Southern Bears, Well-Stocked Liquor Cabinets,
and Bible Belt Dungeon Fantasies: Shane Allison Talks to Jeff Mann about A History of Barbed Wire

Shane Allison: I’m excited to have the opportunity to talk about your writing and A History of Barbed Wire. Tell us a little of what we can expect from your new book.

Jeff Mann: A sexy cover, to start with. The folks at Suspect Thoughts Press outdid themselves. I’m so pleased with the cover art that I bring the image up on my laptop every day and just grin at it. Then there’s the Foreword that Patrick Califia has written. It means so much to me that a pioneer of BDSM literature like Patrick is associated with my book. And several other writers I greatly admire have kindly written blurbs, so that’s exciting as well.

As for the stories themselves, well, most of them are set in Appalachia, my native region. I’m a country boy who writes about country boys. Fans of BDSM and of beefy, hairy Bear guys will certainly relish the book. I’m an intensity addict, and that fact is reflected in my fiction. I even use the Victorian writer Walter Pater’s famous quotation about living “with a hard, gemlike flame” as the collection’s epigraph.

Allison: When did you decide to put together a book of erotic stories? Were does it fall with writing your other books, the memoir Edge, the poetry collection Bones Washed with Wine, and the recently published Loving Mountains, Loving Men?

Mann: The Bones Washed with Wine poems were all composed in the early and mid-1990’s, after a particularly disastrous love affair. Those poems originally appeared in two poetry chapbooks, Bliss, published by BrickHouse Books in 1998, and Flint Shards from Sussex, published by Gival Press in 2000. Then I combined the poems into Bones, which Gival Press published in 2003.

I didn’t start writing much prose until the late 1990’s, when I wrote a few essays about being both gay and Southern or Appalachian. One of those pieces appeared in Journal of Appalachian Studies, and two others were included in anthologies edited by Jay Quinn, Rebel Yell and Rebel Yell 2. Then Jay encouraged me to put together a book of personal essays for Haworth Press, and that collection became Edge, which appeared in 2003. As for Loving Mountains, Loving Men, most of the poems in that collection were composed in the 1990’s, some even earlier, while the prose sections I wrote in early 2004, when Ohio University Press encouraged me to make the book a combination of poetry and memoir.

Around the time I was writing my memoir Edge, I also started composing fiction. A couple of stories appeared in Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly. Then Devoured, my Appalachian gay vampire novella (that phrase always gets a laugh!), appeared in Masters of Midnight: Erotic Tales of the Vampire, in 2003. I also wrote a few stories in response to various anthology calls for submission, and those pieces eventually appeared in such collections as The Big Book of Erotic Ghost Stories, Kink, Bear Lust, and Best S/M Erotica 2. When a new short story I was writing insisted on becoming a novella, The Quality of Mercy, I realized that I had enough fiction to make up an entire volume, so I talked to Greg Wharton and Ian Philips, wonderful guys who run Suspect Thoughts Press and whom I’d met at the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans in 2003. They agreed to publish A History of Barbed Wire, much to my gratitude and delight.

Allison: What do you think makes A History of Barbed Wire stand out from other GLBT erotic literature?

Mann: I like to think that these stories are more lyrical and literary than a lot of what’s being published. Since I’ve been reading and teaching literature for so long, my fiction contains many literary allusions. Recognizing those allusions is not necessary to enjoy the stories, I hope, but the allusions do add an extra layer of meaning for those who get them. Since I’m primarily a poet, my fiction also tends to be rich in imagery and figurative language. As a poet, I’m also interested in writing prose that is melodic and rhythmic when read aloud. Finally, my fiction deals with small-town and rural gay life, which distinguishes it from much of the gay literature being published, which is obviously urban or suburban in its focus.

Allison: Why do you think there are still some gay writers and editors that shun erotic literature? Why are people so embarrassed by sex?

Mann: I’m so sick of America’s erotophobia! It really irritates me that writing that is frankly erotic isn’t taken as seriously as work that deals less frankly and directly about the body and the body’s desires. Perhaps this is because America is, compared to European countries, a relatively new nation, with a culture still relatively immature. And of course there’s the poisonous influence of fundamentalist Christianity—a virulence if there ever was one—with its unrealistic demands and flesh-hating dogmas. These many years of the detestable Bush administration have made things even worse. At this grim point in American history, I feel like every openly queer or erotic poem or story that’s published is an act of political and philosophical defiance.

Allison: What excites and concerns you about the state of gay literature and what would you like to see on the shelves that you’re not yet seeing?

Mann: I’m excited by the great variety of gay literature, but I’m concerned by the fact that it seems harder and harder for openly queer material to get published, especially by mainstream presses. The state of the publishing industry is certainly dismal in this regard. Thank God for Suspect Thoughts Press, Gival Press, and other LGBT-owned places that give us queers a chance to be heard!

I suppose I’d like to see more queer literature that deals with rural or small-town experience…which is one reason why I write what I do: stories about leather-enthusiast country boys like myself.

Allison: Would you say that all GLBT literature is political?

Mann: Yes, especially in the present bleak state of things in Bush’s America. To speak a desire, to express it in writing, is to insist on your right to feel it. And to insist on unconventional desire, unconventional identity of any sort, is certainly defiantly political.

Allison: Do you feel that our books being categorized as “gay and lesbian” fiction helps or hurts getting our work out to a larger audience?

Mann: Well, sometimes I feel very much ghettoized as a gay writer. Which is to say, the only place you’re liable to find my books is the Gay/Lesbian section of a bookstore. At the same time that I write a great deal about the queer experience, I like to believe that many of my themes and concerns are universal and would be appreciated by a mainstream audience. But I never have achieved that larger audience. A pervasive and usually tacit assumption that appears in both the publishing industry and in academia is that openly homosexual work is automatically limited in worth, depth, and relevance, but openly heterosexual work is automatically universal.

Sometimes that pisses me off…and sometimes I think that the folks I’m really writing for are either Appalachians or queers, so if those audiences read me, that’s more than enough. The email notes I’ve gotten from my LGBT or mountain-bred readers certainly mean a great deal to me. And as an Appalachian, I have a clan mentality. That means, in this context, that a “mainstream audience,” the majority, is a group I care less and less about. Reaching “my kind,” “my people,” seems more and more important. Sure, selling more books to a mainstream audience, getting mainstream recognition, would be pleasant, but I don’t write to make money, I write to make sense of my life and hopefully to provide folks like me—queers, pagans, leatherfolks, hillbillies—with some literature that will help them survive their own adversities.

Allison: How does the reader play a role in what you write, and would you say you’re writing for a particular audience?

Mann: Well, I can’t help but include literary allusions in everything I write, just because I’m pretty well-educated and I’ve been reading and teaching literature for so, so long. I don’t mean to be intellectually elitist, that’s just how my mind works. I hope that those allusions don’t alienate readers…though, as I said earlier, the allusions in the fiction can be missed by a reader entirely, but the intense plot is liable to make the story enjoyable reading nevertheless.

I was raised to be a Southern gentleman, and that means bending over backwards to make folks comfortable and avoiding confrontation and offense. But my political nature encourages me to write openly gay material because I think conservative America needs to be confronted by in-your-face queer work. Those two sides of me conflict, so, often, when I’m giving a public reading, I’m torn between making my reading innocuous and pleasant and making it super-queer. Usually I strike an uneasy medium between those two. But, since most of my audiences at readings are primarily straight, I’m often afraid that they won’t relate to my work emotionally. As a sort-of entertainer, I feel like I owe an audience kind enough to come hear me a good time, but I’m always afraid that I’ll offend them instead. But then I think, “Well, if they’re close-minded enough to find this material offensive, fuck them.” Reading to a queer audience is a rare and much-enjoyed luxury.

Can you tell I’m a mass of internal contradictions? Oh well, I hope that makes me interesting.

I write what I’m inspired and driven to write. Only after I compose something do I think, “Hmmm, well, hell, what sort of reader would like this? What sort of publisher would print it?” Those concerns are secondary and usually unrelated to the composing process. So I’m not really writing for a specific audience, but most of my material tends to be queer or Appalachian in some way, so those groups would be my constituents, so to speak.

Allison: Tell us a bit about gay life in Appalachia.

Mann: There are so many stupid preconceptions about Appalachia that swirl about in the outside world, thanks in part to mass media. No, we are not all a bunch of racist hicks. Yes, we have cities here. Yes, we have gay bars and pride parades and festivals and queer guesthouses. Yes, we have LGBT organizations. We also have a slower pace of living, a native folk culture, and a proximity to nature that city folks lack. Certainly gay life here isn’t as developed or exciting or varied as that in many cities, but still, in my lifetime, gay culture in Appalachia has progressed impressively. When I was a high school kid in Hinton, West Virginia, and then a college student at West Virginia University, there was a sparse number of gay bars in the state but not much else. Now Charleston, the West Virginia capital, not only has 3 gay bars but a big Pride Festival in June. I’m not much on cities—I like to visit, mainly for the leather bars, the bookstores, and the ethnic restaurants—but I can’t stand the crowds, the noise, and the traffic, so I never stay for long. Here in the mountains, I can get tastes of gay culture every now and then, and still live in my native area, the region that has shaped so many of my values.

As for misconceptions that urban dwellers might hold about rural people… No, we’re not all conservative Deliverance–style rednecks. Many of us have educations, love classical music, travel to Europe when we can. Many of us are enviable mixtures of the cosmopolitan and the country, the rough and the refined. We’re as complex and varied as city folks.

Allison: Have you ever thought of moving to the city? Wouldn’t it be easier to move somewhere where you would be accepted?

Mann: Ah, every time I get to San Francisco, I think, “Man, I could live here! I love this!” Then I’m reminded of how expensive everything is, and I realize that, on an academic salary, I’d probably have to live in a dumpster.

There was a time in my life—a narrow window, as the expression goes—when I could have perhaps transplanted myself to a city. Perhaps in my twenties. But I realized a good while back that, in my field, I’d never make enough money to live in the sort of urban neighborhood I’d prefer: Dupont Circle or Georgetown in DC, for instance. And, as I’ve said, I’m very sensitive to noise, I hate crowds and traffic, I’m super-impatient. The stress and annoyance of city life simply wouldn’t be worth it. I have no pressing reason to leave the mountains. Here in Appalachia, I’m near what remains of my family, I have a great (patient, long-suffering) partner, I have a good job, I’m in the region that shaped me, a region with some of the most beautiful landscape in the world, a region I love, despite the proximity of my natural enemies, the obnoxious right-wingers and frothing fundamentalists. Besides, I love a good fight. My personality is built on resistance, on bucking convention and going against the grain of whatever context I find myself in. This region is conservative enough that I can feel that there’s work to be done, battles to be fought, that I can make a difference…but I’m close enough to the liberal influence of the university to feel fairly safe being openly gay, being honestly myself. Plus I’m enough of a good old boy/mountain man that many local folks who would not ordinarily like queers, well, they like me well enough, just because I can sit around with them drinking bourbon straight and smoking a cigar and shooting the shit about country music and pickup trucks and hunting knives and the local baseball team. I guess, for folks like that, I live up to sex-role expectations, their ideas of what a man ought to be, and so my sexual orientation is something they can overlook or eventually accept. They just focus on what we have in common, rather than what makes me different from them. And I do the same.

Allison: You consider yourself a Bear. What do you love about being part of Bear culture?

Mann: Being a Bear for me means being beefy and hairy and muscular and masculine. It’s about relishing the delicious contrasts between roughness and tenderness. It’s great to be part of the Bear community because I can hang around with guys with whom I share certain values, a certain aesthetic. I love the relaxed nature of the Bear world—we’re not all dieting and obsessed with being slender and smooth and young and fashionable. One of the great advantages of being a Bear and of being part of the leather community is that, at age 46, I still feel attractive, I’m still an erotic being. In mainstream gay culture, I would have been put out to pasture over a decade ago. As it is, my silver-streaked goatee has its share of admirers, thank God.

Allison: What are your thoughts on gay marriage, and how do you think it would affect Bible Belt states if gay marriage were to become legal tomorrow?

Mann: I myself am not interested in getting married…though if I had to, it would be in my kilt and in a Wiccan ceremony. Marriage and monogamy are too conventional for my taste. On the other hand, it’s ridiculous that, after eight years together, my partner John can’t be added to my health insurance policy as my spouse. Clearly, denying LGBT folks the right to marry is simply another form of denying people their basic civil rights.

Oh, if gay marriage were suddenly legal in those states, hundreds of happy queers would rush off to take advantage of that opportunity, slews of loathsome right-wingers would snarl and picket…and then perhaps—when no expected earthquake or tornado ravaged the region, when the Sacred Heterosexual American Family didn’t crumble—they’d realize that LGBT unions are a threat to no one. God help them—they’d have to find someone else to hate.

Such stupid, stupid people. Living in the Bible Belt all my life has given me a vigorous detestation for the unpleasant kind of Christian. Luckily, I’ve encountered many true Christians, people of understanding and compassion, so I don’t dismiss the religion. Denise Giardina, an Appalachian novelist who was kind enough to write a blurb for Loving Mountains, Loving Men, is a wonderful example of a Christian passionately devoted to the social gospel. And several Christian students in my Gay/Lesbian Literature class during Fall Semester 2005 at Virginia Tech were real delights. They offered intelligent perspectives on our texts and have given me real hope.

Allison: Does Southern gay literature exist? Is there such a thing?

Mann: Yes, I would say that Southern gay literature exists. I remember reading Tennessee Williams’ and Carson McCullers’ work when I was an undergraduate, gobbling up as much of it as I could find. That combination of Southern and queer concerns I could so much relate to.

Allison: Is it safe to call you a Southern gay writer?

Mann: Yes, that’s a label I embrace. I’m so completely pervaded by Southern and Appalachian values. Just about everything I am has been shaped by my native region. Attachment to landscape and family, a sense of history, a constant hankering for down-home Southern food, a streak of fatalism, a strong clan mentality…yep, yep. A true hillbilly, albeit with more education and cosmopolitan interests than the usual mountain stereotype depicted in media.

Allison: Describe your writing process.

Mann: Fragments of lines, images, ideas come to me. I scribble them down in the little notebook inside my battered old black-leather backpack, which goes everywhere with me. On the mornings I have time to write, I get up early, fix some coffee, put some music on, and start reading. These days I’m rereading Mark Doty’s most recent book, School of the Arts, and Edwina Pendarvis’ Like the Mountains of China. Reading other authors primes the pump, so to speak. Then I start up the laptop and start trying to compose. When I get stuck, I get up, I make more coffee, I read more, I stride about, curse, sit down, and try again. After a morning’s effort, I usually get at least one poem written. I’m a big reviser, so I’ll come back to that rough draft again and again before I finally am satisfied enough with it to send it out for possible publication. Writing fiction and creative nonfiction is much the same as writing poetry…except that I can only compose poetry in the morning, and prose I can keep at all day long, if necessary…well, at least till cocktail time.

Allison: What inspires Jeff Mann?

Mann: Ah, the natural world, the changing of the seasons. Beautiful men, strong women. The tensions, agonies, and kinky convolutions of Eros. History, mythology, literature, music, neopaganism. The transitory nature of all things. Folk cultures, food. My detestation of fundamentalists.

Allison: How much true life experiences goes into your erotica?

Mann: A good bit here and there. Few of the stories are actually autobiographical, but details of setting are straight from my experience, and certain characters are to some extent based on me or on guys I’ve known. This is typical of fiction-writers, I think: we garner some of the material from our lives and entirely make up the rest. For instance, my vampire protagonist Derek Maclaine (who’s the narrator in Devoured and also in “Hemlock Lake,” a story that recently appeared in Blood Lust: Erotic Vampire Tales) looks somewhat like me and possesses many of my personality traits and values, but he kills and drinks blood, as I do not. My kidnapper protagonist Sean, in The Quality of Mercy, the novella that ends A History of Barbed Wire, is to some extent an extension of who I am and is to some extent a different man entirely. On the other hand, the settings my characters move through—the Potomac Highlands, Charleston, Hawk’s Nest—are places I know well, and the frustrations and desires the men in my stories experience are certainly ones I’ve struggled with.

Allison: What pisses Jeff Mann off?

Mann: Oh God, I could go on and on. Bad Manners, obnoxious children (caused by incompetent parenting), barking dogs (caused by thoughtless owners). Cell phones, rap music, loud car stereos. Slow traffic, or anything that makes me wait. (My patience is about the size of a mustard seed.) Those are the relatively small things. Then there are the morons who make fun of mountain people; or the idiotic homophobes, the sorts that push their hateful religion in your face, the nosy kind who are so concerned about how you live your life; or the imbeciles and orangatans running America these days. Or those sons-of-bitches who are ruining Appalachia with mountaintop removal mining. I’m constantly pissed off at one or another of these, and my fantasy life is rich with violent scenarios in which I eradicate Baptist ministers or Republicans or coal-company executives. In this regard, my vampire novella Devoured was one long, delicious wish-fulfillment. Talk about fun to write!

Allison: Who would you be willing to wait in line for?

Mann: For sheer artistry, Joni Mitchell. I’ve been a huge fan of hers all of my adult life. “High Priest of the Joni Cult,” I jokingly call myself. Long ago I taught myself to play piano, guitar, and mountain dulcimer just so I could play her music. I really admire Carly Simon and Melissa Etheridge and Mary Chapin Carpenter too. Very fine musicians.

For sheer erotic appeal, the country-music singer Tim McGraw. I’m completely infatuated with him. The actors Eric Bana and Colin Farrell would be close seconds. I think a log cabin on a ridge with all three of them would be my idea of heaven. Big kitchen, well-stocked liquor cabinet, hot tub, basement dungeon…Hmmm, perhaps I should add Viggo Mortensen in there too…he could give me sword-fighting tips…

Allison: If you weren’t teaching and writing, what would you like to do?

Mann: A long time ago I got a bachelor’s degree in Nature Interpretation in the Forestry Department at West Virginia University, so maybe I’d be a forest ranger or something or another in the forestry field. Or a musician, if I were more confident and charismatic and had a better baritone and were a better guitarist. There are lots of musicians and music in my fiction. I think I’d like to have been a country music singer. Maybe Tim and I could sing duets…

 

Read more about A History of Barbed Wire on Suspect Thoughts Press
Read "Raspberry Moonshine" from A History of Barbed Wire

Shane Allison’s poems and stories have graced such pages as Velvet Mafia, suspect thoughts: a journal of subversive writing, Outsider Ink, Mississippi Review, New Delta Review, Mc Sweeney’s, Best Black Gay Erotica, Truckers: True Gay Erotica, Hustlers, Cowboys: Gay Erotic Tales, Ultimate Gay Erotica, Love in a Lock Up, Muscle Worshippers, and Best Gay Erotica 2007. He has authored four chapbooks of poetry and his fourth book of poems, I Want to Fuck a Redneck is forthcoming from Scintillating Publications. He recently edited the anthology Hot Cops: Gay Erotic Tales. He loves getting emails at starsissy42@hotmail.com.