When Suspect Thoughts Press publisher Greg Wharton and Lambda Literary Award-winner Ian Philips read on stage together they bill themselves as the Terrible Infant Tour. They upped the number of terrible infants on stage November 14 at The Center to benefit the Harvey Milk Institute. Patrick Califia, Kirk Read, Simon Sheppard, Charlie Anders, horehound stillpoint, and Thea Hillman joined the couple to read from Wharton's Johnny Was & Other Tall Tales and Philips' Satyriasis: Literotica2. "It was like the Vagina Monologues but with a wider array of genitalia," says Philips.

Greg Wharton: What's it like to have your second book out?

Ian Philips: A miracle. I'm not just talking about getting a book made, sold, and read in our post-ADD age. Where even a sound bite is on the long side since it has to be big enough to fit above a televised talking head. Where there are as many independent bookstores left as there were Democrats in Congress voting against Bush's "Cakewalk in Mesopotamia." Bless them all!

GW: The bookstores or those who voted no?

IP: Both. A blessing on any receptacle of independent thinking! Love 'em while they last people. The real miracle is that I was writing and editing stories up to three weeks ago. I can only imagine what it was like for you while I spent a few more hours having a perfectionist tizzy over describing an orgasm without using the words "quiver," "spasm," or "explode." But you were a saint through the whole process and it looks so beautiful.

GW: More than beautiful, baby!

IP: As is yours. What I was struck by was how it was both erotica and it wasn't. Some stories are very comic. And a few strike me as more traditional erotica. But most of Johnny Was are these little heartbreaking queer erotic vignettes. So in many ways your book is emblematic of Suspect Thoughts Press. It has been pegged as a gay erotica press, but it isn't.

GW: We definitely publish erotica. And we always will. But you're right. We also publish fiction and poetry. And we're a queer press, not gay. Queer in the widest possible sense. Not just those who are Other because of their sexuality but because of their outsider or bent worldviews. Not just a queer erotica press. That and a whole lot more.

IP: And that's how I felt about your book. It's erotica and a whole lot more. Like the haunting story "Coyotes". So many of the elements, like the protagonist's underage boyfriend on the run with his family in hot pursuit, could have made it so easily cliché. But, like M. Christian said in his foreword, you don't treat your characters like puppets or playthings. You treat them like real people. You don't go for the obvious once. Instead you went for the surreal by contrasting the boys' relationship with the doomed relationship between the lesbian park ranger and her lover who's being slowly taken over by some angry entity. Maybe even a goddess. I'm waiting for the movie. Something like Bagdad Café meets Mala Noche. With Cherry Jones and Kathy Bates as the lesbian lovers.

GW: Nice. Who'd play the boys?

IP: Hillary Swank and Chloe Sevigny.

GW: Excellent! Before we cast the rest of the film, I want to talk about "What the Market Will Bear."

IP: My love letter to George Bush & Co.

GW: Despite what Patrick Califia said in his foreword about the "essential good-heartedness" underlying your satires, there is none of that when Mistress Lysistrata goes after her little black book of the Powers That Be.

IP: It's balls-to-the-wall bleak. I got the idea when Bush's call to war was just one drumstick on a child's snare drum. But as he kept on beating, like that godawful Energizer bunny, I kept on writing the story. Stopping for months to be depressed over all that was happening in the world. Letting the story ferment. Reading dystopias. Learning how hard, especially emotionally, it is to write one that isn't really humorous. A 1984 rather than a Brave New World. But I can't escape the satiric impulse. I turned the sharp point I usually reserve for popping the biggest gas-filled balloons on the protagonist too when she commits ritual suicide.

GW: For me, that and "Shrimpboat Willie" are standout pieces of your collection. Not that they don't show glimmers of your trademark sardonic humor and your addiction to the surreal. You just seemed to be writing from a different place and it shows. And they're so heartbreakingly sad. I must be rubbing off on you.

IP: You are. But I work through sadness more operatically. "What the Market Will Bear" is definitely operatic. Medea with a Madame Butterfly ending. While your work reminds me more of classic country torch songs. Patsy Cline or Tammy Wynette. And I think the closest I have to a torch song is "Steamboat Willie." I know I tried to siphon some of the atmosphere from your "Coyotes" into that story.

GW: So we're starting to blend, but we haven't yet started dressing alike. We both have beards. But that's as far as it goes. You've got your Hawaiian shirts and I've got my "dueling plaids."

IP: Especially when you're wearing your yellow plaid shorts and yellow paisley shirt. It's like a Garanimals' tribute to former punks. The Clash covering a Sex Pistol.