Flesh and the word Book

[These notes were made in 1993:]. You would not have believed the silly song-and-dance I went through with myself to get a copy of this anthology of sexually explicit short fiction about gay men. Determined not to cross the threshold of Glad Day myself (why? would I turn into a pumpkin?) I dropped mention of it into conversation with all my gay friends until eventually one took pity on me and gave it to me for Christmas. In the event, it proved only intermittently satisfying, and much of it was surprisingly familiar. The marquee name on the cover, and one of the only two women writers represented, is Anne Rice, finding a place to publish two chapters dropped from her novel Exit to Eden. These chapters are actually more in the vein of her Roquelaure stuff, in my opinion, than the rather dismaying tendency of the novel overall (towards the mainstream, towards "maturity", towards heterosexuality, away from S/M games, away from gay sex...) Anyway, the chapters were moderately exciting to discover. The Hollinghurst contribution was an excerpt from The Swimming Pool Library, which I read recently, tho' alas I didn't get around to reviewing it. Edmund White was also represented by a couple of excerpts (sex scenes, of course) from longer published works, where, despite the usual immediacy and unusualness of the sensual metaphors and similes, I felt the lack of context hurt the writing somewhat, and made it seem closer to the art-less run-of-the-mill paperback porn than it would have been had the characters already been alive from elsewhere in the story. The most striking, and certainly the most disturbing item in the collection was a short story by Steven Saylor ("Aaron Travis"), called "Blue Light." Explicit S/M, this is also fantasy fiction of the most visceral kind, for the masochist (who is also the narrator) is by some magical means decapitated and castrated, thus becoming entirely dependent on his captor quite literally for his reintegration. The psychological reverberations (even for a woman reader who cannot quite, I think, comprehend the full gut horror of the fear of castration) are immense and fascinating. Having read it through once for its uneasy but strong stimulation value, one then immediately wants to reread it to find out exactly what is going on, what it all means. The last story I'd like to single out is not so complex in terms of layers, but it appeals to me, inevitably, because of the gender-bender aspect. This is the only other story in the book by a woman, "Belonging", by Pat Califia [2010: Califia has since transitioned to male], and interestingly enough, along with Rice's contributions, it is the most straightforwardly and ferociously S/M story in the collection. An accident, a reflection of Preston's tastes, or a clue in that never-ending puzzle of what makes a certain and distinct segment of womankind so fascinated with male-male encounters? This one is about self-knowledge, and though 3rd person, is very much from the point of view of a casually contemptuous self-identified straight male, who is kidnapped and cowed by another man into realizing where he "belongs" (in both the sense of fitting in, and of being owned). The captor is also the brother of a woman who wants revenge, who has been at once dominatrix of and despised by the captured man, and much of the climactic (pun intended) action happens in her shadow, as it were, as the captor runs home movies of the woman and his prisoner. But just as the captive finally realizes on the most fundamental level that he wants a man, not a woman, so too the projector runs out, leaving the truth - the two men together - exposed in the bright white light. It's an interesting image, and the more so for having been written by a woman. I was not overly impressed by the quality of the writing in the collection generally, though the items I have mentioned were the exceptions; I was also fairly bored by the emphasis, which seems to be fairly common in the gay community, on teenage sexuality and early self-discovery.