Works by
Trebor Healey
(Writer)

As Editor

• Queer and Catholic (2008 release), Amie M. Evans and Trebor Healey, eds.
  
  Fiction

• A Perfect Scar and Other Stories (2006) Nominated 2007 Lambda Literary Award for Male Fiction
  A Perfect Scar and Other Stories is a whimsical, sly, and slightly crazy collection of short stories from award-winning novelist, poet, and songwriter Trebor Healey. These 12 tales cover a lot of ground, including AIDS, aging, death, eroticism, tattoos, and multiculturalism—all told with humor, insight, and Healey's rich, lyrical touch. This sometimes poignant, sometimes erotic assortment of fauns, punks, cowboy dykes, old men with swollen prostates, young men with criminal records, and gangsters doomed by their own beauty and grace are bound together by folly, fate, and passion in their search to find some semblance of peace in the world.

• Through It Came Bright Colors (2003) -- Winner 2004 Ferro-Grumley Award; Winner 2004 Violet Quill
  Coming-of-age story about a cautiously queer suburban kid whose heart is unexpectedly squeezed hard by a young junkie’s quicksilver mind and beautiful lean body.
  
  (Note:  Cover art is by Daniel Austin Kopyc. http://www.cricketcage.com)
  Through It Came Bright Colors is the story of Neill Cullane, a closeted, conflicted 21-year-old who lives in two worlds, light years and a short drive of his beat-up VW bug apart. At home, he's the dutiful son of Frank and Grace, and devoted brother to Peter, whose battle with a cruel, disfiguring cancer pulls the Cullane family together, however reluctantly. But in the shadows of the San Francisco underworld, Neill finds release with his secret lover Vince Malone, a beautiful junkie/philosopher/thief whose burning desire for truth lights the path Neill always knew he'd travel. Through Vince, Neill learns about honesty and love and finds the courage to confront his family in the face of tragedy and loss.

  I told myself I wasn't ready yet; I told myself they weren't ready.

  As Neill watches his younger brother endure surgery after surgery, he is forced to confront his own physicality, and by extension, his long dormant sexuality. It is as if through his brother's mortal struggle, Neill awakens to his own body and to the erotic nature of life itself, finding the courage to act on his sexual feelings with the seductive and enigmatic Vince. The troubled young men's secret affair inspires Neill to speak truths that lay silently, safely, beneath the Cullane family's carefully maintained surface, gradually stripping away layers of the polished, idealized façade. And the chance to live openly, honestly, inspires Neill to reveal the biggest truth of all on a journey of self-discovery that travels through the Bay-area suburbs to the San Francisco Tenderloin district, and finally, to the High Sierra wilderness where he and Vince face the truth about love, loss, and family.

• Eros and Dust (2007 release)
  Short stories

Poetry

• Sweet Son of Pan (2006)
  Sweet Son of Pan is a collection of erotic poems, born of crushes, love affairs, fantasies, dreams and real experiences with men from around the world. And with Sweet Son of Pan, Trebor Healey joins the cloven-footed ranks of other men-loving bards who "sing the body electric":  Whitman, Ginsberg, Broughton, and Antler.

  Healey’s poems offer praise and wonder at the joys of male love, a comic and picaresque account of one wannabe satyr’s fumbling attempts to frolic with the gods; merge with beauty; die into bliss and oblivion. They can be enjoyed on several levels: as anecdotal diary entries of a modern-day satyr; as life-affirming expressions of sexual joy and laughter; as exploration and adventure; as an iconoclastic challenge to sexual conceptualization; even as folly; and finally, as a deathly serious satire, concerned, albeit in a mood of sweet sadness, with the shadow sides of human ecstasy and bliss, such as loneliness, loss, death, alienation, time, and confusion.

  The poems in Sweet Son of Pan are written in a mood of devotion, a praise through language of the sweetest garden we enter as physical beings. They are a response to the sadness that is often a consequence of sex; the fear that so unnecessarily surrounds it; the disrespect that is visited upon it. They are wishes; elegies for our lost brothers--and for the parts of our selves that our lost; parts we rediscover. They are a reaffirmation of sexual freedom and the wisdom that can be gained from the journey along that path--glimpses of paradise, our oneness and timelessness--and if we are lucky, of a small horned creature with cloven hooves who reminds us we came here only to share, and to share joyfully.

See also:

• Beyond Definition: New Writing from Gay and Lesbian San Francisco (1994), co-edited with Marci Blackman