It is a little tough to feel bad for Leif Ueland.
“I really got tired of writing about sex,” he says mournfully.
The author of “Accidental Playboy: Caught in the Ultimate Male Fantasy” suggested that subtitle to his publisher, who at first wanted to use the subtitle, “Living the Ultimate Male Fantasy.”
Ueland felt his version more accurately captured the angst of the six-month bus trip he took in 1998 documenting Playboy’s search for the Playmate of the Millennium–during which he was dragged to strip joints, obliged to photograph topless women and forced (well, maybe not forced) to sleep with two tryouts.
Ueland, 37, will read from the book at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday at Quimby’s, 1854 W. North Ave.
The great-grandson of a suffragette, Ueland worried the tour would turn him into a “pig.” But the struggling writer accepted the offer, eager for cash and adventure and egged on by his shrink.
The book is honest, detailing Ueland’s sexual hangups, his dating humiliations and his frank discussions with his therapist. When he began the job–handsome but perhaps a little too nice, with no job, no money and no car–he hadn’t had sex in five years. (Then there’s the gay-seeming thing. Ueland is well aware of it, but he has little explanation for the slightly effeminate voice and expressive mannerisms.)
On board the bus, he was at first a poodle among pit bulls. Acutely self-conscious and tortured by “a nonstop inner narrative,” Ueland hesitated to approach women even for the clothed pictures required for his Web site dispatches.
But Ueland’s sensitivity is what saves “Accidental Playboy” from being a mere chronology of blond hair, breasts and bright smiles.
Yet what’s troubling or heartening about Ueland’s journey, depending on your point of view, is that during its course, he became more comfortable with his own desire. When the women flirted with him, he flirted back. So many would-be Playmates turned out to be strippers that the revelation ceased to faze him.
All the while, he worried, Am I becoming that kind of guy?
“I think I do feel like a veteran of the sex industry,” Ueland says, “like it or not.”
