by William Dean
(06/26/02)

"Beyond" is the first word that comes to mind when reading Ian Philips. There are some writers who tweak the beard of "the norm" (whatever that may be), but Philips does more than that. Going "beyond," he plucks souvenir whiskers and plants them in unlikely places to sprout new Pans and satyrs. Going beyond, he grabs the stately goatee and leads, not always gently, but always Puckishly, to a velvet-cloaked bathroom or boudoir, private hell or public detour, for some kinky play. He, rightly, calls his writings "Literotica." Rightly, because they are beyond what readers commonly call erotica and/or literature. Let's go beyond with Ian Philips.

CS: Many of the erotica writers I interview live in San Francisco. Of course, the city has a tremendous literary history, from Jack London to present day. I understand you also used to write guides to San Francisco. What is it about the atmosphere there that inspires and encourages authors, do you think?

IP: Ah, yes-the Ol' Barbary Coast. Hangout of brilliant thieves and the festively mad. (Only in San Francisco could someone proclaim himself Emperor Norton, print his own money, and have it accepted as legal tender. Even one of the railroad companies gave him his own personal car.)

And to mangle that famous witticism of Oscar Wilde from The Picture of Dorian Gray, everyone who has gone astray actually does end up in San Francisco. Not merely because it's at the edge of the country and the only further west on foot you can go is into the sea. But because it has become since the '50s -- the 1850's that is -- a refuge where misfits and runaways and freaks can live safely in obscurity -- the real island of misfit toys -- or even make it big and still remain safe and relatively obscure once you're beyond the city limits.

In short (he types, fingers dripping with post-post irony), it's the isolation and insulation from the rest of the country. That's why I think San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area has flourished as a haven for writers and thought criminals and sexual progressives and provocateurs. You come here to get away. You come here to reinvent yourself. You come here to flit, to flirt, to flop, to fuck, to fly, and, in time, to flee -- to somewhere less frenetic, less "faulty", spreading the good vibes and the legend of San Francisco further.

It's also why the Second Coming of the Gold Rush -- known abroad as the Dot Com Revolution -- was so dangerous and has been so devastating.

Yes. It brought lots of misfits. Silicon Valley was once the magic kingdom of the nerds. But with the big money and big hype, it also brought the East Coast and the Establishment a-callin'. And every time San Francisco does try to play by East Coast or Establishment rules the earth gives way and things fall down. Whether in 1906 for "The Paris of West" or 2001 for "The e-Paris of the West."

Which means the initial blossoming of "glamorous nerd pornographers," as Patrick Califia calls the posse of writers who've come of age in San Francisco since the early '90s in his ever-scintillating foreword to M. Christian's boner-popping Dirty Words, may come back into full bloom.

May. It sounds like it's dead on the vine. It's not. But, as you alluded to in your question, San Francisco was heading towards an amazing flowering of literotic talents -- a truly burning bush-before the cyber-locusts came to town and gobbled up any and every property that could be sold and evicted so many artists.

And it may come again. Everyone loves a second coming, don't they. The seeds have been sown. The rents are coming down -- slowly. The conditions are here for a humdinger of a renaissance of glamorous nerd pornography, for literotica with a vicious underbite.

And the conditions are ripe not only historically in the sense that San Francisco has always been a haven for outlaws and pirates and tall-tale-tellin' ne'er-do-wells to settle down and write -- whether they be yesteryear's favorite Dead White Males (Mark Twain, Jack London, Robert Louis Stevenson, Dashiell Hammett, and the Beat Boys -- Jack and Allen and Neal) or today's queertastic rogues gallery (Patrick Califia, Dorothy Allison, Carol Queen, Susie Bright, Michelle Tea, Lynn Breedlove, Lori Selke, M. Christian, Simon Sheppard, Kirk Read, Matt Bernstein Sycamore, Marshall Moore, Charles Anders, horehound stillpoint, Bill Brent, and my hubby-bunny, Greg Wharton -- to name a small few of those talented filthmongers scribblin' away here in Northern California).

But the conditions are ripe geographically as well.

The historical would not be possible without the geographical. As far as a pornographer like myself is concerned, we are just far enough from the center of all things literary which is New York that we can take risks with our writing. Big risks. Especially in suspect genres like porn or sci-fi. If for no other reason than you can do whatever you want in San Francisco and be largely ignored by the rest of the country. Until it catches on. Until gold fever is finally telegraphed far and wide.

Then more freaks and misfits hit the road and we are -- low rents willing -- able to take them in and be renewed. And the exploration and bold risk-taking that has fed Bay Area culture and history in both reality and myth evolves.

Well, that's my Pollyannaian wish. Right now, the economy in general and book publishing in particular are pretty wobbly -- low wages (or lost wages even) mean low book sales which mean lower royalty checks which mean a day job or two to make rent and thus less time to write.

But I'm still hoping for that renaissance of glamorous nerd pornography and I'm sure Clean Sheets readers -- bless you one and all! -- are too.

CS: Speaking of literature, your stories reflect a pretty wide and deep range of references which is not often the case in modern authors. Are you an omnivorous reader with a lot of the classics under your belt?

IP: Omnivorous. Oh, William, you are too kind.

Only in bed.

And now and then.

That's when I read, that is.

And my bedtime reading today, as in the past, is a lot less omnivorous than it appears. A lot of half-read books. A lot of books to be read. And thus a lot of the feel in my stories is really just smoke and mirrors. My characters have actually read the books. I haven't. Take Foucault for instance. Please!

Instead, I went through enough college to know how to drop a few names in the right places. Like Foucault for instance. And I've been blessed to have quite a few brainiacs for friends who are like wonderful walking reference libraries and make me sound more well-read and worldly than I am. Again with Foucault and queer theory and when to use heteronormativity correctly in a sex scene.

That and I was lucky that my Mama got me a scholarship to a private school in Tulsa, Oklahoma and there I really hit it off with my English and Latin teachers. Yes, Latin. Where else could a fat and fey bookworm do well, read homoerotic texts, and feel "normal" with the other misfits (I sense a theme, don't you).

Add in my year at the Santa Fe, New Mexico campus of St. John's College -- "The Great Books School" -- and that explains how I was lucky enough to read so much classical Greek and Latin literature and philosophy.

But read doesn't necessarily imply understand. Oh, how I wish it were otherwise. I still have no idea what Aristotle was lecturing about after he said everything begins with the Prime Mover.

Primer Mover -- doesn't that sound like a polite way to say horny --> -- bottom?

And can we top off this question by taking a moment to offer up a prayer of gratitude to whatever deities are currently on call for the miracle that is a horny bottom.

That's a big honkin' Amen from this grateful top.

CS: The surreal seems like a prominent influence in your collection, See Dick Deconstruct, with tastes here and there of imaginative mind-jumps that remind me of cyber-punk writers such as William Gibson and science-fiction authors like Philip K. Dick and Samuel R. Delaney. How do you approach writing stories like these? Do you sit down and just whip one out in a flow or are they pieced together from notes and careful rewrites?

IP: Oh, honey, if only I could whip that -- hell, anything -- out. But as above so below. I have to take the little bit I have to begin with and coax it over time to grow to something big and long and interesting.

Truly. I start with an image. Almost like it came from a remembered dream or a film one saw as a child. I write it out on a steno pad I carry around with me in my backpack. Then I type the notes into the computer. Next I try to type away at whatever scene or paragraph feels most alive. I print that out and revise. Go pack to the note pad. Then back to the computer. And so on. I could get fancy and say it's an organic process. But that wouldn't be quite right. So, I'll go, as I'm wont to do, for the fanciful and say it's like making a quilt out of patches.

With a lot of cursing.

And snacking.

As for the surreal elements, that's very cool that they remind you of cyber-punk. Well-read though I may appear in print, I have to admit I haven't read any -- yet! (Though I loved Samuel Delaney's autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water.)

My fondness for the surreal comes more from fairy tales and authors who twist them for theirs and their readers' pleasure. Authors like Nikolai Gogol or Angela Carter or Jeanette Winterson.

They and the big Mac Daddies of Magical Realism like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Borges have inspired me to let my imagination all hang out, so to speak.

Well, again, with the smoke and mirrors. That's true -- to a degree. I have read those authors and been mightily influenced. But if it weren't for my friendship with Patrick Califia and him telling me that no, I wasn't insane for wanting to write a story about a televangelist in hell with a Latina hermaphrodite demon and he really did want to read such a story then I probably would have talked myself out of such tales or quietly burned them before publication.

CS: Congratulations, of course, are in order since you just won the LAMBDA award for Erotica. Since this was your first book, were you surprised to be nominated and win? Was it scary to find yourself suddenly boosted to international fame?

IP: Thank you very much.

Yes, I was quite surprised both when I was nominated and when I won. It's still surreal. Like it happened in some other realm. And speaking of other realms, I have the award sitting on my altar to the deities -- an offering of thanks to the Furies and other forces that made this book and all that's come with it possible.

And for a side order of sincere corniness to go with this heapin' helpin' of California Grade-A woo-woospeak, I really was flattered and, more importantly, honored to be nominated with M. Christian, Lori Selke, Lawrence Schimel, and Karen Tulchinsky. Each as both an editor and an author have labored long and hard in the porn fields of the Lord.

We righteous, their readers, have been rewarded for it!

And as for fortune and international fame, to paraphrase Evita/Madonna, I never invited them in -- mainly because they have yet to knock at the door.

Really, I blushed when you said international fame because I think even local fame is a few books away. In fact, I'm still trying to muster up some neighborhood infamy -- but when you live a few blocks from The Castro, that's harder to do than it sounds.

Still, I have received some very nice e-mails from around the world. And I'm still burning candles that the book catches fire abroad -- especially in the UK where I hear that even my most perverted tales could pass for children's bedtime stories. God bless those twisted queens!

CS: Critics continue to attack erotica as "just stroke books for the sexually frustrated." But, if we look beneath the skin, so to speak, we often find cogent and thoughtful commentaries on political, social, and even religious viewpoints. Do you think it's possible to write quality erotica today without also, well, espousing the political and social "soul" of the author?

IP: And those critics must be some sad, sexless fucks because they don't get the joys of stroke books. Which, like the titles themselves, are legion.

To be honest, I'm not an avid reader of the more traditional stroke books. Not to slam these works, but I can't read and jerk off at the same time. I'm not that coordinated. If I want to let loose like Old Man Onan of Biblical fame, then I -- forgive me, dear reader -- pop in a video.

And yes, the visuals are sometimes stimulating, but it's the rare sounds of a man really reveling in fucking and being fucking that turn me on. That fevered moment when he stops the pornospeak and improvises. Better yet, he gives over to the pleasures of the flesh and speaks in tongues. Ah, the wonders of an aural fixation. A sincere groan or gasp or grunt and I'm rolling in lube like a pig in...

But back to your question, William. I'm sure you can write a good story that many would find "hot, hot, hot" without alluding to everything in the cosmos but the kitchen sink. Many of the most popular writers in gay men's skin mags are proof of this. But I wouldn't want to read a story without all the subtextual bells and whistles. When I read, I want to get off in a different way. I want to get lost. Get mentally teased and titillated. I want a book that strokes me back.

And it sounds like you do too.

But to be fair, not every one does. I've seen reviews of anthologies I've been in where I knew my piece was the offending work that made the critic feel like they were in a college class and they lost their patience and, worse, their hard-on.

Though I have no desire to apologize for how and what I write about, I actually do feel for these readers. And that's why I usually call my work literotica rather than porn. With porn, you're guaranteed -- if it lives up to the wet badge of courage implied in the name porn -- a happy, tingling head because all the blood is flowing south. I'm not so sure with my own work. I think there's a lot of border skirmishes going on between the warring sex organs, brains v. genitalia.

In other words, I think some of my desire to throw in the cosmos AND the kitchen sink -- and my belief there are few better genres to do it than within than erotica -- takes away the heat. However, Patrick Califia, who is probably the smartest person I have ever met and it so shows in his writing, never has this problem. He powerfucks every organ and you, me, his happy horny readers, are eternally grateful. But this is very hard to pull off and why he is a master of this among many other crafts.

CS: Most of the literary erotica writers I enjoy mix up the raunch and the spiritual, the hot with the humor, the loving with sheer animal passion, the dark with the lyric. Do you think it's because we are living today in a world of seemingly unending emotional and mental dichotomies, instant gratification? Or simply put, why do you write erotica that is edgy, yet romantic?

IP: I don't feel comfortable speaking of the tenor of the times because I don't quite understand them myself. I'm still so stunned that the Church of the Almighty Marketplace (i.e., Das Capitalism) has made so many converts around the world and tortured the rest of us heathen heretics so. Whatever the market will bear. Please, how is the invisible hand of Adam Smith (aka the IMF) bitchslapping humanity any better than the heavy state-centralized hand of last century's cavalcade of tyrants?

But I could digress, for pages and pages and days and days, and not really say anything that someone like Noam Chomsky or Molly Ivins hasn't said much better.

So, I'll speak, instead, as someone of these times and say that I write the stories I do because these are people I wish to be or be with and with whom I'd love to have sex. Even in the super satirical pieces there is a character or two I would love to be. In a second, I'd shapeshift like Lilith or be Ruth Faust and hang out with Spider Grandma or Mephistopheles or The Devil That Dare Not Speak Its Name or take all three clubbing. I would love to have Walt and Joe and Marcus and Louis and Spit and Julian and Sid over for brunch and an orgy.

I believe we live in a world of magic and realism -- heavy on the realism. And I would much rather live in a world of magic realism -- heavy duty on the magic. So, until I can manifest more of that in the here and now I do it between the pages of a book.

CS: It's obvious from the stories that you like fun and games, but what would you say are your ruling passions in life? What turns on Ian Philips?

IP: Greg Wharton. Covered in ginger pancakes with a light maple syrup and reading a first edition of Virginia Woolf's Orlando in an Italian villa while countertenors sing in the garden outside.

CS: As other authors have told me, their "a day in the life" can be pretty mundane and normal, unlike readers' ideas that erotica writers spend most of their time at orgies, swingers' spas, and smoky leather bars. Can you describe a typical day (whatever that means) in your life now?

IP: Each morning, I untie myself from my St. Andrews cross and get down and light a few human candles to set a mood while I bathe in the blood of innocents --

Then, I wake up, roll out of bed, feed the cat who has sulked silently since 6 AM when she tried to rouse me by climbing back and forth through the Venetian blinds, get dressed, kiss the husband, who's merrily publishing away at his desktop, good-bye, walk to the coffee shop for some liquid personality and the carbohydrate of my choice, walk to work, "toil" at my day job as managing editor for the Damron Company's series of LGBT travel guides, wander home and play house with The Man, toddle off to bed for getting off with same Mr. Man, then rinse -- and repeat.

Come the weekends, I try to squeeze in some writing in between eating, reading, napping, and socializing.

Thusly is my path to perdition and pornography paved.

CS: I understand you're working on a novel, but the transition from story writer to novelist can be daunting. What are some of the challenges and joys of hammering out a full-length story? How do you keep the heat, passion, and excitement going for, perhaps, hundreds of pages?

IP: That's a good question. I have no idea. But I have a feeling I might in a few years. Right now, metaphorically speaking, I'm on the hilltop before the valley where'll I set up camp and begin my climb up that mountain. So, today, all I see is what is ahead and it looks overwhelming and I'm thinking of checking into a roadside motel and hiding for awhile. There in the drawer of my bedside table, instead of a Gideon Bible, I will find Anne Lamott's Bird By Bird and take up and read and be replenished. And with her brilliant suggestion of a 1-inch picture frame, I will inch my way up that mountain!

As for heat and passion and excitement, I leave that to the characters. Believe me, once I trust myself enough to listen closely, they'll tell me where to go and how to get them there. And how to get them off.

CS: What's the Ian Philips formula for having a great sex life?

IP: Most importantly, believe, or learn how to believe, you rock hard as you are. (It took this queen many good friends and therapists and long dark night rides of the soul on the Prozac pony before he was ready to really receive the love of a good man. In fact, I'm still working on this.) Then find someone who also thinks you rock as you are. Not 50 pounds from now -- either way on the scale. Someone who's as bent and kinky as you, or slightly more, and who respects your other passions. Passions of the body and the mind and the soul. And someone whose passions you respect. You don't have to be identical but it would help to have something to talk about while the spent sex juices dry. And then you slowly talk and fuck and talk and fuck your way through the day -- until the weekend is over and you go back to work, then home, then rinse and repeat.

Again, as with novel writing, this is all quite novel for me. I just started a new relationship. My last one lasted six months and was over a decade ago with a college obsession who was asexual and not attracted to me in the least. But I, survivor of an American Gothic childhood, thought I could love him to health and horniness. Well, it was a long 10 years and little good sex or even good first dates. Then, I came into my own with my words and entranced a hotty hung with a heart of gold into my printed web. Well, it's a bit more complicated and interesting than that, but I'll save that tale for my next collection.

CS: Finally, if you could assemble all your fans and readers together in one gigantic room, what would you say to them?

IP: Hi, Mom!

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