FOREWORD

For all the hundreds and hundreds of erotic short stories published each year, in other collections, in magazines, and online, not a lot of cream—or spunk—rises to the top. One of my favorite science fiction writers, Theodore Sturgeon, is said to have said, crankily, that ninety-nine percent of everything is crap. True enough. Every year, I aim, along with the guest judge, to find that other one percent—to lap up whatever rises to, or spills over, the top.

Regular readers will recognize a few familiar names in this collection: Simon Sheppard, Wayne Courtois, Shane Allison, Jeff Mann, Alana Noël Voth, horehound stillpoint, and Andy Quan. Some are new to the book, though they’ve been published elsewhere: Sam J. Miller, Tim Miller, Jason Shults, and Tom Cardamone. Different voices, different styles, different kinks, with quality as the common denominator.

But it’s a particular pleasure to include first-time writers— new to publication, or at least new to me. There are five such authors, more than usual: Lee Houck, mixing sexual memories with the immediacy of an encounter out of control; Arden Hill, writing about the power of cool seduction; Charlie Vazquez, with a story about the rewards of role reversal in sex play; Rhidian Brenig Jones, whose tale explores how good sex is a salve that eases the pain of love gone wrong; and Andrew McCarthy, whose characters exult in the thrill of public sex.

Emanuel Xavier had his own publishing debut in 1997 with the short story “Motherfuckers,” an excerpt from what became the novel Christ Like. It’s been more than two decades since we met; in that time, he rose to literary prominence, curated trendsetting reading events and published the poetry collections Pier Queen, Americano: Growing Up Gay & Latino in the USA, If Jesus Were Gay & other poems, and Nefarious, and edited Bullets & Butterflies: queer spoken word poetry, Mariposas: A Modern Anthology of Queer Latino Poetry, and Me No Habla with Acento: Contemporary Latino Poetry. It’s been a treat to spend time with him again.

 

Richard Labonté
Bowen Island, British Columbia