Fiction. LGBT Studies. After exchanging his least favorite sexual act for ticket money, a young hustler named Reggie (gay, racially mixed, and currently flat broke) finds himself crossing the desert on a Greyhound bus. Unfortunately, Reggie is on speed and believes that sinister cosmic forces are in play and that they're focused on him. Even worse, he may be right. DISTORTION follows Reggie's dark journey from indigent hustler to MTV star and back, across the country and through the twists of his own mind and the minds of the equally dysfunctional people who know him.

Stephen Beachy is a writer. He was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1965. His first novel, The Whistling Song, was published by W. W. Norton with cover illustrations by Curt Kirkwood in 1991 and his second, Distortion, by Harrington Park Press, in 2000. Two novellas, Some Phantom and No Time Flat are forthcoming in 2006, from Suspect Thoughts Press. His fiction has been published in BOMB, Chicago Review, Blithe House Quarterly, SHADE, and various anthologies. He has written literary criticism for the San Francisco Bay Guardian. In October, 2005, he published an article in New York Magazine, exposing the writer JT LeRoy as the concoction of a woman named Laura Albert, with the help of her family members. Beachy teaches in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco. Beachy is also a second cousin of biologist Philip Beachy and historian Robert Beachy.