The Mammoth Book of New Gay Erotica

Ten years after the publication of his Mammoth Book of Gay Erotica, writer and editor Lawrence Schimel has compiled an updated collection entitled (what else?) The Mammoth Book of New Gay Erotica.

Oddly, there's not a single pornographic tale involving same-sex pre-historic elephants boffing each other in the entire collection.

Instead, the book contains 32 explicit short stories by a number of familiar gay writers including Provincetown author William J. Mann (Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn), novelist Andrew Holleran (Dancer from the Dance), Matthew Rettenmund (Boy Culture), former Drummer editor Steven Saylor, and others.

The stories run the gamut of styles, settings and plots, and with mixed success. The three dozen stories aren't merely your usual tales of zero-body-fat enormously genitalled Adonises in their twenties and thirties engaging in incredible sex in death-defying positions in the middle of locker rooms, garages and cowboy bunkhouses.

Rather, many emphasize more believable gay characters and situations. Some are worthwhile, others are so obnoxiously overwritten and overwrought with extraneous detail that you can't wait for them to end.

Examples of the stories include Jim McDonough's The Other Half of Me is a sweet tale of two boyfriends exchanging morning blow jobs before work. Nothing too earth-shattering here, but it's a romantic and realistic interlude.

William J. Mann's multi-generational story, Divide and Conquer, details the exploits of a young gay couple, in which the handsome Puerto Rican half of the pair ends up having sex with his boyfriend, the boyfriend's father, the boyfriend's father's boyfriend, AND the boyfriend's GRANDFATHER! Imagine sleeping with John-Boy, John and Grampa Walton and you've got the picture. The thought of incestuous sex with gramps makes one squeamish, but give Mann an A for thinking outside of the box.

Another story by Barry Lowe, called Gut Reaction, is one of the worst of the bunch. It's filled with an excess of extraneous details and tells the tale of a man who gets instant food poisoning in a Kyrgyzstani restaurant and then ends up having explosive diarrhea in a public restroom on the way home in the middle of a busy cruising ground. It's anything but erotic and the only thing steamy here is the evacuated contents of his bowels.

Greg Herren writes a poignant Brokeback Mountain type story about an Air Force pilot who has his first gay experience with a New Orleans bartender before shipping out to Kuwait in the first Iraq War. While a touching story, it's not overly erotic. Something about having the dead pilot's mother show up with an unsent love letter for the bartender is just a little bit of a wood killer.

Steven Saylor's 72-page opus, Eden, ends the tome with a very erotic, pornographic tale of a young man hitching from Texas to Los Angeles and the excitement he discovers along the way. Saylor, who usually writes as Aaron Travis, has a better understanding than most about what people are looking for in their smut.

The cover of this book claims more than 30 "masterpieces" of homoerotic desire. While there are a few truly erotic stories included here, there's a lot of mediocre material as well.