HIS69-507 Hard to Please

Excerpt

Kent interrupted me: “This book of yours, Roland—it’s really quite dirty, isn’t it?”

“Huh?” I blurted out, staring at him. He was smirking like a choirboy who’d just been caught masturbating in the choir loft.

“You write about your own experiences in Vietnam,” he went on eagerly, “but you seem to have gone through the entire war with absolutely nothing but sex on your mind, and gay sex at that.” Before I could respond, Kent picked up the copy of the book that had been carefully placed on the coffee table in front of him by the prop man. He held the cover up to the camera: it had a photo of me in muddy battle fatigues, but bare-chested, my sweaty torso criss-crossed by an ammunition belt and the rifle clutched in my fists. So far so good—but then Kent cracked open the book and said, “Suppose I just read a paragraph completely at random—? This one, for example: ‘The next thing I knew, I was in a shower room with twenty stinking soldiers. What the fuck, I thought nonchalantly. They’ve all banged me, at one time or another, and in one combination or another. They might as well see what they were getting in a decent light for once, instead of in a muddy foxhole. So I stripped to the buff and grabbed a bar of GI soap. As soon as the hot water had rinsed the first couple of layers of jungle dirt off my skin, I lathered myself up with the strong yellow soap. By now I was recognizable as the piece of stud ass they’d all had, and some of the guys were starting to get itchy all over again. I’m a pretty horny bastard ordinarily, and now as I soaped my buttocks I felt my asshole and dick begin to tingle. I soaped up my crack and started to scrub out my hole.’” Kent put down the book and smiled at me sweetly. “The whole book is like that,” he went on, actually licking his lips. “I guess my first question, Roland, is that just about every perversion known to deviant psychology is incorporated in your book… how did you become so sexually experienced, and yet so completely undiscriminating and lacking in common decency?”

That was only the first lewd, insulting question I had to field! Kent also asked me, in the course of the interview, “What went through my mind as I read this was that the guy who wrote this book was either a very frustrated, sick individual who wanted to defame every Vietnam veteran… or you have had the most lurid sex life of any man I have ever met. Now, which of these two categories do you think you fall into, Roland?”

I managed to keep my head and score some points myself. I didn’t lose my cool, but fought back expertly, laughingly remarking that Kent seemed to lead a very sheltered sex life, or he wouldn’t have been shocked by my book so easily. I insisted that my intention in writing the book was not to make money by peddling sleazy sex but to point out that gay men and women had served their country, and served it well, in Vietnam. Some had even given their lives. And, in many cases, it was only gay sex, man-to-man loving, free and open and unashamed, that had preserved our sanity over there in that jungle hell.