Best Gay Erotica 2003, page 2
“You write about everyone else,” he told me once, referring to my mainstream journalism. “When are you going to write about your own life? When are you going to use your own language?”
By this time, he was as well-known for editing mainstream hardcover anthologies as he was for his erotica, though it was significant that America’s most famous gay pornographer was responsible for starting erotica’s inexorable social rise as a valid mainstream literary genre when the first book in his Flesh and the Word series appeared in hardcover from Dutton in 1992.
Under Preston’s tutelage, I began to write the essays that appeared in his anthologies Friends and Lovers and Sister and Brother. I wrote erotica for Flesh and the Word 3 with my friend Ron, whom you met at the beginning of this essay. My focus turned toward the lives of gay men, our commonalties, our private language. My first book, Writing Below the Belt, explored the lives and writing of fourteen erotica writers and essayed a portrait of where they—and we—saw erotica in the broader cultural context. John Preston never saw the book, which was dedicated to him. He died from complications relating to AIDS just before its publication, in 1994. The most significant literary friendship of my life died with him, and I miss him with every word I write.
If John left me a legacy, though, it is the book you are holding in your hands.
Through our friendship, and his mentoring, I learned that there was indeed a language for what I felt as an adolescent, watching my fellows in prep school grow into men all around me. There were words for the aches I felt, the terrible keening desire to own them, without understanding what it was I wanted from them. There was a nomenclature for those red nights of walking Yonge Street with Ron, when the humid, neon-lit twilight set the stage for a ballet of desire, and the unaware, nameless dancers were men who moved and shook us without ever knowing it.
There was a vernacular for the beauty of men in their most private moments: Barney’s rough hands on the wheel of his car as he drives; Geof’s great golden head, blue eyes, wide smile, his broad shoulders tapering into a narrow waist, the way he looks when he bends down to pick something off the floor with an athlete’s unaware ease; the anonymous sunburnt, tired, sweaty young leatherman in the dying sunlight after the Pride parade, dressed in chaps and a harness—too drunk to affect a tough pose, too happy to care; James, painting shirtless, passionately intent on bringing his vision to the canvas; Chuck cradling his newborn daughter protectively in his arms while his wife watches.
It is the sound of men’s voices, the way they move, the way they smell, the way they taste, the way they look whether asleep or dreaming. Erotica is more than a form of gay men’s vernacular literature. It is more than the language of desire. It is the distillation of our lusts, private and public, into written form.
As I’ve matured, I’ve found that I appreciate, in a way that I hadn’t fully before, erotica that encompasses real-life situations. I defy anyone to read the poetic “First Draft” by Andy Quan, or Jameson Currier’s elegiac “Snow,” or Kevin Bentley’s “My Reagan Years,” and not marvel at what erotica can be in the hands of a blue-chip writer at the top of his game, or how much of an erotic punch can be packed into what doesn’t occur, or what occurs in our everyday lives, or what we remember as having occurred.
The honor of judging the work of these superb writers isn’t one that I take lightly, or one that I will soon forget. This work is variously hot, funny, moving, and joyous—and always sexy. This collection offers something for every taste. Some of the writing is in the classic porn mold, some of it achieves that near-impossible feat of being genuine humor writing as well as being “hot,” and some of the work—my own personal favorites—achieves a literary standard that might have been impossible in an earlier era, before gifted editors and insightful publishers were able to envision a world in which the best writers could engage a reader’s heart, mind, and groin, with no part of that mix getting short shrift. Many porn stalwarts have bemoaned the “legitimization” of erotica, as though a world of dumb, crude language was somehow a thing to be missed. Well, I don’t miss it one bit. I hope you enjoy this evolution as it manifests itself in Best Gay Erotica 03.
One thing that John Preston impressed upon me was the importance of acknowledging your friends, so I hope you’ll bear with me. I’m almost done, and then you’ll get on to the business at hand.
To most readers, Richard Labonté is known as the series editor of Best Gay Erotica, the bestselling erotica series. Others may know him from his career with A Different Light Bookstore, or from his book reviews or cultural criticism.
When I came out at nineteen and left my hometown of Ottawa, Ontario, my mother would send me clippings by one of her favorite columnists in the Ottawa Citizen, our city’s newspaper of record. They were by one of the few openly gay Canadian journalists writing in mainstream media, and I more than suspect that she hoped that I would read them and understand that there were possibilities for me in the world, and that I should pay attention. Maybe I could be like him if I just applied myself.
The journalist in question was Richard Labonté. Both of us have traveled a great distance in the twenty-one years since I first read his work, lovingly clipped by my mother and sent to me in the big city while I tried to figure out what my life as a gay man meant, and what I could do with it. My mother believed in the power of language, and though she might have been bemused by the book you are holding in your hands, she would have been delighted and proud, as I am, that Richard and I finally connected.
The Farmhouse
Toronto, Ontario
August 2002
Everything’s Gone Green
Marshall Moore
It’s too early to call Dave. I think it’s eleven. Besides, I feel like a freshly hatched pod person from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, still slimy and smelly and stumbling over my own feet. Dave told me to give him a call but I’ll take a shower first.
Last night I went out to dinner and to hit a couple of clubs with friends after my roommate flaked out on our plans, and look where it got me. I had a fantastic time, sure, but I’m paying for it in blood this morning. The sun burns down on my face and, outside, a streetcar clatters by. Every limb feels as if it had been sawn off someone else and glued to my overheating torso. Very Jeepers Creepers. I even look the part, a twenty-something actor in one of those slasher flicks about virgins impaled on gardening tools, the only penetration they’ll ever know. No, how about this scenario: I’m a Firestarter extra, about to spontaneously combust here in bed, sweat sizzling off me for a few seconds before streamers of flame burst out of my chest. There are hangovers and then there are hangovers. This has to be some kind of record.
“Fuck,” I croak. My mouth tastes like I blew some guy with a gym sock over his dick instead of a rubber. It’s never a good sign when you wake up in the morning and the first word you utter is Fuck.
I went to Tulane. I know a bit about drinking and how to recover. These days my impression of a grown-up is pretty convincing: I don’t have many hangovers to subdue. The skill stays with you. Some aspirin or Alka-Seltzer, that’s the thing, and Gatorade. Any of those sports drinks will do, but Gatorade is the original, the one, the true, the green syrup that helped me win trophies on the track and swim teams. Slurp enough of that shit and you’ll feel like a god. Especially if you were out all night with your rowdy friends pouring beer down your throat. If that doesn’t work, try something stronger: I recommend Red Bull, but all those energy drinks in the narrow cans are interchangeable. As long as it contains enough caffeine, vitamins, and herbal supplements to send a retiree’s heart into arrhythmia, it’ll do.
Dave. A group of us met for dinner at a new Thai place in the Mission. He came as a friend of a friend’s friend, or something like that. Somebody’s plans changed. I never did figure out his connection to the group. He was there. That was enough. The restaurant was too loud for me to follow the details of the story when Andy, a guy I’d gone out with a few times, introduced us. Josh, this is…what’s your name again? Airport runways are quieter than most of the restaurants on Valencia, and as much as possible I ignored the guy on my right, Simon, who was sleeping with my friend Lance. Simon reeked of cigarette smoke and wore glasses with blue-tinted lenses. He spoke through his nose in this grating, weary I’m above all this drone. Let him talk to his dinner plate. I was more interested in the darkly good-looking guy on my left. Besides, he was one of two people at the table I could actually hear. Lucky me.
Dave Buenaventura, long black hair in a ponytail, handsome almond eyes, olive skin, just thinking about the way he looked at me last night in his car. He’d driven me home. I invited him up but he said, Let’s wait, then leaned over and helped himself to a slow, lingering kiss. When, after some making-out, I undid the top three buttons of his shirt to kiss the top of his chest, he gasped, You found my spot.
Yes, that’s enough to keep me here in bed a little longer, those words…and the way he writhed when I licked his Adam’s apple a second later.
He denied wearing cologne when I asked about the scent. “It’s just soap,” he said, running a hand through my hair.
“It smells too good to be soap.”
He shrugged and I resumed the kissing. A nipple. The other one. I flicked them with my tongue and made him gasp again. Under his shirt, this iridescent silvery thing he had on beneath a battered leather jacket, I went exploring: the smooth expanse of his abs, the suppleness of his skin. White men don’t have skin like that. It’s as if there are no pores. The skin is burnished metal that has warmed up and learned to breathe.
Yes, all this happened in his old Mustang convertible, which I have to say is kind of a ridiculous car for these narrow, vertical San Francisco streets. We fogged up the windows like a pair of teenagers. I stopped short of letting my hand roam south of Dave’s navel. If he wanted to wait, then I’d be a gentleman and show some restraint.
I wanted to keep kissing him until my mouth went dry and his razor stubble chafed the skin off my lips, but a yawn interrupted me. All that alcohol. The late hour. We’d been dancing. It caught up with me.
Dave chuckled, all the more intimate with his face two inches from mine and his lips shiny with my spit. He ruffled my hair.
“You’re not why I yawned,” I stammered.
“Go upstairs and get some sleep, handsome.”
I nodded, suppressing another yawn by biting my lower lip and locking my jaw.
“Guess I should.” I looked at him. His face—half in shadow, half suffused with a surreal orange glow from the streetlight down the block—radiated affection. I leaned over and gave him another quick kiss. My lips tingled from the sandpapering he’d given them with his stubble. “Although I don’t really want to.”
“I don’t want you to, either, but….” Dave left the rest unsaid. Which was fine.
I opened the door, had to shove. Old Detroit iron. A precipitous Noe Valley grade. Wrenching myself out of the Mustang took speed and dexterity worthy of a Cirque du Soleil acrobat. That door slamming shut would have guillotined a limb. Gravity sucks. Dave rolled down his window, and I leaned in for a goodnight kiss.
“Nice meeting you,” I said. “I was supposed to see the new Scream movie with my roommate but he flaked out. Lucky me.”
“No, lucky me.” Dave nodded. “Call me tomorrow, OK?”
“I will.” I slowly pulled away, turned, took a step toward the front door of my building. The usual battle raged between the big head and the little one: Turn around and invite him up! No, don’t, you’re not a horny college kid anymore! To compensate, I walked more slowly than usual, in case he had a change of heart and called out for me to wait a minute. Just think about the moment when you’ve got him in bed and his shirt and jeans finally come off! No, Josh, don’t think about that. I fished in my pocket for the front door key, had just opened it when I heard what I’d been hoping for:
“Hey, Josh!”
I froze. The front door probably woke a few people when it swung shut. Do I show him the shit-eating grin or let it fade before turning around? I took a couple of steps back in Dave’s direction.
“What’s up?”
“You never got my number.”
So much for my buzz.
“I can’t believe we forgot that part.”
“We were having too much fun,” Dave said. “Hold out your hand.”
He wrote his number on my palm with a marker, then blew on it to dry the ink.
“Goodnight, handsome man,” he said.
None of that insomniac tossing and turning last night, no mummification among my own linens. Nope. I passed out the second I got horizontal, a bit rueful that Dave wasn’t here with me, also glad he’d gone home. The fun could wait. My eyes wouldn’t stay open. My consciousness dropped like a stone down a well.
Getting out of bed this morning seems less and less likely, not now, not yet. I’m dying for about a gallon of Gatorade and maybe some Excedrin, but an electric sort of inertia takes over. I keep coming back to what I imagined last night: Dave the pagan sex nymph, here in my bed. Discovery, laziness, the opening credits of a putative romance.
My hangover has receded to a dull anesthetized roar, my hands roam across fabric, under, exploring. He’s wiry. Not the kind of guy you’d find at the gym, but there’s no fat on him anywhere. He runs, I think he told me. Narrow hips, cock lengthening in its lazy way after I slide his jeans off. His eyes are closed. For the first time, I notice his long lashes. I want to kiss them too, but those full lips compete for my attention.
OK, even with a vicious hangover I’ve still got a boner. This comes as faint surprise. I pull the blinds shut, and once I’m out of the sun’s glare I feel better. It’s enough of a boost for me to decide that wriggling out of my boxers is worth the effort. I could always pull my dick through the flap in the front but somehow that isn’t where I see this fantasy going.
Is he circumcised or not? You can never tell. At first I pretend he’s not, and then I substitute a cut version to see which I like better. I can’t decide. It’s him. It’s his. Once it’s in my mouth, will it matter?
Some guys require lube to jack off but I’m not one of them. I prefer a dry hand. It’s a different kind of friction. Something about lube has a numbing effect, makes the sensation more removed, less immediate.
Salt floods my mouth, seawater. I didn’t tell him not to come in my mouth and he didn’t warn me first. I’m OK with that. It’s him. It’s his.
I come faster than I was expecting to, and the volume isn’t my usual gush. The semen sort of falls out of my dick. Dehydration. The pleasure courses through me, then subsides quickly, leaving me drowsy, more depleted than I was at the start.
Dave.
I grope for a towel. They’re under the bed. When I wipe the congealing remnants of my fantasy away from my chest, off my wrist and hand, I see what slipped my mind: Dave’s number. My bones turn to rubber when I look at my palm and see blurs. The numbers look like camouflage. Something in my semen has broken the ink down into its component colors. Some blue. Mostly green. The 415 area code is unmistakable, but the rest? At the end, a 7. The digit before that, either a 6 or a 5. Maybe a couple of zeroes.
Cum dissolves ink. Who knew?
I stare at my hand. It’s a horrifying moment, as if I’m partially possessed. Think of The Evil Dead. Whose hand is this, anyway? Who let the demons in? Whose friend was Dave, and who introduced us? Did he tell me where he lived, what neighborhood?
After a few minutes of hypnosis from the greenish blur in my palm, I tumble out of bed, put on a robe, and make my way to the kitchen for the Gatorade and the phone. If I have to call Information as well as everybody I know and a lot of people I don’t, I’m going to track Dave down. I am. But first, I’ve got to do something about this hangover.
First Draft
Andy Quan
It was a lesson I was taught in a sunny classroom with brightly painted concrete walls in a quiet Vancouver neighborhood before most people in the world knew where Vancouver was. To write a report, or a letter, or basically anything important, you would do a first draft, and then a second, and then carefully recopy the whole thing onto clean paper.
I always wondered about the word draft. I knew it meant “wind” as well as “forcibly recruit” (I admit to precocity.) To write a draft, I imagined, was to write the wind onto a page, have it blown away into a better form, and then have it disappear altogether.
Foolscap was another intrigue. Within the word was a stupid person and a hat. Said quickly, it was neither, and the syllables could alter to evoke “full,” “fuel,” “scape,” and “cup.” So much in a silly rough bit of paper, clearly inferior to proper new lined paper glowing white, showing off three perfect holes.
So, here it is, I’m writing on whatever paper I have found but am imagining it soft and shabby as foolscap, and I’m writing a first draft because, really, I barely know you, so how could I draw you into finished form just yet?
This is how we met. I wrote a story. Sent it off. The editor agreed to put it in a book with other stories. You’d done the same. It was your first story published; mine as well.
The publisher had organized a night to promote the anthology where authors of these stories would do a small reading. The event was held in a small bar in Toronto, a bar that was long from back to front, but short from side to side, so when I eventually read, I would have to look far to the right and far to the left to connect with the audience.
