Foreword

Richard Labonté

The setting for the last five years of the Best Gay Erotica series has been the Castro, West Hollywood, Chelsea—not for the stories (or not all of them, thank goodness), but for me. Whenever I was bored by porn on paper, I could walk the sidewalks of the three queerest neighborhoods in America— by reputation, anyway—and witness in the flesh the nipples and butts and brawn and style of guys. Or, for that matter, I could stand behind the counter of A Different Light’s bookstores in its three cities, Los Angeles and New York and primarily San Francisco, where I worked for two decades, and greet the flesh as it bought books, or talked about them. Either way, I was surrounded by the sex of men.

This year, with deer and skunks, field mice and hawks, groundhogs and whippoorwills outside my new front door, I realized that, over my years of living and working in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City, I’d come to take for granted the effortlessness of lusty possibility. Not that I’d become jaded: Erotic prose loaded with imagination, originality, passion, and tension will always excite me, physically and intellectually. And there were always all those men, in the flesh.

But my sense of how central to healthy queer life is the exploration of queer libido had eroded, I realized while reading submissions for Best Gay Erotica 2002. For the four months in 2001 I was evaluating, selecting, and discarding stories, narrowing several hundred down to fewer than fifty to pass along to judge Neal Drinnan, I was almost entirely by myself, alone on 200 acres of rural Ontario farmland, several miles from the nearest village, with just a couple of elderly farmers within easy walking distance, and the occasional weekend visitor to remind me of other people.

This splendid isolation reaffirmed for me how central to gay male life good porn can be: as stimulation, sure, but more than that, I was reminded that for many, the first intellectual engagement of physical and emotional need comes from the erotic moment—that “click” of putting together the imagination and the act, the pleasure that comes from discovering the architecture of sexual urgency in print, on video, in person, and building an erotic life with it.

There are plenty of building blocks in this edition of Best Gay Erotica, with enough textures and designs, sizes and shapes, for constructing all possible scenarios—a hallmark, I trust, of this series, whose broad focus embraces every conceivable erotic impulse.

The collection this year opens and ends and giggles in the middle with a style of story that is rare: genuinely funny erotica. Both “I’m a Top” by Otto Coca and “Losing It” by John Orcutt cast a wry eye on the inherent humor of sex, though Coca’s earnest search for the perfect man is laced with delightful sarcasm, while Orcutt’s desperate search for a first fuck draws its chortles from the field of slapstick. With both, you’ll laugh out loud, as you will with Scott Brassart’s smartly insane homage to sexy film director John Waters, “Pink Flamingos, Part Three-Way.” (And if you don’t at least smile, you take sex far too seriously.)

There’s good humor, too, in Marshall Moore’s urban voyeur fantasy “I Can See for Miles,” in which an elaborate seduction scheme comes up with a twisted ending; and in Alistair McCartney’s “Frantic Romantic,” two intense parodies of the classified-ad come-on, monologues at once comic and tragic; and in Jay Neal’s whimsical “A Bedtime Story,” which has wicked fun with the fairy-tale form; and in J. D. Ryan’s farcical “Tiger Rag,” which plants a long, wet tongue firmly between the smooth muscular cheeks of porn video-making.

Sometimes the wanting is as great as the getting, and that sense of yearning is captured with wistful charm in pansy bradshaw’s “what i want to do” and in Douglas A. Martin’s “Unlimited Pass,” two short tales about attaining—or not— the unattainable, and in Greg Herren’s fantasy-fueled “The Porn King and I,” a clever melding of prose and visual erotica.

Sometimes the memory of what was gotten has a powerful pull, as in Alexander Chee’s nostalgic “Summer, Eighteen,” work by a young writer that pays skilled tribute to the “I-had-just-taken-my-T-shirt-off-when-this-guy...” genre of classic magazine porn, and in Karl von Uhl’s “Remembering Dalton,” a flashback tour de force both sexy and, in these days of Scouts and queers, quite timely.

And sometimes it’s the more sensual senses, touch and taste and smell, that get us hard, as in Shaun Levin’s recipe for romance, “What a Muse Looks Like.”

Then there’s the lost-in-the-moment physicality embodied this year by Matt Bernstein Sycamore’s brief, lusty story “The Tide” and Simon Sheppard’s brief, scary “Saint Valentine’s Was a Martyr, You Know” and Ian Philips’s brief, shivery “Harder” and Bill Brent’s brief, shivery “CAGE”—four very short stories in which carnality consumes the senses, to remarkable effect.

Several stories submitted this year, as noted in Neal’s introduction, drew either autobiographically or imaginatively from the well of childhood pain. Two that were selected are J. T. LeRoy’s “Natoma Street,” excerpted from his book The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, a brilliant, brutal story about exorcising the past; so, too, milder but no less forceful, is “Chip Off the Old Block” by Michael Stamp, in which a boy follows, almost mutely, in his father’s sexual path.

And then there’s danger as part of sex play, as played out in Sean Meriwether’s flirtation with violence in “Kiss the Concrete,” where sexual excitement is enhanced by physical daring; and there’s subjugation as part of erotic passion, as depicted in two of the longer stories this year, “Ponyboy” by James Williams and “Cocky” by Mel Smith, Best Gay Erotica selections which explore the notion that ultimate satisfaction comes from a willing loss of identity.

The least classifiable story in the book is Andy Quan’s haunting, provocative, and instructive “Positive,” about one man in love with another, one man with HIV loved by another—two men dealing with a confusion of passions and fears, realities, and fantasies. What it shares with the other 23 tales, though it can’t readily be slotted as a humor story, or an S/M story, or a fantasy projected, or a memory resurrected, is that it bonds the erotic and the literate together. It’s proof that our erotica is a part of our literature, that the erotic is essential to a good queer life well lived.

More than half of the contributors this year appear in Best Gay Erotica for the first time—Scott Brassart, Bill Brent, Alexander Chee, Otto Coca, Greg Herren, J. T. LeRoy, Alistair McCartney, Jay Neal, John Orcutt, J. D. Ryan, Mel Smith, James Williams—some of them established writers who have been published elsewhere, several of them younger writers, a couple making their first appearance in print. I mention this because over the years, this series has showcased a number of writers who have gone on to publish more widely, or have produced first novels—a signal to me that the judges I’ve worked with over the years (Randy Boyd, Felice Picano, D. Travers Scott, Christopher Bram, Douglas Sadownick), none of whom knew who wrote the stories they’re sent, have a good eye for talent.

And, given my past years with A Different Light, I’m pleased that four of the stories submitted and selected this year are by former staff, people I worked with in New York and San Francisco. For John Orcutt and Otto Coca, their work here marks their first fiction in print; Alexander Chee’s first novel, Edinburgh, was published in fall 2001; and pansy bradshaw’s own first fiction appeared in Best Gay Erotica 1997, the first collection I edited. It’s nice that their book-learning has paid off.

Thanks, as always, to the three wise folks who make Cleis Press work, Frédérique Delacoste and Felice Newman and Don Weise; to Neal Drinnan for his astute picks and insights; and to some special friends, Justin Chin and Kirk Read and Eddie Moreno and Lawrence Schimel, whose e-mails from afar have kept me in touch with familiar places, and Ken White and Tommi Avicolli Mecca and Jim Breeden, all busy at post–A Different Light careers, who helped with the editing over the years I spent with them in the cozy San Francisco store office.