Table of Contents
Title Page
Introduction
THE PASTA CLOSET
CRUISING ON CARY STREET
GAME BOYZ
DADDY DRADEN
A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC
BAREBACK RIDER
MISSING DADDY
DRUG COLORS
NIGHT VISIT
THE FARMER’S SON
BIGCHEST: CONFESSIONS OF A TIT MAN
FATHER AND SON TAG TEAM (THAT SUMMER! THAT CAMP! THAT COUSIN!)
OPENING DAY AT THE COUNTY FAIR
OTHER RESIDENCES, OTHER NEIGHBORHOODS
1
2
FIGHT CUB
HOT EATS
RED RIGHT
WILD NIGHT
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
ABOUT THE EDITOR
PERMISSIONS
Copyright Page
INTRODUCTION: THE LOCKER ROOM OF MY LONESOME IMAGINATION
When I was invited to edit this volume of the Best Gay Erotica series, my initial reaction was, “How quaint! Who in this age of Internet pornucopia actually walks into a bookstore and buys an old-fashioned, printed book of erotic stories?”
I mentioned my perplexity to a young friend of mine.
“Best Gay Erotica!” he exclaimed. “Back in 2002, when I was twelve years old, I went to a Borders bookstore with my mom. While she was browsing, I wandered the aisles, and completely by accident I found this section marked ‘Gay and Lesbian.’ I wasn’t looking for it; at the time I didn’t know such a category of books even existed. But there it was, and in a mainstream bookstore, no less, which sent the signal that ‘gay and lesbian’ was somehow okay. The first book I pulled off the shelf was Best Gay Erotica. For the next several months, every time my mom and I went to Borders, I’d scurry off to the gay and lesbian section and surreptitiously wolf down a couple more stories. It sent such a strong message to me that I wasn’t a complete freak, that I wasn’t alone in the world.”
“But what about the Internet?” I asked. “I thought gay kids in the twenty-first century could find everything they need online.”
“I was too young. My parents didn’t allow me to go on the Internet on my own. So those accidental books were the only way I had of learning about myself.”
I guess you never know who your audience is going to be. And what a wonderful thing that is.
I lacked entirely the equivalent of Best Gay Erotica in my teen years. We’re talking Memphis, Tennessee, the early 1970s, an intensely religious and repressive environment. As a horny, utterly isolated queer boy I had to conjure my own private entertainments. So I put pen to paper, inventing never-ending erotic installments on the same lined notebook paper I’d do my homework on. I’d add to them on a nearly daily basis, picking up where my climax had interrupted the previous entry, writing with one hand and keeping my other busy as well—the closest I’ll ever come to being ambidextrous. There were several separate narratives—or rather settings, since the action was more or less the same from one plot line to the next. One involved guys initiating each other on a camping trip, another was set in a high school locker room—fascinating how I found my way to those classic tropes of gay porn entirely on my own.
Mostly I peopled my stories with the classmates I secretly lusted after.
Improbably enough, a few of those ancient pages survive. A very brief sample of my handiwork will suffice.
Carefully Greg touched his quivering tongue to the tip of Blake’s penis. Ohh, Blake moaned. Oh that feels good. Greg opened wider and began to envelop more of Blake’s shaft: all the time he was sucking, lubricating with spittle. Blake closed his eyes, moaning like a dove. Ah...ah... It’s like nothing I’ve ever felt before, Blake burst out. Greg continued to work his friend’s cock, pulling out, moving in, licking, sucking, tonguing. He was making a lot of noise. He caressed with his hands Blake’s flanks, his loins, the back of his thighs.
I’m especially embarrassed by that “moaning like a dove” bit, which I think I lifted from a Nabokov novel I’d gotten my smutty little hands on. I was fourteen or fifteen or sixteen. What can I say?
When I went away to college my horizons expanded considerably, and I no longer had much need of that furtive little pleasure dome I’d spent so many wasted hours erecting for myself. Besides, by then I was trying to write serious literary fiction. But writing serious literary fiction was hard. There were so many fraught choices to be made. There were so many missteps to avoid. And of course Greg blowing his friend Blake in the locker room was most definitely not the stuff of serious literary fiction, which was...well, I wasn’t sure what it was, but I suspected it should avoid such obvious pleasures as plot and action and raw libidinal urges.
By 1985 I’d written three serious, and seriously moribund, literary novels which no publishers, to their credit, wanted to publish. I was getting a little desperate. So, as it happened, was one of my colleagues at the college where I was now teaching. One day she and I decided to collaborate on a shameless blockbuster novel in the Jackie Collins or, more precisely, June Flaum Singer vein (if you’ve never treated yourself to June Flaum Singer, do so at once; your self-respect will never be the same). I remember our opus was to be called Blossom, set among the orange groves of Florida, and featuring several seriously depraved generations of southern folk on both sides of both the wealth and color lines.
Forget literary allusions, elegant language, philosophical musings, postmodernism. Blossom would have plot galore, punctuated of course by lots of raunchy sex scenes. We giddily applied ourselves to the task at hand, breaking all the habits we’d so assiduously acquired in graduate school. And what fun it was. How easily the prose flowed. How fecund our imaginations turned out to be. I’m still astonished by my collaborator’s exuberance, especially that scene where the august paterfamilias (I think he was called “The Colonel”) plies his granddaughter with a wooden dildo he’s lovingly polished to a high sheen all by his lonesome!
We wrote our chapters hastily, merrily, goaded each other on, and though the project fell apart for various reasons, it had one hugely important and completely unexpected outcome. In writing those sex scenes I rediscovered something I’d never even realized I’d lost: namely, that old, libido-fueled, unselfconscious, joyous fluency I used to return to every afternoon after school, when I’d eagerly pen the next hectic permutation of raging, uncensored, innocent, holy desire. Who knew that the secret to writing serious literary novels that anyone might ever want to read was so simple? All I had to do was find my way back to that adolescent—eternal, primal—energy where eros and the word blazingly comingle. By all means add adult melodies into the mix, and some complex chords, but mess with that throbbing bass line at your peril.
Out of the serendipitous wreckage of Blossom I began writing the book that would eventually become my first published novel. (My talented, naughty-minded colleague has gone on to publish several acclaimed novels as well.)
What I’ve discovered is that erotica is essentially utopian, a vision of sexual possibility that is often at odds with quotidian reality (witness those super-straight, good-looking classmates of mine, Greg and Blake, blowing each other in the locker room of my lonesome imagination). Reading and choosing the stories for this volume has taken me back to those early days when erotic narratives not only aroused me but also in a strange way comforted me by offering possibilities unavailable in my immediate physical (or even emotional) surroundings. By making a world in which I wasn’t a freak or completely alone. I’m struck, in many of these stories I’ve chosen, by that familiar yearning for connection, belonging, a sense of home that in some ways is the real story beneath all the luscious polymorphous lubricity.
Many of the stories I�
��ve chosen float in that utopia of nearly frictionless desire; they involve those scenarios that have become more or less mythic in gay porn. There are, alas, no locker room scenes here, but adventures at a boy’s camp loom large in Jack Fritscher’s rollicking “Father and Son Tag Team,” a story which contains perhaps the most delightful sentence in this entire collection: “When a good-looking summer-camp director who stands six-four and weighs in at a solid 225 spreads his jock-thighs across my chest while the morning sun spotlights the blond hair on his pecs and forearms, I know, like the joke about where the two-thousand-pound canary can sit, that any man that much larger than life can, if he wants, sit on my face and pedal my ears till the cows come home.”
Other gay-mythic scenarios abound. The venerable trope of the not-so-innocent farm boy appears in Karl Taggart’s “The Farmer’s Son” and J. M. Snyder’s “Opening Day at the County Fair.” The forbidden allure of young flesh animates F. A. Pollard’s “Game Boyz” and J. M. Snyder’s “Cruising on Cary Street.” Frat boy shenanigans enliven Geoffrey Knight’s rousing “Fight Cub.” The meme of the Italian Stallion gets its (or his) due in Davem Verne’s gorgeous “The Pasta Closet.” The inner cowboy in all of us may be seen to gallant effect in Michael Bracken’s taut and lusty “Bareback Rider.”
Since no superheroes were ever gayer than the Caped Crusader and his Boy Wonder, their reunion after several years of estrangement in Barry Alexander’s fantasia “Night Visit” is delicious.
In “Bigchest: Confessions of a Tit Man,” Larry Duplechan surveys with wistful humor his boyhood crushes on movie hunks like Steve Reeves, Johnny Weissmuller and Gordon Scott, whom he wonderfully describes as “something of a male Jane Russell, chestwise.”
Two rather breathtaking forays into extreme sex, Xan West’s “Missing Daddy” and Dominic Santi’s “Red Right,” will surprise you with their underlying notes of trust and tenderness—and even hints of salvation—sounding through the carnal cacophony.
If erotica is essentially utopian in its impulses, it must also be observed that whatever strikes a utopian note is necessarily, in the broken world, melancholy. Several of the stories I have chosen thus fall out of utopia altogether, and resolutely into history, where desire doesn’t rearrange reality but instead collides with it. Examples of this erotic melancholy include Erastes’ “Drug Colors,” Jeff Mann’s masterful and moving “Daddy Draden,” Douglas A. Martin’s “Other Residences, Other Neighborhoods,” a memoir of “boys who see how they might never have a home, if it isn’t in the bed or arms of another boy,” and, perhaps most poignantly of all, “Wild Night,” Simon Sheppard’s autumnal reminiscence that closes the collection.
Poignant. Mythic. Utopian. Melancholy. Look at these ridiculously serious and literary words I’m tossing around! Sometimes I still think way too much, because what I almost forgot to mention is this—these stories are hot ! So please, just read and enjoy. Feel their throbbing bass lines. Let them lead you to the pleasure dome. There’s plenty of time for thought afterwards— after you’ve cleaned up your mess.
So thanks, Greg and Blake, you seriously lust-inspiring guys, for first getting me started. And thanks to Richard Labonté, editor of this invaluable series, for getting other lovely boys started as well.
Paul Russell
THE PASTA CLOSET
Davem Verne
When I was growing up, all I wanted from Gino was a moment: to sit across from him with a cloth between my legs, jerk off in unison to his stroke, wipe off the winged seed that had flown from my cock. I imagined Gino’s legs folded in his bed, shorts crumpled at his feet, greased cock pumping hot Italian cum onto his sheets. After a few minutes, when my courage stirred, I would take the long trip to his crotch, stuttering all the way, and with my hand confirm the rush of masculine desires anchoring the maleness beneath his waist. He’d clamp his thighs together, just as afraid as I was to stroke another straight guy.
In my fantasy, my bare knuckles pummeled Gino’s balls softly, informing him that I was one of the safer straights in the neighborhood, the kind you could walk away from in half an hour, back to your superficial macho life without ever hearing a word about forbidden lovemaking. That was the duration of a good hand job between straight friends: a half hour, followed by cooperative silence. I wanted to tell Gino this, to hunker down beside him, grasp and jerk his rock-hard cock, and take his breeder load into my palm. Why Gino? Because I was certain he was thinking the same.
Gino was a firecracker Italian jock, well mannered but with a short fuse. He was the stud of Hanover Street in the North End of Boston where we grew up. Handsome and hotheaded, he was always at war with his father about the family pasta business. When father and son got into a verbal match, massive veins would pop out on Gino’s neck and his biceps would flex, alarming his father.
It was his parents’ fault, really; monster thighs and massive arms had been filled to magnificence by an aggressive diet of pasta and meatballs, and a body solid from hours in the gym and on the mats. A family friend, I desired Gino because he had an iron man’s restraint, a stoic manner befitting a modern warrior, which at any moment could drill inside you and find your fear. Like other Italian American youths, he had a genius for bravado and scared the lesser stallions in the neighborhood into submission, myself included. But that didn’t prevent me from approaching him in my dreams.
Everything about Gino became mythic as I fell in love with him: his male thoughts, his straight ways, his hairy chest, his prodigious ass. The business of being Gino was obscured as the romance of my feelings for him hardened into the clay of longing. I crafted an immortal cast of him: ill-tempered, strongly built, well hung. No manner of humiliation from his heterosexual hands could provoke me into removing him from the lofty tower where I’d placed him, on a par in my fantasies with the likes of Lou Ferrigno and the inimitable Arnold, enduring.
Gino remained my obsession past adolescence and into early adulthood, when my own homoerotic feelings finally took root. I felt the rush of craving at the doorway to our neighborhood gym, where Italian men abounded, lining the benches and walls like living statuary in a Roman garden. Rocco, Cristofano, Fabbrino, Vilfrido, pumping iron, curling cool steel, and flexing. They were militant in their manliness, lifting to exhaustion, panting. I imagined them straining through clenched teeth as they banged girlfriends behind the bathroom door, staring past an easy fuck into the mirror to admire their own hammered beauty. Gino and his friends were contemporary gladiators. As I passed them, I smelled their well-oiled shells and the sweat soaking their shorts. They made no effort to hide their packages, male cannoli aroused and lined up before me, sensing a cocksucker in their midst.
I crossed the wrestling mat toward my childhood friend. A Sicilian iron man was spotting Gino, hovering over him enviously. Gino’s legs were open as he bench-pressed. His manhood dipped out of his nylon shorts, slightly tanned and bulging. A hairy ball urged his cock forward, gasping for room. I was there to ask Gino between sets when was he ever coming over to enjoy my mother’s cooking, like in the old days when we shared an Italian bench in an all-Irish school. But the adolescent ploy of good food no longer worked. Gino was too busy. He was training all day with his wrestling coach, pitting his strength against a Sicilian bodybuilder in black spandex. He had no time to be my god.
I watched him complete a difficult set, my eyes drawn to his dick atop hairy nuts. He reeked of young manhood, dangerous and pulsing. I grieved, sensing someone else, definitely a girl, had already claimed his meat. When I left, he was squatting in front of the mirror, a thirty-pound weight on his right shoulder. His shorts stretched across his buttocks. It scooped up his meatballs and sausage-cock, keeping them safe between his legs. His crotch mocked me with its straight hunger. I determined never to pursue Gino again.
In those early years, Gino, thought to be the prosperous heir to a pasta kingdom, was also the North End’s wrestling champion. He had reaped a shelf of trophies, accumulated mat burns on his forehead, his nose, his
ears, his back. There were other wounds: a broken shoulder, a fractured vertebra, sometimes a swagger he said followed all-night fuckfests with three bosomy blondes.
One day not too long ago, Gino’s father had approached me near tears. He begged me to bring Gino home. In his thirtieth year, Gino’s reckless pride defied his father, and he had abandoned the family business to a thuggish cousin. Generations moaned as Gino went to work for Lucio’s Pizzeria. I had heard rumors that Gino was married but getting a divorce. Ugo, Gino’s father, was afraid that Lucio was making a New World Italian out of his son in a sordid pizzeria. I laughed and agreed to reacquaint myself with my childhood friend. Gino was the only straight man before whom I’d humble myself to gain a peek at his sweaty groin and primo prick. Perhaps this good deed would bring Gino and me together again.
The crowd inside Lucio’s Pizzeria hovered before the sight of a muscular Italian with a beefy neck. Gino was preparing pizza. First, he molded huge pieces of dough into flattened shapes with his meaty fingers. Then he lavished an abundance of lion-sized toppings: spinach, dried tomatoes, mozzarella, portabella mushrooms. The customers, safe on the other side of the counter, gawked at Gino’s solid shoulders and strong arms. And their mouths watered as he crouched—his hind end a brute force!—and cast the adorned pizza into the oven’s fiery mouth.
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