David Herkt talks to Samuel Te Kani about his new short-story collection: Please, Call Me Jesus

Samuel Te Kani. Photo / Meg Porteous

"I started writing personalised erotic fiction last lockdown, just as something to do, and a way to make some extra cash," says Auckland writer Samuel Te Kani, author of the newly-released short-story collection, Please, Call Me Jesus, who was then charging $40 an hour for his work. "I am not doing it anymore because I can't begin to tell you how labour-intensive it was. As of last lockdown, it was a minimum of 10,000 words daily.

"I have been asked if I had a trusty template that I'd tweak for a customer, but no, I would start from scratch for each person. Sometimes their brief would be really specific. Others would be very broad. But after gauging what their interests were, I would start afresh for everything," Te Kani says.

"I really enjoyed it because it ended up by being a deeper engagement with what turns other people on – broader than what I would have deemed erotic. It was profoundly expansive for me. "

Te Kani is that rarity in New Zealand literature, a young writer who is exploring new territory: sexually charged, adventurous, sometimes disturbing, but always revealing unexpected currents – and frequently with a sting in the tail.

In The Good Boy, the first story in Please, Call Me Jesus, a father puts his young asthmatic son to bed during a weekend when his wife, the boy's mother, is away. During the going-to-bed process he slips his son a sleeping pill in his bedtime chocolate milk, and then prepares himself for a guest.

The guest is male. It isn't their first meeting. The encounter is homosexual and, for the narrator, it is transcendently pleasurable with its BDSM costuming and play. The kick in the story comes at the end with a sudden shock of revelation that is hard to beat – and the neutral segue of the final paragraph simply amplifies the experience.

Te Kani grew up in Whangārei and was always a reader, frequently drawn to escapist literature and science-fiction.

"When I was a kid, I got terrible hay fever, so for three or four months of the year I felt my body was cannibalising itself. I would spend whole summers in the library, so I have turned my first love into a career – or hopefully I am on the cusp of doing so."

Te Kani says, "I was an absolute 'flamer' from a very young age and, looking around myself in Northland in the early 2000s, there wasn't a reality that could afford me the same possibilities as my hero-counterparts. They nudged me into books and barrelled me into reading. In terms of growing up gay, and out-gay, I wasn't so much vilified but it was a huge factor in me coming to reading."

Courtesy of the local library, he discovered more specific gay literature.

"I don't think you can call Peter Wells a strictly homoerotic writer but [his was] one of the first collections I read as a kid, when I was 11 or 12. I think it was called Dangerous Desires and it was the first time I had encountered something erotic, something gay, overtly gay, and something artfully written about a gay erotic experience. I found it a profound thing.

"I ended up branching out from that – maybe in the same week, because I had suddenly realised that gay fiction existed and I started chasing it up doggedly – and I got my hands on Witi Ihimaera's Nights in the Gardens of Spain, which is erotic fiction, or has elements of the erotic in it … It is so much more than a masturbatory piece of erotica.

"I think that type of fiction is not common in New Zealand – and I think we are quite prudish about notions of sex and gender as a nation. I don't know where that comes from – a colonial hangover or whatever – but whatever its origin, I hate it, it's so boring."

Along with many other New Zealand writers, Te Kani came up against the cultural division between arts, sciences and sport in his schooling - but in a typically novel way.

"English was the only class I showed up for and didn't fail but, because I was both Māori and gay, they said, 'You have to be a prefect' and I was going 'Nooooooo!' I didn't want to go to Prefect Camp, which was actually a boot camp, running up hills …"

Now, living in Central Auckland, off Karangahape Rd, Te Kani regularly runs and exercises each morning. His list of achievements and experiences is a full roster. He has written for many outlets, including magazines and arts websites. He has hosted online videos dealing with closeted gay farmers, a lesbian museum, and the renowned photographer, Fiona Pardington. The release of Please, Call Me Jesus is simply the last instalment; five short stories where Te Kani's reader discovers fresh worlds and accounts of new forms of desire.

"Please Call Me, Jesus is aimed at the same sort of person I am," Te Kani says. "People who like being gut-punched and slightly turned on by fiction, in equal measure. I feel there is a market for that: people who like sex, which is practically everyone … and people who like sci-fi and fantasy. If Netflix is any gauge, there is a lot of those people out there."

Please, Call Me Jesus, by Samuel Te Kani (Dead Bird Books, $35) is available now.