Best Gay Erotica 2012

FOREWORD: GOOD WRITING, GOOD WANKING: THAT’S THE GOAL

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.