Reviewer: Sacchi Green at Erotica Revealed
Publisher: Cleis Press
Pages: 216
It takes real balls for an editor to lead off his
gay erotica anthology with a story that satirizes the genre itself. I say
“balls,” but I admit that as a frequent editor of lesbian erotica anthologies
I’d be tempted to do the same (or rather the equivalent) if I had as brilliant
a piece to work with as “Different Strokes” by Richard Michaels (although I
wouldn’t then claim to have “real balls,” just figurative ones. Maybe.)
Michaels pulls off the tricky feat of being outrageously witty and still
providing the nuts and bolts (and grease) to construct down-and-dirty sex
scenes. Multiples sex scenes, in fact, or segments thereof, one after the other
in a wild choose-your-own-adventure fuckfest. He piles cliché upon metaphor upon
over-the-top image, switching imaginary partners from robust black stud to
collegiate blond and still maintaining a convincing sexual tension between the
writer/narrator and the reader in their shared quest for an ultimately
rewarding wank-off. There are so many gems of descriptive overdrive here that
it’s hard to choose just one quotation, but here’s a fairly tame
taste:
…even with the deep-throating technique that all we
narrators of these hyperbolic flights of erotica learned the moment we wrote
our first word, I could not ingest all of his munificence…like driving a truck
through a tunnel that’s almost too small, steering this truck with its precious
cargo on the glistening highway of my tongue until the front of the cab, with
its retracted grillwork of flesh, struck a roadblock and could go no farther,
so I put the truck into reverse and backed it up, and then metaphor breaks
apart, as it always does in these stories, and we get back to basics: I sucked
his dick.
In case you can’t tell, I loved this story.
The danger of a lead-off like this, though, is that the reader becomes
sensitized to overblown prose and may be tempted to laugh rather than pant if
other writers in the book get into a formulaic rut. I shouldn’t have worried,
as it turns out, since, on the whole, all the stories are well-written, and
some are memorable even aside from the sexual content. A few do get rather
deeply into a morass of metaphors, but erotica readers develop the capacity to
swallow plenty of that without gagging, so I’m not really complaining.
Onward to other stories that I found
memorable. “Choice” by Rhidian Brenig Jones features a pair of likeable
guys from Poland working in the UK, and their more-than-friendship with a young
Catholic priest. “Feygele” by Alex Stitt mingles ornithological metaphors with
the talents of a street firedancer in London. Gregory L. Norris’s “The Man In
Black” is a science fictional tale wherein a shapeshifting alien gives the
protagonist what he’s longed for from the various “men’s men, manly men” in his
life who would never give him more than friendship. “Like Magic” by Salome
Wilde involves a young man with a crush on a has-been vaudeville magician, not
a very appealing object of desire, so readers seeking a vicarious erotic charge
may not be satisfied, but the writing is excellent. Dale Chase’s “Nothing to
Lose” is a complex and nuanced study of gay weddings, determinedly casual sex,
and working through loss to healing. “From Here to There” by Xavier Axelson
deals tangentially with a gay wedding, but what you’re likely to remember best
is a fine use for lobster butter.
The final story, “Super Service” by Michael
Roberts, is right up there with the first piece, “Different Strokes.” There’s a
similar sly wit, and a knowing embrace of cliché, in this case the time-honored
scenario of workmen coming to a home to fix plumbing, paint walls,
whatever—three of them here—and using the tools in their tool boxes as well as
those below the tool belt. The narrator stakes his tongue-in-cheek claim to
upper-class erudition right away:
The vision in front of me wore an immaculately
white crew-neck T-shirt that hugged his chest as if it and the torso had fallen
in love and intended to cling to each other as closely as possible. I couldn’t
blame the T-shirt. A fanciful image, peut-êtrè, but the sight made me
absolutely giddy.
Later he stakes his claim to ordinary humanity by
admitting that he can’t manage to get through the Henry James novel he keeps
leaving behind in his chair and then sitting on. A sexy romp with attitude,
similar enough in tone to “Different Strokes” that I wondered whether Michael
Roberts and Richard Michaels were, perhaps, different sides of the same
pseudonymous coin, but I’ll never know, and it doesn’t matter.
Now that I’ve been scrolling down the table of contents, I realize that all of
the stories are memorable in their way, each one worthy of being someone’s
favorite. As so often happens in reviewing, I’m not the target audience for the
erotic aspects of Best Gay Erotica, so there’s no reason to be swayed by
my opinion on anything besides the quality of the writing. Some appealed to me
more than others on that basis, but I can wholeheartedly recommend the book as
a whole, with no if, ands, or peut-êtrès. (Admit it, you thought I was
going make an obvious pun there. Shame on you.)
