A Note from the Author about the Second Edition of Secret Buddies:
| Secret Buddies sold some 5,000 copies
when it was first published in the early 90s. It has been out of print for
several years now, and I'm currently working on a second novel,
Detour. About halfway through that, I decided to pull out my first
book and see how it holds up. Secret Buddies started as a short story. I planned to write a series of little erotic tales, each in a different genre, all examining the nature of sexuality between men—my favorite subject. This was to be a classic four-guys-in-a-cabin porno scenario, to be followed by a gay werewolf story, a science fiction story, something tragic, something comic, and so on. But I soon found I'd built too large a foundation for a short story; the characters came to life, scenes needed to be chapters, and I ended up with a novel. A friend who read the first draft called it "relentlessly sexual," and that it is. If I were writing it now, I'd probably shorten the second half, and I can see that the intricacies of the first-person point of view sometimes eluded me. Still, rereading it ten years later, I fell in love with my boys all over again. The sex turned me on and I had fun with it. It's all hard-ons and heart, and that's what I wanted it to be. So I'm sending my buddies out into the world again. I've made only a few minor edits to the text, so "new edition" refers mostly to the new cover, which this time calls it what it always was—an enthusiastically erotic novel. That's me on the cover, backpacking above the North Fork of the Clearwater River in 1968. A reader of the first edition wrote that he thinks good pornography creates "an impossibly hospitable world." I agree. This is ultimately a romantic fantasy about the way I wish things had been back then. In truth, I was a pretty lonely guy when I took that picture. It's a self-portrait, because I was hiking alone. I didn't come out until I got to San Francisco a few years later. That's where Detour is headed. — Mike Newman |
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