Too bad narrator David doesn’t get to comment on what happened to “The Term Paper Artist” at Esquire, where the story had long been scheduled to run in the April issue. At the last minute editor Edward Kosner scrapped it, causing literary editor Will Blythe to resign in protest. Kosner says reports that he feared the graphic gay sex in the story would alienate advertisers are untrue. “I first read the story back in the fall, and I thought it was very provocative,” he says. “Then weeks ago we revisited it, and I decided it wasn’t appropriate.”
Leavitt does call a penis a penis in this story, but there’s nothing gratuitous or exploitative about his sex writing. In fact, it’s hard to imagine anyone at Esquire getting in a twit about these passages if the action had been heterosexual. Leavitt believes Kosner’s decision was “homophobic.” “This is a story about a gay man who doesn’t proposition straight men but who is propositioned by them,” he says. “In several cases they seem to enjoy it. I can imagine Esquire worrying about losing subscribers.” Kosner denies any such motive. “It’s not a gender issue,” he says.
Meanwhile, the other two stories fall flat. “The Wooden Anniversary,” which describes a complicated house party in Italy, suffers from stilted dialogue and awkward descriptive writing. “Saturn Street,” about a gay man who delivers meals to AIDS patients and falls in love with one, is more successful; but once the characters are in place, the story simply rambles. It’s as if the device Leavitt created for “The Term Paper Artist”–the author as character–opened him up, relaxed his style and freed a natural wit that his more conventional writing keeps in the closet. “The Term Paper Artist” is well worth the price of the book. And it certainly would have been worth the price of Esquire.
