Reaching a milestone of fifteen-years of continuous publication, Cleis Press and editor Richard Labonte have chosen another stellar group of stories for Best Gay Erotica 2010. With a wide variety of voices, Labonte has encouraged writers of a “literary bent” to get porny and worked with writers who “honed their horndog skills in the glossy gay mags.” As these magazines die off one by one, it’s left to the print anthologies to carry on the tradition of well-written erotica, and it’s a task that Labonte takes seriously.

With eighteen stories, the volume has some heft to it. Familiar names pepper the Table of Contents: Simon Sheppard, Robert Patrick, Shane Allison, Trebor Healey, and Jeff Mann along with newcomers Tommy Lee “Doc” Boggs, Jimmy Hamada, and Jamie Freeman. Cleis has always been an equal-opportunity publisher for writers, and encouraging new voices is a worthy effort.

All of the stories work well, and several of them deserve more detailed mention:

“Holiday from Love” starts the book. Author Hank Fenwick offers a smoothly-written, largely narrative tale. The narration feels distanced and it’s intended to be so; the story is told from seemingly years afterward, and the storyteller details their sexual acrobatics with just a touch of wistfulness. The last line tells the tale: “He was a holiday from love and we all need a holiday sometimes.” No grand angst, no dramatic partings, just a non-committed couple of fuckbuddies going their separate ways.

“The Hippie Down-Low” by Natty Soltesz evokes a time of innocence even within the confines of a going-nowhere, post-high-school boy with no ambitions beyond getting high—and screwed. Nate meets three hippie boys: Conrad, Bowser, and Jake at a concert and gets sucked into -literally and figuratively—their freestyle world. There’s some nice lines here; Nate’s ennui is described succinctly. “He’d remained, in a netherworld between high school and whatever came next.” The foursome end up having a suck and fuckfest, and Nate has hope for something grander at the end. It’s a charming tale.

David May contributes “The Stray”, and the pet metaphors and terminology from the Master/slave lifestyles permeate the piece. Bud is taken in as a stray by a couple of older Masters, but he always feels out of place. When he finds his “brother”, (whether this is a soul mate or actual, biological brother is a bit vague here), a leonine man, “…tall, powerfully built, thick legged, and almost impossibly muscular…his brown eyes glinted yellow…” Bud goes home with the lion-man and is taken into a world of acceptance and sensuality he’d never known of before. The sex is raw and animalistic, which works totally for the story.

“The Bed from Craigslist” starts out with a bang. “A guy from Craigslist fucked me.” Rob Wolfsham writes a great redneck character, an inarticulate, seemingly straight guy, who happily beds the just out of the dorms narrator. The dialogue is terse but right on. And the story’s final line evokes a certain smile; it’s not over for the Craigslist stranger and Travis.

Jonathan Kemp’s piece, “Colin and Gregory: 1956” is an interesting choice for an erotica anthology. Unlike other stories, this couple doesn’t have sex yet the feeling of sensuality and fierce attraction Colin feels for Gregory oozes from every syllable. Kemp maintains an even, great voice, that of a partly-closeted, older man who sees Gregory as revisiting a crush from younger days: Trevor who has “…the same green eyes and boxer’s nose, …the same pucker to the foreskin, from beneath which that cyclopean eye stares out to assess me like a wary animal.” This story almost has an incomplete feeling, as if it may be from a longer piece, and it has a nice, memoir-ish feel to it.

“Smoke and Semen” was a story I enjoyed when it was first published in Backdraft, a fireman anthology also from Cleis. It’s a worthy inclusion for the “best of” anthology. The story has impact and depth, telling the tale of a grieving lover who lost his fireman years before. The narrator realizes that Aidan still grips his heart in some ways. When his current lover calls, he concedes: “I’ve never told him about Aidan, about that passionate love affair fifteen years, about Aidan’s beauty, sweetness, and submission. Nathan doesn’t need to know he lives in a shadow.” It’s a lovely line. The feel of the story is sad and the reader is left to wonder if the gaping hole left by Aidan can ever be filled.

Best Gay Erotica 2010 is a book worth having on your shelf. Whether you read strictly for masturbatory material or for some fine wordsmithing and emotional evocations of lost loves, this book will serve you well.

Best Gay Erotica 2010
(Cleis Press, December 2009; ISBN-10: 1573443743)
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© 2010 Vincent Diamond. All rights reserved.