The Naked Truth

My father, the secret pornographer

- Rebecca Duclos

I recently found out that my father, Albert, was secretly writing gay porn during most of my childhood. His was not bathroom-stall salaciousness; it was clearly aimed at the literary set. As a B-side bard in a university post that never thrilled him, Albert had side projects that made allusions to the greats, wrapped inside lines like “ Harris thinks of himself as twice his size, standing astride the shallow pool above Charles.” Digging through my father’s unpublished manuscripts from the 1970s, which I found in a box many years after his death, I wasn’t sure what amazed me more: his plots full of missed sexual encounters, oceanic masturbation scenes, and society seductions or the fact that the figures of his imagination appeared to inhabit the same beloved tidal pools of my youth. Albert’s naughty novellas, Ramshead Passage and Battery Foote, were set on the island where my sister and I spent over a decade of summers as kids.