Phallos: Enhanced and Revised Edition

A quest within a quest within a quest

I read the original back in 2004, and this expanded edition is an even bigger tease: But that's the point. According to rather stuffy essayist Randy Pedarson, somewhere out there is a lush, exotic picaresque gay pornographic novel named Phallos! Exactly who wrote it when is unclear (and is something Randy wished he knew, because it would increase his pleasure in what is already a favorite book.) The book is hard to find. Indeed, we are reading Pedarson's essay because a man named Adrian Rome twice briefly had possession of a copy and had it snatched from his grip, and this essay that recounts much of the plot and situation of the novel but teasingly leaves out all the explicit sex is all that Adrian has been able to find since. As an enthusiast of Delany's work in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I experienced something similar around his pornographic novel The Tides of Lust [aka Equinox]. The book had been published briefly and withdrawn. University interlibrary searches showed a handful of copies--all of them housed in the noncirculating special collections sections of distant university libraries. Douglas Barbour teasingly discussed the novel in his book on Delany "Worlds out of Words." Finally I was in grad school at one of those libraries, and a little elf of a freshman I was sometimes flirting but not sleeping with who worked at the library promised to find a way to photocopy the book. It took him almost a year to do so. In that year, the anticipation for the always close but never present book was both frustrating and invigorating. And I sometimes started to doubt that it really existed at all, or that my delightful but fickle young friend would ever follow through on his promise. (That novel has since been republished twice and can now be obtained as an ebook, and besides the old well-worn photocopy, I have two official copies. Though I like the book, it is not nearly as wonderful as the unread text that tantalized me for half a decade and which I half sus...