PS I'm honored and flattered that someone has launched a "Steven Zeeland Discussion Group." I myself don't plan on reading any of the postings anytime soon (I wouldn't, you know, join any club that would have me as a member.... Plus which it's more fun discussing someone when they're out of the room). But I'm very happy to promote the group:

Yahoo! Groups - Steven Zeeland Discussion Group

Probably it's a good thing I've never aspired to lead "a glittering lifestyle," and that I actually prefer residing in downscale Bremerton to the uptown district in Seattle from which my last words in THE QUEEN IS DEAD were dispatched.

Three years ago this month I had $4,000 to my name and no job. I wrote a check to "alternative" recording artist MOMUS for a thousand dollars -- as a patron for his "Stars Forever" album. I didn't just do it for the publicity. His label was facing bankrupcy, I'm a big fan of his music, and the person suing him was the artist who recorded the first album my mom used to play on our living room console stereo.

This year I could use a little patronage myself.

Buchman has already offered his help; he's given me permission to auction off one pair each of his USMC "tighty-whities" (briefs) and olive drab green socks, both stencilled with his name. They're genuine. But I fear I've diminished their potential four figure market value.

They're clean.

--Steve

Zeeland certainly lives a less glittering and more peripatetic life, and to an English audience his reports have an exotic gloss it would be unfair to to think Simpson could equal - not least his account of his friendship with Andrew Cunanan, the killer of Gianni Versace.

Andrew DeSilva, as I knew him, was a rival, not a friend. Not hardly. I paid as little attention to him as possible. But the more I ignored him the closer he got.

After Andrew made the FBI's "most wanted" list, I accepted an invitation from the literary editor of Seattle's alternative weekly THE STRANGER to write an essay on the overlap between Andrew's social world and mine.

After Versace's murder I turned down invitations from tabloids and tabloid TV. Instead, I shared what material I had to offer with TIME, the WASHINGTON POST, a writer for VANITY FAIR. . . . When the results appeared in print I winced but could not laugh. Pretty much the only words attributed to me by respected US journalists were the isolated tidbits in my story most milkable for shock value. So I ended up getting a taste of "gutter press" exploitation, without the remuneration.

But of course, even in conjunction with an erroneous definition of "glory hole," it was valuable national exposure, right?

Buchman and I did accept a four figure sum from a photo agency for usage of a snapshot taken of him with Cunanan by the "gay spree killer"'s first victim -- the very first picture taken on the Polaroid Captiva "party camera" Cunanan had presented Buchman. I'd let THE STRANGER use the image as an exclusive, and only belatedly thought to exploit it for cash. "You could have gotten twice as much had you called me a week ago!" bellowed the photo agency head. (Four and a half years later, I'm still waiting for a check from the agency's Paris bureau.)

Buchman heeded my admonition and applied most of the ill-gotten gain toward his college tuition that semester, and had just enough left over to pay for a week in Rome.

For a long time I planned on giving the Cunanan camera to John Waters for his serial killer memorabilia collection. I tried writing him once but the package was returned.

Now, next on my list of memorabilia for sale is that camera; a reproduction of the photo (Buchman is keeping the original); and maybe an audio CD-R disc containing two phone messages I didn't realize I had until one day last year when I popped in an old microcassette to be sure there was nothing on it I couldn't tape over and was startled to hear Andrew's voice inviting Buchman to dinner. "And don't worry, I know you haven't got a lot of money right now--"

But you know, I wasn't always a writer whose slim claim to global sub-cult fame rests on the odd offhand mention of his name in The Manila Times; on page 197 of a novel by James McCourt; in a newsgroup list of "all-time favorite characters in Momus songs" (#10, "Steven Zeeland," #9, a monkey that "drinks heavily/ and plays with itself from dusk to dawn/ as wicked as the day is long"); . . .

I wasn't always a marginal author.

I have had other brushes with fame.

I was once a marginal musician.

A decade before I had my first book published I spent a year holed up in the staunchly religious-conservative hometown of Gerald R. Ford and AMWAY -- my hometown -- singing and playing dirge in the Midwest's preeminent proto-industrial noise band.

The only bands within a thousand or so mile radius we owed any debt to musically were Pere Ubu and Devo. We were as quirky; blessed with a not unrelated rustbelt-specific sense of humor; and at least as alienated. But they were conventional rock bands with guitar, bass and drums. We were 3 guys + 3 synthesizers -- droning on about youth taking poison to escape a poisoned world . . .

To an audience not quite prepared for us.

A "SYNTHESIZED SOUND SO EXPERIMENTAL THAT MANY PEOPLE FIND IT DIFFICULT TO CALL MUCH OF IT 'MUSIC'" declared our hometown daily, the GRAND RAPIDS PRESS.

"THE SOUND, WHILE ORIGINAL, LACKS DEPTH AS THOUGH IT WERE STANDING STILL. . . . MAYBE I'M WAY OUT IN LEFT FIELD ON THIS ONE, MAYBE YOUR INTENTION FROM THE START WAS THE STATIC APPROACH. HELL, WHAT DO I KNOW," shrugged the punk zine TOUCH AND GO in a review of our only vinyl release, a single pressed in mono.

But a fledgling zine/record label based in Olympia, WA accepted one of our songs for inclusion on a cassette compilation of American underground bands.

When the compilation arrived we were surprised to discover that actually only half of our song had been included -- midway through the track abruptly faded out! I winced; the other guys barked their indignation. A minute later we were on the floor laughing. . . .

By that point we were almost qualifed to make a career out of confusing people. A show we did in Detroit went over well. Our next gig was supposed to be in Chicago -- as the warm-up act for JAPAN.

But just when all our hard work showed some sign of paying off, I took off to chase a soldier. A week after the compilation came out I was in Germany. And so I missed out on the brief flurry of attention accorded my band-mates in the wake of our first and last national exposure: our song -- the "edited version" -- on SUB POP 7.

Six years later I was still living in Frankfurt and had shifted my focus to writing books. Sub Pop had moved its base of operations from Olympia to Seattle. They still championed music made by disaffected youth from backwater America. One track on the 1988 compilation was by an act from Aberdeen, WA (a Pacific Northwest town as broken-spirited as the one I live in today). The catalog number of Nirvana's first single: SUB POP 23.

Sub Pop became famous, made Kurt Cobain famous, made Seattle world famous for grunge, and godfathered the music industry category "alternative."

There is a "History" page at subpop.com as well as a discography. But you won't find the name of my first band there. There are cover art scans of their first two compilations, but no track lists.

I'm not complaining.

But I have taken stock of the pre-history Sub Pop relics in my collection: subpop 5 cass / subpop 6 zine / subpop 7 cass; and a 20-year-old envelope from Olympia, WA inscribed "THANX FOR YOUR CASSETTE --WE'LL PROBABLY RELEASE 'GARY, IN'."

After I find the right night to put everything else aside and give the tapes a proper final listen, I am going to auction these collectibles.

Why?

Because authoring alternative books costs money.

"I'D LIKE TO DROP MY TROUSERS TO THE QUEEN/ EVERY SENSIBLE CHILD WILL KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS..." (Morrissey)

THE QUEEN IS DEAD: JARHEADS, EGGHEADS, SERIAL KILLERS & BAD SEX is a collection of letters between British writer Mark Simpson and me published last year by Arcadia Books, UK.

I haven't read it. Not out of any embarrassment over certain unsanitized details of my lewd vagrancy. (On the contrary; my life is an open book ... literally.) I just selfishly prefer my limited-edition-of-one set of Mark's personal letters to me v. the konsumprodukt available in the US from amazon.com.

But I do like looking at THE QUEEN IS DEAD. For me it has something of the exotic gloss of a record album in the import bin:

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 1-900850-49-4

Designed and typeset in FF Scala and Scala Sans by
Discript, London WC2N 4BN
Printed in England by The Cromwell Press, Trowbridge, Wiltshire

I'm also impressed with (and grateful for) the acuity of our reviewers' critical comments. Honestly, I never really expected to see THE QUEEN IS DEAD published at all -- much less widely reviewed, slated for translation into Portuguese, and at Christmas listed by THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY as one of their

Especially interesting (and, for me as a first-time author in the UK, instructive) have been the assessments of British journalists published in mainstream newspapers.

I don't know to what extent these letters are edited. Anyway, they read beautifully: certainly, an e-mail correspondence would have been very different in flavour. There's a neatness about the exchange of ink and paper that seems to suit a sergeant-major formalism in the soul of both writers.

Thank you. And, "right on" : E-MAIL SHOULD BE RESTRICTED BY LAW NOT TO EXCEED THE WORD LENGTH OF TELEGRAMS IMHO. STOP.

Simpson always comes across as a very public figure while Zeeland, with his low profile, his drifting across state lines, seems more the genuine inhabitant of the demi-monde that Simpson espouses.

"WHAT'S NEW?"

"I've lived through worse times," I told a friend last week. "But I was younger then."

FLASHBACK

The second week of September 2001 marked the 10 year anniversary of my relationship with THE HAWORTH PRESS.

TRAUMA

Probably I don't need to explain how it happened that celebration of this anniversary was preempted by breaking news.

LASH-BACK

At the height of mid-80's cold war tensions, I was working as a civilian employee on US Army bases in Germany where terrorist bombings occurred with such frequency as to almost become routine.

One of my current projects is editing a 10-year anniversary second edition of my first book, BARRACK BUDDIES. It was during the 1991 Gulf War that I left Germany -- my home since 1982. My interest in interviewing (and later photographing) US servicemen grew out of my stubbornly dogmatic pacifism. Seeing all my GI friends go off to war was more than I could take.

None of my friends were killed. And within months I found a publisher for my interviews with them....

Ten years later I find myself in a military town emptied of sailors "off to war."

STRAY CAT DRESS BLUES

Actually, as it happens almost all of my Navy friends here had already been discharged before 11 SEP 01. Most for getting into trouble. I've always had a soft spot for rebels, troublemakers, military bad boys (and military bad girls too, now).

Last month I turned down an invitation to write a feature story for a prestigious glossy magazine on the state of "gays in the military under George II."

I could have used the money. Badly. But (a) my work has always been more documentarian than political; (b) since my first invitation in 1993 to appear on HARD COPY I've consistently said no to any media exposure I feared might inadvertently exert any negative influence on the conditions under which service personnel work and live. And (c) for the last five years or so the primary focus of my work has been chronicling homoeroticism among military men who do not necessarily identify themselves as gay.

Since "9-11" I've also been ruminating on the question of trivialization.

That my studio photography of sailors these last two years has largely been limited to men (and women) on their way out of the Navy just sort of happened. It's since become requisite. Even so, the second week of September I "blacked out" the galleries of half-naked sailors on this site in acknowledgement of the special sacrifices demanded of active duty service members.

In a statement on the direction I see my work taking, I wrote:

My photography (as my five books) is neither commercially nor politically motivated. Occasionally, I do work up something resembling a spark of lewd-vagrant voyeuristic prurience. Mostly, though (and more and more...), I'm just a not-ready-for-PBS documentarian.

KEYWORD PHRASE: "time capsule."

From here on my writing will likely concentrate on the closing decades of the 20th century: preserving stories that would otherwise go unrecorded.

And sharing some stories of my own.

Later this year Haworth will be issuing an enhanced version of MILITARY TRADE. Whether or not you opt to buy a copy, be sure to check out the newly expanded photo section, which features some choice military erotica images collected by Kinsey himself.

"Steven Zeeland does for gender study what others have to settle for wishing they could. His interviews — THE BEST ARE 'STRAIGHT TO HELL' MEETS STUDS TERKEL IN KINSEY DRAG — let you make your own decisions, by allowing their subjects to speak for themselves. . . . And Zeeland's admiration for the soldiers he documents is a subtext printed with invisible but indelible ink." — Brian Pera / Lowblueflame.com

It's high time I donned my Kinsey drag anew. As reported last month, I've resumed collecting materials documenting military initiation rituals.

If you have any photos, clippings, personal anecdotes, audio or videotapes you'd be willing to contribute to this project, please drop me an e-mail with RESEARCH in the subject line.

Needless to say, I have a special interest in activities that appear to entail homoerotic aspects. My aim is not, however, to "expose" these traditions as somehow "really gay." Nor do I want to embarrass the military. On the contrary. My approach will be documentarian — and elegiac.

My goal is to compile a scrapbook of sorts chronicaling initiation rituals military men have used to bond; to integrate newcomers; to self-govern their living and working spaces; to let off steam, etc. I've already written a little about the "crossing the line" ceremony, a sailor tradition that dates back centuries but is rapidly dying out.

It appears likely that this and other military male-bonding rituals will soon become as obsolete as . . . urinals on Navy ships?

My e-mail address remains the same, steve@stevenzeeland.com. I'm a terrible correspondent, but I do my best to answer as many letters as I can. And I maintain my pledge to read and carefully archive every letter sent my way.

By the way, all of my research materials will ultimately end up — Where else? You guessed it: the newly established "Zeeland Special Collection" at The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction in Bloomington, Indiana.

That's all for now. Back to you, Momus.

Steve
March 2001

My late friend and mentor David Lloyd, the San Diego beefcake photographer, liked to tell me that I should author a play based on the life of Dr. Alfred Kinsey. On the other side of the Atlantic, Mark Simpson had an idea of his own for a musical based on The Kinsey Report itself!

There's something of a thread here . . .

Scottish alt.popstar Nick Currie, aka Momus, was just in Seattle performing material from his new album FOLKTRONIC. In one song, "Psychopathia, SX" Nick imagines himself a 1940's hillbilly stationmaster receiving a certain famous sex researcher:

Puffing round the railway track here comes the evening train / Bringing Dr. Kinsey back to talk with us again. . . .
The last MP3 I downloaded from Napster was from 1948: "Ooh, Dr. Kinsey!" by Martha Raye — a singer remembered for her "willingness to travel to the 'ends of the earth' to see soldiers."

The Haworth Press has just repackaged my all-time favorite of their backlist titles: BAD BOYS & TOUGH TATTOOS: A SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE TATTOO WITH GANGS, SAILORS, AND STREET-CORNER PUNKS by the late Sam Steward, AKA porn writer Phil Andros. In the early 1950s, Dr. Steward quit his career as a professor to open up a tattoo shop catering especially to Navy "boots." BAD BOYS grew out of a journal he kept at the urging of a friend and former colleague, who sometimes stopped in to visit. . . .

  "When Kinsey was observing in the shop I always used
  my best lines of patter to steer the customers into his
  areas of interest. This was not hard to do, since hope
  springs eternal in the human genitalia, especially those
  of sailors. . . . "
When the freshly redesigned BAD BOYS arrived in the mail last week, I was pleased. And proud; I'd had the honor of selecting the vintage photo for this cover.

Also, hot off the press, the import-only
THE QUEEN IS DEAD:
JARHEADS, EGGHEADS, SERIAL KILLERS & BAD SEX

This experimental epistolary collaboration between Mark Simpson and me has, if nothing else, violated convention. Heinously.

As one reviewer put it, kindly:

"Quite why a pair of armchair philosophers writing about trannies, military men's bottoms, and cats should make an enjoyable read is a mystery. But it does."
Honestly, I never quite believed that this collection of private correspondence really would become public. Indeed, most of my closest friends advised against publishing THE QUEEN IS DEAD until after I'm dead. And yet, here it is — not only in print, but garnering praise in prominent places.

"One of the most congenial, winning, intelligent and original 'gay' publications for many years."

— The Independent (London)

"This book is full of clever lines. But cleverness alone doesn't do it for me. What makes THE QUEEN IS DEAD different and moving is the graceful arc it makes as the two men become friends and confidants. . . . "

— Hot Press (Dublin)

"What makes this book so appealing is that you can read it on three levels. As a tale of bawdy exploits with enlisted men, it skirts the fringes of highbrow gay porn. It can also be read as a thoughtful critique of masculinity and the urban gay lifestyle, scattered with witty epigrams that are pure entertainment. Equally engagingly, it is a story about the relationship between the writers who, encountering misfortune in love, come to realise the value of friendship."

— The Guardian (London)

Click here for information on how to order this import title from amazon.co.uk.

A NIGHT IN THE BARRACKS — AUTHENTIC ACCOUNTS OF SEX IN THE ARMED FORCES
Alex Buchman, Editor

A NIGHT IN THE BARRACKS is at last off press. This is a collection of non-fiction erotic stories, most of them set on base, presented by my former Marine pal young Mr. Buchman (that guy pictured on the cover of THE MASCULINE MARINE).

I've contributed the Foreword; one clinically-detailed confessional chapter ("In a German Peep Show"); and the 22-page photo insert.

"A NIGHT IN THE BARRACKS is a memorable night indeed. Alex Buchman's keen eye and first-hand knowledge have assembled a collection that is INTENSELY EROTIC AND THOUGHT-PROVOKING. Heartily spitting in the eye of porn clichés and expectations, the book stares you down with its hard authenticity and emotional candor. . . . LEAVES YOU EXCITED, CONFUSED, AND HUNGRY FOR MORE. I look forward to future volumes."

— D. Travers Scott, Author, EXECUTION TEXAS: 1987;
    Editor, STRATEGIC SEX AND BEST GAY EROTICA 2000

Click here to view excerpts and images from Buchman's first book — and for information on submitting stories for possible inclusion in Volume II.or possible inclusion in Volume II.