Best of the Best Gay Erotica

by Richard Labonté

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  The Yellow

  First Shave

  Aegis

  We Own the Night

  Motherfuckers

  The Adored One

  Pleasingly

  Clothes Do Make the Man

  Social Relations

  Griffith Park Elegy

  Six Positions

  Tricktych

  1. - “what i really want…”

  2. - “afternoon on the hill…”

  3. - “chainsaw fuck…”

  I Wonder if My Great Great Toltec Grandmother Was Ever a National Geographic Centerfold

  Cocksucker’s Tango

  1. Queen

  2. Pisser

  Liberty

  Body Hunger

  The Nether Eye Opens

  Ganged

  Sexual Harrassment in the Military: 2 Performance Pieces for 4 Actors in 3 ...

  ACT 1. USMC SLAP CAPTAIN

  ACT 2. CIGAR SARGE

  Thomas, South Carolina

  Steel Gray

  Stroke the Fire

  Hotter Than Hell

  Heat Wave

  See Dick Deconstruct

  The First Branding Journal

  Yellow

  About the Authors

  About the Editor

  Copyright Page

  Forever, again, Asa & Percy

  Introduction

  Richard Labonté

  Welcome to Best of the Best Gay Erotica, drawn from five years’ worth of an anthology series which has been both best-selling and genre-defining since its inception in 1996, when it was edited by Michael Thomas Ford and selected and introduced by Scott Heim (In Awe, Mysterious Skin).

  When I took over editorship in 1997, I found out fast just how much erotic writing/porn authorship there is out there (for the 1999 edition, when I mined the internet for work, I looked at more than a thousand stories). I also discovered how much is good: those are the stories I’d pass along to the judges, between forty and fifty a year, from among which they’d select the twenty to twenty-five winners. I was the funnel; the judges were the fine sieve. The Best Gay Erotica anthologies of 1997 to 2000 were the well-refined result of their work: Doug Sadownick (Sacred Lips of the Bronx, Sex Between Men) judged 1997; Christopher Bram (Gossip, Father of Frankenstein, In Memory of Angel Clare, Hold Tight, The Notorious Dr. August), 1998; Felice Picano (The Lure, Ambidextrous, Like People in History, Book of Lies, New York Stories), 1999; and D. Travers Scott (Execution, Texas: 1997 Strategic Sex), 2000. While I worried about the appropriate use of “cum” vs. “come,” and helped contributors hone their prose, it was the judges who wrote each year’s final table of contents.

  What’s remarkable to me is how seamless was my weekend of reading through five anthologies, more than a thousand pages and more than a hundred stories: despite their own different styles, ages, interests and output, each judge brought to his book a sharp eye for porn with both a lilt and a purpose, and the constancy among the books is quite simply their quality and diversity. Best of the Best is my chance to take the process one step further, by selecting stories which epitomize the perfect blend of the literary and the lusty, by distilling the very best from among the best.

  So: many thanks to the four judges with whom I worked, to the writers whose stories are reprinted here, to all the contributors whose erotic fantasies, lurid moments, fevered talents, and literate imaginations have made the Best Gay Erotica series possible, and such a success. And: as many thanks to Frédérique Delacoste, Felice Newman and Don Weise of Cleis, a delightful trio to work with, on this book and all others. They’re the best, too.

  San Francisco

  April 2000

  The Yellow

  Michael Lassell

  For John Preston,

  who said “Write about what you know,”

  and meant it…

  and then published it.

  It begins, of course, with desire—or, rather, in desire—this time on a Passover Saturday night in New York City, the night before Easter, too. Where the desire begins is anybody’s guess, perhaps in fever. This time it began in the sky, in a cloud cover so low—the way it gets in spring—you feel…immersed, caught in the act, drowning. And the Empire State Building is lit up a kind of yellow that doesn’t exist in nature, not in healthy nature, but you can’t see the top of the building, anyway, because of the clouds: a translucent mist rendered opaque by mass, volume, density—the whole thing looking like special F/X for hell or some urban apocalypse movie.

  You know the sort of film. They were popular in the seventies: It’s the year two-thousand-something and the Island of Manhattan is a penal colony, blah-blah-blah…young men encased in tight muscles and leather vests, headbands. Hollywood shit. But not ineffective. The kind of thing that gets under your skin no matter how you resist: hard rival males, little more than school yard Caesars, battling for supremacy and the nubile charms of this year’s pouting starlet, a fight to the death that establishes the right of the fittest for supremacy (fitness being measured not only by strength but by cunning and moral rectitude, movies being fiction, after all, and not the glandular dance of the cobra and the mongoose).

  Yes, it’s on nights like these that the city seems most Darwinian, nights that conjure the Tortugas, amphibians crawling out of the ooze, nights of survival, jazz, and ejaculation.

  Soaking into the fog like amyl into cotton, the light looks like an incandescent blotch on heaven—God’s urine in stained glass on an awesome scale, a hotly contested work of art, perhaps, by a painter/photographer of Latin-American extraction, or a cathedral, say, in Rome, the flaked and scaling plaster mapped by brackish water and mildew, a cathedral where the Polish pope is no doubt droning Easter mass right now, it being later there than here, so probably tomorrow already. And it’s spreading, the yellow fog, like sweat on sheets or hatred. That’s what the light of Easter through the unseasonably raw Saturday reminds me of. And of London, Jack the Ripper, fish and chips in yesterday’s Evening Standard, of unheated bathrooms, longing, and brandy hangovers in an Earl’s Court bed-sitter.

  I’m watching this sky from the bed of a fourth-floor flat on Ninth Avenue where a somewhat overweight but extremely intense young blonde is finger-fucking me while sucking my dick. No condom. It’s still sort of safe now, or it isn’t, or it sort of is, or some people think it is, or people are so sick of everybody still being dead they figure, Who gives a shit? Resurrections, like the Japanese yen, being in greater demand than supply these days, we pilgrims settle for a naked hard-on incubated for an hour or so in mucous tissue at ninety-eight point six degrees Fahrenheit.

  The hair’s a dye job, of course, and actually streaked…or tipped—a subtle distinction, to be sure—but it started out reasonably fair and it’s long, the way I like it, and smells sweet—like papaya. There’s some kind of scented candle thing going on, too, but they all smell like wax to me. But sweet. All burning things smell sweet. The day after the old ghetto burned the whole neighborhood smelled like marshmallows, but that was long ago and far away—well, about sixty miles on I-95. It smelled like roast fowl, too, but that’s because the Mesopotamian next door kept a flock of guard ducks that never got out of their pen.

  You just dial, you see, seven little easy-to-remember digits. Punch in is, of course, more accurate, since you need a Touchtone phone to proceed. Listen to the “menu,” then poke the six to listen to the “actual voices of New York’s hottest professionals.” “Hi, I’m Jim. I’m five-foot-ten, weigh one-fifty. I give a hot-oil full-body Swedish massage with a sensual release, and more.” Oooh, baby.

  Take notes. Choose. Call the
number. Leave yours on the machine. Wait. Dial again. Leave your number. And again. Wait. Wonder if any of them will call back. It is, after all, a holiday Saturday night. Desperation rises from the smoldering coals of desire: You will agree to see whoever calls first, no matter how much he charges, no matter where in the city he lives, even if it’s the Upper East Side. Desire—sprung from the ether like crocus through the unsuspecting snow.

  His name is Chip. Right. He’s six-two, one-eighty or ninety, twenty-four, from Massachusetts. Shaved balls for some reason. An angel puppy with a hot mouth—and I’ve got the bite marks on my unshaved ass to prove it. I did his lover yesterday, who is better looking but less enthusiastic. Neither of them know. It’s my little secret (and, by the way, I’d like to have them both together).

  A hundred bucks. It doesn’t seem like much until after you come. Well, holidays and all…and one from each side of the family tree. Special occasion, that sort of thing. He’s Caucasian, not my usual choice. They look better dressed as a rule. Maybe it’s the northern light. Too much unrelenting pallor for passion, perhaps, or for honesty, as far as that goes. There’s something about white that lies on its face. If you pass white light through a prism it breaks down into its component colors: puritan purple, repression red, entitlement green, conformity yellow.

  This white boy is an exception, I think, as I watch the Empire State Building through what looks like the steam that water turns into when hosed onto an inferno. Back in the early eighties, there was a bathhouse in San Francisco that had a steam-room maze. I sucked weenie until I practically passed out from dehydration. I learned about chemistry in bathhouses—not from the red tin box of chemicals I got from my parents the birthday I asked for drums, or from the minister of our church, who did little lab experiments on compulsory Wednesday night services during Lent, turning some clear liquid red, which was supposed to remind us of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ’s first miracle (turning the water to wedding wine at Cana). I don’t imagine that indemnity carriers allow toy companies to market chemistry sets anymore. Although it was all pretty benign. Nothing at home ever turned colors. Just into a sludge, like powdered chocolate that stubbornly refused to dissolve in milk.

  In bathhouses, in the pitch dark, you can touch a dozen men and feel nothing but flesh—the same feeling you might get rubbing up against an old woman on the uptown local. And then you touch another man, his arm or chest or waist, and your dick leaps to attention like it’s on a spring and you are engulfed by him. That’s chemistry, when the elements overcome the prejudices the mind has insulated the senses in.

  This Empire State Building yellow is the same yellow they lit it that Friday night after St. Patrick’s Day, as I recall, the first time the poor oppressed Irish Catholics who run the city of New York refused to let any queers march in their boozy parade (I keep track of holidays by how much pain they cause—ask me about Fourth of July of ’76, or Halloween, 1970). There was, of course, the year the Empire State Building was illuminated especially for the troops in the Persian Gulf. Before it was a footnote—Desert Storm? The war in which American G.I.s were poisoned by chemical weapons invented here and supplied to the enemy by us. It’s almost as ironic as the fact that Irish faggots march routinely in St. Pat’s parades in, for example, Dublin and Belfast. It’s only Fifth Avenue that’s too narrow for fairies.

  Of course, even piss yellow was better than the red, white, and trite fucking blue they were shoving down our throats before the war was over. Patriotism. Sounds lethal. Like botulism. And it is. You’d think they’d go for something less cadaverous, chromatically speaking, for so prominent and phallic a landmark—a nice white-inspired yellow, like wheat or a Yalie’s argyles, suburban kitchens of the 1950s, or sunlight on the arm hairs of a Norwegian sailor, a sapling swabbie on leave abroad and not sure where to berth his buoy, not some revolting color that looks like what’s been sitting in a stopped-up toilet at the Eros All-Male Cinema on Eighth Avenue for a week or two underneath that scrawny nude kid who’ll take anybody or anything into his mouth or up his ass or all over his body. You’ve never seen hunger until you’ve said, “I don’t think so,” and looked into those eyes while you let loose your stream into a nearby urinal while that scabby desperado nearly weeps to see you waste it. It’s nice to be so sure of what you want. I envy that. It’s the obsession that frightens me, for obvious reasons.

  Here’s what makes me puke: that washed-out bow-ribbon yellow florists were doling out to tie around trees in working-class Republican neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens during the Desert Storm fiasco, the satin ribbon they paste gold paper letters on to spell out Congratulations and Beloved Uncle Guido and so forth. Of course, even that isn’t as bad as the yellow they aim at the Empire State Building, at enormous cost no doubt, a yellow that has some Gaelic emerald in it left over from the No-Pansies Drunken Mick Pig Parade—or else some khaki in it to remind us how cool America is for having the biggest army in the whole wide Western world.

  How long has it been? A year or two, and it’s so over it’s like it never happened. Except for the dismembered orphans and the troops of veterans who are rotting slowly from the inside, thanks to the American army. All those dead people, and nothing to show for it but an oil slick the size of Nebraska. And don’t get me started on Vietnam, where a hundred thousand American boys are buried in rice weed. It’s a tourist destination now, and I’d go if I could. Just to be near the place where Ralph died—in the days when boys still died one at a time and not in droves like the firstborn of Egypt. The angel of death doesn’t pass over very many any more, ram’s blood or no. Maybe blood just isn’t as repellent as it used to be now that the national immune system is…compromised.

  So the roiling midtown sky is blazing like it’s National Water Sports Week instead of Easter. And Passover. Like the skyline is an Andres Serrano “Architectural Icon Suspended in Urine” lithograph. And the country’s finances, like those of its citizens, are in the toilet. It was Kenny’s humiliation that he could no longer get himself onto a toilet seat that finally did him in. The will just cracks, like the Liberty Bell, like Easter eggs boiled too fast on a gas stove, or a vial of poppers. Twenty years ago, when I was young and Ralph was already dead, on the night of a lonely birthday, I got smashed on beers at a bar uptown and this blazer homo named Wayne took me to his luxury doorman tower to piss in his mouth, which, as I remember it through an amber haze of guilt, memory, and a dozen bottles of brew, kept turning him yellower as I let loose—pulling hard on his scab-crusted nipples all the while—yellower than hepatitis eventually turned my eyeballs: mustard-gas yellow, the spewing sulfurous billow above a chemical plant in Baghdad hit by a U.S. scud, the pus color a kid’s legs get when they’ve been blown off at the knees and there aren’t any antibiotics left in the country so the kid will die real slow of infections, of peritonitis, just like Bette Davis in merciful black and white, without brain fever and hallucinations in Arabic. Maybe we didn’t really kill tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, as impartial international observers insist. But, knowing us, we probably did, killing being the thing we do best. I’m so proud to be an American I could just shit shamrocks.

  So what do you think, it’s a coincidence that the same day Irish queers march for the first time in the St. Paddycake Parade (unauthorized, of course, by the Ancient Order of the Ku Klux Hibernians), two undercover vice goons bust a naked dancer at the Gaiety Burlesk for solicitation? So now there are no more private shows because the Greek broads who run the place are paranoid city, and Joey Stefano says, laconic as August in Ecuador, “Pigs are pigs,” and eats a cold McDonald’s single burger by the pay phone in the Get Acquainted Lounge, which used to smell of grass, cash, and impending sex, but now only smells of ammonia from where a Lebanese kid mops up the room behind the stage so the dancers won’t slip on the generic-brand baby oil they use to get their dicks hard before working the runway for their second of two numbers.

  I’ve spent a lot of time on floors in my day. Wooden fl
oors of back-room bars passed out on coats, linoleum floors of peep show arcades working my jaws over any available hunk of sausage, tile floors of bathrooms in places like the Chelsea Hotel (coming to with dead Danny’s dick up my ass), cement floors of various…institutions, let’s say. And what I remember most is the smell of Pine-Sol, industrial strength. It’s an aphrodisiac to me now, like glue, however toxic when inhaled. Behind the screen at the Gaiety Burlesk, it used to smell like semen and the mellow illusion of possibility, now it just smells like sweat. There’d be a lot less hypocrisy in the world, I always say, if human odors were indelible. Of course, there’d be a lot more flies, too.

  I’ve spent a lot of time at the Gaiety Burlesk, too, and a lot of money in that sleazy little temple of priapus where you tend to run into people like the clerk from the mail room at work and David Hockney. It’s a microcosm, you know, although too many of the dancers on any given night are likely to be white. Most of the clients are bigoted old queens who get up and leave the auditorium when the black dancers come on, or the brown ones. Well, one thing about fags, we have not got our race shit together. But there were lessons to be learned at the Gaiety Burlesk, and not all the boys were white.