Jesse Trautmann's Manscaping still. Seriously.
03 May 2020. -

Dating blunders happen to everyone. I myself recall a blind date with a man who told me he had just broken up with his partner of five years. One day the police showed up with a search warrant and found a bunch of kiddie porn his partner had made. He looked at me flatly and said, “How do you think I felt? I hate children.” 

Jesse Trautmann is another gay writer who knows of what I speak. Trautmann just published the third volume of his Manscaping series. Entitled Seriously, I’m Still Manscaping for This? (2020, Haven’t You Heard Press), I had to ask - is he himself into manscaping? “The real title was I Shaved My Ass for This? But Amazon won’t promote your book if there’s a curse word. That’s the reason I changed it. It’s a riff off of an old country song called Did I Shave My Legs for This? [by Deana Carter]. I thought it was funny and went with the Manscaped version.”

It started as a blog based on his very real experiences going to clubs, dating guys, doing brunch, and generally hanging out in the gaybourhood. “I started writing because I love to tell stories and hear them. Getting together with friends, I always had an abundance of hilarious and/or tragic tales to share about dates, random hookups or boyfriends. As it turned out, so did they. I started writing down rough drafts of all this and crafted it into a column. It began to have more meaning for me when I started to get feedback from readers. Whatever story they had read got them through something similar in their own life. They felt less alone.”

The stories are hilarious. I especially liked the one about going to a movie with a dream hunk who asked him to take off his shoes and socks so he could massage Jesse’s feet during the movie. Or the friend who had slept with a half dozen men in his apartment building. “Jeez, does the rental office list you as an amenity?" Jesse asked him. 

Trautmann lives in Edmonton right now, buying and renting houses. His own literary tastes range from Koji Suzuki’s Ring series, Candace Bushnell, Joan Rivers, and he just finished reading Jamie Oliver’s book about Italy. He is currently writing volume four of the series and plans to publish a novel entitled Diary of a Human Lab Rat. He clearly loves writing, but like all of us, he’s quick to acknowledge a hard truth. “I definitely don’t get laid more,” he told me. Well, don’t stop trying. I’m looking forward to volumes four, five and six.