like tattoos were the epitome of the meeting of the body and writing and it was a great, natural topic for an erotic anthology.

It also seemed to be a sort of no-brainer topic for what people would be interested in. I was able to pitch this because tattoos have become so widespread that even though it is alluring and interesting and intriguing, it’s not so fetishistic that it would put anyone off. One of the interesting things about the anthology is that less than fifty percent of the contributors have tattoos. That sort of suggests that the interest of tattoos goes beyond those who get them.

Currier: Do you have a tattoo?

Gladstone: I do not. I have this major tattoo fantasy—which is the story that I wrote for the comic book—of having five really tiny tattoos—no bigger than he size of a pinky finger—and they would all be of the same thing—probably an eye or a human palm—and I would put them in five obscure places on the body—under the scrotum or beneath the knee, for example. The fantasy would be that the first guy who ever noticed them all is Prince Charming—that he could see you holistically. And along the way there would be guys who would notice one or two of them—but only one guy actually pulls them all together. Of course, this may mean that I’m telling you that I don’t have a tattoo but I may indeed have five. The intriguing notion about this is that once you did that—got five tiny tattoos—and you’re committed to the notion of only one man being able to discover them—then every time you had sex you’d be in this exquisite sense of tension because if you didn’t feel true love was possible with a certain guy you would then be desperately praying that he didn’t find all of them—and if were with someone you were in to and wanted him to be The One, then you would be bending your ear back so he could see the tattoo behind there, so he could find them all.

Currier: Tell me a bit about the stories you found for the anthology.

Gladstone: The stories that I got were really amazing. I really punched it in my call for submissions that I wanted the anthology to be diverse and not pure porn. The lead-off story is a near-future piece by John Fink called “Scenes of the Flesh,” where the basic notion is that tattoos are now made of a liquid crystal material that can take transmissions—so big consumer goods corporations buy space on the bodies of the most attractive people to beam their advertising slogans on. In the story a guy is in love with another guy and the third one hacks into the broadcast system while the two men are fucking and hijacks the lover’s body and beams messages. There’s another good story about a tattoo artist and the guy he’s working on and they’re having sex on and off throughout a very elaborate tattooing session. When the tattooing is finished—there is this real tension between them about who the art belongs to—the artist or the person who walks away with it.

I had about fifty-to-sixty submissions and I used twenty-two for the book. There are some familiar and favorite authors included—Simon Sheppard, M. Christian, Marshall Moore, Sean Meriwether, Greg Wharton, Trebor Healey, Steve Berman, and Drew Gummerson from England. There are also a few Canadian authors, one who is a woman who uses an ambiguous pen name.

I was really impressed—even with the stories that I rejected—that I could put out a call for stories that were not pure porn—but really did need to have an erotic or sexual element to get published and writers really responded. Some of the stuff in the book is really hot, but all of the stories have something else going on—even the stories that are close to being stroke stories have some more depth. Writers were really willing to embrace the idea that stories should have brains as well as bodies.

Currier: How was your first-time experience as an editor of an anthology?

Gladstone: I didn’t want to edit a wholly-unthemed anthology—I felt it would be too hard to figure out what the criteria would be for including something. I thought the theme of tattoos was interesting and I would need to find variations on the theme in order for the stories not to be monotonous. Frankly, I was a little concerned that I would get a lot of the same stories and I was delighted that I didn’t. I thought I would have more stories about tattoo artists and people getting tattoos—particularly because that seems like a sort of metaphor for sex—one guy injecting a needle into another guy—there’s a sort of dominant/passive relationship and it maps very nicely to sex in a way. But I only got a couple of stories like that. I got an historical story about pirates full of authentic detail and a story about a Maori who happens to be in America in the present day—with full-facial Maori tattoos—and it has much to do with about the way the man is stigmatized by society.

I loved that writers could take a theme and play it in a multi-faceted way. Coincidentally, Sean Meriwether and Marshall Moore wrote almost the same story but each of them did it stylistically different so I was able to take both stories. I’ve actually put them one right after the other in the book. I think from a writing point of view it’s really interesting to see how the narrative is similar in the stories but the way the authors approached it was radically different.

One of the things I loved about editing an anthology was that it kept me in touch with a community of writers—getting to have a dialogue on the Internet and the phone with the authors who ended up in the book. The first thing that I ever had published was in an anthology — the Queer 13 anthology that Clifford Chase edited. Chris really worked with me on that story and helped edit it and make it better and better and I thought if I ever had the chance to get a gig editing an anthology myself that I would give some people their first publication too. Five of the stories in Skin & Ink are from first timers. And I worked extensively with some of them on their pieces and that felt really good.

Currier: On a broader, cultural level—there seems to be a trend of more and more gay men getting tattoos these days—any thought on what has generated this?

Gladstone: I don’t know if it is gay men in general. I think it is culture-wide. It used to be that a tattoo was a sign of rebellion. It was very class oriented. I think that thirty years ago when a middle-class person got a tattoo it was in some way indicative of a more blue collar world, that you were outside of the mainstream and a tattoo was a way of differentiating yourself from where you came from. You can see that there are parallels to the way that gay men feel of being separate and yet also having a badge of bonding. It also obviously draws attention to the body in very specific ways and, sad as it is with the whole body culture—how it’s gone so that everyone is all upper body biceps and pecs and everyone’s working out and on steroids—how do you differentiate your huge pecs and biceps from the next guy? It may be by making some sort of mark on them. In some ways we’re back to that clone look from the Seventies and Eighties where everyone was wearing flannel shirts and jeans only now everyone has the same body. Once you are the same, what do you do to make yourself different?

I find it intriguing when I see a tattoo that is really different from other tattoos. I’ve seen a couple of guys with word tattoos and I find that especially interesting—text on the body. And I think that gay men in general feel a certain lack of permanence of things—there are so many things that feel unstable and a tattoo is in some ways a steady commitment. I also feel it is also a very inner thing—it’s something you do with yourself and there’s a psychological limit to it—there is this pain you’re inflicting on yourself and your marking yourself as somehow singular.

Currier: You’re certainly having a diverse publishing career. What’s the next project ahead for you?

Gladstone: I’m perpetually working on a new novel, but I’ve gotten over predicting what’s next. I have an idea for another anthology and I would also like to do another anthology on tattoos. There were a couple of stories that I was hoping for that I didn’t get—I had two different writers tell me they were going to do a story on Holocaust tattoos which didn’t happen. This theme is really fertile and there is a lot more where this can go.

 

For more information about Jim Gladstone, visit him online at: GoGladstone.com

Jameson Currier is the author of the novel, Where the Rainbow Ends, and a collection of short stories, Desire Lust Passion Sex. His short fiction can also be found in the anthologies Men on Men, Best American Gay Fiction, Best Gay Erotica, Mammoth Book of Gay Erotica, Making Literature Matter, Rebel Yell, and Circa 2000, among others. His story “Snow,” published in the first issue of Velvet Mafia, was selected for Best Gay Erotica 2003 and Best American Erotica 2004.