Best Gay Erotica 2005

by Richard Labonté

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Wake the King Up Right

  Yang-Qi

  Pink Triangle-Shaped Pubes

  Face Value

  Gamblers

  The Thanks You Get

  Wrestler for Hire

  This Little Piggy

  Kindled by Vowels (An Epistolary Seduction)

  1. Nearer My Greg to Thee

  2. Husband, Sire, It

  Old Haunts

  The Strange Château of Dr. Kruge

  My Place

  Get on Your Bikes and Ride!

  from Voodoo Lust

  The Bad Boys Club

  Prologue

  Epilogue

  Derelict

  Surf

  from My Name Is Rand

  All at Sea with Master E

  Doll Boy

  Romulus

  The Bigg Mitkowski

  About the Authors

  About the Editors

  Copyright Page

  For Asa Dean Liles, again and always

  For furry Percy, who winters well

  And for Zach, new to the family

  Foreword

  …Always More Than Erotic

  Richard Labonté

  The best sex is never really just sex. And it’s always better when real bodies are involved. But in the absence of a body—and sometimes even in the company of one—sex is fun to read about, in all its infinite, glorious, messy, imaginative, soul-stirring variety. In assembling this collection for the past nine years, I sure have encountered variety.

  That, and an amazing growth in the number of anthologies of erotic writing. Consider, for example, some of the crop of 2003–2004: Fratsex and Escort Tales, Desilicious and Getting It!, Manhandled and Desire Lust Passion Sex, Quickies 3 and Hard Men, Between the Palms and Bad Boys, Buttmen 3 and Men, Amplified—and those are only some of the collections not represented in Best Gay Erotica 2005. Stories were submitted or considered from most of them (as well as from the growing number of quality online queer fiction magazines, the now-venerable Blithe House Quarterly and the newer Lodestar Quarterly); that the stories here all came from elsewhere speaks to the splendid porn boom…it was a very good year.

  Indeed, this year’s judge, William J. Mann, moans in his introduction about jettisoning so many great stories to make room for the even better ones in BGE05. I bookmarked a couple of hundred possible stories between Best Gay Erotica 2004 and this year’s anthology, and received a couple of hundred more original submissions. I selected forty-eight for William to consider. Any one of those few dozen would have done this book proud.

  These best twenty-two savor the body erotic, from urgent tongues and salty lips down to the crusty cracks between toes; they celebrate body types from brick-shithouse hunky to fat and happy about it. If tickling is your thing, there’s a tale or two; if muscles turn you on, pump your pleasure; if straight boys set you humming, there are a couple; if full nelsons and surfer boys get you off, come on in; if coy boys and scary scenes excite, enjoy—they’re all here. But this isn’t just a collection of fetishized body parts, super-sized fantasies, or hyper-masculine stereotypes. Fleshing out all the, well, flesh—what these diverse obsessions, deviancies, and sexual adventures have in common is the fact that the writers (several of them porn veterans and some of them talented newcomers) tell stories with character heft and emotional dimension. Just as the best sex is never really just sex, the best erotic writing is always more than erotic.

  Erotic writing dabbles in the fantastic: Jay Neal’s creepy “Old Haunts” and Drew Gummerson’s science fictional “The Strange Château of Dr. Kluge,” both surely not of this world, nonetheless arouse.

  Erotic writing revels in memory: Michael Huxley’s summertime of sex, “The Bad Boys Club”; Jim Gladstone’s summer camp romp, “This Little Piggy”; Davem Verne’s fable of Hell’s Kitchen, “The Bigg Mitkowski”; Alpha Martial’s boy toy fantasy, “My Place”—all draw on what once was, whether years ago or just last week, to entice.

  Erotic writing relishes vibrant, one-on-one sexual sparking: Steve Berman’s tender “Derelict,” about two teens lighting a dark world with love; Teh-Chen Cheng’s sensitive “Yang-Qi,” about two rural men finding solace in a homophobic culture; and Alexander Rowlson’s wise “Pink Triangle-Shaped Pubes,” about a brave kid who flaunts his queerness, connecting with a bully still afraid of his own.

  Erotic writing lusts after the athletic: Andy Quan’s sun-drenched “Surf” and Greg Herren’s cum-slicked “Wrestler for Hire,” both realizing fantasies.

  Erotic writing is electrified by reality: Bruce Benderson’s “Romulus” and Ian Philips’s and Greg Wharton’s “Kindled by Vowels (An Epistolary Seduction)”—two slices of lives fueled by irrepressible connection.

  Erotic writing is all about the accidental hot encounter (“Wake the King Up Right” by Mike Newman) and the impossible hot experience (the excerpt from Voodoo Lust by M. S. Hunter)—we should all be so lucky.

  Erotic writing is all about indulging desire: in Wayne Courtois’s excerpt from My Name Is Rand, an exalted new fantasy is explored; in James Williams’s “All at Sea with Master E,” a novice plunges deep into sexual depths.

  Erotic writing is all about attempted rescue: in Scott Pomfret’s “Face Value,” a powerful man falls hard for an empowered hustler; in Jonathan Asche’s “Doll Boy,” a wealthy man wins the heart—or at least the body—of a teen virgin.

  Erotic writing embraces self-image: D. Travers Scott’s “Get on Your Bikes and Ride!” inverts the typical equation of neediness with sly eloquence: fat is proud, and furious.

  And erotic writing has a sense of humor—exemplified by several stories, including Simon Sheppard’s wry, sly “The Thanks You Get.”

  Twenty-two tales snatched from a universe of erotic possibilities. Have fun.

  Some friends, both the older and the newer, are constant—a source of information, ideas, inspiration, and comfort: Nik Sheehan, Don Weise, Justin Chin, Lawrence Schimel, Kirk Read, Helyx Helyx, Andrew Currie, David Rimmer, Bryan Wannop, Frank Kajfes. So too are Felice Newman, Frédérique Delacoste, Chris Fox, and Diane Levinson, who keep Cleis Press purring, and who exude constant quality.

  Richard Labonte

  Perth, Ontario

  September 2004

  Introduction

  All That Sex Stuff

  William J. Mann

  My very first published story was about jacking off. I wrote of a kid who makes obscene phone calls and masturbates in front of his mirror. Lots of “suck my cock’s” and spunk shooting onto glass and fingers greased up with Vaseline.

  “You sure you want to make a name for yourself in this way?” a friend asked me.

  “What way?”

  “Sex. With all this sex stuff.”

  I was a grad student, young and untried and eager to be published. “I don’t care what gets me into print,” I said. “Besides, how can I tell the story of a kid who makes obscene phone calls without getting into a lot of sex stuff?”

  Much of my early fiction is in fact permeated with sex stuff. After that first anthology—the story was “Cords of Love,” later made into a short film by Dean Slotar called The Absolution of Anthony—I started writing for porn mags. I also contributed to all those endless early 1990s erotica anthologies that Richard Kasak of Masquerade Books was rolling out. I even won first place in an erotica contest sponsored by the late Scott O’Hara’s Steam magazine, writing about sex between three generations of the same family. All that sex stuff was, in fact, getting me somewhere.

  So when I wrote my first novel, The Men from the Boys, it was
inevitable there’d be a lot of sex. I’ll never forget the very first interview I did for the book. I was an anxious, first-time author going face-to-face with the Big Bad Press, personified by a serious-faced straight lady from the local newspaper of my then-hometown of Northampton, Massachusetts. “I’ve never felt so outside of a novel before,” she said, taking me by surprise as she scolded me for having written a story that dared to not accommodate a heterosexual sensibility. “I mean,” she said, her umbrage growing, “there was so much sex in it!”

  Indeed, in the nasty review she published the next day, she wrote that there was, quite simply, “too much sex” in the book. I was devastated—it was my very first review!—until my editor rather astutely pointed out, “Saying there’s too much sex in a book is not a bad thing. In fact, we can use it as a blurb on the cover of the paperback.” We didn’t, but his point was well taken: The Men from the Boys turned out to be a best-seller.

  The moral here: Making a name for myself with “all that sex stuff” worked out pretty well.

  Now, of course, I don’t need to defend sexual writing—erotica, literotica, whatever—to those of you reading this book. You’ve picked it up because sex is part of the fabric of your lives. It’s part of your consciousness, how you see and interact with the world. But there are still lots of people out there—reviewers, publishers, and prune-faced straight ladies like that one in Northampton—who don’t see it that way. And ever since Janet Jackson’s bustier busted out on national television, the forces of reaction, championed by the Bushies, have been clamping down everywhere and anywhere they can. That’s why works like this anthology are so important. Writing about sex is important for all people, but I think especially for lesbians and gay men and other nontraditionally heterosexual people. Our deviance—for that’s what it is, a deviation from the antiseptic norm—is made out to be frightening and dangerous, something to be denied expression. But of course fear and danger are part of why sexual writing is so vivid and important. What turns us on? What is the line between desire and fear? Between safety and danger? Where do they intersect?

  The answer is different for each of us. What makes the stories in this collection so powerful is their individuality, their iconoclasm, their distinct imprint on how each author experiences the erotic. When Richard Labonté asked me to judge this year’s entries, I accepted without giving much thought to what I might be reading. In the old days, when I started out, erotica was usually written merely to get the reader off. But as the genre has evolved, it’s become more focused on what all good fiction must ultimately be about: the telling of a good story.

  Indeed, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the stories Richard sent me were, by and large, some of the most exciting and provocative I’d read in a long time. The quality of the submissions was incredibly high; I found myself truly regretting having to narrow it down to this final twenty-two, necessitating the elimination of so many fine pieces. I looked for a number of things in making my decisions: a diversity of experience, so that we didn’t end up only with one type of story or character; a strong, unique authorial voice; and a narrative that engaged me—and yes, got me hard.

  It’s that immediate, visceral sexual response that distinguishes erotica from other forms of fiction. You don’t have to be into S/M or wrestling or the joys of teenage sex to appreciate the power those experiences can have—not if the stories are told well, and if they compellingly convey the writers’ own desire. That’s what this anthology is intended to do: offer a wide-angle lens on desire.

  I hope you enjoy the stories here, in all their quirky, individual deviance. I hope they make you consider your own fantasies, your own wells of desire. I hope they engage you, seduce you, and encourage you to write your own stories. And most of all, I hope they turn you on.

  William J. Mann

  Los Angeles

  August 2004

  Wake the King Up Right

  Mike Newman

  On the road from Baton Rouge to San Francisco, April, 1970

  Kevin opened his eyes in the dim early light to find a man’s face startlingly close on the next pillow. His fuzzy mind woke up in sections, like the windows of a dark house lighting sequentially as someone moves from room to room. He remembered Jerry getting into his car, he remembered Jerry’s naked body in the shower, he remembered Jerry’s cock going up his ass. There was a sunset over the Grand Canyon back there somewhere, and a campfire, and a fistfight. And Jerry’s cock up his ass.

  Asleep, his hitchhiker seemed younger than before, closer to Kevin’s age, even boyish, with his dark eyelashes innocently knitted together and his lips parted slightly, showing the white of his front teeth. Kevin’s morning erection stiffened. He felt like a spy, staring so intently at the unguarded face of a stranger he had picked up only two days before, now dozing inches from his eyes.

  For the first time he noticed a slight asymmetry to Jerry’s face, a subtle mismatch of cheekbones that made one side look friendly and the other side seem stern, even cruel. One black eyebrow arched a bit more than the other. An off-center dimple marred an otherwise perfectly square chin. But it was mostly the eyes. Jerry’s features shifted between angelic and crude as Kevin searched from one closed eyelid to the other. His hard-on throbbed.

  Fucking mesomorph. You guys have all the luck. Your face is lopsided and you’re still sexy. How could anyone be horny for a girl when a man is so…achingly…male?

  The stubble Jerry had grown during their short time together dotted his jawline and spread down his throat. Kevin tensed his cock until it hurt. He wanted to lick the coarse, black bristles sprouting from the protruding Adam’s apple.

  I don’t just want to fuck with you. I want to be you.

  Kevin sighed. Trying not to jiggle the bed, he slipped from under the covers and padded, nude, to the bathroom, flipping on the wall heater as he passed it, watching his hard-on wag with each step. A window behind the plastic shower curtain let morning light into the room, making the old lion-foot tub and the checkered tile floor glow blue.

  Squinting groggily, he stood at the toilet and pushed his erection down to aim at the bowl. It insisted on pointing out and up instead. Twisting it to the side only made it impossible to let anything out through the rigid tube. He moved to the bathtub and stood with his hands on his hips, cock high, waiting for the valve inside him to unlock from the night’s sleep.

  He yawned. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

  He stared at the dimpled clot of his semen still clinging to the shower curtain, below the gap where he had torn the plastic loose from the curtain rod while Jerry fucked him up against the wall. His asshole tightened and his hard-on reared at the thought. He let a blip of gas pass, and took pleasure in the vibration. When his urine first stung at the base of his dick, he liked that, too. Crossing his arms and hugging his bare nipples, he brought back the image of the two of them pissing into the Grand Canyon side by side. Interior parts functioned, his most personal muscles loosened, fluid trickled inside him. He farted again, loudly, and forced out his first burst. A physical pleasure like a minor orgasm sent a shudder through him.

  “Ah-h-h,” he sighed, relaxing and flowing freely, playing with his private little golden arch, twisting his hips to sweep the stream up and down the tub. “My piss pistol,” he whispered, repeating Jerry’s name for it as he held it down level and squeezed off three strong shots that made satisfying splatters against the shower curtain across the tub. He shuddered again, farted once more, shook himself off, and laughed at his wickedness.

  When he turned around he saw another streak of his cum across the mirror above the sink, trailing runny drips now congealed on the glass.

  God, how many times did he fuck me? It’s a wonder I can fart without leaking.

  He used toilet paper to blow his nose and wipe his butt, which was clean and sore—properly sore, he thought, for a piece of personal equipment he had finally used right for the first time in all his twenty-one years.

/>   Back at the ticking wall heater, he turned his behind to the warmth and cupped himself. His pouch had shriveled like a prune in the cold air but his erection still strained toward his navel. As the flame growled behind him and the backs of his legs baked, he surveyed the cabin.

  Thick, dark curtains drawn over the front window blocked out most of the daylight, leaving only a halo around the edges that softly lit the rest of the room. Jerry’s blue jeans lay wadded on the carpet by the table, then some balled-up socks, then Kevin’s briefs next to Jerry’s white boxers. He liked that, the trail of his first real night of debauchery leading to a bed with a naked man still sleeping in it. Kevin bent forward slightly to push his bare buttocks closer to the heater. His balls sagged in his hand.

  Under the faded color photograph of the Grand Canyon, Jerry lay on his back with one arm crooked to his hairy chest, holding a corner of the sheet part way over his belly and hips. One muscled leg stuck out from under the tousled green chenille spread that half fell off the bed. Slowly pulling on his cock, Kevin watched the expansion of Jerry’s chest as he snored.