Quest for Sex, Truth & Reality

“The three stories are among my favorites of my stuff,” Lee says. The stories are the intellectualized b-movie-like “The Seeker” and the Lieberesque “The Goddess of the New Dark Age,” plus the potent existential porn piece, “Sex, Truth, & Reality” aka “Pay Me.” The latter has never been reprinted, and was originally accepted in the early ‘80s by HUSTLER magazine, even to the point that Lee’s manuscript was copy-edited and sent to the typesetter. “Jut my luck,” Lee recalls. “Right before they were going to pay me something like 800 bucks,” the fiction editor left the company and the story was rejected by his successor, said HUSTLER was no place for philosophical fiction. It’s the only time I’m ever gotten a manuscript returned with copy-edit marks.”