Best Gay Stories 2009 Book

Another mixed bag (as I always observe for anthologies), reading authors familiar to me, introducing me to authors new to me and, in two cases, revisiting stories I had read some time ago elsewhere.

Anyway, a handful of my personal favourites: David Levithan's Starbucks Boy is a lovely tale (and one I might read to Chris at some point). The six-year-old as matchmaker is a wonderful device. Of course it's all highly unlikely, as romantic fiction is, it is most excellent escapism and charmingly written. I really enjoyed Jameson Currier's The Chelsea Rose. A bit of a tear-jerker, this one, recalling the narrator's ten years in Chelsea, NY, watching the AIDS crisis unfold and gradually cut a devastating swathe through his friends and neighbours. I was still at primary school when people started dying and at secondary when the full Thatcher-era media scarmongering campaign was in force. I sometimes wonder if this put my coming out back a few years? If you don't get the crap beaten out of you, the plague will get you - but that's a handy excuse for a coward. I like Currier's writing (what I have read of it so far). Trebor Healey's Saint Andy is an excerpt from the then-forthcoming Through It Came Bright Colors. I read the novel maybe a couple of years ago (and no doubt jotted down a few thoughts here - I don't like to think of myself as reviewing books - who am I to judge?) and this excerpt reminded me how much I liked it. I can identify with Healey's characters, or at least empathise with them - and I think that's vital to my enjoyment of any book. Aaron Shurin's King of Shadows and Richard Bowes' If Angels Fight are definitely worth a shout out. Jeff Mann always satisfies - and Binding the God was no exception. I love Mann's writing and always feel a warmth and connection with the narrator. This story made me raise my eyebrows at some of the blasphemous fantasies its narrator contemplated, but I suppose the Church would consider many an individual's truth subversive - heretical, even? Steve Berman's own Kinder (pronounced as in German for 'children') is the sort of speculative piece one might expect. It put me in mind of Hansel and Gretel and was may a Grimm reminder of those fairy tales... Lastly, I must mention JM Snyder's Henry and Jim - which I had already read in Best Gay Romance 2008. A simple, touching story about a couple in their latter years after fifty years together, time, the failing of body and mind catching-up with them, but still very much in love (and sexually active! Who knew?!). This story - and Sandra Gail Lambert's In A Chamber of My Heart in the Saints and Sinners 2013 anthology are suggesting to me that fiction depicting older gay characters is a liking of mine. The YA stuff seems to be more popular, but, although it represents hope for the kids, the fiction depicting older gay people experiencing love, sex - hell, even life - after forty, fifty, eighty - represents hope for me. I do think the focus on gay teens is important, but, for me, it's equally important not to forget or dismiss, older gay people. They/we are just as valid.