Kindred Spirits: An Anthology of Gay and Lesbian Science Fiction Stories by Jeffrey M. Elliot (ed)

Author:Jeffrey M. Elliot (ed)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-05-12T04:00:00+00:00

Flowering Narcissus

Thomas N. Scortia

Thomas N. Scortia was born on August 29, 1926 in the small Mississippi River town of Alton, Illinois, twenty miles across the river from St. Louis. He graduated from Alton High School (with a brief one year vacation in a local industry) into the infantry in 1944 and managed to arrive in the Pacific as the war tailed to an end. He spent a year on occupation duty in Osaka, Japan.

From 1946 to 1949 Scortia took his undergraduate degree in chemistry and biology at Washington University in St. Louis and went on to the graduate school of biochemistry at Washington University's Barnes Hospital. It was during his undergraduate period that he first began to write fiction at the encouragement of his English professor, Lucille Codd, and her boss, Dr. George Stout.

In 1950, Scortia returned to the service during the Korean War, spending most of his time either commanding a chemical mortar company or serving in various staff functions at Fort Bragg. He was discharged in Colorado Springs, Colorado at Fort Carson and managed during that brief two weeks to meet Robert and Virginia Heinlein, a friendship that has grown with the years. On his return trip, Scortia began to write in earnest, accumulating a hundred rejection slips before selling his first story, a novelette, "The Prodigy," to Science Fiction Adventures. This was quickly followed by a sale to John Campbell at Astounding (now Analog). He wrote as a hobby from 1954 on, pursuing his career in the chemical and later the aerospace industry.

Scortia was chief of Advanced Propellant Research for United Technologies in 1980 when the aerospace industry collapsed. He rashly decided to pursue a career as a free-lance writer. The first year he sold a number of stories, an anthology, and a novel. Scortia developed an idea for a novel about a high rise fire and invited his friend, Frank Robinson, to join him in San Francisco as a collaborator. The book was remarkably successful as was the later movie, The Towering Inferno. Robinson and he subsequently collaborated on three other novels, the last being The Gold Crew (1981).

Scortia moved to Los Angeles in 1980 and has worked in film and television while still writing novels. Asked about his current projects, he remarks: "I have just finished a very kinky horror story, 'Green Fear/ and am now working on a very daring (for me at least) novel with the working title of Twelfth Night. It's a novel I've wanted to write for years but did not until the last few years have the financial security or the command of my craft to attempt. I hope it is a novel you will hear about in the future."

Honcho is dreaming. It is a simple, brutal dream. He stands spread-eagled feeling the potency in his muscles and the cold touch of leather against his bare loins. He's proud of the muscularity of his thighs and buttocks. Every time he stands in a bar (as he does now in his dream), he flexes the muscles, feeling the heavy indentation in his glutei maximi.

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