Simon Sheppard: Best Gay Erotica 2012

By the end of 2012, I’ll have edited some forty anthologies for three publishers, more than thirty of them for Cleis Press, which set me on the unintentional career path of porn when I was asked by Felice Newman and Frédérique Delacoste to assemble, on short notice, the second collection in the BGE series, Best Gay Erotica 1997 .

I like them all, the hot anthologies and the rough anthologies, the bearish anthologies and the Daddy anthologies, the coming-out anthologies and the buff- and beautiful-boy anthologies; a couple of hundred different contributors, hundreds and hundreds of stories, hundreds of thousands of words; lots and lots of cocks and passion, butts and lust, cum and love.

But I like the books in this pioneering series the best, because I share assembling the table of contents with writers who appreciate a well-turned phrase, a well-wrought image, a well-cast character (as do I), but who also bring a fresh set of eyes and a different taste in fetish and fantasy than merely mine to selecting the “bests.”

The colleagues I invite to judge the stories—among them, over the years, Christopher Bram, Felice Picano, William J. Mann, Emanuel Xavier, Blair Mastbaum, Kirk Read and Timothy J. Lambert—aren’t themselves primarily writers of erotica, though they all certainly know their way around a set of cock and balls; what they share is an appreciation for the goose-bump combination of good writing and good storytelling.

The erotic is always the intent with this series, yes indeed, but every year I ask my guest judge to look for those goose bumps—to balance craftsmanship with cocksmanship, selecting stories with two standards in mind, the literary and the erotic. Or, as this year’s judge, Larry Duplechan, notes in his introduction: “I applied a two-tiered criterion: a basic ten-scale for overall writing (How good is this story as a story?); and one to five boners (How good is this story as wank fodder?).” Good writing, good wanking: that’s the goal with all of my anthologies.

But it’s always a pleasure to have writers—whose own work I’ve relished over my four decades of reading queer lit—share their sensibility and their insight with me in reaching that goal.

In spite of having written it on occasion, I don’t read much fiction; gay fiction even less; and gay erotica even less than that. My taste in pleasure reading runs to nonfiction—biography, history, theology. True, there was a time when I did read a certain amount of gay erotic fiction: back in my teens and early twenties (this was the mid-to-late 1970s, by the way), I was quite a fan of the old “one-handers,” those little porn novels (sometimes sparsely illustrated, sometimes not at all) with titles like Biker’s Boy , Trucker’s Load and Horny Seaman —indifferently written, short on plot and character development, long on purple prose describing purple-headed penises.

After a year or two, I graduated to Gordon Merrick’s The Lord Won’t Mind series: larger books, hardcover; the plot and character development marginally better than Trucker’s Load , the prose and the penises just as purple. By the mid-1980s, I was writing gay fiction myself—at least in part as a small black man’s reaction to the six-foot-tall Rinso-white protagonists of Merrick’s oeuvre. And modesty aside, I think I write about sex rather well, which makes me something of a tough room when it comes to fiction that purports both to tell a story and get the reader hot under the waistband of his tighty-whities.

So when my old buddy (and longtime Larry Duplechan booster) Richard Labonté invited me to judge Best Gay Erotica 2012 , my initial reaction was: “Suffer through thirty or forty badly written fuck stories for a few bucks and my name on another book cover? I think not.” Happily, I reconsidered. In your hand (and I’m assuming you’re leaving one hand free) you hold the cream (all entendres intended) of recent dude-on-dude-action short fiction. In choosing these stories, I applied a two-tiered criterion: a basic ten-scale for overall writing (How good is this story as a story?); and one to five boners (How good is this story as wank fodder?). The included baker’s dozen short stories, and one luscious lagniappe of a mini-comic book, all rated high in both categories.

Obviously, there are only so many ways for an author to get fictional characters introduced, established and ejaculating, in twenty pages or less. With a story whose chief raison is the description of two or more men engaging in sexual activity—as the old song says: “It ain’t what you do (it’s the way that you do it).” In “Training Tyler,” Jace Barton takes that hoariest of plots—making it with the “straight” roommate (which storyline I believe originated in Greece, sometime during the fourth century BCE)—and makes it seem very nearly fresh, applying a light, humorous touch and a delicious sensuality. Anthony McDonald turns a similar scenario into a three-way Highland fling, complete with Scots accents, kilts and considerable foreskin, in “Delivering the Goods”; while Tony Pike gives us Brit boys bunking together on holiday on the Cornish coast in 1976 in “Three Boys and a Boat—or Possibly Five,” with an exponential increase in partners, positions and (naturally) purple-headed penises.

David May flips the “Daddy breaks boy” scenario in “Commerce: A Not Very Cautionary Tale,” in which the entrepreneurial “boy” breaks “Daddy,” a veteran porn star, to the betterment of both men’s respective careers. In “The Robin Club,” David Holly weaves the World War II–era tale of a group of teenage comic book geeks who create a private sex club, and a peculiar sort of family, behind a clubhouse door with a No GIRLS ALLOWED sign on it. The result is as touching as Stand By Me , and as sexy as an orgy-by-the-pool DVD by Hot House: the only story here that made me hard and also made me cry.

As previously confessed, I currently read very little gay erotic fiction. Which is not to say I don’t read any at all. Over the past several years, I have become a huge fan of gay erotic comic books: the incomparable hard-core raunch of the “Big Sig” series by Bill Schmeling, aka The Hun; the candy-colored priapics of the Class Comics line (particularly the adventures of preposterously hung space heroes by the great Patrick Fillion; and various Japanese bara manga (erotic comics created by and for gay men, featuring brick-muscled manly-men; as opposed to the willowy, huge-eyed, lady-boys of the made-for-schoolgirls comics known as yaoi ), from the light-hearted sex-frolics of Jiraiya to the dark, S/M-heavy works of Gen Tagame. For me and my fellow comic geeks, “Touched” is a special treat—a hard rock fantasy, story by Dale Lazarov (of the STICKY , MANLY and NIGHTLIFE books), told entirely in pictures by Kardyman. Side note: In gay sex comics translated from the Japanese, the sound of male masturbation is most often rendered “fap fap fap.” The term has seeped its way into the household lexicon between my husband and me, both as a sound effect and as a verb: I fap, you fap, we all be fappin’.

I feel oddly compelled to mention Jock Ripper’s “For Jordan,” for a nom de smut that actually caused me to say, “Oh, no she didn’t,” (though that was before the author opted to use his nom de real), and “Your Jock,” by Simon Sheppard, for broadening my personal horizons concerning uses for raw eggs, and for my single favorite metaphor in all of these stories: “Eating a funk sundae.”