The Word as an Act of Desire: Lawrence Schimel and the Literature of the Uncensored

Mark Dunn
2025-12-27T08:11:00-08:00

Lambda Award-winning author Lawrence Schimel brings his razor-sharp, unapologetic queer erotica to the debut issue of SNIFF, and reminds us why literary desire, in the right hands, is its own form of power. The contributed pieces are from his book A Beard Paradox.

Over a career spanning more than three decades, he has moved fluidly between children's picture books and raw, award-winning gay erotica, between Yale-educated literary criticism and the sweat-soaked underground of queer desire. His appearance in SNIFF's debut issue, Scent One, is not merely a contribution to a new magazine. It is a statement about what queer literature has always been capable of when it refuses to behave.

Schimel contributes three original erotic works to Scent One, pieces that carry his unmistakable fingerprints: intimate first-person narration, psychological precision, and a sexuality that is always about more than sex. In a publishing landscape that routinely sanitizes queer desire for mainstream comfort, these stories arrive like a cold glass of water, clarifying and unapologetic.

A Career Built Across Borders

Born in New York City in 1971, Schimel studied literature at Yale University before relocating to Madrid, where he has lived and worked for decades. He writes and publishes in both English and Spanish, a bilingualism that is not merely a practical skill but a philosophical orientation. Language, for Schimel, is always a site of crossing: between cultures, between genres, between what is permitted and what is true.

He has published well over 100 books, a number that should be staggering but somehow feels exactly right for a writer with his restless range. Short story collections, poetry chapbooks, graphic novels, anthologies, translations, children's books: Schimel moves between all of them with the confidence of a writer who has never accepted the idea that an author's value lies in their legibility to the market. His adult short fiction collections, The Drag Queen of Elfland, His Tongue, Two Boys in Love, and the Spanish-language Una barba para dos, have established him as one of the foremost voices in gay literary fiction.

He writes sexuality not as spectacle but as interiority — the politics of pleasure, the grammar of desire, the way control and surrender organize the self.

As an anthologist, Schimel has shaped the landscape of queer literature for a generation. He edited or co-edited landmark collections including PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality (Lambda Award winner, 1998), First Person Queer (Lambda Award winner, 2008), Kosher Meat, and The Mammoth Book of Gay Erotica, among many others. He is a founding member of the Publishing Triangle, the organization of LGBTQ+ professionals in publishing, which he chaired during its formative years in the late 1990s. He is also a member of the National Book Critics Circle and the Academy of American Poets.

The Erotica as Literature

What separates Schimel's erotic writing from the merely titillating is that he has always understood desire as a form of knowledge. His stories do not simply describe sex, they excavate the consciousness behind it. His narrators are self-aware, often obsessive, always specific. They know precisely what they want and why. The wanting itself becomes the subject.

Take Control, one of his contributions to Scent One, translated into English by Sandra Kingery. Its narrator is a man defined entirely by a singular, clarifying fixation, and the story's power lies in how precisely Schimel renders the psychology of that fixation: the democracy of desire that erases social hierarchies, the pleasure of being the unseen orchestrator of another's release, and the deferred, private ecstasy that arrives only once the narrator is alone again. It is erotic writing in the tradition of the great confessional monologue, intimate to the point of transgression, controlled to the point of art.

This is the tradition SNIFF has invited into its pages: not erotica as indulgence or shock value, but as a form of serious, sustained literary attention. Schimel's inclusion in Scent One alongside visual artists, photographers, and fetish practitioners signals that the magazine understands what the best queer cultural spaces have always known — that the erotic imagination is not a lesser faculty. It is, in fact, among the most honest things a person can put on the page.

SNIFF and the Politics of the Uncensored

SNIFF, published by The Male Muse Publishing, the team behind the queer art magazine Inspiró, arrives as a deliberate provocation. In its own words, it is "a sanctuary for uncensored queer expression in a world still policed by censorship and conformity." Scent One features photography, painting, illustration, and experimental visual work alongside its literary content, blurring the line between queer fine art and fetish culture. The debut issue includes interviews with Spanish fetish photographer Abraham Saraya and leather and BDSM community figure Master Bearded Koldo, alongside visual work from artists including J Davies, Greif Lazic, and others.

The digital edition of Scent One is expanded with over 100 additional images — content considered too explicit for print, making clear that SNIFF is not interested in being palatable. It is interested in being real.

Schimel's erotica has never been interested in the respectable. It has been interested in the true.

In this context, Schimel is the ideal literary collaborator. His work in His Tongue, The Drag Queen of Elfland, and his numerous anthologies has long demonstrated that gay erotica can carry the full weight of literary intention, exploring identity, power, shame, joy, and the complex negotiations of queer selfhood, without apologizing for its explicitness. His stories treat their readers as adults capable of holding complexity, which is, ultimately, one of the most radical things a writer can do.

Why It Matters

In 2021, Hungarian authorities fined a bookseller for stocking Schimel's LGBTQ+-inclusive children's picture books, deeming them a deviation from the norm. The incident is a reminder that the impulse to police queer expression does not stop at the bedroom door, it extends to the nursery, to the schoolroom, to everywhere queer people dare to exist visibly. Schimel's response to this reality has never been to moderate himself. He continues to write children's books that center queer families. He continues to write erotica that centers queer desire. He does both because both are necessary.

His presence in SNIFF is, in this light, entirely consistent. A writer who has spent thirty years refusing to be sorted into a single acceptable category belongs in a magazine that refuses the same thing. SNIFF is not a fetish publication that dabbles in art, nor an art publication that permits a little naughtiness. It is something more interesting: a space where the full range of queer desire — visual, tactile, literary, psychological — is treated as worthy of serious, beautiful attention.

Lawrence Schimel's three erotic works appear in SNIFF, Scent One, available now in print and digital formats from The Male Muse Publishing. Originally published in his book A Beard Paradox which can be purchased at
rebelsatori.com/product/a-beard-paradox