Oct. 7 launch party at the Slipper Room was a total blast! I narrated a lot of my comic strips and sang and danced my heart out. I’m not emo, but I do emote quite a bit according to the photographic record. The vibes in the room were quite fresh. There’s my dear old dad in the foreground of this photo. He was such a good sport for coming down. My mom came too and my twin brother Pete. Good lookin out, fam!
Shout out to Vanessa for taking photos and Peggy for bringing friends. Expect more of the same Heatley Energy™ in Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Portland next week. Yeah boyee.
I got 5 or 6 emails last week alone from readers wondering why I “blanked out the wee wees” in the comic strip “Sex History” featured in my new book. That sentence alone speaks volumes about the maturity level of the person writing to me, but it’s a question worth responding to. This isn’t the first and definitely won’t be the last time I get asked about this, so here’s my attempt to nip it in the bud. Pantheon in no way pressured me to “censor” my book. And this isn’t me capitulating to anyone, especially not a force called “The Man.” This was a creative decision I arrived at on my own shortly before the book was published, for strongly held personal reasons
When I originally drew this strip, it felt important to graphically show all the sex that was happening (a la Crumb or any number of other underground cartoonists). After all, it was going to be appearing in a modern day “underground” anthology. Isn’t this what “underground” cartoonists draw? Now was my chance to claim that mantle! And to be honest, I was getting off on drawing some of those panels. My wife was pregnant and unavailable. So reviewing past sexual conquests, even though they were mostly unsatisfying, felt like my only outlet. Pathetic, isn’t it? Once the strip was drawn and rushed out that very week to the printer for publication, it dawned on me that the strip is about bad sex, longing, and grasping for love. It’s about the exhaustion we feel after chasing something unattainable. It’s not meant to be an erotic story. In many ways my ideal reader for this strip is female, not the teen and 20-something boys writing me telling me that my strip gave them a boner. And definitely not the writer of last week’s angry email shaming me for covering up the penises and asking “How am I supposed to live vicariously threw [sic] you when there’s big pink ‘no no’ bars all over the good stuff!” I guess you’ll have to get your kicks elsewhere! There’s certainly no shortage of available sources.
In preparing the book for Pantheon, I wanted to tone down the pornographic element of my strip for all those reasons, but felt that making the bars fluorescent pink would be funny. It would draw attention to itself and add another layer of narrative to the strip. If you read to the end of the story, you’ll find out that I’m in a program for sexual recovery. I don’t watch (or produce) pornography of any kind, not because of what it does to the women involved (though I’d argue it’s not healthy for them), but because of what it does to me. Pornography is about power fantasies. More often than not, it’s about anger towards women. It’s about unresolved “mommy” issues. In pornography, there’s no distance between desire and attainment. I’m much happier learning how to live in my real life with all its frustrations and trials, all its earned joy and accepted grief. I don’t long to recapture any idealized moment in my past when I had a certain all-powerful woman’s attention all to myself and I could “have my way” with her body. My sexual energy is directed at my wife alone these days and it feels great. As I say in the story…
What do I have in common with Senator Ted Stevens, Grace Jones, and Sarah Palin? We’re all on the front page of the UK’s “First Post!” Very strange, but very true…
I got a flattering write up for “My Brain is Hanging Upside Down” by Danny Graydon. Check me out y’all!
Peter Terzian wrote a wonderful piece about my book in today’s Time Out New York. He really got the spiritual thread running through all these stories. We had a nice exchange during the interview and I was thrilled to read that so much of it came through. I wish the piece wasn’t called “Porn Again,” but hey… sex sells. I won’t quibble.
