Short Takes: ‘Gold’ (2022) ★★ 1/2

Zac Efron tries to convince us he’s more
than a pretty face the same way hot celebs
wear glasses to convince us they’re smart.

If he wanted to, Zac Efron could quit acting and live just as comfortably making a series of Playgirl-style videos, available exclusively on his website. The series could be called Efrotica—or possibly Zefrotica. The first episode could open with Zac, face down on a king size bed, the top sheet kicked off, revealing his tight, muscular butt encased in a pair of white briefs, a tease at what’s to come. Zac could then lazily roll out of bed, looking adorably disheveled, walk over to a window and open his drapes with a flourish, his godlike body shimmering as it’s bathed in the sun’s golden rays. The camera could then slowly glide down the length of his body, studying its rigid, perfectly sculpted contours, pausing at the bulge in his tighty-whities just long enough for us to wonder if we’ll see the full Zac. Maybe, but not in episode one, and certainly not at the standard subscription tier. That’s fine. We’ll pay the V.I.P. price, Zac, so long as you hold up your end of the bargain.

But Efron seems pretty committed to this acting thing, and lately he’s been trying to stretch, or at least prove he’s more than just a pretty face. And what better way to do that than fuck that face up in a bleak post-apocalyptic semi-western?  

Efron’s pretty face gets fucked up real good in writer-director-co-star Anthony Hayes’ Gold. When we first meet his nameless character—listed in the credits as Man One—his face is merely dirty, with a jagged scar cutting down one side of it, rendering him ruggedly handsome rather than simply beautiful. He’s hired Hayes, the cantankerous Man Two, to give him a ride to “the Compound,” their trip stalling in the middle of a desert hellscape, a.k.a. the Australian Outback, when their truck breaks down (Hayes told Efron this would happen if he turned up the A/C). It’s while Hayes is fixing the truck that Efron discovers a huge, bolder-sized chunk of gold buried in the sand, so big it will take an excavator to get it unearthed.

The bulk of the movie is devoted to Efron guarding the rock while Hayes is off to get said excavator. In Hayes’ absence, Efron must contend with scorpions, snakes, wild dogs, relentless heat, sandstorms, a dwindling food and water supply, and a smart-ass nomad (Susie Porter) who just won’t fuck off.

Though hardly the best movie of 2022, Gold is the best of the three movies Efron starred in that year. His performance is commendable, but not transformative. The raunchy comedies he’s appeared in (Neighbors, That Awkward Moment) may have successfully put his High School Musical days behind him, but Gold can’t make us see past his pretty face, no matter how blistered, cracked and bloody it gets. It does, however, succeed—frustratingly so—in hiding his highly fuckable body. 

Short Takes: ‘From Zero to I Love You’ (2019) ★★

Jack (Scott Bailey), one of the main characters of writer-director Doug Spearman’s From Zero to I Love You, has a nice life: a loving wife, two young daughters and a successful career of sitting in front of a computer screen (he’s a book editor, it turns out). It’s the life he’s chosen for himself, but it’s not authentic. Jack is gay, a fact the movie would have you believe he’s suppressed for a decade, until he gives in to cruisy cater-waiter at a friend’s birthday party, hooking up with him while his wife Karla (Keili Lefkowitz) is in the next room. And yet Jack bristles at his therapist’s suggestion that he’s gay or bisexual. Jack is adamant he doesn’t want to be either, so he goes on pretending he’s not.

Until he meets Pete (Darryl Stephens of Noah’s Ark: Jumping the Broom), a sexy magazine copywriter who we’ll just assume inherited the chic Philadelphia townhouse he calls home. It’s meant to be a one-night stand, until Jack comes back for a second night, and then a third. Pete’s been down this road before, Jack being the fourth “straight” married man he’s gotten involved with. “Stop fuckin’ around with these down-low motherfuckers!” bellows his bullying/supportive father (Richard Lawson). But no matter how loudly his father yells, Pete can’t say no to Jack, allowing the relationship to become a full-fledged affair, one the audience knows is doomed unless the two men deal with some shit.

This one has gotten a lot of favorable reviews, and I really wanted to love it, or at least like it a lot. Yet while the movie does have some worthwhile things to say—about being true to yourself, about how the best choice isn’t always an easy one, and, all-too-fleetingly, about race—I just never quite fell for it (hey, we can’t always choose what we love). Spearman doesn’t spend much time developing the central romance, instead focusing on the complications that arise from it. That’s fine, but I still wanted something established between zero and the first “I love you.” Instead, Jack and Pete are in love simply because the screenplay says they are. The movie isn’t helped by a script that liberally uses tropes from rom-coms and soap operas yet refuses to fully commit to them, resulting in numerous scenes ending without any comedic or dramatic payoff.

From Zero to I Love You is well made on a technical level, with Spearman getting the most out of a small budget. The movie also benefits from some good performances, especially from Stephens and Lefkowitz. The weakest link is Bailey, who goes through the entire movie looking surprised he’s in it. When Pete dumps Jack in the second act (this movie at least subverts the third act breakup trope) for a trust funded, tattooed muscle bear (Adam Klesh, who, sadly, hasn’t done porn but has modeled for some artistic nudes), I became more invested in the movie simply because there was so much more chemistry between Stephens and the charismatic Klesh. Alas, the movie isn’t titled From Zero to ’Bye, Bitch, so this more compelling relationship isn’t the one that lasts.

Use Whichever Hand You Like

I’ve been so busy at work and bogged down in the never-ending nightmare of getting work done on our house (as I write this the interior of our home is draped in plastic sheeting, like we’re aspiring serial killers) that I almost let May slip by without posting anything. And I still might (I write slow), but I want to at least try to post something new before June.

So, let’s watch some classic gay porn!

Director Jack Deveau’s 1972 debut LEFT-HANDED, co-directed by Jaap Penraat (no, not the World War II resistance fighter) not only gets singled out as one of the first scripted gay porn films with an original musical score, but it’s lauded as much for its artfulness as it is for its eroticism. While I appreciate all those things, what drew me to the movie was its star, Ray Frank. The moment I saw Ray Frank’s photo on the cover of the Bijou Video DVD of Left-Handed—his hair damp from the shower, his body like a Greek sculpture if Greek sculptors were into man-sized penises, and wearing an expression that lets it be known that he’s just been fucked and ready to be fucked again—was the moment I knew I had to see this movie despite some initial reservations, which we’ll get to later.

No doubt his crotch would be censored if he
wore these pants on American television in 2023. 

When we meet Ray, he’s walking down a New York City street, wearing a Canadian tuxedo like it’s fetish wear. I swear his pants have been specially tailored to accentuate his crotch and ass. Ray covers a lot of ground in his post-credits walk, so it’s understandable he’d have to stop at a men’s room to drain the lizard at some point. While he takes a leak, we get a sampling of the graffiti adorning the walls, from jokey (“Please don’t throw toothpicks in the toilet—crabs pole vault”) to the usual offers of blow jobs with numbers for interested parties to call. Other people are advertising more specific needs: “I want to meat [sic] a young boy with a huge cock to fuck my ass and eat my cock who I can beat with a big wip [sic] and cat of nine tail [sic] and make bleed and cry and come in my mouth as I shoot off in my wife’s mouth.” (So, does he mean boy as in “young man” or as in “icky and illegal”? And is his wife just sitting around waiting until her husband is ready to nut? Maybe she could enter this harrowing scene as a cruel school mistress, taking that cat o’ nine tails to her husband every time he misspells a word, which will most definitely leave him bleeding and crying.)

Elton-Carvey is ready for another round!

The graffiti that piques Ray’s interest is a drawing of a large dick pointing at the last stall, with the accompanying plea to “lick my hot cock.” He opens the stall door to discover a bespectacled dude idly beating off, just waiting for someone to follow the dick drawing to his toilet stall lair. This might be more inviting if the man in the stall didn’t look like a cross between a young Dana Carvey and a young, de-glammed Elton John, neither of whom inspire instant lust. But Ray is clearly not focused on this tearoom queen’s face—the camera certainly isn’t—when he joins him in the stall and, as instructed by the graffiti outside, licks his hot cock, as well as sucks it.

Meanwhile, Woodstock-based drug dealer Bob (Robert Rikas), goes into the city to make a delivery. His client is Larry (Larry Burns), who owns an antiques store in NYC and sells pot on the side, or, more likely, the antiques store is just a front for his drug dealing as Larry seems to have zero interest in his antiques business.

This is Larry, hard at work.

It turns out that Larry’s antiques store is also Ray’s ultimate destination. He’s hoping to find a good deal on a Queen Anne tea table. OK, I’m kidding, he’s there to score some weed. Ray arrives at the shop about the time Larry and Bob are concluding their deal, and it’s lust at first sight. (One of the sights Ray sees is Bob lifting his sweater to stick his payment into the waist of his jeans, because sticking the money in his pocket like a normal person would deny Ray—and the viewer—a glimpse of Bob’s rippling abs.) Larry tells Bob to say hello to his girl for him. “What a waste,” Larry laments once Bob’s out the door. “That’s one we’ll never get.”

“Maybe you can’t get him. I bet I could,” replies Ray.

All this thirst for Bob might seem a bit mystifying if your only frame of reference is his unflattering photo on the cover of the Bijou DVD, on which he looks like Crispin Glover as an anthropomorphic steam shovel. However, Ray is more appealing in the movie proper, resembling a young Viggo Mortensen. Also, he’s got a rockin’ bod.

There’s no escaping straight people,
 even in gay porn.

Perhaps to hammer home the challenge Ray faces in seducing the hunky dealer, we get a scene of heterosexual humping (not an uncommon occurrence in ’70s gay porn; Navy Blue and Passing Strangers, to name but a couple, also feature scenes of hetero fucking). I’m sure there will be queer viewers who will find this sequence unnecessary/repellant—the same ones who let out a horrified shriek whenever a woman doffs her top at Pride—but the camera is primarily focused on Bob’s body, which, again, is quite nice. His girlfriend (played by Cindy West) could just as easily have been a Fleshlight with a wig glued on top. At the end of the scene, as Bob’s unnamed girlfriend sucks him off, she suddenly declares in a voice over that “you’re all a bunch of bastards” because... he came in her mouth, maybe? It’s never explained.

We then join Ray back at his loft, where he strips down to a pair of fishnet briefs, lies back on his bed and rubs one out fantasizing about Larry, never mind that fantasizing about Bob makes more narrative sense. It’s still a hot scene, the fantasy action shot in black and white while Ray’s stroke session is captured in glorious, grainy color. Robert Alvarez, Left-Handed’s editor who co-founded Hand-in-Hand Films with his partner Deveau, said in an interview on the Bijou Blog that this sequence was meant to be a reverse of The Wizard of Oz. “I really loved the idea of creating a piece, a sex scene that had some rhythm to it and some sense of movies, of real movies, you know?” says Alavarez.

Ray enjoys some personal time.

Bob suddenly accepts the fluidity of human
sexuality.

Later—the next day, next week, next year, who knows—Ray and Bob meet up and head back to Ray’s place to smoke a couple joints (in stars-and-stripes rolling papers, no less). As the evening wears on Bob’s straightness begins to wear down. Next thing we know, the staunchly hetero Bob is tentatively reaching for Ray’s crotch, because no one is that straight. Ray drowsily rolls into Bob’s arms for a kiss. The camera then backs up into a wide shot to capture them naked and making slow, sensual love. They later hop in the shower for an energetic fuck.

This no one night stand but the beginning of an affair, with Ray spending weekends up at Bob’s place in Woodstock. Seems awkward, given that Bob lives with his girlfriend, but she seems content to just hang around the house, smoking cigarettes and staring pensively into the distance while Bob and Ray go off to the barn for a quick B.J., or to make out by a creek. Though we never get to see a direct confrontation between Bob and his girlfriend, we can tell by her body language that she’s not happy. Later, Ray tells Larry that Bob’s GF won’t be around much longer. She’s definitely not around when Ray spends another weekend with Bob, the two men doing ’shrooms before doing each other. Deveau and Penraat earn points for not resorting to the usual camera tricks used to portray onscreen drug trips—fly vision, fisheye lenses, kaleidoscope effects—but they still manage to find a filter that robs the scene of its erotic impact by making the action look like an animated Rorschach test.

Hot?

Alas, the high can’t last forever, with the beginning of the end signaled by Ray telling Larry that he’s ready for a change. Ray then makes the tragic decision to shave his beard.

Noooooo!

Becoming Al Pacino.

Ray Frank is an attractive guy with or without facial hair, but personally speaking, I found him 35% sexier with a beard. Ray’s decision to shave coincides with Larry’s invitation to attend a little orgy that he’s hosting, starting promptly at 8 p.m. This orgy also presents another argument against Ray shaving his beard: most of the orgy attendees are also dark-haired, clean-shaven men with slight, muscular builds (diversity is not one of the movie’s selling points), so Ray gets lost in the pile. Larry, another bearded dude, and a guy who kind of resembles Barry Gibb if you squint, end up being the only distinctive performers. This makes the final minutes of the film, when Bob—invited to show up at eleven, after all loads have been spilled—appears at the door and discovers his boyfriend is a cheating bastard, a lot less impactful since Ray blends in with the crowd.

 Or maybe Bob’s just sad that Ray shaved his beard.

It should also be mentioned that this final orgy scene includes a fisting sequence, something I could’ve done without, personally (it makes me think of animal husbandry, but that’s just me). In fact, that is why I was initially wary of seeing this movie, because I was sure its title alluded to there being a whole bunch of handballing going on. (Had Left-Handed been directed by Joe Gage I’d just assume it would be all about masturbation.) But the fisting in Left-Handed is not only brief but executed far more gently than is usually seen in gay porn (it’s all hearts and flowers compared to the PTSD-inducing anal assault seen in Fred Halsted’s Sextool.) More viewers will likely be put off by the scene’s boner-killing jazz rock score.

Grittier than Boys in the Sand, yet Weirdly More Romantic

Ray gives Bob a hand.

Left-Handed was released shortly after Wakefield Poole’s Boys in the Sand, and while it’s not quite as polished a movie, it’s no less effective. In fact, I’d argue that it’s more effective than Sand. Sand is pretty to look at, and the sex is fairly hot, but it’s strictly fantasy, while Left-Handed’s gritty style and story arc, simplistic thought it may be, make it more involving. Consequently, though Sand has the more romanticized presentation of gay sex, it’s the grungy looking Left-Handed that’s the more romantic movie, the fisting notwithstanding. It even features a couple ballads worthy of any second-rate Vegas crooner’s set list.

Left-Handed is available through
BijouWorld.com, and can be streamed on
PinkLabelTV.com and GayHotMovies.com

As much as I enjoyed this movie, and really think it’s hot, I realize it’s a tough sell to present-day audiences. Even if you’re cool with the scraggly hippie look and aren’t turned off by the early ’70s fashions (they are a hoot, but the guys usually aren’t dressed very long for them to be a distraction), the sex scenes will likely not appeal to current sensibilities. For that reason, Left-Handed is best approached as a movie to be watched in its entirety, rather than a mere masturbation aid. The sex scenes are plentiful, but usually last for only 5-10 minutes, and the acts aren’t always captured in explicit detail, a fact that Alvarez acknowledges: “Our [movies] were more like—at least I felt, and Jack felt—to capture the sensuality of the sex or the dynamics of a sex scene, and whatever shot said that the best is the shot that we used. So, we didn’t go in for, like, where you can see every pubic hair, you know?” I didn’t think Deveau’s approach is any less powerful, though I will admit there were a couple scenes—the tearoom blowjob; Ray and Bob in the barn—that could’ve benefited from better lighting.

Above all, what really makes Left-Handed worth a watch are the two lead performers, Ray Frank and Robert Rikas. When so many current porn videos look like endurance tests, it’s nice to see performers who 

What’re you looking at?

appear to actually enjoy sex. Frank is the more dynamic performer, as well as the more charismatic presence, though Rikas proves to be more sensual than his stone-faced expression would have you believe. Yet, despite being such a natural, it was Frank who bowed out of the industry after two movies, his only other credit being in Deveau’s follow-up feature, Drive, while Rikas went on to appear in several more movies, his last IMDb credit being 1976’s Fetishes of Monique. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything else out about either performer. Alvarez wasn’t any more enlightening about the Left-Handed’s two leads when asked about them by Bijou: “[Jack Deveau] used to put out casting calls. And, I think, we knew the guy who played the lead. We knew both of them. And so, they agreed to be in it.”   

Considering how often I’m disappointed when I learn more about performers’ personal lives, maybe that’s all I really need to know.

Short Takes: ‘Jobriath A.D.’ (2012) ★★★ 1/2

I first learned about Jobriath in the 1980s, when I checked out the book Kitsch from my local library. One of the chapters featured the cover to Jobriath’s failed self-titled debut album, which depicted the singer in profile, face down on the ground, nude, with his legs crumbling away like he was a classic sculpture being chipped away by the ravages of time. The book presented the album cover as an example of bad taste, but I thought it was cool. From what I recall, author Gillo Dorfles’ accompanying text about Jobriath was kind of dismissive: he was an openly gay David Bowie wannabe who never lived up to his hype.

However, Jobriath was more than a glam rock no hit wonder, as director Kieran Turner’s 2012 documentary Jobriath A.D. proves, with interviews from people who knew him as Bruce Wayne Campbell, a child prodigy growing up in Pennsylvania; as Jobriath Salisbury, the wildly talented (and just plain wild) cast member of the Los Angeles production of Hair; and, of course, as his most famous incarnation, Jobriath Boone—or simply Jobriath—“the true fairy of rock and roll.”

One thing that becomes clear as Jobriath A.D. goes along is that as badly as the musician wanted to be famous, he did not want to be known, making an intimate portrait a bit of a challenge. Most of the people interviewed are people who worked with him, or who are fans, like Ann Magnuson, who released a Jobriath tribute EP the same year as this doc, and Scissor Sisters’ lead singer Jake Shears. The recollections shared by Jobriath’s younger brother, Willie Fogle, give us a sense of what life with their emotionally distant mother was like, but he hardly knew his brother any better than anyone else. 

Much of the documentary is dedicated to exploring how this musician who, per Rolling Stone, had “talent to burn,” failed to make a spark on the 1970s music scene. Homophobia is brought up, but fingers are also pointed at the gay community, which at the time, according to Jayne County, “was very, very negative against the whole androgynous, gender-glitter movement of the ’70s.” Most of the blame for fucking up Jobriath’s career is directed toward his manager, promoter and club owner Jerry Brandt, who once upon a time also managed Carly Simon. Brandt has a lot to say on the subject of Jobriath in the documentary, which isn't surprising. One of the criticisms lobbed at Brandt is that he often commandeered interviews with Jobriath, with the singer barely given a chance to answer a question, and Turner provides the receipts. (Brandt argues that Jobriath wasn't comfortable giving answers, and some of the clips showing a somewhat stiff Jobriath responding to an interviewer’s questions suggest there’s some truth to that, as well.) What comes out is that Brandt seemed more enthusiastic about promoting the persona Jobriath had created than building an audience for his music, so by the time his debut album dropped people were more familiar with its cover than the music contained therein. It was like Jobriath was a vanity project, only it was Brandt’s vanity being served.

For all the finger pointing, I think timing might have been Jobriath’s biggest enemy. I don’t think he’d have fared much better if he had beat Bowie to the punch, but maybe, with some tweaking of his sound, he could’ve made a bigger splash in the New Wave era. Instead, Jobriath found success in the Manhattan cabaret scene, performing as Cole Berlin or Bryce Campbell, though he did sex work on the side when money was tight. But his second act was short-lived: Jobriath died from AIDS complications August 3, 1983. Singer Will Sheff summarizes Jobriath's career—and the arc of this documentary—thusly: “He got to be the mega star, then he got to be the joke, and then he got to be forgotten. And now he gets to be the beacon for so many great artists out there who didn’t get their due.” 

A Story of Big Business and Blue Balls

Harry Whittington is one of my favorite novelists, so I’m kind of surprised I’m just now getting around to reviewing one of his books. But better late than never, and this particular book is even somewhat topical, it being about the railroad industry, which is kind of a hot topic in the U.S. now. Although the likelihood of people following the disaster in East Palistine, Ohio, immediately seeking out historical fiction about the expansion of a railroad in Florida during the 1800s is negligible, I figure it’s worth a shot.

Anyway, back to Harry. I first discovered Harry Whittington when I caught the movie adaptation of his 1956 novel Desire in the Dust on the Fox Movie Channel, back when that was a thing. I thought the movie was awesome and immediately sought out the book, which was just as good. Since then, I’ve been going on periodic eBay binges, searching out his work. Luckily, there’s a lot to choose from, and in a wide variety of genres: westerns, crime thrillers, mysteries, sexploitation, soapy potboilers and even queer pulp.

Of course, not all of Whittington’s books were written under his own name. Among his many pseudonyms was the name Blaine Stevens, which he used for a trio of historical epics he published in the very late 1970s and early ’80s, the first of which was 1979’s THE OUTLANDERS.

Set in the late 1800s, The Outlanders is the story of Ward Hamilton, a man with a dream: to own his own railroad. He’s so driven to achieve this goal that he hunts down his older brother Robert, wanted for stealing $100 thou in gold, so he can collect the $20,000 bounty. Also, he wants to know where Robert hid the gold. “I can use that money you stole,” the 19-year-old Ward explains to Robert when he finds him, hiding in a shack in the wilds of Florida with his servant (and recently freed slave) Thetis, “and warrant you a tenfold return you’ll never get with it planted somewhere in the ground.” Robert, out of spite, doesn’t admit to having stolen the gold, let alone divulge where it’s hidden. Ward will just have to make do with the $20 grand reward money.

Twenty-thousand dollars isn’t enough to buy a railroad, but Ward doesn’t let that stop him from bidding on the East Florida & Gulf Central railroad when he learns it’s for sale—information he gets when he beds the frustrated wife of its owner (“It’s been ten years since [my husband has] had an erection. Five since he’s wanted one.”) With some financial sleight of hand and the kind of self-confidence only found in those too young to know better, Ward’s bid for EF&GC is accepted. Now he must cover the full purchase price. So, he heads to Atlanta, where he calls on Lily Harkness, the prettiest of the Harkness daughters and Robert’s fiancée prior to his incarceration. She’s pretty, sure, but what Ward wants as much as access to her pussy is her knowledge of where Robert stashed the hidden loot—surely, he’d have told the person he loved the most. He gets neither, even when they marry. Lily has her own motive for marrying Ward, and that motive ain’t sex, the very concept of which she finds disgusting (the couple only bones two times during their decade-long marriage). Worse, Lily has no clue where Robert stashed the stolen gold (hint: the person Robert loved the most was not a woman). Ward gets more out of a business arrangement with one of Lily’s other suitors, the homely but goodhearted bank vice-president Hobart Bayard, from whose bank Ward secures a generous line of credit.

As the story progresses, Ward’s business success increases while his home life becomes more and more miserable. He and Lily have two children, only one of which is Ward’s: a son, Robin, and daughter, Belle. Lily becomes a religious nut, and then just plain insane. Ward isn’t always the easiest guy to root for — he’s a bastard in many instances — and his reasons for courting Lily were hardly admirable, but it’s hard not to feel a little sorry for him as he tries to do everything possible to give Lily a happy life, only to see her grow more hostile, poisoning Robin against him and resenting Belle for her closeness to Ward. Lily is also a sad case, but since The Outlanders is told from Ward’s point of view her behavior is often presented as the result of her being a spoiled bitch and not mental illness.

Adding to the tension is Julia Fredrick, the daughter of Dayton Fredrick, a one-time successful developer who was depending on buying EF&GC to transport vacationers to his struggling resort in Port St. Joe, Florida. When the two first meet, Julia is a precocious 13-year-old who develops an immediate crush on the young Ward Hamilton, which, fortunately, Ward doesn’t take advantage of even though the book is set at a time when sex with underage girls wasn’t necessarily frowned upon (“I like to pluck ‘em young, too,” a sleazy EF&CG rail executive tells Ward conspiratorially when he discovers Dayton Fredrick’s teen daughter in Ward’s company). Her feelings change, kind of, when Ward buys EF&GC, and she swears she hates him as much as she loves him, even though Ward and her father continue to be friendly. Ward’s feelings also change, from viewing Julia as a smartass kid to seeing her as a woman and realizing he has romantic feelings for her (mitigating factor: by the time Julia is in her twenties Ward’s balls are the color of Concorde grapes).

Ward’s fortunes begin to turn as the 19th century draws to a close. He is granted a divorce from Lily, but by the time it’s final Julia has married someone else — Hobart Bayard, now a bank president. Ward’s son Robin will have nothing to do with him, while Belle is uncontrollable, having been kicked out of every school she’s been enrolled in. Then Belle marries Laddie, an arrogant aspiring artist and abusive prick who beats Belle as regularly as she cheats on him. 

The stresses aren’t confined to Ward’s personal life, however. Industrialist Henry Flagler needs a railroad to transport guests to his Ponce de Leon Hotel in St. Augustine, and the railroad he wants to buy is Ward’s. He asks Ward to name his price, but Ward is too proud to sell. But Flagler’s not the type of man to take no for an answer. If Ward isn’t going to sell willingly, Flagler will use his power and influence to make sure he’ll have to sell. Still, Ward holds out, until a hurricane forces his hand.

Harry Whittington by Any Other Name is Just as Good

I’ll admit that I was wary of this one before I started reading it. Several years ago, I read Whittington’s second Blaine Stevens novel, Embrace the Wind, which was marketed as a bodice-ripping romance, and found it tough going for its first fifty pages or so, when Whittington really leans into the romance genre, adopting an uncharacteristically florid prose style (the book picks up when it becomes more of an adventure story). Thankfully, Whittington keeps the flowery descriptions to a minimum in The Outlanders, the novel being more discount John Jakes than Johanna Lindsey rip-off, though the eBay seller I bought it from categorized it as a western, probably because of the cover.

The Harry Whittington copyright
was enough to sell me on this book.

Essentially a rags-to-riches story, The Outlanders doesn’t necessarily offer a lot of surprises—you’ll realize early on that Dayton Frederick’s story foreshadows Ward’s, that Ward and Julia are destined to end up together—but that doesn’t diminish its entertainment value. Whittington’s writing keeps the story moving, and he cleverly weaves in real people (Flagler, Dr. Lue Gim Gong) and events (e.g., using prison labor to build railroads), as well as a few Easter eggs. One character that I thought was a real person in history was Marve Pooser, leader of a homesteader uprising against Ward’s ever-expanding railroad. I was sure I’d read about him somewhere before. And I had: that was the name of the villain in Whittington’s 1959 novel, A Moment to Prey (a.k.a. Backwoods Tramp).

If I have one quibble with the book, it’s that while Whittington successfully keeps us in the world of the late 1870s, a few of his characters behave as if they stepped out of the 1970s, specifically Julia. Yes, she’s supposed to be wise beyond her years, but sometimes she’s a little too sexually blunt for the time. The likelihood of a young woman in this time period declaring, in her father’s company, that she would like to go to bed with a man, and that her father would not rebuke her for doing so, strains credulity. Less anachronistic, though still behavior more closely associated with our time, is when Ward’s sister-in-law Lavinia seduces him (hey, Ward was bound to stray sooner or later), immediately giving him a BJ (He felt her face pressed against him, her breath across her parted lips hot and moist upon his glans). I realize blowjobs were discovered long before the Summer of Love, but I don’t think one would be so freely given by a young woman with limited sexual experience and raised in the Antebellum South. But considering that readers of the 1970s expected at least a dash of smut in their pop fiction, this can be written off as fan service. The sex scenes, BTW, aren’t all that frequent and are just explicit enough to make it clear what’s going on without straying too far into raunch.

I find Harry Whittington to be a safe bet, no matter what the genre. Even his lesser books are, if nothing else, entertaining. The Outlanders, while no classic, is a satisfying read, well worth checking out if you should happen upon a reasonably-priced copy.