Best Gay Erotica 2011

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

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 rarely 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.”