A month or so ago I learned about the existence of Obama slash; fan fiction stories devoted to the apocryphal gay sex life of our current President. There’s apparently a fair bit of it, with numerous pairings — Obama/Biden and Obama/Rahm Emanuel being two of the most popular.

I was intrigued because…well, it’s so wrong, isn’t it? It seemed like the sort of thing that *somebody* should want to pay me to write about. Sure enough, the good folks at Bitch magazine expressed interest. So I hunkered down to read me some Obama slash.

There was only one problem. What was that problem you ask? Well, here’s the semi-contrite, semi-agonized email I wrote to my esteemed Bitch editor Andi Zeisler:

Hey Andi. So I started reading some Obama slash…and I think I’m going to have to bow out. I kind of can’t take it. It’s really viscerally upsetting. Obama/Rahm is horrible enough, but there’s Barack/Michelle which I actually can’t even bear to look at, and god, Obama/Hillary Clinton. Argh.

Sorry; I didn’t quite realize I was going to find it quite so unpleasant. I’ve read other slash before, and found it entertaining, but there’s something about the real people…it’s just not worth the psychic trauma, I’m afraid.

So there you go. I’m just not enough of a man for Obama slash, basically.

Did I mention that I think Hillary Clinton is the person in the world that I *least* want to imagine having sex? *shudder*

Anyway, if you’re made of sterner stuff, below are some links to Obama slash communities:

main one

and a couple more here and here.

Telma Hopkins. She also did time as part of Tony Orlando and Dawn. Then she went into tv acting and had a supporting role in Bosom Buddies. Did a lot of tv acting, actually, decades of it. And she just had a movie role, but it was in The Love Guru.

I know about him because I’m writing a novel set in 1960s LA. My research included What Really Happened to the Class of ’65, a best-seller in the ’70s, forgotten now. The book is nonfiction and follows a dozen or so kids during the first 10 years after they graduated a fancy high school in LA. A lot happened to them, ’60s and ‘7os stuff, transcendental meditation and drug smuggling and massage certification and God knows what else.

Here’s a review of a romance menage novel, of all things.

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More of the Same

Be With Me is an erotic romance, which means hot semi-nude bodies on the front, lots of graphic thrusting in the interior, and splurting gobs of exploitation plastered across the back-cover blurb . Heroine Reggie Fallon is in love with not one, not two, but three manly hunks — and since she refuses to choose among them, they’ve decided to share her. In other words, this should really be titled Be With Us.

That, though, would be just a little too outré. Author Maya Banks is determined to shoehorn her protagonists’ thoroughly unconventional ménage into a thoroughly conventional romance narrative. She manages this with brilliant obliviousness. Her simple strategem is to treat the three “boys” — Hutch, Cam, and Sawyer — as if they were a single six-armed, thirty-toed, three-dicked heartthrob. Oh, sure, each guy has distinguishing characteristics: Hutch can cook, Cam has glasses, Sawyer likes anal sex. But they were all brought up together with the same foster mother, they’re all business partners in the same architectural firm, and they all live together in the same enormous dream home. When Reggie needs help, they all come running; when it’s time for a romantic misunderstanding to spin out the plot, then by God they all misunderstand her in the same way. They even sleep together, but only when Reggie’s there, because, as they are careful to tell us, they aren’t gay, no, no, no.

Reggie is, of course, herself a thoroughly familiar spunky romance heroine. Her main distinguishing features are (1) she’s a cop, and (2) she’s beaten senseless by a perp in the first three pages. Convalescence fortuitously allows her to be needy and feminine without compromising her independence. Nor does it compromise her libido; once she’s out of the hospital, she cheerfully fucks her way through a series of efficient and crowded sex scenes. If you love generic romance novels, but wish they featured a tad more triple penetration, then this book may just be heaven.

The same guy directed the pilots for Star Trek, Hogan’s Heroes, and Batman. He also did the pilots for Hill Street Blues and Moonlighting. And the pilot for Remington Steele. And he directed a Disney film I saw years ago, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, that starred Kurt Russell at age 17 or 18.

I’ve got an article up at Comixology about why Spider-Man should be a pacifist:

Indeed, Spiderman’s real sin here is not against morality or society, but against the tropes that keep the genre afloat. Super-heroes have to act. They’ve got to fight crime. If they don’t, you don’ t have a narrative. Super-heroes have “great responsibility,” but it’s always the responsibility to do something. You could conceivably have an origin story in which Wombat-Man decked a baddy, the gun went off, Cousin Joe got shot, and the hero decided “With great power comes great responsibility!” And so Wombat-Man decides never to mess with crime again, and instead uses his phenomenal digging powers solely to aid with infrastructure projects! Again, you could have such an origin – but what you’d end up with would not exactly be a super-hero comic

Bram Stoker
The Lair of the White Worm

It’s hard to believe that this novel was the basis of the excellent 1988 Ken Russell movie. Indeed, Bram Stoker seems to have written The Lair of the White Worm with his brain tied behind his back. The protagonists wander like lobotomized puppets from scene to scene, pausing occasionally to launch into long passages of earnest, muddled exposition, and then to congratulate each other on their lucidity. They are, moreover, bland to the point of culpability. Lady Arabella is a decidedly ineffective villain, especially considering the fact that she can turn into a giant snake, but, though it was clear early on that she wasn’t up to the task, I spent most of the book hoping against hope that she’d devour that prig, Adam, and his little wife too.

The book would be unreadable if it weren’t for a loathsome current of anxiety sliding underneath the surface malaise. This anxiety breaks through most distastefully in the novel’s insistent racism, which even by the low standards of 1911, is embarrassingly vicious. It peeps out rather ludicrously in the bizarre, unmotivated plot devices — the confused references to mesmerism, the multiple mongooses, the giant menacing kite, the titular, antideluvian white worm itself. And it is most effective in the last few pages, which, in true horror fashion, come leaping out of the general fog to deliver heaping and gratuitous gouts of gross-out.

Entertaining as that ending is, the real reason to check this book out of the local library is the set of lovely and evocative illustrations by Patricia Coleman Smith. Just another reminder that, from Dracula on down, Stoker has always inspired better art than he himself could produce.