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Review

Labonte’s return gig in Best Gay Erotica 05 brings back four authors from the previous collection: Greg Wharton, Jay Neal, Andy Quan, and Jonathan Asche, who’s nailed poor white trash sex with precision in “Doll Boy.”

The collection starts strongly, with Mike Newman’s “Wake the King Up Right,” the tale of young Kevin’s night in a motel room with his slightly older sailor boy whom he’d picked up on his way from Louisiana to California. Jerry, the sailor, seems as if he’d fit the chat room profile of Masc.,Str8acting, discrete, but get him in the motel room and all gay hell breaks loose. Newman’s writing is straightforward, concise, and hot. Just ask the maid who walked in on our two travelers.

I had some interesting, and pretty erotic, adventures of my own at summer camp back in the days of my youth, but none, I think, can compare with the erotic treatment of foot massage Jim Gladstone provides in “This Little Piggy.”

Alexander Rowlson’s contribution, “Pink Triangle-Shaped Pubes,” is short, taking up only three pages of text actually, but it very ably gets us into the mind of its closeted, questioning narrator who sneaks out to the ubiquitous “park” to spy on a fellow classmate getting and giving a blow job and masturbates while watching. Rowlson’s economy may seem unwise at first, but at the end, we realize he needed write no more.

For me, the most disappointing piece in the book was D. Travers Scott’s “Get on Your Bikes and Ride!” And I’m not quite sure why; after all, I’d thoroughly enjoyed his Execution, Texas: 1987. Perhaps it was the avalanche of cultural references. It was humorous, to be sure, but in a fat gay guy meets American Psycho sort of way.

As with any anthology, one cannot expect one totally perfected story after another. Labonte has done a great job, however, year after year, of providing us with good writing, hot encounters reflecting the varieties of gay experience and some mental images that make us laugh, cry, cringe, and often breathe a little harder.

 -- Richard Labonte, Books to Watch Out For