INTRODUCTION: LOVE UNDER “A DIFFERENT LIGHT”
As a new employee at Cleis Press in 2008, I could hardly believe that I would get to work directly with Richard Labonté. “Are you sure?” I had asked timidly at an editorial meeting. It just didn’t seem right. After all, he was a revered literary lion and one of the founders of A Different Light Bookstore, which I trawled every weekend after matinees at the Castro Theater with my dear friend Duncan back in the day. Dunkie was fresh out of the closet and, subsequently, out of his house when his mother 86ed him after he came out to her. He ended up couchsurfing with me in the Lower Haight and we explored the beauty of San Francisco on foot together every weekend. Since we were both new to the city, it was simply electrifying to wake up in a place that enfolded us in her Golden Gate wings and accepted us, flaws and all.
Duncan gave me a crash course in cool culture, badly needed by this Appalachian transplant. I had met him at a séance on Steiner Street, and I thought he was possibly the most advanced person on planet Earth with his “fauntleroons,” cut-off blue jeans trimmed in white lace. Duncan had an eidetic memory, and very long, very black hair that featured an under-layer of cobalt blue. Even better, he was a barback at The Stud.
On Saturday mornings, we would gather his tip money and head over to Castro Street, planting ourselves for hours at A Different Light and reading everything we could get our hands on. I still have a prized remainder copy of Gertrude Stein’s collected plays, as well as several Oscar Wilde tomes, a handsome coffee table book of Aubrey Beardsley’s art, and a battered copy of Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life. I remember Duncan patiently explaining that gay men had made cassette tapes of Louise’s book and passed them around, sort of like bootlegged Grateful Dead tapes, and that those had launched Hay’s career. I remember thinking I would also like to pen something bootleg-worthy one day.
As it turns out, gay men did make my career as well. When I returned to the Lower Haight as Associate Publisher at Cleis Press, I was agog at the very idea of contacting the legendary editor that is Richard Labonté. I worked up my nerve, picked up the phone, and introduced myself. He was unimaginably kind and seemed to know and understand everything
I did not know until my second year at Cleis that for a story to be classified as “romance,” it has to have a happy ending. While Richard is a writer and editor with an incredibly sophisticated sensibility who curates what he calls “literary porn” of the highest order, Richard is also a great romantic.
How do I know?
His own story reads like a fairy tale, complete with a handsome prince and a mystical bonny isle. From my seat in Berkeley, it looks like Richard and Asa live quite happily ever after on Bowen Island, the result of a chance meeting at A Different Light. I have learned much about love from poring over Labont é’s volumes, following his first crushes, first real heartbreak, and the lasting satisfaction of married love. Richard once said “Romance. It’s the emotional component of the erotic… However romance happens, however long love lasts—a heartbeat to a lifetime—it’s a wondrous thing.” And so it is with great pride that I present to you this latest labor of love from Cleis Press. Selected and collected by the inimitable Richard Labonté, Best Gay Romance 2013 offers at least seventeen happy endings. Use these stories to inspire a few of your own.
And to Richard, thank you for the sanctuary within your bookstore and within the pages of your many marvelous anthologies.
Brenda Knight
Berkeley, California
2013