Not Just Another Pretty Face - Full Color Edition

by Louis Flint Ceci (Editor)

The stories, poems, memoirs, and drama in this collection have a single element uniting their wide range of literary styles and genres: they all spring directly from photographs of go-go boys.

The ideal go-go boy is the perfect erotic object. We imagine him as lost or broken so that we might rescue him, or as potent and aggressive so that we might be the focus of his desire. But the images captured here suggest deeper, more complex realities. These dancers are whimsical, haunting, satiric, playful, ominous. They are not objects, not icons, but stories waiting to be told.

Not Just Another Pretty Face plays with the interface of projections: what these young men project in their poses and expressions, and what we project on them in return. This full color edition reveals the complex intersection of expectation and reality. It explores assumptions, prejudices, fantasies, and revelations. It looks beyond the archetype, beneath the skin.

Genres: LGBT

250 pages, Paperback

First published March 11, 2016

About the author

Louis Flint Ceci’s poetry has been published in Colorado North Review and read on air as part of PRI's Living on Earth. His short stories and essays have appeared in Diseased Pariah News, Trikone, Jonathan, and the anthologies Queer and Catholic and Gay City Volume 4: At Second Glance. His first novel, Comfort Me, was published in 2009. He is a former high school speech and English teacher, and a former college professor of Journalism and Mass Communications. An avid swimmer, he has competed in the past four Gay Games, two FINA world championships, and several IGLA swim meets. He won the Gold Medal in the Poetic Justice poetry slam at the 2002 Gay Games in Sydney.

Reviews

[Amos Lassen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ceci, Louis Flint. “Not Just Another Pretty Face”, (with photography by Dot), Beautiful Dreamer Press, 2016.

Stories, Poems and Essays

Amos Lassen

Several years ago, I met Louis Ceci at the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans. He was something of a new author having just published his first book, “Comfort Me”, and I was lucky enough to be asked to review it. I still remember what an interesting and well-written read it was. Five or six years passed and I forgot about that book until recently when I received a copy of “Not Just Another Pretty Face” that Ceci has edited. And just be reading his introduction (or “Frontpiece”) as it is called here, I was taken momentarily back to that first book and I was surely glad that Ceci is still writing.

“Not Just Another Pretty Face” is a collection of stories, poems, and essays that have a single common element that unites them— all of the writing is the result of looking at photographs of go-go boys that were taken by photographer named Dot. Looking at the table of contents I feel that I am going to reunite with some old friends and make some new ones and the twenty-five entries are evenly divided between authors that I am familiar with— Lewis de Simone, Salome Wilde, Trebor Healy, Rob Rosen, Raymond Luczak, Jim Provenzano, David Platt, Stephen Mead, Jeff Mann, “Nathan Burgoine, Vinton Rafe McCabe, Daniel Allen Cox and Michael Carroll and some that I either I do not remember reading before or whom I have never read before— Richard Michaels, Elizabeth J. Colen and Carol Guess, Gregory L. Norris, Mark Ward, Mike McClelland, Miodrag Kojadinovic, Alan Martinez, Eric Schuckers, Miles Griffs, Jim Metzger, Jonathan Lay and Richard Wilde Lopez.

I often have problems reviewing anthologies and that is because I am torn between reviewing each selection as a separate piece and yet part of a whole or simply reviewing the entire book as a single unit. I am still not sure what I will do here….I am going to let my thoughts direct me. Of this I am sure—the entire book gets five stars not just because of the idea that propelled it but because there are so many good pieces of writing in it. (It would be so easy to stop writing right here and tell you to go out and get a copy but that is not fair).

Twenty-three photos of male go-go dancers are the basis for stories, poems, essays, and drama by twenty-seven authors and we get revealing unexpected mysteries, romance, fantasy, and humor.

Let’s face it—there is something very erotic about a go go boy yet there is also something very sad about him. On one had, he exhibits a sense of cockiness and self assurance as if to say, “I know who I am and I know am hunky and good-looking. All you have to do is adore and worship me for what I represent. On the other hand, if the go go boy is so hot and so good looking, what is he doing hustling for cash in a gay bar. While he represents erotic near-perfection, we sometimes see him as lost or broken and in our fantasies, we can save him while we think he is sexually interested in us. We want to be the focus of his sexual desire even though we know that is probably an impossibility. What we read in these selections show us the go go boy as not only and not always a object to be adored but also as fun, sarcastic, ironic, full of play, ominous and fearful. They are not the paragons that they make us think that they are and they have stories waiting to be told by the authors in this anthology. After all, in imagination, everything is possible. We see that what is projected is not always what is. Just as they project on us, we also project on them. Using the reader as the concept of everyman, these selections look at what we assume, what we feel, what are our fantasies and what can we see about ourselves as we see a go go boy gyrate. We go best the stereotype and the archetype to learn about ourselves as we learn about go go boys. I learned reading Ceci’s first novel that there are philosophies grounded in his writing and he has passed that on to his contributors and we see that each entry has something to say. Each writer responds to a photograph of a go go boy. Because they are near nude when we see them, we understand that go go boys have nothing to hide. This is where the stories pick up— if by any reason whatsoever, we could become part of the dancer’s world, would we find more than what we see on the stage?

The photographs that the entries are based upon take the boy out of the go go and then invite us to explore what we see and I am sure that there are those who know or, at least, can guess what they will find. But that is not what you will find here. Because we have such a wide diversity of writers here, so shall we have a wide diversity of what they find as they explore the guy in the photo. The only thing that were told to do was to follow where the photo tasks them. As a result we are told about things we could not have possibly expected and I found this to be true of writers I had read before. It is the diversity and variety of the stories that keeps us reading and looking for the story that is the most relevant to what the reader is looking for. We got beyond go go bars and go go boys and the entire experience is rewarding.

Eventually I will write about each selection but for now I am only giving an overview—when I am ready to do some more investigations, I want other readers to challenge what I have written.

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting collection of stories. Dot, the photographer, took some amazing, beautiful and generous photographs of go-go boys, which in themselves are worth seeing. These 23 photos then became the springboards for 27 authors, some, apparently novices and others more established authors. The result is a weird, wonderful collection of stories and poems, and a single play.

As with any collection of contributions, there were some I loved and others I felt a bit meh about. I didn’t dislike any, so that’s pretty good for such a broad collection of work.

What I loved was how the authors used the images and wove words around, before or after the moment of photography. The stories range from the beautiful possibilities of first meetings in Limerick, to the interplay between partners with an understanding in The Boxers, the struggle a man might have in finding out he is falling for a drag queen and the misogyny in his reactions, all the way to the sad loneliness of the old man surrounded by beautiful youth in I am Your Mirror, Django, Django, Thief of Heats, and After Russian Hill.

Interspersed in these rather profound stories are two wonderful fantasy tales with a wizard fighting the toad of evil in He-Witched with the power of love, and a wizard and a werewolf ganging up on a domineering great –grandfather in Bound, again with love as their weapon.

I was very touched by many of the characters in the works – I still feel sad for the dancer in Stripper, and the old man in After Russian Hill. But I also felt such joy in many of the other stories that overall the collection is one of good and positive emotions.

A few lines I really enjoyed and so lifted from the collection:

‘I learned long ago that you can’t really re-create the world as it is on a flat surface. It has to be changed in order to look real. It has to obey the rules of art in order to feel at all like life.’ Your pretty Little Head by Lewis DeSimone.

‘I don’t know what to say so I just sip my drink, letting the straw fill the gap between my mouth and the words that should be coming out of it.’ For Love and Resistance by Richard Wilde Lopez

‘”But you are clean now, right?”
“What a ghastly word. Clean. It implies too much purity. And honey, ain’t none of us pure.”
She’s right. I hate the word, too, and I can’t believe I used it. It causes shame and opposing hierarchies: those who are clean and those who are unclean, dirty.’ For Love and Resistance by Richard Wilde Lopez

Each of these stories, poems (and play) could actually have a whole review of their own, but that’s not what one does with a collection. Altogether this is a wonderful selection of very human stories which will make you happy, sad, thoughtful and delighted.

[manatee · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. I thought that the writing was especially strong in the short stories "Kicks" and " He-witched" and "Limerick". The stories are colorful, very well written and offer a new perspective on the idea of objectifying another. The writing is by turn serious and whimsical and the premise is new and refreshing also. Each work of literature is in response to a photograph of a male go-go dancer.

That said, I found a few garbled sentences and did not find the poetry to be as well-written as the prose. I would highly recommend this book as I stayed up late just to finish it.

Such Fun!

[Grady · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘I’m standing shirtless at this bar of 1st and 2nd Avenue painfully aware of how sticky the floor is'

Louis Flint Ceci is a quiet author, a writer who understands and appreciates the skills of humming a tune before he sings it, of setting an atmosphere slowly and gently before he ignites his story, and who appreciates the opportunity that writing fiction allows for making important philosophical statements without beating the reader over the head. Louis is also and educator, and software engineer. His published works include poems, short stories, autobiographical essays, and the splendid novel COMFORT ME He has also published scholarly works on poetics, linguistics, and artificial neural networks. He is a masters swimmer, having competed in the past two Gay Games, the IGLA World Championships in Paris, and the FINA World Championships in Perth. He won the gold medal in the Poetic Justice poetry slam at the 2002 Gay Games in Sydney. Now he adds another dimension to his creative spirit – that of curator or editor of this series of short stories poems and essays that are by a select group of twenty seven writers and are responses to the photographs by Dot (aka Tom Schmidt) of male go-go dancers.

A true collection of ‘stimulus/response’ each of the photographs by Dot finds that otherworldly gaze that go-go dancers use to enchant their viewers. The stories and poems (and plays) that accompany the images are excellent – fine gay fiction that is not so in your face that it means the book should be secreted somewhere beyond knowing eyes’ reach. Just as it is the women who are most successful at writing erotica for Chick Lit devotees, so are these stories by men for men top of the line. The only criticism is the lack of a story by the editor Louis Flint Ceci – who just happens to be one very fine writer. Recommended for a very broad audience.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reviewed for Foreword Books IndieFab Awards.

Mostly fun stories, and well edited. Not always related to the photo, but I could usually see the inspiration.