The following tale of Alexander the Great’s visit to a small village in the mountains outside of Ecbatana in Persia was discovered forty years ago. The tale was written on stone tablets. It has been translated from the Persian and then rendered into the modern idiom by the radical queer movement Who’s The Denialist Now? It is estimated that the story can be dated 324 BC although its authenticity cannot be verified. It is known that Alexander was in Ecbatana at this time.
I had heard all the stories. Great warrior as a blond as the sun, whatever that was supposed to mean; covered in as many wounds as he was muscles, which sounds like a new category of fetish all in itself; takes lovers in every town even though he had his eunuch, his ‘best’ friend and his ‘wife’ in tow, which is too nasty to think about. I hated him years before I saw him.
Then, I never thought I would have to see him. Alexander the Great. He had to come to this village, didn’t he? His retroussé nose sniffed the hills as he luxuriated in Ecbatana and he said, “You know, Hephaestion, I think I’ll teach the mountain dwellers ‘round here a thing or two. So much better than city folk. I mean, they’re already hip to the square. Mountain dwellers are so … what’s the word I’m looking for? Innocent. Persian hicks always scream louder, anyway, when you …” Here he would trail off and wink.
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Categories: Short Fiction
Tagged: alexander the great, bagoas, bryon fear, hephaestion, homosexuality, julius caesar, polari, william summers
- Published:
- August 15, 2009 – 12:05
- Author:
- By William Summers
Why write a speculative and perhaps scurrilous story about Alexander the Great?
The main reason is that there is a romance surrounding Alexander that does not take the hard facts into account. And of course by hard facts I mean the pillage and plunder. Why on one hand is to acceptable to praise Alexander but oppose the Halliburton/Microsoft sponsored war in Iraq? True, Alexander at least had a culture to bring to his conquered lands, whereas the Bush junta had … Microsft contracts, Halliburton contracts, faux rhetoric about freedom and democracy that in effect meant control of the oil fields, and governments that would not get in the way of such control. And Hollywood films of course.
There was not the hypocrisy in the campaigns of Alexander, which provides an historical tick, and also the culture of the time did not question the politics of limitless conquests. And didn’t he do well? All that conquering by the time he was 29. Julius Caesar at 32 wept beside Alexander’s grave because he had yet to really get started on his conquering.
I don’t like warmongers, no matter what period in history they arise. One should always understand and contextualize, of course. In the end, I see Alexander not as a romantic figure but as a murderer.
This is why the story was ‘translated’ into the modern idiom. It is a form of revisionism written by the vicitm.
Alexander was in Ecbatana at this time, and Hephaestion was indeed poisoned there. Alexander’s grief and rage provide a fascinating insight into this hero who wanted everything his way and his way only.
Categories: Short Fiction
Tagged: alexander the great, homosexuality, julius caesar
- Published:
- August 15, 2009 – 10:07
- Author:
- By William Summers
Robert Astrid collected a roll of sellotape, a scalpel and all the things that were needed and moved them into the cluttered back room that doubled as his artist’s studio. On a desk piled high with magazine cuttings he was using to make a collage of an East End street scene, he placed two cameras – one Polaroid, one digital, and a large pair of scissors. He returned through the kitchen to the bedroom and struggled with the battered trunk. It was too heavy to lift, so he took the handle at one end and dragged it along the floor until he reached the gripper rod between the kitchen and the back room, at which, it lifted frayed, mildewed carpet, unhousing a family of silverfish. “Bloody things.” He stamped on them and tugged the man-size trunk into the studio and set it down at the edge of the room. Then he emptied its contents onto the floor: props, costumes, toys, a collection of DVDs, a leather harness, lubricant. From the DVDs he chose one that would set the tone for the night.
Outside, on the opposite side of the street, wearing his favourite black leather jacket, Jonathan was looking up at Robert’s first floor window. The flat in Goswell Dwellings was on a narrow street bordering a typical East-End square. It adjoined a converted pub, which had, when Jonathan visited ten years ago, been home to an array of gangsters, pimps and filth, with half of them staggering out on to the street. To think he used to find all this charming. Hardly where you’d expect a famous artist to live. Though, even now, with the pub sign painted over and its notorious street-peddlers gone, Old Shoreditch Road had not lost its otherworldly appeal to him.
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Categories: Short Fiction
Tagged: bryon fear, justin ward
- Published:
- July 4, 2009 – 12:30
- Author:
- By Justin Ward
The first time I saw myself cast in plastic was at the Annual Sci-Fi Convention in Los Angeles. I tilted my head, squinted, and held the figurine a ruler’s length away. It looked vaguely like me. The uniform was right in every detail. But then strictly speaking it wasn’t me. It was Captain James Purcell, the centre-piece from TV’s Out In Space! The waist was a little tighter, the chest broader, but that is par for the course when an actor becomes character becomes idol.
I shuddered a little at the thought and handed the figurine back to the rep from Revell.
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Categories: Short Fiction
Tagged: barbra streisand, james purcell, jane weyland, judy garland, out in space, plastic, tom steel, william summers
- Published:
- May 9, 2009 – 12:05
- Author:
- By William Summers
When I walk into a bar, or the gym, or a frakking Starbucks, or, like, wherever, I know people are looking at me and thinking, ‘if only he could be mine,’ or ‘if only I could be that fabulously beautiful,’ or ‘I could drown in those blue eyes, full of sensuality and light.’ Well, maybe, if they were as articulate as yours truly – or mine truly: hands off girlfriend! – but most of the time they probably just think ‘phwoar, grunt.’
That said, life can be a little hard if you’re blond – like I – and pretty – like I. There is no way that people will take you seriously, no matter what you may or may not say. My blond hair and my brain and not one and the same. Not all pretty-boy blonds are self-obsessed!
I decided to do something about that mired perception and have embarked, fabulously, on a career in retail.
Retail? you may ask.
Retail is for those who have people skills, who bring joy to the downtrodden on the High Street looking for a way out, a way up, and a dream of fabulousness which, with the right outfit and the right state of mind, could be theirs.
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Categories: Short Fiction
Tagged: bryon fear, saint of retail, william summers
- Published:
- March 26, 2009 – 13:01
- Author:
- By William Summers
I came across the church by accident; a small clearing in woodland, two miles from the unfamiliar town where I was staying. No road passed by, only a footpath, one person wide. A church not meant to be found.
There was nothing frightening in its solitude. The light was bright, the day sunny. Why, there was a grass lawn each side of the neat gravel path that led up to the church porch; a pretty boundary wall of painted stone. What is there to fear when you imagine a lawnmower used twice a week at that time of year, when you know that somewhere nearby a tin of white masonry paint is stored, a skin not yet formed across its creamy surface? Someone who mows and paints and stoops to pull weeds from between shiny-leafed rose bushes. What is there to fear?
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Categories: Short Fiction
Tagged: as you step outside, bryon fear, vg lee
- Published:
- January 16, 2009 – 12:20
- Author:
- By VG Lee
I
This is the third time, Morris thought as he caught the eye of the man sat directly opposite, the third day in a row. He shifted nervously in his seat. As the train pulled out of Liverpool Street he wished he had something to read, something to look at that was not the floor, his shoes, or the shoes of the mystery man opposite. He closed his eyes. The man couldn’t have chosen to be there deliberately, he decided. That he was again in the same carriage was undoubtedly just a coincidence. He was far too masculine, rugged even, what with the aid of dark stubble and that conventional suit.
Morris shook his head as if to dislodge the daydream. The train pulled to a stop at Bethnal Green and he rose from his seat. He tried not to look at the man as he made his way slowly down the carriage but proved incapable of this. Then, as the doors opened and he stepped onto the platform, he saw from the corner of his eye that the man was also leaving the train. On the previous day Morris had, once on the safety of the platform, steeled his traditionally anaemic nerves to look back into the carriage. He thought he saw the man’s head turn slightly to look out. Yet, unlike this evening, he had stayed on the train.
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Categories: Short Fiction
Tagged: alan turing, bryon fear, david maxwell fyfe, entrapment, homosexuality, john nott-bower, polari, william summers
- Published:
- December 3, 2008 – 11:02
- Author:
- By William Summers
‘In The Life’ is set in November 1956, around the time that the use of Polari was at its height.
Homosexuality in Great Britain in the 1950s
The prosecution of homosexual acts increased in the 1950s after a relative lull in wartime. In 1938 there were 316 prosecutions for “gross indecency”. In 1955 there were 2,322. The increase for “homosexual assault” in the same time frame went from 822 to 3,305. The “purge”, as it was known, was started under Herbert Morrison, Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of the House of Commons under the Labour Government of 1945-1951. (Morrison was, interestingly, grandfather to the Labour politician Peter ‘Mandy’ Mandelson.)
It was the Tories in the 1950s who really stepped up the purge under Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, Churchill’s Home Secretary, and a Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir John Nott-Bower. The British Press aided and abetted with the usual scurrilous and sensationalist stories.
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Categories: Short Fiction
Tagged: alan turing, david maxwell fyfe, entrapment, homosexuality, john nott-bower, polari, william summers
- Published:
- December 3, 2008 – 11:01
- Author:
- By William Summers
