Best Gay Erotica 2003, page 23
So, I opened the carton and poorly feigned surprise to discover that the forty copies were of his latest book: Intimations of Aubergine. Poor Robert. If it weren’t for his hole, I’d pity him more than I loathe him. After all, I knew publishers didn’t give these books away. He must have been spending all his royalties to buy his own works.
But I gave him his forty whacks. And his virtuoso, voracious hole rewarded me with full-bodied shudders that burned their way under my skin like rivulets of thin, blue flame. I convulsed. I flailed. I came.
And Caliban, oblivious to the torrid love affair exploding behind him, bashed his face into his books as he tried to kiss both them and that very same picture on the dust jacket until he’d soaked a pillow or two.
I wished he’d called out his own name. That would have been a nice touch. But far too neat and convenient. And, alas, false.
Instead he remained oddly silent. Perhaps the perfection of that moment. Narcissus able at last to consummate his love. It was I who howled out something about being his total butt slut.
And I was.
I am.
The problem is that to enjoy the hole I have to suffer the ass that grows around it.
So, now, we get together only when I can no longer resist the siren song whistling out from between his cheeks. And the rest of our 365 days we write about the other in the hope that wewill end up in print. Together. Like here. Only pages apart: calling, cajoling, taunting, teasing, bellowing, cooing, serenading the other.
I know he’s come by now. How about you?
It is, after all, a true story.
Not for Long
Jeff Mann
Summer has left before you. A few weeks of drought, a few cold nights, and between one lovemaking and the next the heat has receded, the leaves have started to brown. This morning I notice these deaths as I drive to work. And as I study the mountains, I ask myself why my love for the land—the comfortable earth that outlives and receives us—can be so diffuse, so serene, while my love for men—ephemera of body hair, beard stubble, biceps, and nipple—must be so sharp and maddening.
All about me autumn has arrived: purple tidal pools of ironweed, goldenrod’s funereal flowers, the frowsy road-edge foxtail grass. By the New River, golden leaves are congregating along the limbs of sycamore and box elder. Signs of age, like this early silver on my temples. The sunflowers edging garden plots seem exhausted, bending their weary necks to earth. I recognize despair. I recognize resignation before the guillotine.
For adulterers, every touch is furtive, hasty. If only I’d met you first. A few afternoon rendezvous stippled across one summer is what our timing has allowed. And now all the green we shared degenerates. The rain’s brief pointillism blurs my windshield, medians of redtop grass rush by. Stratus clouds collect, inside and out.
In the office, I check my voice-mail. Nothing. For a week, you have not called. Any day now you and your lover, diplomas in hand, will nail down jobs, load up a U-Haul, and drive off, heading for God knows which city and state. Just when I am convinced that you have finally bolted, that even with you, old patterns and new cowards assert themselves, you appear, grinning reprieve in my office doorway.
My officemate, teaching Southern literature this semester, bends over A Streetcar Named Desire. I tap on the office next door, which belongs to my friendly colleague Ethel. “May I borrow your office while you teach?” I ask. “I have a confused and upset student, and we really need some privacy.” She smiles, nods, and heads off to class. I lead you in, turn off the lights, lock the door.
“Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Edward and Gaveston, Jeff and Thomas,” I joke, pulling you to me. On this campus there are, for us, no other safe square feet. Any open touch of ours would heap us with scorn, real and metaphoric stones, the swing of pipes, steel edges that would end your beauty in an instant. All summer I have scrabbled together these rare and risky borrowed spaces, these hasty privacies. Outlawed fusions in secret niches, the double stigma of gay adultery. Only here do our bodies exist, our kisses petal into possibility.
Seconds after the lock clicks, I have your T-shirt tugged up around your neck, your jeans jerked down about your knees. My fingers dig into the hard curves of your biceps. My face nuzzles your chest hair, the cleavage-cloud of fur still moist from the gym-shower. I clutch you close as Antæus did the earth.
Our moustaches mash together, tongues stretched and wrestling to their limits, and still we graze only the shallows, we taste only the surface of each other’s darkness and depth. “Priapus,” you mutter. “Mephistopheles,” I whisper, between mouthfuls of musk and mercy. Soon you will be leaving the room, the town, the state, and I am ravenous in the face of famine, all my frame shaking as you unbutton my pure-white professorial dress shirt and touch my chest with what appears to be the silent and studious wonder every inch of you evokes in me. We never know what is mutual, what myths we embody, what myths our lovers stroke.
I want to beg, “Stay, stay!” but instead stifle speech with your cock, with your nipples, with the furry mounds of muscle over your heart. I take as much of your body into mine as I can.
At last we pull back before release. You’ll have no chance for another shower before you meet your husband, and he’s grown suspicious, having smelt extramarital musk on you before. Seconds after we’ve buttoned and zipped up, the backwoods janitor, without a knock of warning, unlocks the door and ruckuses in to empty the trash.
I am teaching freshman composition three doors down the hall in half an hour, and you have to head home. In the hallway, just before we part, you say casually, “Oh, I have something you want.” Tugging open your backpack, you hand me a package. A quick visit to the men’s room to wash my scent from your moustache, a blithe wave at the end of the hall, and then you are gone, dissolving around the corner into memory.
All that denseness of muscle, that softness and ripeness of pubic hair against my cheek, the spill of preseminal sap in my palm like liquid moonstone. One second there, and now suddenly only images stored inside some wrinkle of my brain, the neurons’ weak chemical hold on history. How many trysts have we left, I wonder, how many meetings more and more difficult to arrange? When we make love one final time, will we know that touch must be the last?
On my fingers, in my beard, the scent of you still lingers, my lips still sting with stubble-burn. Summoning my usual composed facade, I return to my office, where my officemate continues to reread Streetcar. I borrow the paperback for a moment, and on a whim read the epigraph out loud, my favorite Hart Crane stanza:
And so it was I entered the broken world To trace the visionary company of love, its voice An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled) But not for long to hold each desperate choice.
I return the book, then silently behind his back I open the box you left. Amidst gift paper, white jockey shorts. I touch them. Still moist with workout sweat. A few stray hairs. I press the fabric to my face.
It is time for my freshman composition class. While I am teaching, defeated leaves, dry with drought, drop outside my classroom window. As I discuss the fine points of comma splices, the lurking dangers of mixed metaphors, I lift my left hand to my face, ostensibly to smooth my beard, and breathe you in, the vestige of your musk.
Not long after the seedtops of redtop grass comes first frost. You can stay no more than summer could. Back in my desk drawer, from your jockey shorts the sweat evaporates. From my fingers, your aroma fades. Collect what relics you can, derides autumn. You retain nothing.
About the Authors
BARRY ALEXANDER lives in Iowa, but doesn’t grow corn or raise hogs. The author of All the Right Places, he has published work in many gay magazines such as In Touch, Men, and Honcho as well as in anthologies, including Casting Couch Confessions, Rent Boys, Skin Flicks 2, Divine Meat, Friction, Best of Friction, Hard at Work, Heat Wave, and Seduced 2.
PAUL BECKFORD AND KEVIN DAX describe themselves thus—Paul: GWM, 26, 6’, 150 lbs., athletic, lean, light brown hair, blue-green eyes, very good looking, facial hair in flux, lightly hairy, graduate student, deceptively wholesome in appearance; interested in intense, exhibitionistic, transgressive homo-sex. Kevin: GWM, 36, 6’, 160 lbs., slim, handsome, blue-eyed, brown-haired, clean-shaven, smooth upper body, hairy legs, misleadingly wholesome in appearance, professional; interested in humbling himself before sexy men—as many as possible—of any race or type.
KEVIN BENTLEY is the author of Wild Animals I Have Known: Polk Street Diaries and After, from which “My Reagan Years” is excerpted, a humorous and erotic narrative culled from his twenty-five years of San Francisco diaries. He is also the author of Sailor: Vintage Photos of a Masculine Icon, and the editor of Afterwords: Real Sex from Gay Men’s Diaries and Boyfriends from Hell: True Tales of Tainted Lovers, Disastrous Dates, and Love Gone Wrong. His writing has also appeared in the anthologies Flesh and the Word 4 and 5, His 2, Bar Stories, and The Man I Might Become: Gay Men Write About Their Fathers.
JAMESON CURRIER is the author of a novel, Where the Rainbow Ends, and a collection of short stories, Dancing on the Moon. His short fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Men on Men, Rebel Yell, Circa 2000, and previous editions of Best Gay Erotica. “Snow” was first published on the website VelvetMafia.com.
DEAN DURBER is currently enrolled in doctorate study at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia. The focus of his research is consideration of how the discourse of gay liberation participates in the oppression of non-normative homosexual relationships between men. “Just because my dick likes touching your dick does not signify my existence as a gay man.” His first novel, Johnny, Come Home, was published in 2002. He has written extensively on issues relating to sex and sexual identity for cruisingforsex.com. Additional works of fiction can be found in a number of anthologies including Boy Meets Boy, Exhibitions, and on the Blithe House Quarterly (online). Dean has studied, traveled, and worked extensively throughout Europe, Asia, and Australasia, and speaks Japanese, Chinese, and German. After the completion of his doctorate degree (which is currently deconstructing him down to nothing), he hopes to make the move to any large, bustling, no-time-to-think, no-sleep, crazy, fucked-up city in the U.S.
DAVID GARNES’S work has appeared in Quickies, Quickies 2, and Erotic Travel Tales. He has also contributed to a wide variety of other anthologies such as Latin Lovers: True Stories of Latin Men in Love, The Isherwood Century, Tales from the Other Side, Connecticut Poets on AIDS, Telling Tales Out of School, Liberating Mind, and numerous reference volumes on gay and lesbian literature. He recently published a book of poetry, After the War Was Over: Poems of an American Childhood, and is currently at work on a novel about a family in the years following World War II. Garnes spent the decades of the 1960s and 1970s in New York, moving in the 1980s to Connecticut, where he now lives.
STEPHEN GRECO is editor-at-large of the international style magazine Trace. Formerly senior editor of Interview magazine and editorial director of Platform.net, for years the Web’s leading “urban youth culture” community, he writes and speaks often on the arts and entertainment, culture, and media. A collection of his erotic fiction and nonfiction, The Sperm Engine, was published in 2002. He lives in New York.
TREBOR HEALEY’S fiction can be found online at the Blithe House Quarterly and Lodestar Quarterly. Anthologies featuring his work include The Badboy Book of Erotic Poetry, A Day for a Lay, Sex Spoken Here, Between the Cracks, Queer Dharma, Wilma Loves Bette and Other Hilarious Gay and Lesbian Parodies, and Beyond Definition: New Writing from Gay and Lesbian San Francisco, of which he was coeditor. Trebor has also written a hit single, “Denny,” for Pansy Division. His first novel, Through It Came Bright Colors, will be published in 2003.
GREG HERRENis a New Orleans author and editor who lives in the lower Garden District about three blocks and many millions away from Anne Rice. He is the author of two novels, Murder in the Rue Dauphine and Bourbon Street Blues. He edited the erotic anthology Full Body Contact and the horror anthology Shadows of the Night. His short fiction has appeared in Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly, Men, Friction 4 and 5, Rebel Yell 2, Men for All Seasons, Best Gay Erotica 2002, and the forthcoming anthologies Roughed Up, Three the Hard Way, Balls Without a Chain, and My First Time 3.
DANIEL M. JAFFE’S novel, The Limits of Pleasure, was a finalist for ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Award in 2002. He compiled and edited With Signs and Wonders: An International Anthology of Jewish Fabulist Fiction and translated the Russian- Israeli novel Here Comes the Messiah! by Dina Rubina. His short stories and personal essays have appeared in dozens of literary journals and anthologies, including Bearotica, Kosher Meat, Found Tribe, Rebel Yell, The James White Review, and Greensboro Review. For more than eight years, Jaffe taught a les-bi-gay writing workshop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he now teaches writing for UCLA Extension.
JEFF MANN’S work has appeared in many publications, including The Spoon River Poetry Review, Wild Sweet Notes: Fifty Years of West Virginia Poetry 1950-1999, Prairie Schooner, Journal of Appalachian Studies, The Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly, Callaloo, Rebel Yell, and Rebel Yell 2. He has published three prize-winning chapbooks: Bliss (1998), Mountain Fireflies (2000), and Flint Shards from Sussex (2000). Bones Washed with Wine, a full-length collection of his poetry, was published in 2002. His essay collection Edge is forthcoming in 2003, as is his gay vampire novella, “Devoured,” to be published as part of the anthology Masters of Midnight. He teaches Appalachian studies, literature, and creative writing at Virginia Tech.
DOUGLAS A. MARTIN’S first novel, Outline of My Lover, was named an International Book of the Year by the Times Literary Supplement and adapted in part for Ballet Frankfurt’s production of “Kammer/Kammer.” His new work covers the mythopoetic biographies of Balthus, Hart Crane, and Francis Bacon.
DAVID MAY was a nice boy from a good family who fell in with the wrong crowd. He first made his mark writing for Drummer and other gay skin magazines in the 1980s and is the author of the S/M-oriented Madrugada: A Cycle of Erotic Fictions. His work, both fiction and nonfiction, has appeared in numerous magazines and journals, as well as in more than a dozen anthologies, including Roughed Up, Afterwords: Real Sex from Gay Men’s Diaries, Full Body Contact, Kosher Meat, Bar Stories, and Flesh and the Word 3. He lives in San Francisco with his Daddy, a dog, and two cats.
MARSHALL MOORE grew up in a small eastern North Carolina city halfway between nowhere and Hell but had sense enough to move to California a few years ago. He’s a sign language interpreter. This makes people think he’s a nicer person than he really is. He writes, too. His debut novel, The Concrete Sky, will be published in 2003. Other recent publications include the anthologies Queer Fear 2 and Rebel Yell 2. For more information about him, please visit his website:www.marshallmoore.net
JAY NEAL is by day a rocket scientist, by night a bear pornographer. From his birth in 1956, he has been attracted to husky, hairy men; he’s written stories about it since 1998. With a Ph.D. in physics, he has worked on various NASA and commercial aerospace and telecommunications projects, publishing pseudonymous technical papers with remarkably silly titles. While pursuing an advanced degree in bearsex, he has published research findings in American Bear and American Grizzly magazines, as well as the anthologies Tales from the Bear Cult, Best Gay Erotica 2002, and Bearotica. He lives with his partner in suburban Washington, D.C., where they collaborate on experimental research with friends and guests.
IAN PHILIPS (“Miss Lammy,” if you’re nasty) is a kinder and gentler Sadist who looks forward to handling a cat of a thousand points of light on America’s backside. Currently, he is undergoing “the change”—from home wrecker to homemaker. Later this year he hopes to transition from short story to novel. His first collection, See Dick Deconstruct: Literotica for the Satirically Bent, won the first-ever Lambda Literary Award for Erotica, in 2002. His second collection, Satyriasis: Literotica2, will be released in 2003. His brand-spanking- new website is up and already frightening the horses; he has humbly named it www.ianphilips.com
ANDY QUAN’S fiction and poetry have appeared in many anthologies and magazines in North America, Europe, and Australia. Here, he makes his fifth appearance in the Best Gay Erotica series. He says: “Smut is good! Smut is great!” Born in Vancouver, he’s since lived in Toronto, Brussels, and London. These days you can find him in Sydney, scootering or cycling around, on a stage reading or singing, working as a policy officer in international HIV/AIDS issues, or just hanging about. Find his book of poetry, Slant, and his Lambda Literary Award–nominated short fiction collection, Calendar Boy, at your local gay bookstore or drop by www.andyquan.com for more info or to say hello. He likes visitors.
SIMON SHEPPARD is the author of Hotter Than Hell and Other Stories and the forthcoming nonfiction book Kinkorama: Travels Through Gay Desire. He’s also the coeditor, with M. Christian, of the best-selling book Rough Stuff and its sequel, Roughed Up: More Tales of Gay Men, Sex, and Power. His work has appeared in all but one edition of Best Gay Erotica, in three editions of The Best American Erotica, in four of Friction: Best Gay Erotic Fiction, and in more than sixty other anthologies, a number of which also contain “Best” in their titles. His second short story collection, In Deep, will be published in 2004. He lives in San Francisco, believes firmly in the pleasures of queer love and desire, and loiters shamelessly at www.simonsheppard.com.
ROB STEPHENSON’S writing has been published in the Blithe House Quarterly (online), Dangerous Families edited by Matt Sycamore Bernstein, and Black Sheets and Fish Drum magazines. He recently edited an anthology of gay erotica with Bill Brent, Tough Guys. He makes and distributes his own chapbooks, including Three of Them Angel, Some Notes on Art and Architecture, To an End, Signals de Sade, and Paris Over Paris. He writes most of his erotica under the name TruDeviant, which appears in Best Bisexual Erotica 1 and 2, Sex Toys, and Butt magazine (the lovely pink one from Amsterdam!). Contact him at trudeviant@aol.com.
