When I was in Colorado last weekend I found myself in lovely, beautiful Colorado Springs. By accident I happened to be there for their gay pride celebration, which by SF standards is more like a cute craft fair, but I discovered by Colorado Springs standards is a major leap into the modern era. Why? Because as it turns out, Colorado Springs is the home of that most warm and fuzzy organization, Focus on the Family.
Which made me excited. You see, FotF and I have a relationship — a special relationship. They started it — er, I mean, they made the first move. Regular readers will know this story, so bear with me. The time: about six months ago. There my Fellatio book was, in the library minding its own business, when a really creepy guy picked it up, found his, uh, passions to be inflamed, and took the book home against its poor little will. Then he stayed up all night torturing his Christian soul reading every page, every excruciating line. Then he called Focus on the Family, and they all had to get their own copies, and read every single line, too. Mysteriously, that’s when angry Christian reviews started appearing on Amazon, berating the book for its sinful ways, chastising it for its ungodly lifestyle, wishing the book would just go away and quit its evil job and work at Starbucks instead. Focus on the Family became a major player in the ensuing campaign to ban my book from libraries. So I had to visit their stronghold, I had to make a pilgrimage. And visit I did, a hilltop where their vast campus stretches far and wide, and quite eerily empty. I was eyed suspiciously by two security guards and three parked, empty cars as Hornboy took a photo.
On other fronts, I realized last night that I’m reading five books at once. I need to cut back. They are The Corrections, In a Sunburned Country, Under the Banner of Heaven, Stormy Weather, and Eats, Shoots and Leaves. But I adore Eats, Shoots and Leaves and never has a book rang so true to my professional experiences. I mean, in porn, and in sex writing from small publishers who annoyingly don’t bother to edit their authors, the punctuation and grammar often have me in fits ranging from despair to violence, often back and forth within the span of a minute. Porn boxes are the worst offenders. The criminals of the spelling and grammar underworld. These people shouldn’t be prosecuted for obscenity, but for depicting obscene acts against the English language. Nonconsensual apostrophe abuse. Word bastardization. Grammatical rape. An endless gangbang of inappropriate capitalizations. Here are a few examples:
Big Cock Maddness (spell check for boxcover titles, anyone?)
Interracial Sex at It’s Best (the apostrophe is there against its will)
Muff Diving Maidens (compound that ‘muff-diving’ unless a fuzzy little old-fashioned hand warmer is going swimming with the girls)
Bi-Lingual Interactive Sex (it wasn’t even a ‘bi-sexual’ title)
Assufication (huh!?)
She Gets Dirty Stripped Down Naked (the frightened missing comma doesn’t want to see her dirty or naked, apparently)
Smell it, Lick it, and Fuck it! (but the dirty little comma after the second ‘it’ wants a piece of *this* action)
Young Ripe Mellons (another boxcover title, another misspent youth)
Dives Into Jordan’s Cucchi (it must be one of those new designer coochies)
Girls Who Love 14′ Up Their Ass! (they are evidently really, really long girls)
An Idea Whose Time is Cumming! (my editor at Cleis would faint)
Young3sum (possibly also the AOL IM name of the sleazy director)
I Love’ Em Natural (the apostrophe is trying to escape)
Meat Pushin in the Seat Cushion (this lucky one got away)
Double Filled Cream Teens (proper useage: ‘double-filled’ unless it’s two teens filled with cream, or many teens filled with double cream)
Granny’s Gone Wild (is granny lost in the outback? has she gone feral?)
