Best Gay Erotica 2013

by Richard Labonté

  But if Eighteenth and Castro was the intersection of a burgeoning queer community, the town’s throbbing libido was based a little lower down, south of Market Street, South of the Slot. Down on Folsom Street.

  I was young then, of course, and temporal distance lends enchantment. But I truly think it’s true: on those few gritty blocks bloomed a garden of earthly delights, a cock-filled cornucopia redolent of Weimar at its wildest, Sodom before the brimstone, Eden before the Fall.

  Back then I was also, in my peculiarly jaded way, innocent… or at least inhibited. There were places, scenes, where I never set foot. There was the Cauldron, where “water sports” had nothing to do with surfing. And the Slot, where men fisted each other, a pursuit that seemed so anatomically improbable that when I first heard about it, I dismissed it as an urban myth… but no, it turned out that all it took was a bottle of poppers, some patience, and a glob of Crisco. And there was also the Catacombs, a dungeon so depraved, it was whispered, that the Slot was a convent by comparison.

  (I did make it at least to the front desk of the Slot, where a boyfriend of mine worked as a towel boy. It is, I suppose, a minor-but-lasting regret of mine that that’s as far as I ever went.)

  So, heavy kink was beyond my ken. I did, however, patronize a few of the more mundane penis-palaces. I got down on my knees in the misty precincts of the Ritch Street Baths’ tiled steam room, thrusting my tongue into the nether regions of a half-seen muscle-hunk, thereby contracting a positively gruesome case of shigellosis (though not even that erased my taste for rimming). The Bulldog Baths, down on Turk Street in the seamy Tenderloin, featured—if memory serves—the cab of a semi truck plunked down, shining headlights and all, in the middle of a rather butch orgy room, as well as a two-story cell block, a novelly transgressive mise-en-scène for the same old sodomy. The Twenty-first Street Baths, nearest bathhouse to the Castro district, was airy and uncontrived by comparison.

  And I once paid a visit to the Sutro Baths, the city’s only coed bathhouse; the men were mostly heterosexual, the women decidedly outnumbered, and I dimly recall giving head to a very cute boy, who might or might not have been bisexual but in any case made the visit well worthwhile. I also remember a campout room, with tents set up in a dimly lit space achirp with the piped-in calls of crickets, an invitation to sex in the great faux outdoors. On second thought, that campout room might have been somewhere else; it’s been quite a while. (But hey, this is a love letter, not a grand tour.)

  Still, the bathhouses, however fabulous, however hot the action (and who can ever forget the sight of that famous fister with his arm sunk improbably deep into another man, only to pull it out and reveal he was an amputee?), for all their sometimes-deluxe and always lust-filled ambience, ran second place in my affections to San Francisco’s infamous backroom bars.

  Now there are those—queer men amongst them—who decry recreational sex. Just the other day, cruising for action on Craigslist, I ran across a posting by a no doubt splendid fellow who insisted that we gay guys grow up, stop fucking around, and take our rightful places as properly partnered monogamous men, preferably with rugrats in tow.

  Sure, responsibility has its upside. And, if I’m honest with myself, I’ll have to fess up that I’ve wasted an uncountable number of hours in the pursuit of more-or-less random orgasms. When I should have been studying graphic design at City College, for instance, I often as not took a sex-filled study break in the men’s room. On the other hand, all the techniques I learned back in the era of X-Acto and hot wax layouts are as obsolete as blacksmithing, but I still recall that blond in the bulky white sweater who was my very first tearoom trick.

  And heaven knows the action in the balcony of the Strand Theater kept me entertained through any number of execrable double features. It was, yes, a formative experience for me to get blown during the battle scenes of Young Winston, though the long-gone theater’s balcony, with its sticky floors, scampering rodents, and dozing junkies, now seems as long-ago and far-off as the Boer War.

  Somewhere along the line, I’m sure I visited at least one of the provocatively titled “adult theaters” in the always-gamey Tenderloin—the Circle J? The Tearoom?—where classic raincoat-on-the-lap mutual hand jobs were fitfully illuminated by the glow of grainy porn “loops.” And I dimly recall visiting the Church of Priapus, a sodomitical sanctuary where, in my flawed memory at least, the “services” were held in a grungy apartment reeking of cat pee. Ah, those were indeed the days.

  And the nights.

  After dark, you see, lust ran wild at wide-open San Francisco’s sex bars. In those days, before the Internet made getting laid as potentially easy as ordering out for pizza (and too often as frustrating as hell), a night at the backroom bars was perhaps the simplest, safest path to getting one’s rocks more-or-less off. And, unlike going to the baths, stopping by a bar for a blow was an impromptu, low-commitment affair; the borderline between a beer at the pub and public sex was permeable indeed.

  I recall the feelings of anticipation as I alighted from the Muni bus and headed down some dimly lit street in what was then still a rather industrial part of the city, a neighborhood where faggots and funkiness had not yet been supplanted by het fashionistas strutting their stuff at bridge-and-tunnel boîtes. Heading down the sidewalk toward expected stand-up sex, humming Van Morrison’s “Wild Night” to myself, I felt so very naughty, so much more sleazily mature than I’d been when I first moved to San Francisco and settled into a gay hippie commune not far from Golden Gate Park, a delightfully drug-soaked place where Sylvester and the other Cockettes would come to call, and where I rather successfully kicked over the traces of my well-behaved middle-class upbringing.

  Okay, I still wasn’t nearly as rakish as I thought I was. Yes, I went to the weekly slave auctions at the Arena bar, but mostly to see Mister Marcus fling embarrassing questions at nearly naked contestants who, when commanded to, readily bent over to display their well-used holes. I had very little idea, though, of what actually went on once the slaves were taken home by the Masters who’d successfully bid for them; it would be another decade or longer before I learned to swing a flogger and properly degrade tied-up bottomboys. Poor me.

  My still-vanilla nature didn’t stop me, however, from hanging out at the Black and Blue, where, if fading memory serves, a gleaming motorcycle hung suspended over the pool table and a semisecluded little corner alcove provided cover for cocksucking.

  There was, too, the even more suavely monikered Hungry Hole. I’m sure I hung out there, I’m sure that I swallowed gallons of what porn writer Dirk Vanden dubbed “someone’s unborn children,” but I’ll be damned if I remember a single thing about the place. Except the name. And though the orgy room at the hyperbutch Ambush had a popper-soaked notoriety that approached the status of legend, I have no memory of playing there, either. Maybe the chaps-and-chains ambience intimidated me. Or maybe I was too stoned at the time for memories to stick.

  I do vividly recall the back room at Folsom Prison, even though it was pitch black, save a single dim red bulb somewhere ceilingward. That was a venue for venery at its most anonymous, where touch, taste, and smell were all you had to go on. On a good night, bounties of sweaty flesh—indistinguishable as its owners might have been in that Stygian, popper-infused gloom—fused the transcendent and the trashy and the true.

  Best of all, though, was the Boot Camp, where the back room was in fact in the front room, an orgiastic area partitioned off from the bar by nothing more than a few oil drums. I still remember—or at least think I remember, which is pretty much the same thing, really—one stand-up fuck, my bottomboy perched on a bench while I plowed away, as one of the breakthrough booty moments of my life.

  If you are, like me, one of the fortunate ones who slutted around back then and still managed to survive, then you most likely have your own memories, your own favorite dives, too. Ah, where is the sperm of yesteryear?

  Okay, sure, I was looking for love—a love I was shortly to fi
nd in an enduring, endearingly open relationship that is, I’m thrilled to note, still going strong. But that search for affection didn’t preclude the call of those wild nights, that quest for meaningless, objectified, endlessly lovely male-to-male (to-male-to-male-to-male, sometimes) sex. Because San Francisco was, as it had always been, about adventure, possibility, the gilded bacchanal. Or at least so the myth goes.

  And then came the crash, part, as it happened, of one of the greatest health crises in the history of humankind. Okay, nobody saw it coming. But even if, as Prince has pointed out, parties weren’t made to last, this particular orgy wound down especially quickly and brutally, with a sickening viral thud.

  We all know the story. The butch boys and fabulous fisters started dropping like flies. In, tellingly, 1984, then-mayor Dianne Feinstein shut down the bathhouses… which, truth be told, had not been all that proactive in the face of oncoming plague. Folsom Street became a ghost town, Castro Street an outpatient ward. Larry Kramer kvetched at us. Homocon Andrew Sullivan castigated us for being immature and irresponsible, even while he was secretly cruising for bareback sex. We were goaded to disavow sex, drugs, and rock and roll, unless they were, respectively: in the context of a committed relationship ; Viagra; and the Clash’s soundtrack to a Jaguar ad.

  In the bedraggled City by the Bay, sex took a decided nosedive. Defunct backroom bars and bathhouses were supplanted by no-private-cubicles sex clubs, from the clean and well-lighted Eros, to Mike’s Night Gallery, which was neither. The hospital overlooking Buena Vista Park was turned into pricey condos, the neighbors began complaining about hanky-panky in the underbrush, and defoliation followed. The overgrown paths at Land’s End—where I’d screwed a dog-walking redhead slung over a log while his pooch waited patiently—fell under the supervision of the National Park Service, and families replaced fucking. And, lest we forgot and got a hard-on, the walking wounded of Castro Street served as a memento mori: Not only silence equaled death. Sex did, too.

  Yet, even amongst the trendy restaurants and trendier nightspots, and even amidst the plague, South-of-Market sex in bars persisted. There was the dangerously crowded patio of the Powerhouse. And, sleaziest of all, My Place, a hangout for pervs from every walk of life, from tweaked hipsters to closeted husbands; like the Strand Theater before it, My Place epitomized the great democracy of dick. And let’s not even talk about what took place at the urinal trough. Sure, the bar was engaged in a running battle with the powers that be, which led to some odd regulations: once I was reprimanded by a barback who told me I could fuck my friend in the back of the bar, but only if his trousers remained up around his thighs. Go figure. Eventually, the state’s Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control got its way and permanently shut the joint down, and then there were none. More or less.

  Now the Strand stands shuttered on Market Street, awaiting the wrecking ball. A discount supermarket has been built on the site of Folsom Prison, while the Black and Blue’s former home now houses, chromatically enough, a paint store. Folsom Street Barracks bathhouse, destroyed in a massive 1981 fire, has been replaced by a het-yuppie bar serving microbrewery beers. And where the Boot Camp reigned, there’s now a Chinese restaurant. At 1808 Market Street there stands the chastely welcoming GLBT Community Center, apparently unhaunted despite being built over untold orgasms’ graveyard. At least the Arena was succeeded by the relocated Stud, the city’s original hippie-stoner bar, which didn’t host sex, but did feature Yoko Ono on the jukebox.

  But hey, it’s no use crying over spilled sperm. Some sage pointed out that the very best rock and roll was made when you were eighteen—no matter when you were born. Nope, things aren’t what they used to be. And they never were. Still, I can’t help but wonder whether, in some globally warmed future, some aging pornographer will look back on the Arctic Monkeys and cruising Craigslist with the same unforgivably sloppy sentimentality I reserve for the Velvet Underground and wild nights at the Boot Camp.

  I know, I know. The struggle for queer liberation comes down to much more than a furtive blow job in the dark. Of course, of course. And times change. New HIV treatments have brought some of us, like lecherous Lazaruses, up from the brink of the grave and back down on our knees. Folsom, despite its annual S/M street fair, may be a pale shadow of its former raunchy self, but the Castro is vibrant again, even if there’s a Pottery Barn hovering above its now-unaffordable precincts. Guys still gather for group fucks at places ranging from the Citadel to the Faerie House. And if barebacking and crystal meth are inviting the Angel of Death to stick around for a while, if desperate men still search for love and find ashes instead, if an endless quest for penis can be, in point of fact, rather problematical…well, there have been quite enough threnodies, thank you very much. Too many, in fact.

  Because even now, even at the very moment you’re reading this sentence, somewhere or other in San Francisco, two men who have just met are naked before each other, erect, and for one long orgasmic moment, everything is, for them, joyful and beautiful and right.

  Same as it was at the Boot Camp on some long-ago dark, wild night.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  BARRY ALEXANDER’s fiction has appeared in several magazines and in anthologies including Best of Friction, Best Gay Erotica 2002, Saints and Sinners, and all of David MacMillan’s anthologies: Casting Couch Confessions, Freshman Club, Rent Boys, Skin Flicks 2, Divine Meat, and Lovers Who Stay with You. Alexander lives in Iowa, the tall porn state.

  MICHAEL BRACKEN, a Derringer Award-winning mystery writer, is the author of eleven books, including All White Girls and Yesterday in Blood and Bone, and more than one thousand shorter works that have appeared in literary, small press, and commercial publications worldwide. Bracken is also the editor of eight published or forthcoming crime fiction anthologies.

  KAL COBALT was born and raised in a small Oregon town where the diner across the street from the railroad depot was always open. See more work in Hot Gay Erotica, Best Fantastic Erotica, Distant Horizons and at www.kalcobalt.com.

  LARRY DUPLECHAN is the author of five gay-themed novels, including Blackbird and the Lambda Literary Award–winning Got ’Til It’s Gone. He lives in Woodland Hills (a suburb of Los Angeles) with his lawfully wedded husband and their Chartreux cat, Mr. Blue.

  ERASTES lives in the UK and was a punk in London in 1977, but will only admit to being too young to remember. His gay short stories have been published in collections as varied as Ultimate Gay Erotica, Treasure Trail and Superqueeroes. His first novel, Standish, was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. www.erastes.com.

  JACK FRITSCHER (JackFritscher.com) is founding San Francisco editor of Drummer magazine, where he first introduced the concept of daddies in a 1978 feature, “In Praise of Older Men,” leading to special issues titled Daddies. Eighteen books include the award-winning Gay San Francisco; Some Dance to Remember: A Memoir-Novel of San Francisco 1970-1982; and his bio of his lover, Robert Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera.

  GEOFFREY KNIGHT (geoffreyknight.blogspot.com) is the author of the hit gay adventure series Fathom’s Five, which includes The Cross of Sins, The Riddle of the Sands and The Curse of the Dragon God. Geoffrey is a lover of handsome heroes, evil villains and tall tales. He lives in Sydney.

  TOM MENDICINO spent six raucous years eking out a living in the sales departments of several New York publishing houses before attending the University of North Carolina law school. Since 1994, he has practiced as a health-care lawyer; his debut novel, Probation, was published in 2010.

  JEFF MANN has published two books of poetry, Bones Washed with Wine and On the Tongue; a collection of memoir and poetry, Loving Mountains, Loving Men; a book of essays, Edge and a volume of short fiction, A History of Barbed Wire, winner of a Lambda Literary Award.

  DOUGLAS A. MARTIN is the author of two novels (Branwell, Outline of My Lover), a volume of short stories (They Change the Subject), and two collections of poetry. He is also a coauthor of the haiku year.

  F. A.
POLLARD’s stories have appeared in The Ultimate Zombie, Chilled to the Bone and The Year’s Best Horror Stories: XXII. Current projects include a speculative-fiction novel entitled Shattered Mirrors.

  DOMINIC SANTI (dominicsanti@yahoo.com) is a former technical editor turned rogue whose stories have appeared in many dozens of publications, including Hot Daddies, Country Boys, Uniforms Unzipped, Caught Looking, Kink and several volumes of Best Gay Erotica. Future plans include more dirty short stories and an even dirtier historical novel.

  SIMON SHEPPARD is the editor of Homosex: Sixty Years of Gay Erotica, and the author of In Deep: Erotic Stories; Kinkorama : Dispatches From the Front Lines of Perversion; Sex Parties 101 and the award-winning Hotter Than Hell and Other Stories. His work has appeared in about two hundred and fifty anthologies, including many editions of The Best American Erotica and many, many volumes of Best Gay Erotica. He writes the syndicated column “Sex Talk” and hangs out at www.simonsheppard.com.

  J. M. SNYDER (jms-books.com) writes gay erotic/romantic fiction and has worked with many different publishers over the years. Snyder’s short stories have appeared in anthologies by Alyson Books and Cleis Press. In 2010, Snyder founded JMS Books LLC, a queer small press, which publishes GLBT fiction, nonfiction and poetry.