More extensive Description by the author, Dirk Vanden

I Want It All

Warren Miller is a 27-year-old college dropout in or around 1969.
He has left Academia in search of "Reality,"and has ended up
working on a cattle ranch, where his best friend, Bill Thorne, has
the biggest cock in the tiny town of Gorman, Colorado. Bill wins bets.
That's how Warren knows it's big. One drunken Saturday night, in
Red's Bar and Billiards, Warren is reluctantly dragged into the rape
of an out-of-town Queer who has made the mistake of groping Bill
Thorne in the Men's Room. Warren is forced to lead a dozen drunken
men as they take turns fucking the out- of-towner in the alley behind
the bar, with the man tied belly-down over a discarded water heater.
     After the rape, Warren helps the young man escape, and in his beat-up
old Chevy pickup, drives him to a motel in the nearest large town, where
he realizes that he and the "Queer" look enough alike to be twins! He
also realizes that he has never been so horny, or so relieved, as when
he fucked Brad Nelson in the alley behind Red's! They spend the night
at the motel, but in the morning, Brad has gone and Warren has no idea
where or how to find him.
     Taking his only clue from remembered  addresses on Brad's often-
corrected California Driver's License, Warren heads the rattletrap old pickup
for San Francisco, which had the most crossed-out addresses having a few
homosexual adventures along the way. By the time he gets to The City by
The Bay, Warren is half convinced that he is a "closet case" who needed
the experience with Brad and the boys to bring him out.
     In SF, he quickly learns the street-value of a hunk like himself, a
"Cowboy from Colorado," and turns to hustling for a living for a few weeks
until he tires of all the weird and sad old men he meets while plying the trade.
Besides, he is beginning to dislike himself for pretending to be rough trade,
when what he really wants to be is a cocksucker! He finally goes to the
South-of-Market "Unholy Trinity": The Ramrod, The Stud, and Phebes,
in the book called "The Branding Iron," "The Hyperion," and "Leather Country,"
where he meets and goes home with a new friend and future boss, Ash
"with an 'h', short for 'Asher,' which I hate." Ash and Dave are lovers,
having lived together 4 or 5 years Ash doesn't remember and are getting
ready to open a new Gay Bar South of Market in the spot where the infamous
No Name used to be to be called The Cosmos, catering to Bikers, Cowboys,
Space-Travelers and anyone else with the price of a beer in those days 25 cents!
They hire Warren to be their Manager/bartender, or "hunky beer seller."
     Of course, Warren is very popular with The Cosmos' clientele except those
he has to keep from fucking and sucking in dark corners. He learns about gay bars
and gay men and an ex-Marine named Kurt Denning introduces him
to "beer and mushroom parties" where he goes on a psychedelic
sex-binge and ends up at "The Ganymede" Dave's Baths!
     Thus ends the first half of the book. It would spoil the fun to tell you more,
but at this point you're only half-way-through! According to The Gay and Lesbian
Literary Heritage, my books feature "explicit, perverse, and perpetual
man-with-man sex," but "despite the nature of the sex acts explored,
Vanden always emphasizes the reassuring and caring nature of the
personal dynamics." In a Review called "The Greatest Story Ever Told,"
in SCREW Magazine, 10/5/1970, Michael Perkins called
I Want It All "The best homosexual fuckbook I've ever read."

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All Or Nothing

Book 2 in the "All Trilogy" is the story of Bill Thorne, Warren Miller's "best friend"
a gas-jockey-mechanic at the town's only gas station, in Gorman, Colorado, 1969.
Bill's the guy with the biggest cock in town, the one who instigated the rape of Brad
Nelson in book 1.
     Bill's narrative begins on the Saturday morning before the rape, as he is having
a bad-everything day. One thing after another goes wrong and he goes to Red's
Bar & Billiards after work, that night, almost looking for trouble. It finds him in the
Men's Room, fairly drunk on whiskey with beer-chasers, when the guy next to him
at the urinal, says "Hi!" then "Good God!" and grabs his cock! "Good God, that's
beautiful! Ever had it sucked?"
     Instead of just saying "Thanks, but no thanks," as he knows he should, and just
walking away, he decides he wants a blow-job and tells the guy to meet him out in
the alley behind the bar, where there's no danger of someone walking in and catching
them. On his way through the bar, Bill can't resist telling a drunken cowboy, "there's a
queer out in the alley. Wanna have a little fun?"
     The next morning, horribly hung over, he regrets everything. He's not a bad guy, really,
it was just one thing after another, and he was drunk...
     "Hey, Bill! You seen Warren Miller lately?"
     "Not lately, why?"
     "He ain't been at the ranch all day. We figure he took off with that queer last night."
     "Why the hell would he do that?"
     "Maybe he fell in love."
     "Listen, you bastard, that's my best friend you're talking about!"
     "Well, maybe you had a queer best friend. Without knowing, I mean."
     It turns out that Warren had come closer to the truth that he knew when he speculated
that Bill might be another "closet case" like himself, that their relationship had been
closer than normal friendships ought to be. This truth begins to haunt Bill, who admits
to himself that he really enjoyed fucking the guy in the alley. Also, he misses Warren
more than he thinks he should and spends a lot of his time drunk.
     After a drunken sexual adventure with Andy (the kid in the tight Air Force uniform in
I Want It All) and Andy's girl friend, and then later, with Andy alone, Bill decides to go
in search of Warren, or the queer, or both, to beg their forgiveness. He's driving himself
nuts with guilt. Besides, they're starting to gossip about him in the tiny Colorado town.
Even one of the whores tells him "You got nothin' to worry about, honey. Nothin' wrong with you."
     Bill learns from the motel owner that Brad Nelson had registered his address on a street
called Sweetzer in Hollywood, California. Bill decides that's probably where Warren has
taken him, and so, he heads for Hollywood!
     "Sorry, Brad Miller don't live here no more. He moved. No idea where."
     While he is having a hamburger, trying to figure out what to do next, he is approached
by a gay body-builder, a movie-extra, who boldly propositions him. Bill finds out what it's
like to be "manhandled!" He ends up tasting cum for the first time in his life and decides
it reminds him of the library paste he had loved as a kid.
     Brad's ex-landlord tells him that Brad was headed for San Francisco when he moved out,
so Bill goes to San Francisco where he discovers how much gay San Franciscans love big
cocks. And other big things. To say more would spoil the fun.

In his review, printed in California Scene Magazine, February, 1971, Victor DeStefano wrote:
"If you thought that Vanden's I Want It All said it all, you are mistaken.... Whether All or Nothing
marks the apex of Vanden's writing career remains to be seen but he does reach a new height
for a homosexual novelist.... Of its genre, it has to be the best book ever written."

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Long Summary for ALL IS WELL, by Dirk Vanden

     Book 3 in the "All Trilogy" is about Bill Thorne’s brother, Robert. Late 30s. Robert is several
years older than Bill but is much deeper into the closet. A "Jack-Mormon," he is married with children:
a teen-age son and twin daughters – whom he suspects are not his. He knows that his wife has been
having an affair for years with his partner in the advertising business, but he refuses to deal with the
problem. He has been receiving nasty, childishly hand-written notes, accusing his son, Chuck, of being
queer --and of course it’s Robert’s fault. He doesn’t know who might be sending such hate-mail, but
there is no doubt in his mind, someone hates him. It could be Chuck, himself, or Chuck’s "best friend,"
Jerry, or even Robert’s own business partner, the twin’s father, Ed.
     One summer evening in the early 70s, at the International Airport in San Francisco. Robert is waiting
for a flight home after attending a designers’ conference in The City. He meets a man in the terminal,
and then later on his flight back to Salt Lake City, who reminds him of his brother, Bill, whom he hasn’t
seen in many years. The man is just a little too friendly, and, later, in the Airport Men’s Room in Salt Lake,
boldly propositions him. Robert explodes defensively and calls the man a "filthy pervert," threatens to call
the police and stalks out self-righteously. But he can’t stop thinking abut the possibility that the man might
have been his brother, who either didn’t recognize him -- or did! And he can’t stop wondering what it
would feel like...? It has been a long time since he’s had any kind of sex.
     When he gets home, the house is empty. His wife and the twins are in Ogden at her parents’ home.
Chuck is somewhere with Jerry. He had hoped to catch them in a compromising situation, so he could
confront Chuck, but that disappointment only adds to his frustration. As he is unpacking, he discovers
an unfamiliar envelope in his suitcase, containing pornographic photographs of men sucking and fucking.
Did Bill put them there? Has he been following Robert all along?
     He is so wide awake he can’t relax, so he goes to a steam-bath to "unwind." He does, indeed, unwind, but
in a way that will surprise you. From then on, in his search for his brother, Bill, he encounters many different
gay men & learns that sex with them can be fulfilling and often enlightening! This leads him to suspect that
he has been gay all along but because of Mormonism, he has tried very hard to be "normal" and raise a
normal "Mormon" family. But obviously, even to him, not very successfully.
     Richard Amory, author of Song of the Loon, etc., in his review in Vector Magazine, March 1972, wrote:
"This is Vanden’s best work to date, which makes it a very good book indeed... All Is Well is a very
ambitious book. Vanden takes an emotional casket named Robert Thorne, one of those hollow men that
seem to abound in the Middle West ... and brings him through a series of beautifully suspenseful trauma
into the warm, loving sunlight of self-realization. In Thorne’s case, the new self happens to be homosexual,
but it is more than that too – it is pro-sex, pro-love, pro-life; the real enemy, as Vanden sees it, is the
desiccated Puritanism of a dead and dying culture, no matter what form it might take, straight or gay.
Right on, brother!" (Visit www.RichardAmory.com for the complete review and more of his reviews
and articles. Read the review at
http://home.earthlink.net/~richardamory.com/id2.html  )

John Francis Hunter, in Gay Magazine, 12/6/1971, in an article entitled "The New Erotica: All is Well!" wrote
"In his All Is Well, San Francisco’s sage yet incorrigibly idealistic Vanden has come up with the best work
of fiction, to date, of the new new-gay literature... Since he writes about the middle-class closet of today
and one man’s escape from it with the aid of the youth Weltansicht and drugs as catalysts, it seems to me
that All Is Well is presently the Zeitgeist novel of early ‘70s gaydom."
    "All Is Well is the final step in the metamorphosis of the gay novel. It takes homosexual literature out of
the grade ‘B’ or ‘trash’ category and elevates it to a new albeit long-awaited height. It is basically a book
of liberation through self-discovery.... Should be required reading on any gay booklist."
"KC" in David Magazine, February 1972.
     "By all means, start this book early. You won’t want to put it down. This has got to be the best gay book
on the scene today... Buy, read, pass on, ALL IS WELL, by Dirk Vanden. You can’t help but feel good
after reading this one."
Marc Williams, Mattachine Times, Dec. ‘71