The Favour Of A Reply
By Stinson Carter

The invitation came engraved on the finest gilded cardstock. I tried to tuck it away in the pile of bills on my desk, but after ten years of tucking her away, I realized I could no longer keep our past in unopened envelopes and unreturned phone calls.

I was an awkward ex-pat Southerner trying to find my place at a new school in a foreign corner of the country with a grownup secret in my teenage head. And Audrey was the first person I ever told.

After my parents’ divorce in Louisiana, we stopped going to church, I stopped going to private school, and the bank took back the house of my tree forts and Christmas mornings. My father lost his business, my mother lost her fairytale, and I lost any ideas I still had that the grownups can make anything better. My dad ran off to Seattle to build a new life, and my mom and I started over in a Transcendental Meditation community in Iowa. I was twelve. At fourteen, I left my mother and my mantra and moved to Seattle. Six months into living with my father, I found out why our Southern life had fallen apart. He sat me down one afternoon in our apartment, hesitated in putting his hand on my shoulder, and said, “I need to talk to you about the fact that your father is gay.”
click to read full piece

Stinson Carter NPR Interview
Air Date: 6/22/10
click to hear my NPR interview on Gulf oil spill

Blood In The Water: We Shouted Out, “Who Killed The Pelicans?” When After All, It Was You and Me.
-By Stinson Carter

The Gulf has always been good to me. I come from a Gulf State, and grew up eating its oysters and shrimp, its Blue Crab and Red Snapper. I fished in it, swam in it, and nearly learned how to surf in it. But I also lived in a house built by oil. Oil paid the bills at my school and filled the coffers at my church. We’re Oil People who love our wildlife, and now we face the grim hazards of that contradiction.

When my mother was eight months pregnant with me, she and my father were swimming at a beach off Destin, Florida, when my mother was taken down by a wave and her plump belly struck the bottom. Hard. They were scared for their unborn son, and even blamed that wave for my premature birth a few weeks later. But I came out fine, and if that wave did me any harm, it was more than made up for by its value as an excuse for bad behavior: “Please forgive me, residual wave damage.” Every year as I grew up, my parents took me back to that same beach to stay in a little rented Florida Panhandle shack we called the Sunshine House. I always used to sprint down to the water the moment we’d end the seven-hour drive to build castles out of sand as soft and white as freshly sifted flour. And at the end of my childhood, when my parents divorced, it was to that same beach that my mother took me one particular weekend when things at home got too hard for her. As the Southern Belle daughter of a Gulf State, there was no landscape more affirming than a white sand ribbon wrapped around endless blue. This was the Gulf that I loved as a child of the Pelican State, and now our Pelican is covered in heavy oil and dying in tar-soaked sand.

But as much as I am the son of a Gulf State, I am also the son of an Oil State. Over water drilling was pioneered a few miles from my hometown, on Caddo Lake, where my grandmother owns stock in a hunting and fishing camp (not to mention, stock in Big Oil). When I was growing up, every house in my neighborhood was built by oil money. In my elementary school if your father wasn’t an Oil Man he was a lawyer who drafted their deals, a banker who handled their money or a doctor who delivered their babies. My father was in advertising, but whenever anyone asked him if he was in the oil business, he’d just say, “We’re all in the oil business.”

Our men love their “Sportsman’s Paradise,” but they also clamor for smaller government with no end in sight; no de-regulation is quite de-regulated enough for their taste. I get emails on a monthly basis from my uncles and cousins in the Louisiana Oil and Gas business about how our president will end the energy sector as we know it, through his government’s meddling. But perhaps what’s really washing up now on the coast is the proof that we can’t have it both ways. Environmental responsibility and industrial safety have never been the path of least resistance for the free market. And this is what happens when we contradict ourselves–wanting Laissez-Faire policies with the oil companies and peel-and-eat shrimp and fresh oysters and pristine places to take our families in the summer time. We have to pick a side: the economy’s or the planet’s, because we clearly haven’t yet figured out how to successfully reconcile the two.

We may be able to cap this hole in the bottom of the Gulf in a matter of weeks. And in a matter of years, we may get our beautiful shoreline back. But how many generations will it take until we shore up our contradictions?

A hole in the ground spewing thousands of barrels of oil a day can be the stuff of dreams or the stuff of nightmares. But the ground doesn’t decide which one it will be; we do.

Lurking below the passenger decks of every cruise ship is a hidden wonderland inhabited by third-world laborers, sex-crazed dancers, nocturnal engineers, and nomadic magicians. Welcome aboard.… click to read full story

SEX ON CAMPUS
Interviews by Stinson Carter
Playboy Magazine
October, 2009

From the Playbill: College is where most of us finally get the freedom to figure out who we are. Which makes it fertile ground for our Sex On Campus 2009 Feature. Stinson Carter reports from the front lines.

As school gets back in session, Playboy takes an inside look at the secret sex lives and steamy side jobs of six all-American college girls… click to read

False River (novel excerpt)
By Stinson Carter

The Cathedral bells knocked Cam out of dreamless sleep into a cold and dewy Sunday morning. As the clangs rattled his teeth, he crawled out from the hibiscus bushes to get a jump on the morning Mass crowd.

He hopped the fence onto Royal Street and drew stares from a horse-drawn carriage passing by with the day’s first batch of tourists. The driver was warming up his hangover voice with lies about ghosts and old battles––weaving a peculiar history in which Napoleon and Andrew Jackson were not only contemporaries, but even fought alongside one another in the Battle of New Orleans. It was clear to Cam that the twenty-dollars these Yankees paid wasn’t for the history lesson as much as for the sound of horse hooves clacking on the cobblestones.

As the carriage went off and left things quiet again, the silence of an empty Sunday morning street handed him the hard truth that sleeping in the St. Louis Cathedral prayer garden left him no less tired than he was when he collapsed there at 4am, and thanks to the fresh topsoil he was as dirty as he was stranded. He knew if he was going to have a fighting chance of somehow conning forty bucks by the day’s last Greyhound to Shreveport, he’d have to find a way to look presentable at best and trustworthy at least… click to read novel excerpt

By Stinson Carter
BlackBook Magazine, February 2008

… Downtown is still a tough sell to a designated driver. But if you have a reason to go there––jury duty, long-delayed first visit to friend’s loft, etcetera––don’t head back to your comfort zone without checking out The Edison: a well-funded experiment with alcohol, distressed surfaces, and visible filament. Take a date to a pair of leather club chairs in a candlelit boiler. (Just pretend you don’t notice the busboys hustling around you in suspenders and newsboy caps.) click to continue reading this and more bar reviews

Jesse James on Skincare
by Stinson Carter
BlackBook Magazine, April 2008

Jesse James is about to blow the lid off a few biker stereotypes at a Kiehl’s store near you. The 39 year old is best known as the host of the Discovery Channel shows “Monster Garage” and “Motorcycle Mania,” and for the celebrity-heavy client list of his Long Beach, California bike shop, West Coat Choppers. (Kid Rock, Keanu Reeves and Shaquille O’Neal, to name a few).

But he’s sure to pick up some new fans in the wives and girlfriends of “regular dudes who work with their hands and are filthy dirty every day like I am,” as James describes… click to continue reading

On Neutra Ground
by Stinson Carter
Room 100 Magazine, Summer 2008

Vidal and Ronnie Sassoon met in the early 90’s while she was designing a product from his “If you don’t look good, we don’t look good” line, and he has trusted her design eye ever since. Vidal Sassoon may not let his wife cut his hair, but she’s the only one he’ll let touch his houses. Ronnie Sassoon has a passion for redesigning mid-century moderns, but her latest undertaking may be her finest work yet: a major remodel of Richard Neutra’s c. 1969 Singleton House, a benchmark of the architect’s Southern California Regionalist style… click to continue reading

Love On The Halfshell
BlackBook Magazine, June/July 2007
by Stinson Carter

“I’ve always been into turtles. But I’ve been closeted about it,” says Eric Goode, understatedly referring to his idyllic three-acre compound in Ojai, California, where he cares for, feeds, and houses 300 turtles and tortoises, 15 rare species in all, some of which subsist largely on hors d’oeuvres of escargot.

Just north of Ventura, Highway 33 makes an inland trek from the Pacific Coast Highway into the foothills of the Sierra Madres. The notion that you’ve left Southern California behind first hits you as you drive through the menthol-scented colonnade of eucalyptus trees on the outskirts of Ojai. The shops and restaurants in the heart of town mostly fit within one long, continuous white stucco arcade––shading the Spanish tile walkway outside windows displaying crystals and dream catchers, vegetarian lunch specials, and watercolor landscapes. The skate park at the eastern edge of town is devoid of rebellion, as local kids would catch more flack for lighting up a cigarette than they would for lighting up a joint. click to continue reading

The Good Life of Brian Van Holt
BlackBook Magazine, February 2008
by Stinson Carter

“I don’t really believe I’m the ‘Mayor of Venice.’ My friends just call me that,” says 38-year-old Brian Van holt, who recently showed both his acting and surfing skills in “John From Cincinnati,” the critically praised HBO series from “Deadwood” and “NYPD Blue” creator David Milch.

Whether or not Van Holt abides or suffers the “mayor” title, he doesn’t have to pay for his coffee at Stroh’s, the upscale Abbot Kinney deli around the corner from his loft. And when we stroll into the neighborhood French bistro after their posted lunch hours, the waiter lets it slide. Much later, at the chic tapas outpost Primitivo, he is greeted by name, and by primo back-porch table. Later still, the jam-packed Otheroom bar makes space for his sizable group. The bill is light.

Abbot Kinney runs from Washington to Main, between the yuppie-dom of Santa Monica and the sleaze of the Venice Beach boardwalk. And it’s a perfect middle ground between the two. here you can buy a wetsuit or a Paul Smith suit, a slice of pizza or a slice of foie gras. And it’s a place that Van holt had in his crosshairs years before he finally moved in and took up his post. click to continue reading…