From the Library of ACCEPT Adrian Newell-Paun, Co-ordinator of ACCEPT Information and Documentary Centre

User
Author: Bruce Benderson
Dutton Books – New York, 1994

„Benderson is the most original thinker I have ever known…He has the aggressive sieve, verbal, and analytic style of the Talmudic tradition, combined with the hipster slant of modern urban bohemia.”
(Camille Paglia)

„Bruce Benderson turns the sewer fluids of New York’s Times Square into a fountain of youth for today’s wrinkled literature. The arm wrestling between self-destroyers and survivors is deftly revealed by this new poet of the underworld.”
(Manuel Puig)

    The main character of his novel is the son of a black derelict and a white New Ager, a beautiful toned specimen of urban male beauty, and a New York City street hustler. His special gift is reeling in the customers who flip to him like spawning salmon. His greatest pleasure is feeling his eyes about to roll back as if Delaudid has had injected races through his veins and begins licking his brain. His name is Apollo, and he is one of the most disturbing and seductive characters of the recent American fiction. Bruce Benderson’s User takes you into his world – a shocking world filled with stark yet hypnotic eroticism, mined with terrors peculiar to the subterranean big city in the hours after midnight.
    It is a world of crack dens and hide-away clubs that come dangerously to life after the rest of the city shuts down…where a half-illiterate, drug-addicted male prostitute spends more time with the entitled, the creative, and the rich than most celebrities dream possible…where justice is enforced by a cop in a flawless tuxedo, with a fierce and foxy transsexual on his arm…where a voyeuristic john finds thrills watching hustlers shoot up...and where an HIV positive Ivy League dropout tries to salvage Apollo from demons he himself has failed to escape. For Apollo it is a world that changes forever when he nearly murders the bouncer of s porn theatre, and inspires a vow of blood from his victim’s homeless, avenging young son.
    The book speaks with the authentic voice of characters from the edge, with an excitement and poignancy the reader will find impossible to resist – or forget.

    Bruce Benderson is the author of one previous novel, The United Nations of Times Square, and a short story collection Pretending to Say No. His work appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, including The Portable Lower East Side, Between C & D, and Men on Men 3. He lives in New York City, where one of his short stories is currently made into a movie. Bruce Henderson recently visited ACCEPT office where he talked, laughed and wondered for over three hours, with the employees of the association. He talked about how he came to witness the Stonewall Inn rebellion which sparked the American gay and lesbian liberation movement, his early activity as a gay activist and about his boyhood as the son of a prominent upper middle class and socialist family, from upstate New York. Bruce also shared with us his freshest and rawest impressions about life in Romania, his literary future plans and…his likes and dislikes, hopes and warnings about the future confronting the American gay community, today’s life of gays and lesbians in the West, and the Queer lifestyles.
    An interview with Mr. Benderson, taken by Adrian Newell-Paun, will be published in a future issue of our bulletin.