Mammoth Book of New Gay Erotica edited by Lawrence Schimel
Review by Jean Roberta

Thick and Meaty

Groan-worthy double-entendres (big, thick, meaty, rising to the occasion, capable of delivering what it promises) are hard to resist when describing this anthology of 32 stories by popular writers of gay male erotica, several of whom are award-winning novelists. Some of the stories are sweetly domestic, some are edgy tribal tales of initiation into Daddy/boy (or consumer and sex-toy) sex, some are haunting tragedies of lonely men who can’t find what they want and need, or who find it and lose it too soon. All the stories are written by seasoned writers who could (and in some cases, do) write critically-acclaimed mainstream fiction. All the stories are realistic, as though speculative fiction (fantasy, sci-fi, fictionalized history) had no place in a book meant to be read as Literary Erotica.

The absence of a single supernatural being in an anthology of gay-male erotica edited by Lawrence Schimel (who has written witty queer fairy-tales) is a bit surprising, although the “realism” (loosely speaking) in this anthology is imaginative. The stories are diverse, coming from a good mix of male writers from most English-speaking countries and a few others, such as Israel and Spain. (Lawrence Schimel has lived in Madrid for years, and Spanish culture flavors his stories.) Local gay-male culture is never the focus of these stories, but it provides a fascinating context.

In “Gut Reaction,” Australian Barry Lowe describes the brick toilet house in an urban park as a “beat” which is dominated after dark by “beat queens:”

“the people who live on scraps of sexual experience away from bright lights, scuttling from contact to contact, disappearing at the slightest hint of trouble, and so widespread and adaptable are their earth-wide foraging fields that they, too, like their insectoid counterparts, would probably survive a nuclear holocaust.”

The metaphor of cruising gay men as insects makes the non-homophobic reader almost as queasy as the narrator, who needs to use the toilet for its original purpose after eating exotic food. The resentment of the “beat queens” is amusingly described, and the narrator’s uncontrollable physical processes are a grimly funny parallel to sexual release. The narrator’s effect on the star of the “beat queens” seems less convincing but consistent with the farcical tone of the story.

The gay-male tradition of the fast, anonymous pickup emerges in many of these stories, and it always has more emotional resonance here than it does in conventional porn. In “13 Crimes Against Love, or, The Crow’s Confession,” Alexander Chee describes the casual seduction of men who are already in committed relationships as the theft of love by envious scavengers who want to spoil what they can’t have.

Several of the characters in these stories are professional sex workers. Even these stories are heartbreaking, since the human need for an emotional connection (on both sides of the whore/john divide) asserts itself at the most inconvenient times.

“Dear Drew Peters” is a hilarious love letter to a porn star and escort from a devoted young fan. The innocent narrator’s lust, curiosity and admiration lead him to the slow-growing awareness that he does not really know his idol at all, and probably never will.
In “A Ho’s Hieroglyphic,” a hustler lives an eerily invisible life as the secret plaything of a rich man who keeps a trick apartment in San Francisco, but while “John” is away, his boy finds another Daddy. In “Daddy Lover God,” a male escort movingly describes his encounters with johns (especially regulars) as spiritual experiences outside of ordinary time. In this story, the prostitute-client relationship looks like a degraded version of one of the legendary ancient paths to enlightenment.

The grandfather of all such stories is City of Night (1963), the autobiographical road-trip novel by John Rechy, a gay male hustler of the Beat generation who survived against the odds in a conservative era. That book was enormously influential simply because there was nothing else like it at the time, and its bittersweet flavor runs through its descendants to this day.

Another narrative tradition which appears in this anthology is the “coming-out” story.
The young men who go forth to seek their fortune in these stories (as in traditional folktales), usually right after high school graduation, have a variety of epiphanies about themselves, other men and life in general.

In “Unsent,” Greg Herren’s story of old New Orleans (pre-Katrina), a virginal young man who has joined the U.S. Air Force to “become a man” goes to a gay bar the evening before he is to be shipped out and persuades the bartender to take him home for the night. Having discovered the joy of sex with another man, he wonders whether it was necessary for him to join the military. Eventually, the bartender learns that the Air Force man consoled himself during the Gulf War with memories of their night together

“Eden” by “Aaron Travis” (Steven Saylor), published in 1981 as a serial named “Blinded by the Light” in the now-defunct gay-male BDSM magazine Drummer, recounts the post-high school road trip of the narrator, who hitchhikes from Austin, Texas, to Los Angeles to reconnect with a friend he does not want to lose. En route, he catches a ride with a macho truck driver who seems dangerous and homophobic, and on whom he is completely dependent after he finds that his money has been stolen. The narrator comes of age in an unexpected turn of events.

A few of these stories describe desires which are never realized. In “The Bureaucrat,” Andrew Holleran’s narrator disapprovingly watches an older man who regularly displays an impressive erection in the gym. The narrator goes out of his way to learn as much as possible about the older man, and refuses to admit to himself that he is bitter because he believes that the object of his attention is out of his league.

“The Dream People” by Rick R. Reed is probably the closest thing to a paranormal story in the book. The narrator has a series of uncannily realistic dreams about a charismatic man who wants him intensely, and whom he wants. When the narrator meets his dream-man in the real world, he sees why the dream-man is unlikely to approach him in reality.

The stories in which no sex occurs show that male-to-male eroticism does not require fountains of jizz erupting from poetically-described cocks, although most of the stories in this anthology include such descriptions. Sexually explicit or not, these stories show that the human search for personal love (which can be temporarily diverted into a search for immediate gratification) is no less important for men than for women, or for anyone in between.

This book would appeal to fans of gay-male erotica in general, and especially to fans of the particular writers represented in it (Jameson Currier, Trebor Healey, William J. Mann, David May, Kirk Read, D. Travers Scott, et al). This book is clearly meant to impress, and the professional team assembled by the editor does its job.

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Jean Roberta loves books. She has taught first-year English classes in a Canadian prairie university since the Jurassic Age, and writes in several genres. Over fifty of her erotic stories have been published in print anthologies, including the annual Best Lesbian Erotica (2000-01 and every year since 2004) and websites, including "Ruthie's Club," as well as print journals such as Harrington Lesbian Literary Quarterly. Her reviews appear regularly in newsletter-style erotic journal Batteries Not Included, and websites "The Shadow Sacrament," "The Dominant's View," "TCM Reviews," "Clean Sheets," and "Girlphoria." Watch for her reviews on the new site, "Erotica Revealed," to go live in May 2007.