Best gay erotica 2010, p.1
Best Gay Erotica 2010, page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword
Introduction
HOLIDAY FROM LOVE
THE HIPPIE DOWN-LOW
THE STRAY
I WISH
THE SUBURBAN BOY
“fifteen minutes naked”
A BEAUTIFUL FACE
WE MESSED AROUND AT THE EL CAMINO MOTEL
CELL 13
BETTER LATE THAN NEVER
THE BOY IN THE MIDDLE
FRAZZLED
UNDER THE RUSHES
8 BEAUTIFUL BOYS 8: THE FOLLIES REVISITED
SMOKE AND SEMEN
COLIN AND GREGORY: 1956
THE BED FROM CRAIGSLIST
THE STUFFED TURKEY
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Copyright Page
For Asa…
who has found his “best home ever”
on Bowen Island.
FOREWORD
Fifteen years of Best Gay Erotica. My, my. Fourteen of those under my stewardship. Who knew we’d be together between the covers for so long, this annual erotica collection and this one-time gay bookseller…or gay-book seller, as it were? I’ve read (confession: many I skimmed…first pages often tell all) close to four thousand stories over the years, and selected about six hundred for my fourteen judges to review, from Douglas Sadownick in 1997 and Christopher Bram in 1998 to James Lear in 2009 and Blair Mastbaum in 2010. The result: about twenty of the best short stories every year blending sexual intensity and—always my goal—literary craftsmanship.
Back when BGE made its debut, nonerotic literary anthologies were a going concern. All this happened in the nineties: David Bergman became editor of Plume’s venerable Men on Men series after the death of its founding editor, George Stambolian. Brian Bouldrey was compiling the Best American Gay Fiction collections for Little, Brown. Faber & Faber released three volumes of His (exuberantly subtitled Brilliant New Fiction by Gay Writers), edited by Robert Drake and Terry Wolverton. Alyson Books published an anthology almost every year, among them Certain Voices, edited by Daryl Pilcher; Circa 2000, edited by Drake and Wolverton; and Not the Only One, a collection of gay short stories for the young adult crowd. David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell assembled The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories, and Mitchell put together The Penguin Book of International Gay Writing. There was even a Mammoth Book of Gay Short Stories, edited by Peter Burton for Carroll & Graf. These are but a few collections among many, including a slew of science fiction, mystery, and horror titles, where short gay fiction could be found.
Those were the good old days of queer literary fiction. Now we’re lucky if we get one or two such collections a year.
Which is where BGE comes in. I take the “erotica” part of the title seriously: porny is good, and that’s what this annual anthology hews to. But every year I encourage writers of a literary bent to sex up their stories some, and every year I coax polished prose from writers who honed their horndog skills in the glossy gay mags.
Meanwhile, outlets for erotica have shrunk as well: Mavety Media announced in May 2009 that it was suspending its gay magazines. Torso, Mandate, Inches, Playguy, Honcho—all gone. (A question for Queer Trivia, should there ever be such a game: which BGE judge once worked as an editor for Mavety Media? I’ll never tell.) The fiction published in those magazines was often rigidly formulaic and sexually hyperbolic, but BGE has featured a few classy tales from their pages. Now that market has vanished, so it’s up to collections like this, and others from ever-inventive Cleis Press, to keep cum alive…creatively and with literary flair.
Richard Labonté
Bowen Island, British Columbia
INTRODUCTION: REALLY, IT’S ALL YOU, AND ALL NATURAL
Blair Mastbaum
Porn has a much more significant place in our lives since the Internet delivered first photos, and now video clips, cams, and chat. It’s everywhere, and everyone talks about it. I wonder, though, if this public acceptance and proliferation isn’t making it kinda boring. More like…television. (Maybe my friends are a bunch of pervs, but talking about visual porn with them is like talking about where to eat dinner that night—not a big deal in the slightest.)
That’s why the written word remains important when it comes to sex. Words bring porn back into the private realm. Words put the erotic back in your mind. You conjure up the images when you’re reading, with cues and hints from the author. But really, it’s all you.
Think about it. Letters—and words—are symbols and series of symbols, and you’re seeing something when you read those words. It’s incredible, and it’s beautiful. (And I always want to find some guy reading Shakespeare on XTube. I think it would be sexy.)
I really don’t understand the hesitancy about sexuality. There’s nothing dirty about sex. It’s as natural as breathing. Our body tells us what makes it happy, sad—or randy. It tells us as we read something or watch something or hear something, or just think of something, that it’s erotic, and we respond. Or at least we ought to.
Great sex is narrative unto itself. There’s a wordless story—a beginning, a middle, and an end. I’m not talking about those forced stories in seventies porn films. I’m talking about the process—being turned on, randomly, impulsively, or on purpose; initiating the sex, performing it, and finally, if you’re lucky I suppose, cumming. It starts on a train, or on a hiking trail, or in a college classroom, and it ends up somewhere smaller, darker perhaps, more private, and weirder, even if it’s just behind a grove of trees or in the janitor’s closet.
And it also starts on the pages of this collection.
Sex for fun is one of the most obvious aspects of what separates us from most other animals. Okay, yes, bonobos do it—but they can’t read.
So read this book. Prove to the bonobos that they have nothing on us. This book is art, really. Sometimes, the sex is secondary. It’s the words that are primary.
Blair Mastbaum
HOLIDAY FROM LOVE
Hank Fenwick
When I think of Erik I think first (and very definitely foremost) of his dick. It was—I hope and trust it still is—a lovely thing, long without being intimidating, sturdy without looking like a club, warmly pink, rising (almost always rising) out of a mop of light-brown curls. It was very much like its owner—well worthy of affection and respect.
The thing I respected most about him was his discipline. It was almost impossible to deflect him from his plans—especially when his plans involved getting an early start at a day’s work. Erik is a painter, rather a good one, I think, but at that time he made his living as an illustrator and he created that work on his computer. His weekend days were given over to paint and canvas in a borrowed studio and he didn’t like to waste any of the light. Many Sunday mornings I stretched out on the bed, trying to look seductive, watching the sun begin to touch the treetops outside, reaching to catch that bobbing, half-hard truncheon of flesh with my mouth as its owner gathered up his clothes.
I succeeded only once, by changing my tactics. He was stooping, one leg raised as he put on his underpants, and instead of aiming for his dick I lunged for his arse. It surprised him so much he stumbled, I drove my tongue into his crack, and he turned to escape. That was his mistake: his ass was mine, as was his dick. So was the next half hour. I gorged on the shaft then returned to his sweet, musky hole. He’d showered quickly after wakening, and there was a faint smell of soap, a reminiscence of shit, a warmth of sweat as we bucked on the mattress.
He was annoyed, laughing but annoyed with me for distracting him, with himself for being distracted—and that current of annoyance affected the sex. He was usually gentle, almost pedantic in the way he led me along, like an infinitely patient sex therapist. This time the gentleness vanished.
As I buried my face in the curves of his behind he twisted his body so that I was trapped under him and he bore down on my mouth. He had strong thighs, strong glutes, and he raised himself up so that he was sitting on my head, impaling himself on my tongue. I’d lost the advantage, he was in charge, and he made sure I could feel it. I was suffocating in that sexy stink. I drilled my tongue deep into him but I needed to breathe and I couldn’t. I tried to pull my head away, just for a minute, to catch some air. He pressed harder, grinding my head into the mattress with his weight. I flailed and he relented, pulling himself back a few inches. He leaned over and grabbed my jaw with one hand, forcing my mouth to open wider.
“Suck my balls,” he said. “Gently!” That “gently” had a note of threat to it. And he straddled my neck, dipping first one hairy egg then the other into my open mouth. Then he drew away, moving down the bed until he was between my legs.
Before, when he’d fucked me, he’d taken it gently, licking, stroking, working lube into me until I was all hole, waiting for him. Now he grabbed my thighs, threw my legs up onto his shoulders, and hit me across the buttocks with the flat of his hand fast and hard. I’d barely registered the sting when he did it again, on the other side; then the first, then the second again. I was burning. And that was it for foreplay. He placed the head of his beautiful dick against my sphincter and pushed, not quickly but not slowly either. It was an efficient thrust and god, how I felt it. I started to roar, with pain and also with the shock of pleasure, and he clamped his left hand over my mouth. He was always respectful of the neighbors and it was, after all, still early on a Sunday morning.
Neither of us lasted much longer. It was a fast, fierce, a
I was never able to repeat the experience. He hadn’t been really pleased to lose that half hour. He thought it a failure of self-discipline. He was too generous to blame me, but he guarded himself better against me in the mornings after that. But I regarded myself as a potential bad influence—and what a pleasure that was. All my romantic life I had been the stable one, the one who tried to maintain sanity. Being coupled with someone who did all that stable stuff, and did it so much better than I ever had, was a rest, a relief, an unbelievable indulgence.
Going to bed with him had always been a totally happy experience, sensual and domestic. He may have had a schedule but he had no inhibitions and he took real pleasure in overcoming mine. That may have been why he was taken off guard by my arse attack; rimming had been part of his repertoire, not mine.
Affection and respect aside, the fact is that we picked each other up on the street. It was in the west eighties, between Columbus Avenue and Amsterdam, and we passed each other, looked, stopped, looked back, and I asked him home with me. I must have been feeling uncharacteristically confident that evening. I don’t know how he was feeling but he’s told me since that he has a weakness for my body type. He didn’t describe it as a weakness; he just said he fancies it. Likes lanky, I suppose.
He’s not my type. Usually I go for the tormented, dark, Heath-cliff sort—a touch of Montgomery Clift. It’s not a healthy taste. He’s Danish, with a cheerful Scandinavian face and a purposeful manner. The manner isn’t a pose; he usually has a purpose. I’m amazed, looking back, that he went home with me that night. Perhaps his schedule said Get Laid—and he did.
My place was a sublet in a run-down apartment building in the northern reaches of Central Park West—I’d been lucky finding it through friends. Nowadays it would cost a fortune and even then it was a find. He had an even smaller place on Amsterdam Avenue, just a few blocks away, and he borrowed studio loft space from a friend downtown. He used the studio on weekends and sometimes, very rarely, during the week. He could use it all day if his friend was in the country, but otherwise he guaranteed to be out of there by ten A.M., which was when his friend liked to start work. That’s why those early hours were so important to him. After that one successful seduction my bobbing for his dick became a ritual, a gesture without any real intention of consummation, a mutual joke. Sometimes he would wag his half-erection at me to wave good-bye.
Because he was so much not my type there was always an element of surprise in seeing him in bed. I’d look at him and I’d start to laugh. How the hell did this happen? How did it turn into a regular thing? Not only in bed. We’d be sitting opposite each other at one of those tiny New York café tables, having a quick snack (he didn’t drink, which for me was another oddity in a partner), and I’d watch him eating and the laughter would begin somewhere near my stomach and then spill out and I’d be laughing, then he’d laugh though he never quite understood what I was laughing about, then I’d get hard just looking at him sitting so close across the table and I’d wonder how I was going to stand up without everyone in the place seeing the growing pyramid in my pants. What could be better than that, laughing and getting a hard-on simultaneously?
He’d have been pleased if everyone in the place had noticed the boner he’d given me. It would have amused him to see me embarrassed, and of course it would have been points to him. But the embarrassment would have been the gratifying thing—he wasn’t vain. I whispered to him, once, when he wanted to leave, that I couldn’t get up, I needed a minute for my hard-on to wilt. He grinned and got up anyway, moving to the door. I hobbled after him, trying to use the paperback I was carrying as some sort of shield. He stopped, suddenly, so that I bumped into him and that damned erection probed into his backside. He started laughing then and so I did too, though I only found it half funny at the time. I took to carrying a book bag to conceal my crotch.
In bed our sex was a tussle for the top position, a fight I usually let him win. Outside of bed I didn’t find it so easy to give in, so our arguments could be edgy. Not that we disagreed about anything substantive; he was, I think, a better person than I am and in some moods I would like to have been more like him. They were more about matters of taste—a disagreement about a painter, a movie, a book. Those aren’t insignificant when both your careers are involved in things like that. I’ve known long-term feuds to spring up from people taking sides over a play or a film.
But at least we were interested in the same things, even if we didn’t react to them in the same way. Neither of us had much money but I had contacts that got us into a lot of places and events where Erik didn’t have access. I remember one evening we began by going to a reception at the Metropolitan Museum; I can’t recall who the painter was but it was someone Erik admired. He drank tonic and I drank the champagne on offer and he explained to me the different things he liked about the work. He liked to explain things to me and sometimes I let him.
Then we went on to a party in the west seventies, where a Danish dancer, a major ballet star and a notoriously handsome man, was the guest of honor. I knew the host, and Erik wanted to meet the dancer; he had been a fan since he was a teenager. We had spent longer at the exhibition than we had intended so I suggested splurging on a taxi across Central Park rather than waiting for a bus. Erik vetoed the taxi, said it would be faster to walk than wait for a bus. Always assuming, I thought, that we don’t get mugged on the way. There’d been a lot of stuff in the papers about robberies in the park. I said something wimpy, like “Do you think we should?” and Erik said, full of purpose, “Of course, why not?” So we set off.
The light had gone—it was nine o’clock on a November night—and I was nervous. But I was also exhilarated. I told myself that Erik was well-built and that I was tall so together we probably looked like a team that shouldn’t be messed with. I twitched at every rustle in the bushes but kept up my side of the conversation as gamely as I could, so he wouldn’t know I wasn’t as confident as he was. I was surprised when we saw the lights and traffic of Central Park West just ahead of us. He had been right, it had been quicker to walk. No bus had passed us on the way.
The party was a success. There was a big buffet and the exercise had made me hungry so I wolfed down chili and salad while I chatted to our host.
“We walked across the park so I’m really famished,” I told him, apologizing for my concentration on his food.
“You walked across the park!” he said, gratifyingly horrified.
“Sure,” I shrugged. “Why not?”
“You’re crazy,” he said but there was a hint of envy in his voice. Maybe he fancied Erik but I knew his estimate of me had gone up.
I talked to the host’s wife and watched Erik network. The star was looking even more handsome than his pictures, though a little bit worn around those beautiful edges. He and Erik chatted together for a few minutes in Danish—I don’t speak Danish but they were both from Denmark so what else would it have been—then Erik came over and said he was ready to leave if I was. We went to say goodnight to the host and he saw us to the door—I think he wanted to find out more about Erik, whose hand was on my backside, guiding me out.
That evening stands out for me, because it was so close to the last. He had been offered a job in San Francisco, a good one, teaching computer graphics, and he had accepted. That was something else we disagreed about: he loved that city. I suppose I could have learned to like it but we weren’t a couple and we had never seriously talked about my going with him, or after him. When we got back to my place that night we were both aware that in a few days he would be gone. There was nothing to be sentimental about but it affected the way we touched each other. When I took his shirt off I inhaled the sweat from his armpit.
