Porn War

The song "Kisses Sweeter than Wine" sprang to my mind, because that was what his kisses were. As far as I could tell in the dimly lit Blue Moon resort hotel room in Las Vegas, he was a young hunk, no older than I was. Most of the men in the room were older, a few probably twice or more my age. None were complete throwaways, but he was prime among them. And he had latched on to me as soon as I'd entered the room, probably the last to arrive of eight or nine or twelve. It was that murky in the room. The rest of them already naked. Most of them already humping.

We stood, rocking together against each other in instant high heat, and kissing—those sweeter-than-wine kisses—as he pulled my clothes off me. We all wore face masks, which, along with the dimness in the room, supposedly would make it difficult to identify each other during the meetings of the conclave the next day when we were clothed—but surely not impossible.

He certainly couldn't hide his mop of blond hair or his magnificent build or his extra-long cock completely even in clothes in the light of day in a Las Vegas hotel meeting room. And if he touched or kissed me again, I'm sure I would know it was him.

I could recognize Marty Doans without any trouble. Muscle solid, but a bit squat, nearly bald, and bordering on pudgy—and very, very hairy. I could identify him primarily, even with a face mask, because he obviously was holding court. I'd never seen him naked before, and although I'd heard about him having a super-thick cock, I couldn't see this now. He was sitting on the side of a bed, one of two queen beds in the room, with another man kneeling between his knees and servicing his cock. Which is why I couldn't see it. Two men were on the bed behind him, fucking, and Marty had a cigar in one hand and three or four fingers of his other hand up the ass of the man doing the fucking behind him.

Marty was the organizer of the conclave and a big-name publisher of pornographic e-books. You got your books under his gay male imprint and you could quit your day job.

My books were under his imprint, and I'd never had to have a day job.

So, yes, I knew Marty, of all the guys in this room, even with the mask on. And I also knew the squirrelly little guy who came with Marty, Peter Knoles, who, though obviously wanting some of what others were getting, was nervously flitting around the room from coupling to coupling, but pulling back almost immediately because Marty wanted something or Peter was afraid Marty would want something and someone other than Peter would supply it. Last I saw of him on this night, he was standing at the wall trying to adjust the temperature because Marty complained about it being too hot in here.

Of course it was hot in here with a dozen or so guys in high heat.

I didn't know whose room this was. Probably either Marty's or Peter's. The invitation delivered under my door shortly after I checked in earlier that afternoon just said, "If you're really a player, and we're not talking cards, there will be more of this in Room 103 at 11:00 p.m." The invitation had included a fifty-dollar bill.

The sweeter-than-wine hunk had me straddling him on the bed Marty wasn't using himself. The hunk was on his back, my knees were buried in his pits, and I was arched back, grabbing an ankle with one hand and his cock with my fist, while he sucked me and I slowly face-fucked him. He lifted my torso to vertical after a period of good moaning and servicing, raised my hips a bit more, and brought them forward so that his mouth and tongue could get to my asshole. The underside of my cock was thumping on his forehead and he was bringing me to a boil so fast I hoped I wasn't going to be leaving anything sticky in his wavy blond hair.

He'd already asked me if I took cock or gave it, and my answer of "both, but more of the taking," had pleased him immensely. I knew then that I was going to be fucked by a long cock. In truth, from the atmosphere of the room, I knew I was going to be fucked by more than one. By Marty, for sure, if this was his party. He'd asked me for it before, in New York, but I'd never given it. I'd always managed to fend him off with a plausible excuse. I sure was going to be giving it tonight.

Didn't matter to me tonight. I was walking along the edge on a vodka high already, and I didn't mind doing research for my books and being gifted with new plotlines.

I went to arch my back again, but couldn't, because I realized that there was a chest behind me, a chest obviously sporting a studded leather harness. And two beefy, hairy arms encircling me, one holding me in place and the other possessing my cock, slick from the attentions of the sweeter-than-wine hunk. The new arrival had leather bands with studs on them on his wrists, and his arms were tattooed. The hard cock at the small of my back wasn't anything to sniff at.

Between the hunk working my ass with his tongue and the leatherman working my cock with his fist, it wasn't long before I gave the hunk a facial. Sorry about the hair, I thought. A protein shampoo. My ejaculation signaled the leatherman to move me back and set me on the hunk's long, curved cock—it took an eternity for me to slide down that pole—and then he moved around to kneel over the hunk's face and receive attention for his own ass and for me to bend down and suck his cock. He didn't take that position for very long, though. He moved back to behind me, embraced me with one arm, and stuck a popper under my nose with his other hand.

"Inhale this good," a growly voice whispered in my ear. "You're gonna want it. We're gonna go for a DP here."

I moaned and inhaled. I kept right on inhaling—and moaning and groaning—as the leatherman slowly worked his cock in on top of the one the hunk already had buried inside me. The hunk held still with his while the leatherman began to slow pump me. They came almost simultaneously inside me.

My world was spinning from the popper, so I didn't much care or feel very much pain. I did do a lot of groaning and grunting, though.

I think I was only semiconscious, but I was awake enough to realize when the leatherman was pulling me off the hunk and carrying me over and setting me in Marty Doan's lap, facing him, and on what I found was a very thick cock indeed. I just let my shoulder blades fall back onto the tops of his feet and my arms dangle on the carpeting beside me, as Marty began pulling me on and off his cock. The leatherman knelt down and gave me another pull on the popper before sliding his cock down my throat.

I woke I have no idea how much later to the flush of a toilet in the bathroom off the hotel room. The lights were off in the room, but a weak glow of sun was coming in from around the edges of the curtains on the windows and the light was on in the bathroom. The bathroom door was open. I saw a naked, fat, hairy rump standing in front of the toilet. I heard a second flush.

No one else was in the room. My arms were pulled above my head, my wrists bound to the headboard with restraints. My legs also were spread and restrained at the ankles, with leather leads running down to the bottom corners of the bed. The leads on the legs weren't pulled tight. There were a couple of pillows under the small of my back, elevating my hips. And I saw a small collection of toys—dildos and beads—laying on the bed beside me. I had no idea if these had already been used or were waiting to be used.

It all seemed familiar. I wondered if I'd written this scene before. My predecessor under my pen name, Brent, certainly had.

As Marty walked out of the bathroom and toward me, he was adjusting a wide, studded leather band around the base of his cock. He also was stroking himself to an erection.

"Hey, what're you doing?" I asked.

"Wrong question," he muttered. "It should be what have we been doing? Good of you to join the party again. There for a while it was like fucking Raggedy Andy. Too bad you weren't more awake. The part of you that was was enjoying it."

Without further ado, he hopped up on the bed, crouched in a half stand between my spread legs, and reached down and grasped my waist in strong hands. He pulled my pelvis up to his, shifting my weight onto my shoulder blades with my torso arcing down to the head of the bed. He thrust his thick, studded cock inside me and began to pump. Feeling no pain or even difficulty in taking his cock with added studs, I realized that my channel had been reamed well open, with no opportunity to tighten up again for however long I'd been in this room.

Whatever.

I turned my cheek to the side and moaned. He was fucking me good. I just wouldn't look directly at the gnome he appeared to be in this stance. He was fucking me really, really good, in fact.

But the restraints and the toys had me a bit worried.

"Um, Mr. Doans . . . Marty . . . just because I write gay male BDSM doesn't mean I practice it."

"You do now," was his response. "Do you want me to stop?"

"No, not particularly."

"You need another shot of the poppers?"

"Depends on what else you're planning on doing."

"I'll take that as a yes. Before I do it, I'll give you another shot or two. You'll want it."

At the front of my mind was the knowledge that Marty Doans could either make or break a gay male porn novelist.

Before he untied me and sent me back to my room, with another $100 in my jeans pocket, to shower, breakfast, and show up at the conclave only an hour late, I discovered that, no, he hadn't used all of those toys already.

* * * *

Before facing the first session of the conclave, an annual meeting of gay male porn writers, held pretty much in secret wherever Marty Doans's Bent Stallions Publications made arrangements, I felt I needed a real drink. It wasn't that far from noon. I saddled up to the bar of Las Vegas' Blue Moon resort hotel, a gay guy's only place, and asked for a Bloody Mary double. I'd met Marty before, face to face, in his New York offices when my lover, Brent Davenport, the original Jasper of the Jasper rough sex novels fame, died and I had to establish that I had written Brent's last three manuscripts—his highest-return best-sellers—myself. But I'd never been to one of Marty's conclaves, although I'd been invited before.

The main reason I'd never come was that Brent had been in a war of traded barbs with one of Doans's other best-selling authors, the gay male Romance novelist going by the pen name Niles James. The bitterness was such between them that, if they had ever met at a venue like this, the fur would fly.

I had only come to this conclave because I had been asked to come as a paid speaker—and was assured that Niles James would not be attending. Once here, though, I saw his name on the attendees' list. Well, I would just have to do my best to avoid him. I had half a notion to take off my "Jasper" name tag and go in as someone else—but I was a paid speaker in that name, so I guess I'd just have to find out who the old codger was—he had to be old if he was a contemporary of Brent's—and stay clear of him.

When I went to put the Bloody Mary on my room tab, the bartender checked his computer and said, "Your account has been linked to the Room 103 account, Mr. Jasper. You may just cite that room for charges from now on."

Marty, I thought. This was beginning to look like a setup, like I was lured here for Marty to use. He'd made clear before that he wanted me, and I'd only barely been able to outrun him—until now, well, until last night, of course. I'd thought that last night would do it for him, but now he was slowly owning me. I downed the Bloody Mary, ordered another one, and, that one in hand, soared into the meeting room.

A panel session on the difference between erotica and porn—an argument I had no time for; what I wrote was what I wrote—was in full cry. I took a seat toward the back and looked around. There were maybe seventy people there. I wasn't a bit surprised to see that well more than half of them were women. Brent had had a major burr under his saddle about the false genre of women writing "just pretend" or "how we'd like to fantasize our man" stories read mostly by other women. I had come to share his disdain for this quite large share of the gay male porn market, but like him, not too vocally because many women buying and reading that fake stuff were also buying ours, even though we thought of ourselves as writing for the actually actively gay male.

Over half of the men present were well into their fifties and sixties. Although I felt a bit sorry for them writing what most of them weren't actively engaged in now, I respected that most of them—probably all who dared come to a conclave such as this—had once been active and were now writing from memories they wished to remain captured and arousing them for as long as possible.

Only a few of the men present were young, as I was, or not much beyond forty, and probably writing from active experience. Not that I could say that much of what I wrote was from active experience myself—or was before Marty started taking me under his jaded wing the previous night. I had enough gay sex, just not that much that could be classified as BDSM. I now certainly could write BDSM stories better, the specialty Brent had known best and written most—with the knowledge of experience. At least light BDSM. I was willing to bet that it was from this core group of younger men here that Marty had chosen his invitation list for last evening's party in his hotel room. And I wondered if more active and intimate sessions were in store during the three-day event. I wouldn't be surprised if they were the only reason Marty even held these conclaves.

I scanned the room several times, trying to pick out who Niles James might be. I couldn't very well avoid him if I couldn't identify him. At the next break I asked the older man I'd been sitting beside if he knew who Niles James was and could point him out to me. He did and could and pointed over to where a pudgy cross between Orson Wells and Truman Capote older man was talking with a well-built young blond guy.

"That's him," the man said. "Writes great Romances. The best-selling author in the Bent Stallions stable."

I bristled at that claim, but I remained polite. I had marked James's looks so that I'd remember to stay away from him, but my attention had already gone to the young blond he was talking to. I was sure just from watching him move and assessing his build that he was the sweeter-than-wine lover I had started with last night—and would have been more than pleased to continue with. Now him I would make no effort at all to stay away from.

I turned to ask the man if he knew who the blond was, but he was gone, and Marty was bearing down on me. I was to have the privilege of lunching at his table, at which he had gathered a bevy of twittering women authors of gay male Romance. It was not lost on me that Marty was introducing me to many disparate forms of sadism.

* * * *

The porn war between Jasper—as initiated by Brent Davenport—and Niles James was of the most bitter sort. It was born from a love-hate relationship. Brent and Niles had been lovers. They met as writers, with Brent writing mainstream sci-fi short stories for a pulp magazine and Niles already writing his gay male Romances for another publication of the same pulp magazine conglomerate. This, of course, was light years before the advent of the computer, let alone the e-book, which had caused the porn novel industry to burgeon because a buyer didn't have to worry about what to do with the book after he'd read it—or that much while we was reading it. Although Niles wrote Romances, he practiced BDSM and introduced Brent to the practice before Brent ever thought of writing that genre. It was Marty Doans, a young BDSM adherent of Niles's, who both encouraged Brent to switch to writing gay male BDSM for his startup Bent Stallions publishing effort and came between Brent and Niles sexually.

And it was Marty who tore Brent away from Niles and who egged on the two in competition with each other as writers and who, gleefully, started and nurtured the porn war between the two. He touted and promoted them both as "the" best-seller in his stable and encouraged and exaggerated the professional animosity between the two. It didn't take the two long to buy into the hype themselves.

This manufactured animosity was a palpable source of energy in this conclave, I clearly could see from the first session I attended. Nearly every side conversation I heard concerned the porn war between Marty's two standards and the fact that this was the first time that anyone had seen both Jasper and Niles James on the list of speakers. That neither name was applied yet in the schedule of sessions and the key concluding session time slot was not filled in yet only added fuel to the fire of anticipation.

If this was Marty's doing, I'd have to give him props as a consummate showman. Even I didn't know for sure what session I was to be impaneled on. The invitation to speak had suggested that I talk about the rules of BDSM in writing, which I found to be laughable. There were no definitive rules for BDSM in either doing it or writing about it, I believed, after having picked up writing it upon Brent's demise. There were, of course, clubs of it with rules of their own, but I had found that there was a whole range of application of the genre in both practice and stories and that a varying readership could be counted on for falling into this range.

My own BDSM writing thus far had been a toned-down version of Brent's and more heavily geared to bondage and milder toys and full enjoyment by all concerned. I would be the first to admit that I had little personal experience in the heavier BDSM arena and would be writing Romance myself—which only added to my resentment of Niles James dominating that aspect of the gay male market—if given the choice. I did enjoy a rough kind of sex, though, and I had been taking Jasper's work more in that direction. The fans of Jasper hadn't seemed to be complaining about that, at least yet—that I knew of.

Brent had not practiced BDSM techniques with me—well, beyond some of the tying up practices. By the time we met, he had softened and was actually quite romantic with me in our love-making.

I had accepted the invitation and the topic and had proceeded to put together a talk on the various techniques, equipment, and toys of BDSM in the gay male world and on how they could be—were being in Jasper's writings—applied to pornographic writing. I would just ignore the word "rules" altogether unless it came up in the question period. And if it did, I knew there would be a knock-down-drag-out fight in the room no matter what I said I believed about it.

As we went into the afternoon session, still without a topic for that last session or a mention of either me or Niles James as session speakers, I became increasingly convinced that I had been given a fake topic and wouldn't be speaking on the rules of BDSM at all, but rather would be paired with Niles in some sort of cat fight to conclude the conclave.

In this I was proved to be quite right.

My eyes kept going to the puckered-lipped, obviously self-satisfied pile of blubber who had been identified to me as Niles James and who sat simpering in the front row of the other section of chairs in the meeting room in the middle of a harem of equally simpering female writers. And as my eyes bored into him, I was aware that others were looking at me too, apparently having zeroed in on my "Jasper" nametag and already in delicious anticipation of what Marty obviously was planning.

When I couldn't take any more of this, I rose and slipped out of the room—I had sat as far back as I could find a seat—and went to the hotel reception desk.

"Is there an appropriate bar I can go to around here?" I asked. "Not in this hotel." I already was taking my name tag off as I asked. I wanted to be away from all of this for a while.