Hello, kinky readers!
Irv O. Neil has been a professional writer of erotica since 1974, as well as an editor of adult magazines, and In the 70s he had four porn novels published. Irv also wrote many X-rated feature films from the 1980s through the early 2000s. Furthermore, Irv also wrote the R-rated erotic thriller Other Men’s Wives for the Playboy Channel, which was later remade as an X-rated film called Wife Taker.
So, when I had the opportunity to interview Irv O. Neil, undoubtedly, I was really psyched. If you are eager to learn more about Irv O. Neil, then please read on!
1 .Irv O. Neil tell us your background?
I grew up in Chicago, Illinois, went to college in Ohio, and moved to New York City after that. My father was from New York originally so we visited Brooklyn often during my childhood and I was always intrigued by New York and wanted to become a famous writer there when I grew up, lol. I didn’t become famous but I made a decent living for a long time working in the adult magazine and adult movie business as a fiction and article writer, interviewer of porn stars and strippers, adult magazine editor, and screenwriter for X-rated films. I wrote about twenty-five feature-length movies. Then the Internet essentially demolished the newsstand sex magazine business and changed the X-rated feature film business too, so I switched to primarily writing online. I’ve written for many erotic websites as well as Only Fans accounts and private clients, doing story commissions. Recently I even edited a book of erotic poetry for someone. Like the male protagonist in my new ebook TAMARA, Eternal Dominatrix, I like poetry. I’ve even written poems in honor of a Domme I like a lot, Goddess Lycia, which you can see and read about here.
2. You have 29 books on Goodreads; how wide a scope of genres do you cover?
I started my ebook business in 2011 and have published 29 books in my “Irv O. Neil Erotic Library” and also a thirtieth book, a standalone full-length psychological suspense novel called Fate of a Stripper. My erotic books are almost all femdom fiction, and the few exceptions, like Sins of Dr. Jekyll, Blonde Meets Bookworm, or The Cuckold and the Cleavage, have femdommish elements. Even my mainstream, non-porn novel Fate of a Stripper has a foot fetish subplot that is crucial to the story, although the scenes are written to advance the tale, rather than to get the reader horny. Although they could get horny from those scenes, I guess! 😉
To read my interview with the OrgasmicWays people click here..
3.Feel free to shamelessly plug, which book are you most proud of?
I’m proud of all of the books. They all have their individual qualities, whether of hotness or psychological intensity or even humor (I think humor has a place in erotica), and I think I did a good job with each. But I’d like more people to read Darva Chan: Cruelty Queen of the Piano because it blends classical music with Asian femdom erotica and it interprets a famous piece of Prokofiev’s piano music through a kinky angle. A composer of classical music who read the book said it changed his view of Prokofiev’s Seventh Piano Sonata! I was proud of that. I even give the reader a list of music on YouTube that can be listened to while reading the story. It’s a very twisted novella complete with cuckolding, domestic servitude, humiliation, and more. And ends on a tender note of what I guess might be termed “femdom romance” where the fierce Darva gives slave Jason a break about what he sees as the unhygienic task of licking her shoes.
Other stories I recommend to the newbie to my writing would be Learning to be Cruel, parts 1 and 2, which center on humiliation in a restaurant and a legendary NYC bookstore; Rule by Cleavage, which is for all lovers of cleavage teasing (a group in which I include myself!) and has a findom angle too; His Urge to Serve is another favorite, about a guy who becomes a slave to his new, rather Amazonian neighbor; and my two other recent books, the pandemic-themed So You Want Me to Dominate You?, which shows the inventive way two kinky people hook up during the NYC lockdown,and my “erotic authoritarian” story about a cruel female attorney, The Slave You Were Meant To Be.
Also, I want to give a shout-out to Revenge by Fitness, another one of my favorites but which Amazon labeled “erotic humor” although it is quite the story of humiliation, of how a woman gets even with her husband for the single time he cheats on her.I want more people to read about the poor guy and his pink sock…
4.Your latest book has you collaborating with Sardax. How did that come about?
Well we’ve known each other for years, going back to the ‘90s when the editor of Leg Show magazine, Dian Hanson, would have Sardax illustrate my fiction, as well as the works of many other talented writers whose tales were happily interpreted by his palette! Your readers can find more about his work at his own blog, https://sardaxart.wordpress.com. Now, when I started the ebooks with Learning To Be Cruel, Sardax made a painting of the Chinese-American dominatrix character, Miss Meirong, just for himself; and then later, he did a second painting of Miss Meirong and her slave, which inspired me to write a sequel. I don’t usually write sequels; for example, I’ve been thinking about writing a sequel to Darva Chan and in fact I have a great photo for a cover, a really amazing and striking picture, but I still haven’t gotten around to it after six years! I’m just not much of a sequel writer, although I recently wrote a sequel to a private commission that the client was very happy with. Generally,
though, I write a story, get it out of my system, and move onto the next. In any case, early in 2021 Sardax and I started talking about doing a project together and he gave me the basic idea which became the story that I entitled TAMARA, Eternal Dominatrix. I would do the story and he would do the cover, as a nice change of pace from the photo covers I usually use.
5.Your new book involves poets, dommes, medieval elements–can you give us more information without spoiling the plot?
It takes place in 1978 and is about a young woman, Tammy, originally from the country of Georgia in the Caucasus mountains near Russia, who works at a special library in NYC. She is obsessed with a Russian poem about Princess Tamara, a mythical femme fatale who lived in those mountains, and Tammy likes to feel she is the incarnation of the princess, who attracted lovers to her castle for nights of love but then had them dumped in a raging river the morning after.
Literary scholars know Tammy has some missing papers that her literary critic father wrote about the poem, and when they come to Tammy asking to see them, she strikes an unusual bargain with them. That’s where the protagonist of TAMARA, Eternal Dominatrix comes into play. His name is Emanuel and he is obsessed with the poem too, for reasons of his own. When Tammy and Emanuel meet, her sexually dominant nature is a perfect match for his sexually submissive one!
6.How is Tammy/Tamara, the central character in your novella, inspired by the real 13th century Queen Tamara of the Caucasus? What do the two have in common?
Queen Tamara was really revered by her countrymen and even today is a character in a famous video game! She was the first female ruler of her country, Georgia, and oversaw a golden age there in the 13th century. What my story explores, when it’s not dealing with Emanuel’s desires to be sexually humiliated by Tammy in leather—or also by a beautiful streetwalker he picks up in the sleazy streets of 1978 Times Square—is why the Russian poem transforms a queen who was regarded as a saint into a dangerous femme fatale who used up her lovers and then discarded them. But I don’t want your readers to think TAMARA, Eternal Dominatrix is a literary essay! It’s not, it’s a slice of femdom erotica that, I hope, gives the reader a full experience of what it would be like to meet someone like Tammy and discover what she enjoys doing when she gets out of her librarian dresses and horn-rimmed glasses and puts on leather, nylons, and stiletto heels. These historical discussions are just the banter that Emanuel and Tammy exchange when what they’re actually doing is subtly flirting with each other on their way to becoming Princess Tamara and her groveling slave!
To answer the second part of your question, Tammy, whether in librarian or dominatrix mode, has the same kind of confidence, determination, and ability to manipulate men to her purposes that Queen Tamara had back in the 13th century. Because it wasn’t easy to become and remain the first queen of Georgia, just like it’s still difficult for a woman to become and continue as a top political leader in our 21st century world.
7.Of all the fictional characters you’ve written about, what makes Tamara stand out from the rest?
Her backstory is more involved and complicated; it involves her being born in Georgia, coming to the United States with her parents in the mid-1950s, growing up a wild girl in the streets of Greenwich Village in the late 1960s, and then inheriting her father’s unique house in the 1970s, where she pursues her femdom interests. Usually the dommes in my stories are a bit more mysterious; they are feminine forces who irresistibly capture the attention of submissive males and act upon their libidos and imaginations, while remaining almost mythic, like poetic legends, themselves. I guess I see my fictional dommes as women to be served, but not to ever truly know…with a couple of exceptions, like Darva Chan, whose backstory in classical music and as the daughter of a wealthy father is explained in more detail. Anyway, maybe after TAMARA, Eternal Dominatrix I will move more in the direction of giving some of my future domme characters more elaborate histories; but only as long as their backgrounds, or the backgrounds of my male characters for that matter, don’t slow down the arousing tales I want the readers to enjoy. 😉 As I’ve said elsewhere, I write “erotic adventure stories for submissive men,” which of course can be read by everybody, guys and gals alike. This reminds me of an old toy company slogan back from when I was a kid in the ‘50s: “Every boy wants a Remco toy—and so do girls!” Remco brought the world the hula-hoop, among other things.
8.Is the erotic genre still niche and taboo? Or have things like 50 Shades made it more mainstream?
I still think it’s fairly taboo. I know there are various tv shows about BDSM or memoirs about dominatrices, but I don’t think they really change people’s attitudes that much. Millions of people may read 50 Shades, but that’s about female submission, which has always been acceptable in Western society in one form or another. Male submission is something that society is less comfortable with. I think one angle on the problem is this: people forget that femdom can just be a style of lovemaking, and just because a man wants to treat a woman as a goddess in bedroom roleplay doesn’t meant that he wants to be—or even can afford to be!—her slave 24/7. People confuse the private with the public, and decide if a man likes to submit in private, they assume he wants to be submissive in public too, all the time, and they get embarrassed by that. Society’s attitudes still seem rigid, holding onto the idea that all men must be strong and dominant or they’re not “real” men.
I didn’t really talk so openly about being submissive until 2011, when I published Learning to be Cruel. The funny thing is, I’d published femdom stories for many years, made no secret about it, but everybody I knew besides the editor either didn’t read the stories or just assumed I was writing this stuff just to earn a buck. Dian Hanson, the editor of Leg Show, and Sardax, they knew where I was coming from, and that I was into what I was writing about. When she accepted one of my stories once, Dian sent me a note saying something like, “I’ll purchase this story about your…I mean, your character’s kinky adventure.” Lol. When my friends, who are mostly vanilla (at least, as far as I know) read Learning to be Cruel, wherein a young Chinese-American woman humiliates a middle-aged man in public in a restaurant, I could tell they were…well, maybe not shocked but definitely surprised. Remember, I’m a child of the ‘50s and ‘60s, as are many of my friends. Talking about one’s desire to worship feet or be a sexual slave was not what we were brought up to do. We were supposed to grow up to be guys like Kirk Douglas or Burt Lancaster or Humphrey Bogart.
9.What are your thoughts on the lack of social media platforms for the kink world?
Well, that’s another example of how society is not all that comfortable with kink, at least on the corporate level which makes decisions about social media. But I think Twitter has been a pretty good forum for kinksters, I write tweets for a femdom site as one of my freelance jobs, and of course I promote my books on my own Twitter as well. I try to curate my personal Twitter @irvoneil so it’s accessible to a wide range of people, and intermix my erotica interests with my posts about classic film, art, music and literature. I do know kink people get suspended now and then from social media for reasons which often seem vague, which is always scary, but after working in this adult business for 47 years I am used to the raised eyebrow of the mainstream world. The vanilla world may now find porn or kink more “acceptable” and “interesting and entertaining” but the powers that be in that world, it seems to me, will always try to regulate or even stop sexual expression for their own complex reasons. So I try to just stick with being a good writer and storyteller.
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to chat about my work with your audience, Pod! I enjoy your posts a lot.
Links to my Amazon page and blog:
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Irv-O-Neil/e/B005KA6DZQ/ref=dp_byline_cont_pop_ebooks_1
TAMARA, ETERNAL DOMINATRIX:
My blogs:
https://irvoneil.wordpress.com
https://hornytimetraveler.wordpress.com/
There we have it, Kinksters! A massive shout out to Irv O. Neil, and thank you for taking the time to answer my questions so thoughtfully.
So, I hope you guys are as excited as I am about reading Irv O. Neils new book – TAMARA, ETERNAL DOMINATRIX as well as the rest of his work.
I hope you enjoyed reading this interview blog. Let’s support each other so please feel free to SHARE this blog post with others. Feel free to hit me up on Twitter @podofeleus and Instagram @Podopheleus.
Much Kink Love
Podopheleus
