$14.04
ISBN 159021191X
available through
Amazon
Reviewed by Jean Roberta
(04/15/09)
These are stories of gay men meeting, loving, breaking up, and most of all, dreaming of what could have been or what could be. This anthology covers a lot of ground, both geographically and stylistically. If there is a theme in this collection other than "gayness," it seems to be the persistence of memory.
The stories about young men in their teens and early twenties trying to cope with surging hormones and awkward crushes all show the wisdom of hindsight. One of the great advantages of a collection of stories which are all sensual but (for the most part) not sexually explicit is that the drama of a teenage crush can be shown in all its intensity without attracting the attention of the censors. (Or perhaps this reviewer sometimes regresses to a state of pubescent wishfulness.)
In "Bronx Boys in Poe Cottage," two childhood homeboys grow to realize that their feelings for each other could get them beaten up or killed if the other guys on the block ever found out. They consummate their secret relationship in the perfect fantasy setting, a faux nineteenth-cottage which is both cozy and faintly creepy. The implications of their meeting in the "home" of the most gothic of southern gothic writers, Edgar Allan Poe, whose life was dismal and whose writing is unforgettable, are nicely understated.
"Lost Sometimes" is a breezier tale of a fling between two healthy boys in high school. They make out in a wild variety of hidden and semi-public places. The sex is always exciting, but the narrator wants more emotional depth than his boyfriend is willing or able to provide.
"My Boyfriend Refuses to Speak in Iambic Pentameter" by Billy Merrell is actually a play rather than a story, and it dramatizes the sensitivity and moodiness of misunderstood adolescence. Its two characters seem less engaging than the boys in the other stories about the melodrama of being gay in high school.
In "Daniel Is Leaving Tonight on a Plane" by Paul Russell (which also appears in The Mammoth Book of New Gay Erotica), a young man in the limbo between the end of high school and the beginning of college is seduced by a guy he would normally have overlooked, and gains self-awareness during a summer fling.
In "Moonlit Serenade" by Paul Reidinger, an older man meets a heartbreakingly attractive young man while walking his dog in a park, which is shown to be the kind of neutral territory where the two can meet regularly to talk without making a commitment or being judged by others. Outwardly, nothing sexual happens between them, yet after the young man disappears, the older man finds him hard to forget.
In "The Coat of Stars" by Holly Black (which also appears in a paranormal anthology, So Fey), a young man has literally been stolen away by the fairies so that he actually lives outside of time, in much the way that memories and fantasies can capture a moment forever.
The various approaches to youth, or the first "coming-out" phase in a young gay man's life, range from coarse comedy to searing tragedy. "The Ballad of Jimmy Pie" by Ethan Mordden is a kind of dirty story about a con-man "daddy" and his two "boys" in the tradition of oral tall tales. "Ivan & Misha" by M.S. Allen, however, is a complex, realistic story about immigrants in New York, and how a pair of very different male twins and their Russian biological father adapt to America as they see it.
Several of these stories could be classified as local-color pieces. In "Taming Trees," Jeff Mann shows once again why an honest gay man might prefer to live in rural Virginia, despite its overtly redneck, homophobic culture, than in an urban gay ghetto where men, like trees, are pruned to fit an artificial environment. New Orleans writer Greg Herren has written a very noir story, "Annunciation Shotgun" (presumably referring to a style of house on Annunciation Street) about how easy it could be to make someone disappear in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Aaron Shurin's "In the Bars of Heaven and Hell" is a fond look back at the early gay bars of San Francisco in the pre-Stonewall 1960s. "Drug Colours" by Erastes is a mood-piece about a parallel pre-AIDS punk bar scene in London, England, in 1978. The flavour of the place is deftly described in passages like this:
"A Bolshie freedom slides through the city with a brash over-confidence. Clubs proliferate and the straight and the not-so-straight and wish-they-weren't-straight all congregate where the queers are."
"Interpretations" by Raymond Luczak is a look at the very specific culture of deaf gay men who communicate in sign language, creatively expressed on the page.
Arguably the most disturbing story (and one of the best) in the collection is "The King of the Big Night Hours" by Richard Bowes, told by a narrator who has spent years working on a college campus where he never really fits in and where he literally seems to have a guardian angel, a former maintenance man who rescued him years before from the spell of a building which seems to lure students to their death. (This reviewer has a teaching job and an office in a similarly-constructed university building. Reading this story made my blood run cold.)
"The Witch" by James Klise is a kind of black comedy about another out-of-place loner, a librarian in a high school who is neither student nor teacher, and who craves peace and quiet so much than he follows the instructions in a book on casting spells to change one's life.
These stories, like the experiences they describe, linger in the mind long after they have been read. The authors include some of the most respected names in the field, magicians of the printed word. This is an outstanding anthology.
