Best gay erotica 2002, p.1
Best Gay Erotica 2002, page 1
Copyright © 2001 by Richard Labonté.
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published in the United States by Cleis Press Inc.,
P.O. Box 14684, San Francisco, California 94114.
Printed in the United States.
Cover design: Scott Idleman
Text design: Karen Quigg
Cleis Press logo art: Juana Alicia
First Edition.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
eISBN: 978-1-57344-879-6
“what i want to do” © 2001 by pansy bradshaw. “ “Pink Flamingos, Part Three-Way” © 2001 by Scott Brassart, originally appeared in Starf*cker, edited by Shar Rednour; Alyson Books. “CAGE” © 2000 by Bill Brent, originally appeared in Rough Stuff, edited by M. Christian & Simon Sheppard, Alyson Books. “Summer, Eighteen” © 2001 by Alexander Chee. “I’m a Top” © 2001 by Otto Coca. “The Porn King and I” © 2001 by Greg Herren. “Natoma Street” by J. T. LeRoy, originally appeared in The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, © 2001 by Bloomsbury USA. “What a Muse Looks Like” © 2001 by Shaun Levin, originally appeared on-line in Mind Caviar; February 2001. “Unlimited Pass” © 2001 by Douglas A. Martin. “Frantic Romantic” © 2001 by Alistair McCartney. “Kiss the Concrete” © 2000 by Sean Meriwether, originally appeared on-line in Suspect Thoughts, issue 3, spring 2001. “I Can See for Miles” © 2001 by Marshall Moore. “A Bedtime Story” © 2000 by Jay Neal, originally appeared in American Bear magazine, Dec. 2000/Jan. 2001. “Losing It” © 2001 by John Orcutt. “Harder” © 2000 by Ian Philips, originally appeared on-line in Suspect Thoughts, issue 2, fall 2000, and is reprinted in slightly different form from See Dick Deconstruct: Literotica for the Satirically Bent, Attagirl Press. “Positive” © 2001 by Andy Quan. “Tiger Rag” © 2000 by J. D. Ryan, originally appeared in Skin Flicks #2, edited by David MacMillan, Companion Press. “Saint Valentine Was a Martyr, You Know” © 2001 by Simon Sheppard. “Cocky” © 2001 by Mel Smith. “Chip off the Old Block” © 2001 by Michael Stamp. “The Tide” © 2001 by Matt Bernstein Sycamore. “Remembering Dalton” © 2001 by Karl von Uhl. “Ponyboy” © 2001 by James Williams.
Once again,
For my man Asa and his dog Percy
My family, where-ever we are
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword Richard Labonte
Filth and Consequences: An Introduction Neal Drinnan
Losing It John Orcutt
Positive Andy Quan
I Can See for Miles Marshall Moore
Harder Ian Philips
Cocky Mel Smith
Unlimited Pass Douglas A. Martin
Ponyboy James Williams
Summer, Eighteen Alexander Chee
Saint Valentine Was a Martyr, You Know Simon Sheppard
what i want to do pansy bradshaw
Frantic Romantic Alistair McCartney
The Tide Matt Bernstein Sycamore
Pink Flamingos, Part Three-Way Scott Brassart
Natoma Street J.T. LeRoy
Chip Off the Old Block Michael Stamp
A Bedtime Story Jay Neal
What a Muse Looks Like Shaun Levin
Tiger Rag J. D. Ryan
The Porn King and I Greg Herren
Kiss the Concrete Sean Meriwether
CAGE Bill Brent
Remembering Dalton Karl von Uhl
I’m a Top Otto Coca
About the Authors
About the Editors
Foreword
Richard Labonté
The setting for the last five years of the Best Gay Erotica series has been the Castro, West Hollywood, Chelsea—not for the stories (or not all of them, thank goodness), but for me. Whenever I was bored by porn on paper, I could walk the sidewalks of the three queerest neighborhoods in America— by reputation, anyway—and witness in the flesh the nipples and butts and brawn and style of guys. Or, for that matter, I could stand behind the counter of A Different Light’s bookstores in its three cities, Los Angeles and New York and primarily San Francisco, where I worked for two decades, and greet the flesh as it bought books, or talked about them. Either way, I was surrounded by the sex of men.
This year, with deer and skunks, field mice and hawks, groundhogs and whippoorwills outside my new front door, I realized that, over my years of living and working in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City, I’d come to take for granted the effortlessness of lusty possibility. Not that I’d become jaded: Erotic prose loaded with imagination, originality, passion, and tension will always excite me, physically and intellectually. And there were always all those men, in the flesh.
But my sense of how central to healthy queer life is the exploration of queer libido had eroded, I realized while reading submissions for Best Gay Erotica 2002. For the four months in 2001 I was evaluating, selecting, and discarding stories, narrowing several hundred down to fewer than fifty to pass along to judge Neal Drinnan, I was almost entirely by myself, alone on 200 acres of rural Ontario farmland, several miles from the nearest village, with just a couple of elderly farmers within easy walking distance, and the occasional weekend visitor to remind me of other people.
This splendid isolation reaffirmed for me how central to gay male life good porn can be: as stimulation, sure, but more than that, I was reminded that for many, the first intellectual engagement of physical and emotional need comes from the erotic moment—that “click” of putting together the imagination and the act, the pleasure that comes from discovering the architecture of sexual urgency in print, on video, in person, and building an erotic life with it.
There are plenty of building blocks in this edition of Best Gay Erotica, with enough textures and designs, sizes and shapes, for constructing all possible scenarios—a hallmark, I trust, of this series, whose broad focus embraces every conceivable erotic impulse.
The collection this year opens and ends and giggles in the middle with a style of story that is rare: genuinely funny erotica. Both “I’m a Top” by Otto Coca and “Losing It” by John Orcutt cast a wry eye on the inherent humor of sex, though Coca’s earnest search for the perfect man is laced with delightful sarcasm, while Orcutt’s desperate search for a first fuck draws its chortles from the field of slapstick. With both, you’ll laugh out loud, as you will with Scott Brassart’s smartly insane homage to sexy film director John Waters, “Pink Flamingos, Part Three-Way.” (And if you don’t at least smile, you take sex far too seriously.)
There’s good humor, too, in Marshall Moore’s urban voyeur fantasy “I Can See for Miles,” in which an elaborate seduction scheme comes up with a twisted ending; and in Alistair McCartney’s “Frantic Romantic,” two intense parodies of the classified-ad come-on, monologues at once comic and tragic; and in Jay Neal’s whimsical “A Bedtime Story,” which has wicked fun with the fairy-tale form; and in J. D. Ryan’s farcical “Tiger Rag,” which plants a long, wet tongue firmly between the smooth muscular cheeks of porn video-making.
Sometimes the wanting is as great as the getting, and that sense of yearning is captured with wistful charm in pansy bradshaw’s “what i want to do” and in Douglas A. Martin’s “Unlimited Pass,” two short tales about attaining—or not— the unattainable, and in Greg Herren’s fantasy-fueled “The Porn King and I,” a clever melding of prose and visual erotica.
Sometimes the memory of what was gotten has a powerful pull, as in Alexander Chee’s nostalgic “Summer, Eighteen,” work by a young writer that pays skilled tribute to the “I-had-just-taken-my-T-shirt-off-when-this-guy...” genre of classic magazine porn, and in Karl von Uhl’s “Remembering Dalton,” a flashback tour de force both sexy and, in these days of Scouts and queers, quite timely.
And sometimes it’s the more sensual senses, touch and taste and smell, that get us hard, as in Shaun Levin’s recipe for romance, “What a Muse Looks Like.”
Then there’s the lost-in-the-moment physicality embodied this year by Matt Bernstein Sycamore’s brief, lusty story “The Tide” and Simon Sheppard’s brief, scary “Saint Valentine’s Was a Martyr, You Know” and Ian Philips’s brief, shivery “Harder” and Bill Brent’s brief, shivery “CAGE”—four very short stories in which carnality consumes the senses, to remarkable effect.
Several stories submitted this year, as noted in Neal’s introduction, drew either autobiographically or imaginatively from the well of childhood pain. Two that were selected are J. T. LeRoy’s “Natoma Street,” excerpted from his book The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, a brilliant, brutal story about exorcising the past; so, too, milder but no less forceful, is “Chip Off the Old Block” by Michael Stamp, in which a boy follows, almost mutely, in his father’s sexual path.
And then there’s danger as part of sex play, as played out in Sean Meriwether’s flirtation with violence in “Kiss the Concrete,” where sexual excitement is enhanced by physical daring; and there’s subjugation as part of erotic passion, as depicted in two of the longer stories this year, “Ponyboy” by James Williams and “Cocky” by Mel Smith, Best Gay Erotica selections which explore the notion that ultimate satisfaction comes from a willing loss of identity.
The least classifiable
More than half of the contributors this year appear in Best Gay Erotica for the first time—Scott Brassart, Bill Brent, Alexander Chee, Otto Coca, Greg Herren, J. T. LeRoy, Alistair McCartney, Jay Neal, John Orcutt, J. D. Ryan, Mel Smith, James Williams—some of them established writers who have been published elsewhere, several of them younger writers, a couple making their first appearance in print. I mention this because over the years, this series has showcased a number of writers who have gone on to publish more widely, or have produced first novels—a signal to me that the judges I’ve worked with over the years (Randy Boyd, Felice Picano, D. Travers Scott, Christopher Bram, Douglas Sadownick), none of whom knew who wrote the stories they’re sent, have a good eye for talent.
And, given my past years with A Different Light, I’m pleased that four of the stories submitted and selected this year are by former staff, people I worked with in New York and San Francisco. For John Orcutt and Otto Coca, their work here marks their first fiction in print; Alexander Chee’s first novel, Edinburgh, was published in fall 2001; and pansy bradshaw’s own first fiction appeared in Best Gay Erotica 1997, the first collection I edited. It’s nice that their book-learning has paid off.
Thanks, as always, to the three wise folks who make Cleis Press work, Frédérique Delacoste and Felice Newman and Don Weise; to Neal Drinnan for his astute picks and insights; and to some special friends, Justin Chin and Kirk Read and Eddie Moreno and Lawrence Schimel, whose e-mails from afar have kept me in touch with familiar places, and Ken White and Tommi Avicolli Mecca and Jim Breeden, all busy at post–A Different Light careers, who helped with the editing over the years I spent with them in the cozy San Francisco store office.
Filth and Consequences: An Introduction
Neal Drinnan
What won’t we gay men do in search of sexual fulfillment? What delicious twist of cosmic fate has cast us in such a compelling and intrepid sexual role? Why are we capable of using sex as an integral component of love as well as using it as a medium to explore other vast and different avenues of interpersonal congress? For some of us the pursuit of sexual expression verges on the ridiculous. In our large cities at least, sex can be procured as readily as a burger and fries (hold the mayo). Our secret fears about illness and the morality of our behavior add color and drama to many of our escapades, and as we were never educated or encouraged in our lifestyle, the adventure becomes an even more frightening and exhilarating one.
I was told as a kid that there was “nothing wrong with sex as long as the man and woman loved each other.” So where did that leave me? It’s all right to fist someone whom you find in a sling as long as they’ve douched first? It’s OK to have sex with a man loitering in a nightclub toilet so long as there isn’t a needy queue for the cubicles? It’s fine to have sex with five different men in a sex club so long as you wash your cock between partners? For these questions and more there are no clear answers—no established etiquette. Of course there are those of us who desire nothing more than a picket fence, a dog, and a loving partner to grow old with in a monogamous relationship punctuated with sweet, ever-diminishing vanilla sex. But I don’t think you’ve picked up this book to read about that—though if you have, you will find among these tales of sexual adventure a number of beautiful love stories about men sharing love and sex in ways that would satisfy the traditional romantic streak in anyone.
There is a history about a group of Franciscan monks in Venice in the sixteenth century who realized that total immersion in the senses had rather the same effect on the spirit as complete asceticism. (The lower chakras are capable of conjuring up the same spirits as the higher ones). They believed that ultimately we are divine beings capable of rising above our physical self, and while this was traditionally achieved through prayer and meditation, it was equally attainable through defiling the body via engrossment in the physical senses. These monks feasted and fornicated themselves into a state of religious delirium by offering their bodies up to every form of sensualism and sensuality to attain the same exalted state reached by spartan Buddhist monks or Carmelite nuns, and when news of their wickedness reached the Vatican, the entire monastery was torched, incinerating all within and extinguishing all evidence of this maverick tradition. There is a moral to this historical tale that informs our behavior still: The libertine has always been in peril of martyrdom, and unless we take the bull by the horns (so to speak) so are we.
Similarly there are avenues of sexual pursuit available to the modern homosexual male that seem to share some of these ancient tenets. The use of stimulants and the pursuit of extreme sensations go beyond any act of simple sex. The awesome extent of penetration some of us allow ourselves is as much about meditating on the physical extremes we are capable of, as it is about the pursuit of a simple orgasm or any expression of love. Indeed anyone who indulges frequently in fist-fucking and S/M will tell you that the sensations they experience take them into another dimension entirely and that dimension by no means precludes love. The act becomes not merely sexual but spiritual. By testing our physical limitations we are broadening our spiritual ones. Now you try explaining that to the guardians of the heterosexual hegemony!
Homosexual men are strange creatures, and I might be biased but I love ’em (well, some of them). Much of our sexual fantasizing has often revolved around gay boys mooning over straight boys, which has more to do with the value of “straightness” in our hetero-world and the emotional baggage we queers have than about the true desirability of the straight man per se; but it pleases me that there are few stories in this collection that dwell on that. Pornographers still make crappy porn that presumes gay men will be that much more excited by a plot if there is some ludicrous charade suggesting the actors are straight, but they never fooled me, and I’ve always been much more enamored of men who know themselves and their desires than those fey fence-sitters who seem to require inordinate amounts of seduction.
Still, each to his own. We are an extraordinarily contradictory bunch. The same boys who screamed at the approach of a rock-hard baseball or cricket ball so often grew up to be seemingly fearless of all the potential perils in an unlit park or a dangerous meat-packing district. The same little boy who was frightened by firecrackers as a child turns out to be fearless when it comes to having anonymous sex with multiple strangers. So many men who never triumphed on the playing field have yet managed to become sexual athletes on their own terms, their achievements only ever truly celebrated in collections like this.
We are the only subculture I know that invests millions of dollars in supporting theme parks in which to exorcise our lusts and fantasies, flocking to lush faux temples and rabbit warrens to pour out our desire for hours at a time. We are definitely the only sector of society that can spend most of our lives cruising with a very real prospect of sexual fulfillment at the end of each evening’s search (if we play our cards right). We go among the people during the day imitating the average, sometimes doing a better job than many of the straight ones, but by our desire we know each other, and as poet Pat Parker once stated, “We Be Something Else....” My view, of course, may not be a popular one. So many gay men slave so earnestly not to “be something else.” They strive to intimidate the heterosexual male with their own hard-won machismo, and in gyms and nightclubs many look for the reflection of a formulaic masculinity in others to match their own—and sometimes they find it. For a moment at least.
I’ve battled for a long time against the idea that love and sex are necessarily synonymous. I don’t know whether I should have, but I have. I can’t deny that love has much to do with the definition of erotica, and what could be more erotic than the sex enjoyed by lovers in the first throes of passion? Especially young lovers, young beautiful lovers with smooth skin, hard youthful cocks, and gently budding pink virginal arseholes ready to be plundered for the first time...but I’m jumping ahead and that scene is way too reminiscent of an oft-played Bruno Gmunder Eastern Bloc sexploitation porn video, so I’ll stop right there!
