Porter, D: Midnight in Savannah

Midnight in Savannah is the deliberately more explicit, and more entertaining alternative to the John Berendt / Clint Eastwood Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. For more than a year after its appearance in 2000, it was one of the best-selling GLBT books in the Deep South. Midnight in Savannah skillfully incorporates Carson McCullers, Pamela Harriman, Libby Holman, the City of Savannah, and references to Georgia's most famous (recent) murder into one delectable whole. This book is not altogether straight, but it certainly isn't altogether gay, either. Pan-sexual and Southern might be its best description, permeated throughout with a morality that's more than a bit untidy. But considering what tends to happen after dark in Savannah, who cares? Darwin Porter is a native-born Southerner who's also the author of two of America's best-selling travel guides Frommer's Guide to Savannah and Frommer's Guide to The Carolinas and Georgia. Midnight in Savannah evolved from his intense exposure to that city, and to his belief that John Berendt only told a fraction of the real story. Midnight in Savannah is a steamy romp that explores the sexuality of one of the Old South's most bizarre cities. --The New York Blade. In Midnight, both Lavender Morgan ('At 72, the world's oldest courtesan') and Tipper Zelda ('an obese, fading chanteuse taunted as the black widow') purchase lust from sexually conflicted young men with drop-dead faces, chiseled bodies, and genetically gifted crotches. These women once relied on their physicality to steal the hearts and fortunes of the world's richest and most powerful men. Now, as they slide closer every day to joining the corpses of their former husbands, these once-beautiful women must depend, in a perverse twist of fate, on sexual outlaws for le petit mort. And to survive, the hustlers must idle their personal dreams while struggling to cajole what they need from a sexual liaison they detest. Mendacity reigns. Perversity in extremis. Physical beauty as living hell. Cat on A Hot Tin Roof's Big Daddy must be spinning in his grave right now. --Eugene Raymond, staff writer for After Dark.