Inside The Mind Of A Writer: Plotting “Buy Guys”

Okay, so l got these two handsome gay young guys from Jersey with nowhere jobs and nowhere futures who decide to drive down to sunny Fort Lauderdale to play male hustlers to frustrated locals, partying vacationers and wealthy retirees.

In my very first draft, l had one of them, methodical Pete, with a girlfriend who he doesn’t know he got pregnant until the end when he and cocky Blaze return from their adventures down South. But l soon dropped that storyline since l felt it was a distraction from the budding romance l wanted to develop between my two guys.

The “Buy Guys” in the title refers to the fictional male escort website on which they advertise their talents. (I wonder, are pimps a thing of the past? I mean don’t today’s ladies of the night use the web too?)

Now l can already predict your immediate knee jerk reaction to all this: pretty standard fare for male gay erotic fiction, huh?

But ripping off a technique from Alfred Hitchcock, famed movie director of such terror classics as “The Birds” and Psycho,” l came up with what Hitch called a “MacGuffin,” a plot device or hook. So what could have been a ho-hum boring fuckfest turned into a male version of “Thelma and Louise,” with my protagonists, who thought things would be easy, breezy, instead finding themselves running for their lives.

In the beginning when Blaze, who is trying to convince Pete to join him on this adventure, asks, “What have we got to lose?” the answer should have been “Everything.”

But if l told you more about my “MacGuffin” you wouldn’t buy my book now, would you?

BTW, most of the sex my two guys experience as dicks for hire is based on experiences l had as a private citizen, shall we say, and as a rentboy which l played a month, of course, to research my book.

Hey, anything for my art, right?