Fun times in the rain! From the alley to the store interior of Book Row. Heard some great pieces from Emily Mitchell, Goeff Dembricki, Kevin Gonzalez, and Mani Mekala, who all appear in the inaugural issue of the New York Review of Smut. From the reading:
I developed a baseline identity, a bisexual Italian guy from either Brooklyn or Long Island. The customers, locals and tourists alike, ate it up. I modeled my speech on blue-collar types, mechanics who drive in early from Long Island in their vans and go from one job to the next, men who fixed things, men who had the right tools for the job. It wasn’t so much that I put on an accent; I just summoned the speech patterns of my hometown, which I’d spent years trying to erase. I thought of myself as one of these laborers, a fixer, a technician, a mechanic, or maybe even a utility worker on the night shift. The decorator had been an Italophile, so sexualizing my heritage was familiar ground. He’d projected his fantasy of a dissolute Italian prince upon me, but for escorting, I went for more of a blue-collar persona.”
