Brian's Hobbies

I have a wide variety of interests, too many sometimes. There's only so many hours in a day and so many days in a week but I seem to have something to do in all of them.

Dancing

I was also a member of the Triangle Squares, Toronto's gay & lesbian square dancing club. I managed an "A" level before having to discontinue because of other commitments.

These days, I'm square dancing with the DC Lambda Squares in Washington DC. Kent and I decided to start again from the ground up as some calls have shifted between levels and both of us have been far too rusty for too long. With the club's helpful encouragement, we've completed the basic, mainstream and plus levels and are looking forward to jumping into A1 and A2 at the earliest convenience. The DC Lambda Squares is comprised of some of the most friendly and wonderful people I've ever had the pleasure to know. If you're in the DC area and want to get into square dancing, you'll never find a better environment!

Computer Toys

1. a 1600 MHz AMD Athlon running Windows 98;
2. a 200 MHz Pentium MMX running RedHat Linux 7.2 (with lots of enhancements and patches);
3. a 90 MHz Toshiba laptop running Windows 95;
4. a 300 MHz AMD K6 machine both running Windows 95;
5. a 166 MHz Pentium running Red Hat Linux 6.0 (as a backup for the 7.2 box);

Travel

Of late, I've spent most of my time shuttling between Toronto (where I used to live) and DC (where I am now). The past year has seen extra trips to Ohio, Texas and California, among other places; see the Travelog for more details and pictures. I have yet to see any of the US northwest (although I've been to Vancouver twice on the Canadian side of the border) or much of the US south-east: I will have to do something about that. Internationally, I want to see large portions of Europe, particularly the UK, France and Italy, largely for historical interests. If there's time, I'd love to see portions of Russia: St. Petersburg (or whatever it's called this year), Moscow and such. I'd also like to visit Berlin, again because of the historical aspects.

I have no interest at all in visiting the Caribbean or taking a cruise. If I wanted to rest and relax that way, I'd take up meditation and lock myself in the electrical closet, saving a thousand dollars.

Volunteering

I'm a non-singing member of The Lesbian & Gay Chorus of Washington DC and of Singing Out! The Lesbian & Gay Chorus of Toronto. While I'm not active with the Toronto chorus anymore, I keep in touch and send them money from time to time; I was lucky enough to be one of the chorus' founders and their ASL interpreter for several years before moving to DC.

With the DC chorus, I spent most of my time staffing the information table during breaks, assisting with monthly mail-outs, helping out backstage and generally making myself useful wherever possible. I have a low tolerance for political stuff so I'll never be on a board or officer position but there's lot of thing to do on the grunt level. (Interestingly, the DC chorus does not have board positions: it is run by concensus. We do have signing officers but only because corporate law, government and the local bank demands them; those positions exist only for interfacing with the world outside of the chorus.)

I've also had the pleasure to work on concerts for DC's Different Drummers. They're a fantasic bunch of musicians and you really should attend their concerts if you ever get the chance!

I'm the keeper of the lists for the gay & lesbian chorus mailing list, both the interactive list and its digest list. You can subscribe to the interactive list by clicking here and entering in the message (not the subject line) either

subscribe chorus

subscribe chorus-digest

I'm also a member of the Chesapeake Bay Bears, although Kent and I joined only after we ended up going to most of their events anyway as volunteer staff. Kent has a degree in theater and is well known as a local volunteer to assist with lighting and sound equipment. I usually get dragged along as his lovely & talented assistant. Wht the hell... it's been fun and I've learned lots.

Porn!

I collect gay male images, mostly from the Internet. So far, I have about 54,000 JPEG images which I write to CD-ROM periodically. The CD-ROM burner was the best purchase I've made in years. I also collect MPEG and AVI files but they're harder to come by so my collection there is limited.

I also write very good gay male porn fiction. I've had short stories published in First Hand and Guys magazines. I have a few stories which are on file but haven't been published, probably because they're longer than most publications can accept. I could trim them I suppose, but I like them very much the way they are. Since I don't rely on writing for a living, I can afford to not hack my stuff more than necessary.

I haven't written or published anything for a while but I'm starting to get the urge once again. The largest problem is the fairly limited market for gay male porn. More precisely, it's that the gay male porn market really exists as a series of niches.

Here's an experiment for you:
Go down to your local gay newsstand and survey the porn mags there. You'll notice there are mags for twinkies, mags for bears, mags for older men, mags for size queens, mags for cowboys, mags for hispanics and so on. Everyone has a publication but as a result each publication has a relatively limited circulation.

Now go to a straight newsstand. Penthouse, Playboy and most others are differentiated only by the ratio of print-to-pictures and the artistic styling of the photos. The women are almost entirely interchangeable between the publications. The letters magazines could swap their stories and letters without their readers noticing. The straight market is huge and it is, for the largest part, unified. Write a story for a straight porn magazine and you have a story you can sell anywhere. If it's rejected from one publication, you can send it to another with no edits. You can't do that with gay male porn and the lower circulation means the payments are lower too.

The average short story earns $100 for 15 pages of text. Personally, I need at least 8 hours to complete the writing process, from notes to printing. OK, that's $12.50/hour, not too bad. If the story sells. If it doesn't, you don't get squat. Further, most publishers are notorious for being late in payment. I've never yet been paid on time as specified by the contracts the publishers themselves write; on one case, I was paid over a year late. (Most contracts stipulate payment on publication or within 6 months of acceptance for publication, whichever is sooner).

Anyway, I couldn't make a living off of publishing gay porn if I tried. And I can't compose straight porn to save my life. I've tried and it just isn't sufficiently authentic, in my opinion. Ah, well...

Brian A. Jarvis / bjarvis@office-assist.com