Leigh W. Rutledge was the most frequent contributor to Mandate, Honcho, and Playguy during my years as editor-in-chief. In Chapter Seventeen I quoted from several of his articles, and listed titles of a number of others. My concentration on his nonfiction articles meant, however, that his stories eluded mention. I asked him recently whether he considers “Lifeguards” one of his best fictions, as I do, and we agreed that Substack readers might also find it of particular interest.
In 1992, the late John Preston planned to include “Lifeguards” in the first volume of his anthology of literary erotica, Flesh and the Word, published by Dutton. He specified that the story was to appear verbatim as in Mandate. Dutton, however, objected to the story’s final lines; governessy editors felt that the ending should be changed to reflect the virtues of safer sex — as if readers were not smart enough to know those virtues already. (My own publishing tussles are recounted in Bonus Number 19, “Editors as Heroes and Villains.”)
Leigh refused Dutton’s censorship. Although that story did not appear, another one of his fictions was included instead — a story that I had previously published in Honcho under a different title.
John Preston edited two additional volumes in the Flesh and the Word series before his death in 1997. Prior to my time at Modernismo Publications he had contributed to our magazines. Even earlier, he was the first editor of The Advocate — i.e., the “new and improved” Advocate after David Goodstein transformed and expanded the paper in 1975. Preston wrote for numerous publications, published novels and memoirs, and edited several anthologies in addition to Flesh and the Word.