Best Gay Erotica 2003, page 1
BEST GAY EROTICA 03
Series Editor
Richard Labonté
Selected and
Introduced by
Michael Rowe
Copyright © 2003 by Richard Labonté.
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or online reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Published in the United States.
Cleis Press Inc., P.O. Box 14684, San Francisco, California 94114
Printed in the United States
Cover design: Scott Idleman
Text design: Frank Wiedemann
Cleis logo art: Juana Alicia
First Edition
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eISBN: 978-1-57344-883-3
“Trophy” © 2002 by Barry Alexander, reprinted with permission from Seduced 2 (Starbooks, 2002); “Lust Letters” © 2002 by Paul Beckford and Kevin Dax, reprinted with permission from D.O.C.: Lust Letters (Green Candy Press, 2001); “My Reagan Years” © 2002 by Kevin Bentley, reprinted with permission from Wild Animals I Have Known (Green Candy Press, 2002); “Snow” © 2002 by Jameson Currier, first appeared online in Velvetmafia.com, December 2001; “Death Becomes Me” © 2001 by Dean Durber; “Triton Rising” © 2001 by David Garnes, first appeared in slightly different form in Erotic Travel Tales, ed. by Mitzi Szereto (Cleis Press, 2001); “Spurt” © 2002 by Stephen Greco, also appears in The Sperm Engine (Green Candy Press, 2002); “Neighbors” © 2002 by Trebor Healey; “Wanna Wrestle?” © 2002 by Greg Herren; “Excerpt from The Limits of Pleasure” © 2001 by Daniel M. Jaffe, reprinted by permission of Harrington Park Press; “Not for Long” © 2002 by Jeff Mann, first appeared in Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly, vol. 3, no. 1; “The Bachelors” © 2002 by Douglas A. Martin; “Baying at the Moon” © 2002 by David May; “Everything’s Gone Green” © 2002 by Marshall Moore; “Blade” © 2002 by Jay Neal, reprinted with permission from Bearotica, ed. by Ron Suresha (Alyson, 2002); “Shameless Self-Promotion” © 2002 by Ian Philips, first appeared online in Velvetmafia.com, December 2001; “First Draft” © 2002 by Andy Quan; “Guts” © 2002 by Simon Sheppard, reprinted with permission from Bearotica, ed. by Ron Suresha (Alyson, 2002); “A Spectral Analysis” © 2002 by Rob Stephenson, first appeared online in the Blithe House Quarterly, Spring 2002; “Pigs” © 2002 by Karl von Uhl.
For Asa Dean & noble Percy
my good man & our good dog
here, there, anywhere, always
Foreword
Richard Labonté
Back in 1996, when Cleis Press asked me to take over editing the then-one-year-old Best Gay Erotica series, I wasn’t entirely aware how darn fine erotic writing could be. True, I’d been managing A Different Light Bookstore for more than a decade, and I’d ordered, shelved, and sold tons—literally—of glossy-magazine porn, Gay Sunshine’s seminal (stop groaning) Straight to Hell and Max Exander and Jack Fritscher collections, well-thumbed used copies of old Blueboy Library paperbacks, Larry Townsend’s self-published S/M and Aaron Travis’s wrestling-story chapbooks, and, eventually, John Preston’s first Flesh and the Word anthologies, to say nothing of, soon after, Richard Kasak’s many Masquerade Books.
But porn, while written, isn’t really writing, right?
Silly me.
Going on eight years later, I’ve read several hundred original submissions, downloaded many hundreds more from erotic/fetish Internet sites, scanned hundreds of monthly magazines, scoured dozens of online journals, mined many years’ worth of anthologies and novels for erotic moments— and every year I’m refreshed by what a turn-on a well-turned phrase can be.
“Strive for variety”—after good writing, that’s the only rule I lay down annually for the judges of Best Gay Erotica. So the stories for 2003 range widely, as they ought to—from the playful, boys-next-door rowdiness of Trebor Healey’s saucy “Neighbors,” to the sweaty muscle-play of Greg Herren’s intense “Wanna Wrestle?” to the triumph of love over image in Simon Sheppard’s sensitive, voluptuous “Guts,” to the uninhibited sexual- and self-explorations in Daniel M. Jaffe’s excerpt from The Limits of Pleasure. Barry Alexander’s couldn’t-possibly-be-true “Trophy” comes from the world of surreal porn play, whereas both “My Reagan Years” by Kevin Bentley and “Lust Letters” by Paul Beckford and Kevin Dax offer reality-plus slices of sexual lives lived with joyous intelligence. And two contributors who have made BGE a second home for the past several years borrow cheerfully, or maybe not, from their own writerly lives: in “First Draft,” Andy Quan scribes a delicate longing for another writer over many years, while in “Shameless Self- Promotion” Ian Philips deconstructs another writer’s sexual foibles with delicious cruelty.
It’s always unintentional, but in most years, stories with a certain theme come to dominate this anthology. A few years ago it featured a number of coming-out stories; this year, it has none. Hustler/escort sex has also played out prominently in past years, but less so here, represented by just three stories. In one of them, Douglas A. Martin’s “The Bachelors,” a poetic quintet of impressionistic encounters between a young man drifting through shadowed streets and older men eager to possess his youth, flirts suggestively with the genre. Its take on the flow of sexual power between older and younger, and younger and older, is shared with both Jameson Currier’s “Snow” and Jay Neal’s “Blade,” the two other boy-for-a-night stories. Currier’s is the more wistful: a mature business traveler, trapped at the airport by a snowstorm, delights in— yet is bored by—the erotic pleasure he has rented; Neal’s is the more celebratory, with a furry bear of a fellow who can’t quite believe that he’s the object of a passionate street-teen’s honest lust. And all three express this year’s most prominent, spontaneous theme—play between generations.
That generation gap also figures in two other winners this year. Stephen Greco expresses a sublimely romantic spread of time and a chasm of experience in his story “Spurt,” where an elder gent reflects with puckish relish on the charms of his younger gymnast lover. Karl von Uhl’s searing “Pigs” is that evocative tale’s antiromantic antithesis, and is certainly the most powerful and unsettling story on this year’s table of contents.
Danger and death are among lust’s aphrodisiacs, and the “dangerous” story this year is Dean Durber’s “Death Becomes Me”—which was in fact chosen for Best Gay Erotica 2002, though its description of the sexual thrill to be found in watching a man plummet to his death from the Empire State Building was thought by the publisher to be too raw, real, and unsettling to include last year, being so close to the horrors of September 11, 2001.
Love lost to all but memory is another aphrodisiac. In “Triton Rising” by David Garnes, a man mourning his lover’s death rediscovers lust through revisiting the sites of travel shared. In “Not for Long” by Jeff Mann, an affair ends with the school year, but not before the scent of one last explosive encounter can be tucked into both the memory bank and a top drawer. In “A Spectral Analysis” by Rob Stephenson, lust and longing linger even after death. And in “Everything’s Gone Green” by Marshall Moore, the loss, much less permanent and much more lighthearted, is no less memorable on the morning after the night before.
Love found at last is perhaps the sweetest aphrodisiac, and that’s the beauty of David May’s “Baying at the Moon.” Any editor adores all his stories equally, to be sure, but May’s confident blend of eventual coming-out, of long-lasting gay friendship, of hot sex, of the Daddy/son dynamic, of sustained romantic passion, of partnered domestic bliss, and of shared queer accomplishments—well, that’s erotica at its best.
A footnote: The pieces here by Jaffe, by Bentley, and by Beckford and Dax are excerpts from, respectively, the novel The Limits of Pleasure; the sexual and cultural diary Wild Animals I Have Known; and the sex- and love-emails collected in D.O.C.: Lust Letters, which first appeared in the mid-90s in the zine Drunk on Cum. I encourage you all to read those books in full.
Continuing thanks to the wise threesome at Cleis, Frédérique Delacoste and Felice Newman and Don Weise; eternal thanks to Justin Chin, Kirk Read, Lawrence Schimel, and—for printer services in a pinch this year—Nik Sheehan, among this man’s best friends; and new thanks to David Rimmer of Ottawa’s After Stonewall bookstore, for supplying many of the books combed this year for prospective erotic “bests.”
Red Nights: Erotica and the
Language of Men’s Desire
Michael Rowe
On certain nights in late August, in Toronto, the swollen summer sky presses itself down upon the city, making shirts cling damply to backs and blood rise to the surface of sweaty skin, stroking to life every sensation that we might overlook— or even suppress—on a cooler evening when the heat is less physical. On such nights the humidity wraps the streetlights in gauzy aureole, and every sensation seems stronger, somehow, because of it: sight, sound, taste, smell.
My friend Ron and I called them “red nights” when I was in my early twenties and life was less complicated than it naturally becomes later. I dream of them today, and even when I am awake and walking though the city at dusk, I will occasionally catch the ghost-edge of some scent or other in the indolent lagoon of summer night air, and it takes me back along the paths of memory to the place where I first discovered the pleasure of loving men openly, and celebrating what makes them bea
The heat might have exhausted the suburbanites far beyond the city’s core as they sat fanning themselves on their patios, but for Ron and me, walking downtown along Yonge Street in the subtropical dampness of those August nights, there was an erotic call-to-arms implicit in the sinuous warmth, an alertness to the sexual possibilities all around us. Neither Ron nor I had the inclination to describe or discuss what we were feeling. Neither of us was a connoisseur of written erotica, nor were we inclined to verbalize (much less rhapsodize) the particulars, beyond the verbal shorthand of young gay men. Arousal was too specific a word, certainly at the start of the night. Even when we weren’t looking to score, the visual buffet was there if we wanted to sample it, or even just to admire its presentation. Awareness came closer, but awareness of what? The men in the streets were not all handsome, nor were they all to our respective tastes, which have always diametrically divergent. Ron and I are able to spot each other’s “type” as only longtime best friends are able to, and we often marvel at how two gay men with such different views of what constitutes sexual attractiveness could belong to the same gender, let alone the same sexual orientation. They all were, however, indisputably, male.
On those nights, the most eclectic sexual tastes could be visually indulged.
There were the ethereally handsome gay men, alone or in groups, dressed in Lycra dancing-queen mufti, or leather, or denim. There were the young suburban bulls with K-car muscles and crew cuts, arms draped around their teased and frosted girlfriends who seemed to wear them like bulky bronze jewelry. The boys themselves, firing macho scowls and sweating testosterone, looked everywhere except down at the girls, who flaunted them with such passive possessiveness.
There were the depleted straight businessmen coming home from late meetings, jackets slung over their shoulders, sweat plastering their white shirts to their backs, hinting at broad shoulders and racquetball triceps. The humidity caused the summer-weight poplin of their suit trousers to cling suggestively in a way that was too well-bred to be overtly lewd, yet was inviting enough to have disturbed (or intrigued) them if it had been pointed out. Then there were the men returning from the gym, the ones who wanted to dry off in the summer night air, the ones you could easily imagine naked, who carried with them the faint, clean scent of soap and sweat as they strode home in damp sports gear. Their striated thighs shimmered under a dew of sweat in the refracted neon light, their biceps twitched with exhaustion, and their beautiful, sweaty faces were always, somehow, perfect—no matter what they looked like.
And suddenly, at some point in the night, awareness became arousal. The visual became a language, the flesh made itself word. The men’s “beauty” derived not from any particular aesthetic attribute, but from a gender-based, sexual one. It was enough that they were men. Like us in many ways, unlike us in many other marvelous ones. Their maleness, their “oppositeness” from women, became a keening red night-song that hummed through our young bodies without a sound. It left us bursting with a soaring euphoria that we were alive, that we were gay, and that we were able to appreciate the men who stalked through these red summer nights with such assurance, and to appreciate them in a way that only a gay man could. My communication with Ron remained nonverbal, but in that parade of heat and sweat on those red nights, most words would have been superfluous anyway when measured against the unspoken, inarticulate language of our desire.
I discovered written erotica in college. The visual variety had never interested me. I’d never been one of those boys who hid stacks of porn magazines under his mattress as a teenager. I attended a rough, tough prep school in the wilds of western Canada, and the male form was all around me, 24/7. My friend David, himself a man of extraordinary physical presence, recently told me that he was gay because of straight men. He wasn’t making a statement of fetish, he was referring to his own youth in an all-male boarding school, where the seasons were marked by a shifting array of shucked sports uniforms and locker rooms, and the years were marked by a litany of developing musculature and the salty scent of boys ripening. Winter’s paleness (wide, lean chests and body hair flowering wild, like dark wheat) gave way to summer’s gold (strong young legs flexing in the gilded-green sunlight, supple arms reaching, catching a ball in midflight, sweat cascading down like a sunshower).
The hierarchy of age and strength remains as inviolate in a private boy’s boarding school as in any caste system anywhere else, and as cruel. There was little quarter available to those of us who were effeminate, or uncoordinated, or in any way conspicuously different, as I was. The younger boys looked up to the older ones. We marveled at the shadow of incumbent beards, of lengthening muscle, of more private development, and the braggadocio of sexual adventure and conquest. We dreamed of being these boys, or of having them, but when we dreamed the latter it was never talked about.
By some miracle, I took my first lover from this number, at the age of seventeen. I can still remember the moment rough, chapped lips first kissed mine, the moment a callused, male hand first touched my cock, stroked my thin chest. I can still hear the blood thundering in my ears, see the red darkness behind my closed eyes, and feel my heart stop, then take flight. My first lover, Barney, is still my friend today. We’re both much older, and his beauty, especially as he ages, is the only hint I ever had that God might have a sexual preference.
But the affair was a secret one in those days. Revealing it would have meant the end of both of us. There was no language available to us for what we were feeling, the bittersweet adolescent chiaroscuro of lust, confusion, and longing for love.
For any of us who grew up in an environment like this, mere photographic images would have to achieve something superterrestrial to compete with those heady early memories. I have seen photographs that suggest those times, however— photographs where the beauty of men is so pure and clean and golden that it needs no reference to art, or history, or politics. It is unchallengeable, and it therefore exists beyond the boundaries of envy or acquisitiveness. It exists in the place where light and muscle meet, the place where glamour wears the armor of strength and athletic grace. It is the place where sun and shadow sculpt powerful limbs, strong backs, and broad shoulders; where the planes of a face are wide and virile and uncompromising; the place where art and beauty fuse on celluloid, in the fraction of a second, in the photographer’s clinched eye, in the click of a shutter, in an ephemeral flash of strobe light. It is the place where the photographer and his model become, briefly, the lover and the beloved, and their dazzling offspring is the photograph itself, more beautiful than either of its parents, etched in black, gray, and silver. The photographer and the model will grow into age and wisdom, and eventually will die. Yet the photograph itself, born of their passionate communion, will live forever. Beauty and art are eternal in a way that mere youth and vision are not and will never be.
But the visual never really engaged me, once I’d known the real thing and seen what it cost.
The written erotica I discovered in college was by a man named John Preston, and it was as different from the carnal imagery I had known as a youth as night is from day.
Having come out, and having discovered the bounty available to me as a gay man, I found my erotic imagining shifting to underground sexuality. In the leather bars of Toronto, Boston, and New York, I discovered a world where male sexuality could be rough and endurance-building without being exclusionary and hurtful. As beautiful as the demigods of my childhood were, they were also cruel to those who fell outside their golden sphere. In a leather bar, roles could be assumed at will, and there was respect either way. That the brain is “the biggest sex organ” extant is such a cliché, but frankly the world of S/M, as it revealed itself to me on the printed page, engaged my fantasies in a way not equaled by video porn, pornographic photography, or even the memory of the platinum young gods of my early school life.
Preston’s erotica, whether in books like Mr. Benson and I Once Had A Master or in stories in magazines like Drummer opened my first window on the sexual power of the written word. The very nature of S/M erotica presupposes fantasy, and through most of my twenties I explored its imagery for my own enjoyment. I noticed that in Preston’s work (as well as that of such writers as Aaron Travis and the then-disguised Anne Rice, writing as A. N. Roquelaure) there was a level of literary quality that expressed desire and lust in ways that played the mind like a sexual Stradivarius. Clumsy writing, bad “porn” dialogue of the pulp variety, did the opposite. The summer I was twenty-nine, I went to Harvard to take a writing program there. I met Preston in Portland, Maine, that summer, and we became friends. Later that year, he took me under his wing as a mentor, and began to coax new work from me.
