Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword
Introduction
BEAUTY # 2
ATTACKMAN
COUNTERREVOLUTION
BODIES IN MOTION
SAVING TOBIAS
THE BOY IN SUMMER
1. The Boy Discovers Playgirl
2. The Boy on the Beach
3. The Boy and His Daddy
4. The Boy in the Mountains
5. The Boy Looks at A
6. A Story about The Boy
BLOSSOMS IN AUTUMN
Translated from the Slovenian by Rawley Grau
AND HIS BROTHER CAME TOO
HUMP DAY
I SUCKED OFF AN IRAQI SNIPER
I DREAMT
BAREBACKING
SHEL’S GAME
CLOSET CASE
A NOSE COMMITS SUICIDE
THE LAST PICTURE. SHOW.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Copyright Page
For that fellow Asa
for (almost) twenty years of love
and for bringing us, for her last two years, Tiger-Lily
FOREWORD
In the year since Best Gay Erotica 2010 appeared, the market for written erotica has imploded.
Not for anthologies such as this one, thank goodness.
But the glory days of magazine erotica are gone.
In May 2009, the folks who owned Mavety Publications—founder George Mavety, enthusiastically heterosexual and much-married (with a reported dozen-plus children), died in 2000 while playing tennis in the hot sun—pulled the (butt) plug on a slew of gay glossies: Torso, Honcho, Playguy, Inches, Latin Inches, Black Inches and Mandate. The latter was the (grand) Daddy of the group; the first issue appeared in 1975, mere years after Stonewall, subtitled Entertainment and Eros for Renaissance Men.
The magazines weren’t all naughty pics and one-handed prose, at least in the early days. A version of Larry Townsend’s S/M bible, The Leatherman’s Handbook, appeared in the first issue of Torso, and an edition of the book was available for years from Mavety’s Modernismo Publications. Prophetically, the safe-sex plea “How to Have Sex in an Epidemic,” by Michael Callen (1955-1993) and Richard Berkowitz, appeared in Honcho, expanded for publication as a book in 1983; the mags, in their best years (under editors Stan Leventhal, Jim Eigo and George T. Wallace) mixed the serious with the saucy, community-building with bulging jocks, culture with cock.
And though most men probably bought the magazines for the photos of muscled men and their generous members, the Mavety titles also nurtured the writing careers of dozens of queer writers—a majority of whom churned out formulaic fantasy fodder, but some of whom strove for a form of literary artistry.
The early years of this anthology—I started as series editor with the second edition, Best Gay Erotica 1997—drew heavily on work by the latter kind of writer, those who honed a talent for invoking arousal by penning porn at pennies a word for Mavety’s mags, known around the office in those days (I was a friend of editor Leventhal and visited the editorial offices whenever I was in Manhattan) as the “sophisticates”—presumably to set them aside from the publisher’s other magazines, among them Juggs, a title that leaves little to the imagination about the intended reader’s fetish.
In recent years, I culled fewer stories from the gay glossies, as copycat publishers followed the Cleis lead and added porny anthologies to their catalogues. More outlets meant more writers, and the universe of erotic “bests” realized its own Big Bang evolution. So as a source for this series, the magazines won’t be missed much. But as a training-wheels medium for up-and-cumming authors, their passing is to be lamented.
Richard Labonté
Bowen Island, British Columbia
INTRODUCTION: WHEN PORN IS EVERYWHERE, AND EVERYTHING IS PORN, WHAT IS THE PLACE FOR A BOOK LIKE THIS?
Now that I am capping my career by judging Best Gay Erotica 2011, I can tell you confidentially that I’ve never had such a cool gig. Hey, come on, what amazing luck! At first, a tad nervous, I asked some previous judges, what should I look for? To a man they advised, you don’t have to worry about any looking, your gonads will tell you what you like. The stories will find you. What could be simpler?
I came of age in a different world. How different was it? It was so long ago that I wrote a pornographic book without having previously read one, and I acted in a porn film without having ever seen one. I didn’t know what I was doing in either case, but thinking about it now, I suppose early on I conflated sex with representation or vice versa. It wasn’t all about making marks. If you couldn’t turn back to it and relive it, the sex one was having might as well not have happened. Even then I knew I was being a little bit less, well, spontaneous than most of my peers. More postmodern I guess, for I was all about the image as opposed to the reality. Well, the tide has caught up with me and how. I recently read a statistic that says that nearly every man who owns an iPhone (over 95 percent) has photographed his cock with it. While erect. That’s a lot of photography, ain’t it? (Not all of these hard cocks wind up on XTube—some are deleted immediately—some are lost among a staggering profusion of JPEGs. And then some disappear: do you know where your hard-on went? And still others, exiting sideways, fly the coop for now, only to return home later to haunt their owners.)
Theorist Jean Baudrillard complained, in one of his final essays, that the “illusion of desire” has been “lost in the ambient pornography.” Thanks to the demolition of the taboo and the triumph of marketing, we have “moved into the transsexual.” He didn’t mean “transsexual” as you and I understand it, but as sexuality made literally, and relentlessly, transparent, visible. “In reality,” he wrote (in “The Conspiracy of Art”), “there is no longer any pornography, since it is virtually everywhere. The essence of pornography permeates all visual and televisual techniques.” I wondered what previous BGE judges had made of the reality Baudrillard cites here. When porn is everywhere, and everything is porn, what is the place for a book like this one? Last year Blair Mastbaum spoke to this directly, arguing that in the age of the Internet, it is precisely the book that removes the “transparency” from the erotic.
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.
It’s not as though Baudrillard was a Puritan, far from it; instead he was pointing out that you have to be clear-sighted enough to recognize that porn is being made available to us in the service of a market cynical enough to reward us with sexual pleasure in exchange for giving up our sense of “witness.” Emanuel Xavier, who selected the stories for BGE 2008, made this point in the very first sentence of his introduction. When sex is everywhere around us, he wrote, then it’s “easy to forget we are a nation at war.” Sex mutates into the front pages of newspapers, all over the Internet, used to sell everything from cars to shoes to kitchen appliances. Gay sex is fashionable and mainstream. Even if it’s subtle, all one has to do is pick up a magazine or turn on the television. I would be a hypocrite to claim not to indulge in such pleasures because I would rather focus on the realities of the world. Let’s face it—if every consenting adult could enjoy sex without repercussions, the world would be a better place.
Well, until I read this I had never connected my addiction to porn to my utopian romanticism. So that’s great. (One doesn’t have to be a strict deconstructionist to intuit that the war in Iraq lurks behind all the stories in this book, no matter what they’re ostensibly “about,” just as the specter of AIDS haunted fiction in the ’80s and early ’90s. It’s only that the war rar
ely appears as overtly and in such full strength as it does in the present volume, in the book’s shortest story (a homoepathic dose?), Natty Soltesz’s “I Sucked Off an Iraqi Sniper.”)
James Lear’s introduction to BGE 2009 made it even easier, arguing that a sex story is essentially a conservative act. “It sets out to do a job: get the reader interested, get the reader aroused and get the reader off. If it doesn’t do these three things, then, in my book, it isn’t erotic fiction. It may be many other things, but if it’s not primarily an inspiration to masturbation, it doesn’t belong here.”
A smorgasbord of great stories awaits your attention within the pages of BGE 2011. Before the brilliance of these authors, my own writing seems haphazard, incomplete. Can I make amends by spreading before you, like caviar on Ritz crackers, the best sex writers anywhere?
Dreams of all kinds, mostly erotic (“I dreamt of a doctor armed with latex gloves exploring my asshole”) flit though Shane Allison’s poetic and powerful “I Dreamt.” Eric Karl Anderson’s “Beauty #2” is a Warhol and Leigh Bowery-inspired saturnalia in which circuit boy flirts with fetish top at the annual Folsom Street Fair and at a downtown Manhattan hotel; revenge ensues. For those keeping track, revenge also moves the undead hero of Jeff Mann’s uncanny “Saving Tobias,” who targets a handsome, homophobic state senator on a drizzly February morning. Guys, you’ll go for this one or my name’s not Kevin Killian.
Have you ever desired a favorite video performer, an amateur perhaps, one to whom you return and return, desperate to plumb his mystery? If so, you’ll relate to Thomas Rees’s “Counterrevolution,” with its boy jerking off in a claw-footed bathtub. James Earl Hardy’s magnificent “The Last Picture. Show.” is nearly a novel’s worth of material in a single story, a generous and imaginative gift from a favorite author. Know what, I think some of these guys must have a direct hookup to my fantasies: the straight high school jock who returns humbly, eight years later, to the once-scorned gay boy and offers to romance him: thanks, Johnny Murdoc—I’ve just ruined another suit thanks to that one (“Bodies in Motion”).
Like it or not, porn is always a blend between the everyday and the outré. Martin Delacroix, in “Closet Case,” tells a familiar story of the married guy with a taste for dick, but then he brings in a surprise ending worthy of Rod Serling, which just makes the story hotter. Not to mention more plausible. Only a control freak would insist on absolute plausibility in porn, but I get a charge out of Boris Pintar’s authentic Slovenian hustlers and johns, in “Blossoms in Autumn.” Pintar knows whereof he speaks; you can practically smell the sex desperation flying off his middle-aged hero. Quaint as it seems, love powers the best of these stories, but it’s not the kind of love your mother and father wanted for you; it’s a love with ice in its mouth and fire in its ass.
Reading these stories will get you hot: that’s their claim on you. Stroll with me down the incestuous Oxford streets of “And His Brother Came Too.” (Tony Pike doesn’t mince words when he titles his stories.) Unwind with me down at strip night at Chico, in the San Gabriel Valley on “Hump Day” (by Dominic Santi) and watch the sexiest dancer in California lose his pants in your palm. Voraciously gobbling down these stories, two or three at a time, I had to keep slowing myself down and remembering the wise words of Blair Mastbaum, James Lear, Emanuel Xavier. Xavier especially with his delightful image of the editor surrounded by empty Kleenex boxes, heaps of cumrags. You know what you want because it tells you where it will take you. Zero to a hundred in three or four paragraphs. As Lear said, “If a story can entertain or enlighten as well, that’s great, but those included in this volume have one mission in mind—to help you, the reader, to a good orgasm.”
This collection turns out to have no story by my favorite gay male sex writer, Thom Wolf of County Durham in England. Seems he didn’t submit anything to this year’s contest. Oh, well, this gives me the chance to dedicate my labors to him. Dear Thom, every time I got hard reading these stories, I turned my hard-on east in your direction. Every time I jerked off (or, as you would say, “emptied my balls”), I thought of you. Until I met you, I didn’t really know what sex was, nor writing either. As for you, Richard Labonté, thanks for letting me into this (radical? conservative? totalizing? progressive?) world of yours; and now help me up, boys, I’m not as young as I used to be.
Kevin Killian
BEAUTY # 2
Eric Karl Anderson
We go to the San Francisco Folsom Street Fair to laugh at the fags. Passing the gate guarded by drag queens with painted faces and wimples, we drop five-dollar bills into their charity buckets. “Go forth and sin more,” the darling mustached freaks say to me. The streets are filled with them: overweight men in tight leather harnesses, an explosion of curly gray hair on their chests; anemic, topless skinheads in their twenties wearing bleached denim jeans; muscular, bearded doms wearing nothing but jockstraps and skin that is seared by huge blocks of faded tattoos, whose strut imitates fabled warriors. There are booths pushing fetish gear and an area with a spanking bench over which a handsome man bends wearing nothing but tube socks and cleats. In our Abercrombie & Fitch, with our stylishly cropped hair and clean-shaven jaws, we stand out from the crowd more than the straight tourists who have wandered into this kinky festival.
Our group traveled up to San Francisco from L.A. for a weekend jaunt, a spontaneous fun trip organized at the last minute by our single friend Matt.
“I want to go to Folsom to hook up with a guy I met online,” he told us. “And not just anyone. The director of the whole event. We’ve been exchanging such hot messages!”
We are fastidious about our grooming and the clothes we put on that morning before the event although we know we won’t fit in at the fair, and we tell ourselves that we won’t care what these people think anyway. Our group has unspoken rules. Underwear is important to us. Ginch Gonch are vulgar. Aussiebums are passé. Calvin Klein are incomparable. Our ornate occasional tables are decorated with bowls of artichokes. Our wallpaper is Leigh Bowery-inspired. Our Warhol lithographs have special meaning to us. Our floors are ebonized to give a glossy shine beneath our feet. The books on our shelves are decorative. We sit on uncomfortable sculptural Chinese chairs watching television-show box sets on our plasma screens. I myself don’t come from money, but the others are good enough to overlook this due to the high-paying, intensely difficult job I have at Reuters and fight brutally to keep. We compete to make the best desserts, perfecting the art of baking Sacher Tortes, dacquoises and crumble-topped fruit muffins. But we never ever eat them. They are put on display and discarded after four days. Our diets are high protein, and we eat nothing after seven P.M. except what comes in cocktail glasses. We are all coupled, but we barely ever have sex with our partners. And when we do it’s only cock to cock, never anything anal. Nothing messy. We jerk off in secret watching other men have sex in the steam rooms of gyms. We flirt with each other’s partners via instant messenger. We rate the men on TV into categories of those who we’d “do” and “not do.” Our heroines are women who inhale men and spit them out. Sex is embroidered into every thought of our daily lives, but we never do it. It’s all intention, potential and expectation.
The only exception is Matt, the token single pet of our group, who entertains us with stories of his sexual conquests. Matt aspires to sleep with all the gay celebrities. He screwed a top presenter from E! Entertainment. He fumbled with Rufus Wainwright’s limp dick when the singer was in a drugged haze. He made out with Rupert Everett. He fingered Jake Shears at a party. He shared a candlelit dinner with Neil Patrick Harris. He claims to have sucked off Anderson Cooper, but none of us believe him. And now he’s determined to do the organizer of the world’s largest fetish party as a cursory nod to the kinky fuckheads of the gay community.
After entering the fair, we take time to marvel at the spectacles on show and laugh at these sincere physical expressions of the internal freak. Handsome young men walk on all fours pulled along by leashes held by arrog
ant, ugly, older men. Mean-looking punks walk along the street shirtless with pierced nipples and spiked colorful Mohawks. Men who are practically naked lumber through the crowd wearing spiked masks that entirely envelope their heads. Elaborately made-up drag queens wearing policewomen’s uniforms give high-pitched screams. A black man wearing a white tuxedo drags behind him a chained white man wearing a black tuxedo. Women wearing tight latex pants bare their breasts with their nipples covered only by sparkling jeweled caps. Some men and women are decked out in elaborately detailed full Victorian garb. People either go to extreme lengths to pose or are entirely lost in looking, a bewitching, sexually exciting exchange.
It becomes evident fairly quickly that no one is noticing us with our clean-cut look. This annoys us. We walk impatiently among the crowd searching for Matt’s online hookup, eyeing up the stalls flaunting their wares: Fetish gear. Disciplinary equipment. Dildos. Lubricant. A shirtless man in his late forties saunters past wearing a blood-flow-strangling-tight pair of leather pants, his voluminous stomach spilling over the studded waistband of it.
“Check out the muffin top,” Sylvan says.
“Not so much muffin top as stuffed crust,” is Jay’s retort. We all giggle while the fat man barrels past.
“Sergei!” Matt calls to a bald, muscular, bearded man in the distance. He is holding a clipboard and talking frantically to two guys in leather kilts. Matt strolls up to him. The rest of us follow cautiously behind. Sergei points to a map of the streets and says to the men, “Just make sure this area is kept clear for the next act.” The kilted men leave and Sergei looks at Matt’s face, showing only a couple of brief seconds of uncertainty before his face lights up in recognition. “Matey 77 isn’t it? Hey, buddy, how’s it going?”
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