Saving Julian

By Mason Stokes

Paul believes that homosexuality is an illness. But when he tries to cure himself, and others, he learns just how stubborn desire can be.

Paul Drucker has made a name for himself telling young gay men that he can cure them of their sinful desires'. Trouble is, he's all too familiar with those desires himself, which leads him to Julian Evans, a male escort' he finds online. Paul tells himself, and Julian, that he simply needs an assistant, someone to help him on an upcoming lecture tour. The reality, of course, is quite different, and when the media discovers them together, Paul tries to straighten up his image by starting an ex-gay group at his church.

Which is where Julian's roommate, Aaron, comes in. Eager to expose the ex-gay movement for the sham that it is, Aaron goes undercover in Paul's conversion group, posing as a gay man hoping to be cured'. However, things get complicated, and more than a little strange, when Aaron meets the other members of the group—a motley assortment of queers struggling to reconcile their desires with their faith, and with their families. Will Paul's techniques, which include group showers, lessons in manly walking, and something called holding therapy', lead to newly created heterosexuals? To tragedy? Maybe even to love?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pride Publishing
• Release date: May 9, 2017
• ISBN: 9781786515704

Mason Stokes

At the age of twelve, Mason Stokes thought he was a New York Jewish intellectual. Turns out he was just a gay southerner with a fondness for early-period Woody Allen. But since both options would have gotten him beaten up, he made other choices, devoting himself to quiet study, courtly manners, and non-threatening outfits. This led naturally to an English major (the last refuge of scoundrels), where he found himself obsessed with Russian literature, an obsession he abandoned after failing, on repeated tries, to make it more than halfway through The Brothers Karamazov. In college, his homosexuality was solidified by his experience playing drums in cover bands at frat parties, where he watched drunk boys whisper the chorus of “Feel Like Making Love” into their girlfriends’ ears during slow dances. From this he never fully recovered. Despite his failure with Dostoevsky, novels were the only things that made any sense to him, so he enrolled in a graduate program, where this sense was slowly beaten out of him. He enjoyed this experience, and hoped to inflict it on others, which he was finally able to do when he became an English professor. Along the way he dated scores of men, to whom he sincerely apologizes. Mason teaches at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. Saving Julian is his first novel.

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Saving Julian

ISBN # 978-1-78651-570-4

©Copyright Mason Stokes

Cover Art by Posh Gosh ©Copyright April 2017

Edited by Shannon Combs

Pride Publishing

This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher, Pride Publishing.

Applications should be addressed in the first instance, in writing, to Pride Publishing. Unauthorised or restricted acts in relation to this publication may result in civil proceedings and/or criminal prosecution.

The author and illustrator have asserted their respective rights under the Copyright Designs and Patents Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book and illustrator of the artwork.

Published in 2017 by Pride Publishing, Think Tank, Ruston Way, Lincoln, LN6 7FL, UK

Pride Publishing is a subsidiary of Totally Entwined Group Limited.

SAVING JULIAN

Mason Stokes

Paul believes that homosexuality is an illness. But when he tries to cure himself, and others, he learns just how stubborn desire can be.

Paul Drucker has made a name for himself telling young gay men that he can cure them of their ‘sinful desires’. Trouble is, he’s all too familiar with those desires himself, which leads him to Julian Evans, a male ‘escort’ he finds online. Paul tells himself, and Julian, that he simply needs an assistant, someone to help him on an upcoming lecture tour. The reality, of course, is quite different, and when the media discovers them together, Paul tries to straighten up his image by starting an ex-gay group at his church.

Which is where Julian’s roommate, Aaron, comes in. Eager to expose the ex-gay movement for the sham that it is, Aaron goes undercover in Paul’s conversion group, posing as a gay man hoping to be ‘cured’. However, things get complicated, and more than a little strange, when Aaron meets the other members of the group—a motley assortment of queers struggling to reconcile their desires with their faith, and with their families. Will Paul’s techniques, which include group showers, lessons in manly walking, and something called ‘holding therapy’, lead to newly created heterosexuals? To tragedy? Maybe even to love?

Dedication

For those who know this story all too well

Trademarks Acknowledgement

The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:

Disney World: Disney Enterprises, Inc.

Atlanta Braves: Atlanta National League Baseball Club, Inc.

Discovery Channel: Discovery Communications, LLC

Suave: Conopco Inc.

Pop-Tarts: Kellogg North America Company

Country Crock: Conopco Inc.

Atlanta Constitution: Cox Enterprises, Inc.

Google: Google, Inc.

Boy Scouts: National Boy Scouts of America Foundation

CNN: Cable News Network, Inc.

Amazon: Amazon Technologies, Inc.

Chuck Taylor: Converse, Inc.

Timberlands: TBL Licensing, LLC

AARP: AARP Non-Profit Organization

Village People: Can’t Stop Productions, Inc.

Will & Grace: NBC Universal Media, LLC

Band-Aid: Johnson & Johnson Corp.

Calvin Klein: Calvin Klein Trademark Trust

Lubriderm: Johnson & Johnson Corp.

The Little Mermaid: Disney Enterprises, Inc.

Crate & Barrel: Euromarket Designs, Inc.

Olympics: United States Olympic Committee Corp.

Wii: Nintendo of America, Inc.

How I Met Your Mother: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.

Glee: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.

Ronald McDonald: McDonald’s Corporation

J.C. Penney: J.C. Penney Company, Inc.

Smithsonian: Trust Instrumentality United States

Wonder Bread: Wonderbread Five

Buddig Meats: Carl Buddig and Company

Juicy Juice: Harvest Hill Beverage Company

G.I. Joe: Hassenfield Bros., Inc

Barbie’s Dream House: Mattel, Inc.

Twinkie: Continental Baking Company

Homer Simpson: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.

The Gap: Gap Stores, Inc.

Dancing with the Stars: The British Broadcasting Company

Burger King: Burger King Corporation

Project Runway: Miramax Film Corp.

Jim Beam: Jim Beam Brands Co.

Home & Garden TV: Scripps Network, LLC

Lifetime Movie Network: Lifetime Entertainment, Inc

YouTube: Google, Inc.

Starbucks: Starbucks Corporation

The Three Stooges: Moe Howard, Shemp Howard, Larry Fine, Curly Howard

E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial: Melissa Mathison

The 40-Year-Old Virgin: Judd Apatow

Formica: The Diller Coporation

Grand Theft Auto: Rockstar Games

Gone With the Wind: Margaret Mitchell

Dr. Phil: Philip Gavin Degraw

Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality: Sigmund Freud

Atlanta Constition: Cox Enterprises, Inc.

Google: Google, Inc.

Froot Loops: Kellogg North American Company

Boogie Nights: Paul Thomas Anderson

A Woman Scorned: The Betty Broderick Story: Amy Walllace

Family Ties: Gary Daivd Goldberg

She Woke Up Pregnant:Michael O’Hara

House: David Shore

Twilight: Stephanie Meyers

The Housewives of New Jersey: Bravo TV

Close Encounters: Stephen Spielberg

Village People: Casablanca

The Breakfast Club: John Hughes

The Catcher in the Rye: J.D. Salinger

Blockbuster: Wayne Huizenga, David Cook

The Wizard of Oz: L. Frank Baum

The Towering Inferno: Richard Martin Stern

We May Never Love Like This Again: Al Kasha, Joel Hirschhorn

The Poseidon Adventure: Paul Gallico

Man in the Mirror: Michael Jackson

Bad: Michael Jackson

Smooth Criminal: Michael Jackson

Part One

Chapter One

Aaron

The first time I saw him, I felt like little birds were pecking at my scalp. My feet started to sweat. My tear ducts jiggled a bit.

And as he looked at me, just stared without saying anything, I became acutely aware of what I must look like to someone like him. The ears that seem more inclined to hang-gliding than hearing. The whole ET head-neck problem. The glasses, oh, the glasses. The chest that wasn’t. The legs that no skinny jeans could redeem. And those ridiculous feet, miles and miles of them, unfurling in boat-sized Converse.

In my experience, it’s rare for people like me to come into contact with people like him, and this was probably for the best, given the foot-sweating and the bird-pecking. Sure, I’d seen people like him in movies and on television, but I’d never really been up close to this kind of beauty—the kind that changes the air in the room, that seems to make things vibrate. I first noticed his eyes, an unreal sky blue. I could have sworn I heard some sort of offstage ping as one of them sparkled like in a cartoon. His lips looked painted, but they weren’t, adding a feminine touch to a face that was all twentysomething Hollywood homage—Efron, that middle Jonas, the Twilight boys, with some Bette Midler thrown in as an aesthetic complication. He was wearing a low-cut T-shirt, and I immediately wanted to put my tongue in the hollow of his neck—if I were the type of person who would do a thing like that, which I wasn’t. But still.

His name was Julian, Julian Evans, and he had answered an ad I’d placed seeking a roommate. I was twenty-seven at the time, working on a PhD in American Studies at Emory, and budget cuts had cost me my funding, which meant I was no longer able to swing full rent on my two-bedroom apartment. I’d placed an ad in the local alternative weekly, figuring I’d get either a post-college slacker or a grad student nerd, neither of which would threaten the rhythms of my quiet academic life. Instead, I got Julian, whose email said that he owned his own business. What kind of twenty-one year old owns his own business? I wondered. But not for long.

I’m what they call an escort, he said in our first getting-to-know-you chat. We were sitting on the couch, and I was trying to pay attention to what he was saying. I found this difficult because of the way his knee poked through a rip in his jeans. Once I got finished with the knee, I was going to start thinking about his ankle bone, which protruded adorably above some sort of hipper-than-thou sneaker. I must have muttered something in response, because he kept talking.

Yeah, he said. Basically, guys call me up and we pretend that we’re gonna go to the movies or something, but mostly we go right to the fucking. As near as I can tell, escort’s just a fancy word for hooker. It’s a pretty good gig, though. The money’s decent and I get to sleep late.

This was enough to wake me from my knee reverie.

What kind of guys hire you? I asked, trying to sound like I talked to male prostitutes all the time, that this was a typical Tuesday night for a grad student.

It’s mostly sad married guys, he said. They all say they’ve never done anything like this before, that they’re just curious, but you can tell that’s bullshit once they get started in on the peen. These are not first-timers, if you know what I’m sayin’.

The peen? I asked.

Yeah, the peen. Dick. Cock. I’ve got a beaut. I call it Walter.

You’ve named your, um, your, um… I asked, pointing in the vicinity of his ‘um’. If I had tried to say cock, I would have passed out.

Yep, he said, after my Uncle Walter. He’s a big, tall guy, with a big head and wide hips. Seen from the right angle, there’s definitely a resemblance.

That’s nice, I said. Your uncle must be very proud.

Anyway, most of these guys are pretty gross, but I’m hoping to break into the next level, where it’s mostly gay businessmen who need some eye candy for their charity dinners. The money’s better and so is the food, and I imagine they smell nicer than some of this current crowd. Kinda stinky, if you wanna know the truth. You don’t have to worry, though. I never bring guys home. Anyway, what’s your deal? You’re a ’mo, right?

Mo? I asked, hoping he had some sort of kinky Three Stooges roleplaying in mind.

Yeah, ’mo. As in homo. You’re gay, right?

What makes you think that? I asked.

Well, first of all, duh. And second, your neck and face lit up like Christmas when I started talking about Walter.

Well, a lot of people would have been somewhat discomfited by the Walter talk, I said, "but yes, I’m gay. I came out three years ago when I started grad school. I made a pretty big production of it. Wore the shirts and the buttons and went to all the meetings. I even marched in a parade or two. Otherwise, not much has changed. I wasn’t having sex then, and I’m not having sex now. My dissertation is actually gayer than I am. I’m writing about same-sex eroticism in the movies of Judd Apatow. I’m currently working on a chapter about the fetishism of male genitalia in The 40-Year-Old Virgin."

Julian looked at me like I was from another planet, where people kept their shirts buttoned up to the top and didn’t have names for their penises. He wasn’t wrong.

Dude, he said, you really need to get laid.

He wasn’t wrong about that either, but he didn’t seem inclined to offer a solution to my problem. I guess he was trying not to bring his work home with him. So considerate.

We spent the next few weeks falling into a pretty comfortable roommate rhythm. The ‘we’ being me, Julian and Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln was Julian’s cat. His previously unannounced cat. He was a tabby with bad teeth and he loved to lie belly-up in the circle of sunlight that landed on the kitchen counter each morning. Apparently, Julian’s mom had named him, following a family tradition that required naming animals after presidents. Abraham Lincoln had been preceded by Grover Cleveland, who had been eaten by a possum, and George Washington Pussycat, a randy beast they called ‘The Father of our Neighborhood’. Of course, I was allergic, so I complained a bit about Abraham Lincoln, but I actually liked having him around. Seeing him in his spot of sun, legs up in the air, made me think of Julian, who I didn’t actually see that much of.

He was out just about every night, and I was usually asleep by the time he came home. He didn’t wake up until around noon, leaving my mornings free and quiet to think about the ways in which Judd Apatow seems more obsessed with penises than vaginas, which, I was trying to argue, reveals that at the root of every heterosexual narrative lies an unspoken but bursting-at-the-seams same-sex eroticism. I liked thinking about these things, but the writing wasn’t going well.

Everything I put on paper was so tired, so obvious, so ultimately pointless. Who cared, really? Newsflash—straight guys think about dick, too. Big surprise. But my proposal had already been approved, and I owed my advisor a chapter before the fall semester started. It was already July, so I kept pretending to write it. I’d sit dutifully at the computer, cursor flashing, but then lose myself and the morning reading Entertainment Weekly online recaps of The Housewives of New Jersey and trying to get Abraham Lincoln to chase a rubber mouse.

This was the problem with American Studies, but it was also the lure. I got to ponder the dense patterns and structures of pop culture and not feel like I was wasting time. In college, I had been an English major and pretty sure I would pursue a PhD in literature, but at some point during my senior year, it had dawned on me that I didn’t really like literature that much. Paying so much attention to novels that no one ever read anymore felt masturbatory, and not in a good way. As I struggled to write my senior thesis, ‘The Chimney in the Lesser Novels of Thomas Hardy’, I procrastinated by watching hours of reality television, which seemed much more urgent, more full of meaning to me than Hardy and his chimneys. What did the sixth-season removal of Project Runway to Los Angeles tell us about Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis? What role did the raced bodies of Randy and Paula play in the consolidation of Ryan and Simon’s homosociality? Here, I thought, was true significance, as a nation of millions huddled around collective, ongoing narratives, which got invented and reinvented for each new moment and each new need.

So, when I received a brochure from the graduate program in American Studies at Emory, with its lurid list of courses devoted to deconstructing the contemporary American psyche, I was sold. It went well in the early years. I loved my coursework, delighting in the opportunity to apply neo-neo-Marxist logics to the reality TV spectacle of New Jersey. What fun.

And yet here I was, with Apatow and his weewees and peepees, and I wondered if maybe the bloom was off the rose. Was all of this just too ridiculous to be taken seriously?

Of course, it didn’t help that I was becoming more interested in Julian than film, more invested in his stories than in Apatow’s.

Julian would usually emerge from his room when he caught a whiff of the bacon I was microwaving for my then-favorite sandwich—turkey, brie, bacon and honey mustard on toasted Italian. I tend to ride a sandwich until I can’t stand the thought of it, and this was a good one, likely to last me another couple of months at least. Julian would shuffle into the kitchen, eyes cloudy with sleep, hair a mess, wearing pajama bottoms with little penguins on them and no shirt. He’d drink his coffee while I ate my lunch, though eating lunch while sporting an erection is harder than you’d think. It’s a crisis of dual and conflicting aims.

I looked forward to these moments, in part because of his nipples, but mostly because he’d tell me about his previous night’s work. The kid had no shame and would happily recount, in great detail, the men he’d met and the acts they’d asked him to perform. He made up names for them to keep them straight in the telling. There was Pig in the Blanket, Moley, The Great Assless Wonder—Assless for short—Johnny No Grip, Winnie the Pooh, Beer Can, This Al-Gore-Lookin’ Motherfucker—Al Gore for short—Toe Bitch, and my favorite, Big Gassy Baby, a two-hundred-fifty-pound man who dressed up like a doll and paid Julian to burp him.

His on-the-job experiences made my own desires seem quaint by comparison. I simply wanted to cuddle with him and watch home improvement shows. Maybe later we’d have time for other stuff, but for now I just wanted to rescue him from his world of complicated peens and big gassy babies. I wanted to give him a space free of desire, even as my own desire was at full tilt.

Because while he told his stories with a kind of smirky pride, making himself the whimsical hero in a postmodern sex farce, I had the sense his pride was mostly bluster, mostly show. His left hand gave him away. I didn’t notice it the first few times we hung out, and I’m not even sure he was aware of it, but when narrating his series of perversions for hire, his left hand was in constant motion, each finger touching his thumb in rapid and ongoing succession, and then his thumb touching the palm of his hand. He was counting his fingers with his fingers, over and over again. One two three four five. One two three four five. One two three four five. If it was a relief to discover that, yes, they were all in their proper positions, it wasn’t enough of a relief to keep him from starting over. The counting continued even when his stories ground to a halt, as they inevitably did. He’d just sit quietly staring at the Formica tabletop, counting his fingers. Those fingers made me realize I loved him. Not his eyes, or the perfect planes of his face. Not the way his bare shoulders caught the light from the kitchen window. Neither knee nor ankle bone. Not even Walter, or the hope of Walter. No, it was his fingers, desperately counting, searching for calm in a world that must have seemed anything but.

Then came a period when the stories stopped. I’d sit down with my sandwich, eager for that day’s dose of nipples and debauchery, and nothing. Well, I still had the nipples, but no tales of the sick and twisted. No Al Gore. No Big Gassy Baby. Just Julian, quieter than usual, deflecting attention away from his nighttime adventures by asking me questions about myself. I was happy to oblige. Anything to keep him looking at me, anything for the occasional eye contact.

When he did start talking again, a few days later, things were different. No more invented names, just someone called Paul.

Paul? I asked. Not Stubby or Droolie or Crack Whore?

Yep, Paul, he said. Just Paul.

What makes him so special? I asked, more than a little jealous.

Nothing, really, he said. He’s just different. He’s older than the other guys and less grabby.

He’s paying you to talk? I asked, wondering if this meant I had been on the clock all this time.

He’s not paying me anything yet, he said.

I could tell he didn’t really want to talk about this. He used to love nothing more than piling detail on detail—mouths and asses and penises and warts and scars and unfortunate danglers. But he was tightlipped about this Paul guy. Wouldn’t give him up. So, I let it go.

A few days later, Julian told me he was going out of town, but he wouldn’t tell me where, or who with.

And about a week after that, all hell broke loose. I was reading on the couch, with the local evening news on mute, when I caught something out of the corner of my eye. Julian was on television. It was a video of him at the airport with some older guy who looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him. The crawl at the bottom of the screen said, Anti-Gay Preacher Caught with Male Prostitute.

That was how it all started.

Chapter Two

Julian

I was never that good with the books, but I sure can work the peen. I can flat-out work it. I wield it, really. When guys see me starting to wield it, you can tell they’ve never really had one wielded on ’em before. It’s a revelation to them, the wielding. I know what the Bible says, but I don’t see how the kind of peen work I’m capable of isn’t beautiful in the eyes of the Lord. That just doesn’t make sense to me.

The sad thing is, it’s like the peen is all these guys see. They get so jacked up about the peen that they can’t see the forest for the trees, if you know what I’m sayin’. The forest is like something you’d see at Disney World, full of every kind of plant and animal from all around the world. What was that word Mr. Linseed taught us? Biodiversity. Yeah, biodiversity. And that’s me. My bio is diverse. Only these guys don’t see it because of the peen. That’s sad. That’s a goddamn tragedy.

But this new guy, Paul, was something else. He wasn’t interested in the peen. In that first week I knew him, I offered it up on more than one occasion. But he always found a way to change the subject, to shift the conversation from Walter to me—my family, my past, my ‘hopes and dreams’.

Still, I couldn’t imagine that dick wouldn’t come up at some point, so when he hired me to lift his luggage on a trip he was taking, I just figured that was what old guys called it, luggage, and I was willing. I was ready to lift it, do whatever with it, but apparently, he meant actual suitcases and shit, which seemed a waste of what I had to offer, but whatever. It’s your dime, dude.

But he sure did get his money’s worth on those massages. Never seen a guy so into naked rubbing and yet so awkward around the peen. I thought I’d seen it all, but this thing he called ‘the long stroke’, like he invented it or some shit, required some pretty delicate maneuvering around complicated areas. I had a knack for it, though, and he was happy with it. ‘Happy as a sissy with a bag full of peens,’ as my mom used to say.

So yeah, a whole lot of peen went to waste with this guy, but at least he was actually interested in me as a person apart from the peen. He was always asking me questions. Stuff about my daddy and whether he ever hugged me. Lots of stuff about my relationship to Jesus.

When I talked, he actually listened instead of just waiting for me to stick it in him like the rest of those assholes. It was nice. We had some good talks. Naked talks, which was kind of weird, but real talks. I couldn’t figure this one out, but his avoidance of the peen was no skin off my back. I was all right with it. It was nice for a change. It was a breath of fresh air.

Walter had been hogging all the attention as far back as eighth-grade gym class, which was the first time we had to shower with other guys. I didn’t know what I was walking into, since I didn’t really have anything to compare it with, but me and Walter caused quite a stir that first day. Eyes were poppin’! Asshole football players who wouldn’t be caught dead staring at another guy’s dick couldn’t get enough of mine. They were pointing, crowding around like it was a prize pig at the county fair.

‘Damn, boy! Somewhere there’s a horse missin’ his pecker!’

‘Um, dude, you and your dick should join the circus.’

‘You’re screwed, buddy. Ain’t no girl in the eighth grade gonna stand a chance with that thing. What a waste.’

It made me kind of famous for a while. Kids I didn’t know would shout things in the hall—Firehose, Redwood, King Dong. But eventually the peen business wound down and things got back to normal, which in my case meant a bored fourteen-year-old living in Jasper, Georgia, with no real interest in anything at all and with no one much interested in him either. I had Walter, and I wasn’t bad to look at, I guess, but I didn’t know how to be around people. Which didn’t really matter, since I wasn’t that sure I wanted to be.

I spent a lot of time by myself, watching television when my mom wasn’t home, which was most of the time, and hiding in my room playing video games when she was. She’d get home from work and be all eager to talk to me, to see how I was doing, make sure I was okay, but I couldn’t take it. It was too much somehow, too much attention, too much need for me to be happy so that she could be happy. I think she was trying to make up for my dad not being there, but she didn’t need to. You can’t miss someone you never really knew, and I sure didn’t miss him. But Mom seemed to feel pretty guilty about everything, and I couldn’t take it, so I’d tell her I had homework to do and disappear into hours of Grand Theft Auto.

Eventually I realized I was being left behind somehow. Other kids were moving on, dating, hooking up, bragging about who did what with who over the weekend. I’d hear guys talking about their pathetic attempts to somehow maneuver their girlfriends’ hands nearer and nearer their lesser Walters, but I couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for getting involved myself. I had a couple of friends who were girls. Losers like myself, they were shunned by others and not particularly bothered by it, but they were just friends. Occasionally one of the popular girls would come up to me and ask, ‘Is it true? Can I see it?’ But the minute I went for my zipper, they’d scream and run away, which was the only reason I was brave enough to reach for my zipper in the first place.

But when I was seventeen, things changed. I first noticed it in the mall. I was walking around, killing time, and I started to notice the way guys were cruising me. Older guys. They’d make eye contact and hold it, then let their eyes slide down toward Walter. Then they’d slide back up again and give me half a smile. A weird little grin. Like they knew something about me that I didn’t know.

The more I noticed this, the more it seemed to happen. At the mall. At the movies. Hell, when I was in the grocery store with my