Best Gay Erotica 2011 (2 page)

This collection turns out to have no story by my favorite gay male sex writer, Thom Wolf of County Durham in England. Seems he didn't submit anything to this year's contest. Oh, well, this gives me the chance to dedicate my labors to him. Dear Thom, every time I got hard reading these stories, I turned my hard-on east in your direction. Every time I jerked off (or, as you would say, “emptied my balls”), I thought of you. Until I met you, I didn't really know what sex was, nor writing either. As for you, Richard Labonté, thanks for letting me into this (radical? conservative? totalizing? progressive?) world of yours; and now help me up, boys, I'm not as young as I used to be.

 

Kevin Killian

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We go to the San Francisco Folsom Street Fair to laugh at the fags. Passing the gate guarded by drag queens with painted faces and wimples, we drop five-dollar bills into their charity buckets. “Go forth and sin more,” the darling mustached freaks say to me. The streets are filled with them: overweight men in tight leather harnesses, an explosion of curly gray hair on their chests; anemic, topless skinheads in their twenties wearing bleached denim jeans; muscular, bearded doms wearing nothing but jockstraps and skin that is seared by huge blocks of faded tattoos, whose strut imitates fabled warriors. There are booths pushing fetish gear and an area with a spanking bench over which a handsome man bends wearing nothing but tube socks and cleats. In our Abercrombie & Fitch, with our stylishly cropped hair and clean-shaven jaws, we stand out from the crowd more than the straight tourists who have wandered into this kinky festival.

Our group traveled up to San Francisco from L.A. for a
weekend jaunt, a spontaneous fun trip organized at the last minute by our single friend Matt.

“I want to go to Folsom to hook up with a guy I met online,” he told us. “And not just anyone. The director of the whole event. We've been exchanging such hot messages!”

We are fastidious about our grooming and the clothes we put on that morning before the event although we know we won't fit in at the fair, and we tell ourselves that we won't care what these people think anyway. Our group has unspoken rules. Underwear is important to us. Ginch Gonch are vulgar. Aussiebums are passé. Calvin Klein are incomparable. Our ornate occasional tables are decorated with bowls of artichokes. Our wallpaper is Leigh Bowery-inspired. Our Warhol lithographs have special meaning to us. Our floors are ebonized to give a glossy shine beneath our feet. The books on our shelves are decorative. We sit on uncomfortable sculptural Chinese chairs watching television-show box sets on our plasma screens. I myself don't come from money, but the others are good enough to overlook this due to the high-paying, intensely difficult job I have at Reuters and fight brutally to keep. We compete to make the best desserts, perfecting the art of baking Sacher Tortes, dacquoises and crumble-topped fruit muffins. But we never ever eat them. They are put on display and discarded after four days. Our diets are high protein, and we eat nothing after seven P.M. except what comes in cocktail glasses. We are all coupled, but we barely ever have sex with our partners. And when we do it's only cock to cock, never anything anal. Nothing messy. We jerk off in secret watching other men have sex in the steam rooms of gyms. We flirt with each other's partners via instant messenger. We rate the men on TV into categories of those who we'd “do” and “not do.” Our heroines are women who inhale men and spit them out. Sex is embroidered into every thought of our
daily lives, but we never do it. It's all intention, potential and expectation.

The only exception is Matt, the token single pet of our group, who entertains us with stories of his sexual conquests. Matt aspires to sleep with all the gay celebrities. He screwed a top presenter from E! Entertainment. He fumbled with Rufus Wainwright's limp dick when the singer was in a drugged haze. He made out with Rupert Everett. He fingered Jake Shears at a party. He shared a candlelit dinner with Neil Patrick Harris. He claims to have sucked off Anderson Cooper, but none of us believe him. And now he's determined to do the organizer of the world's largest fetish party as a cursory nod to the kinky fuckheads of the gay community.

After entering the fair, we take time to marvel at the spectacles on show and laugh at these sincere physical expressions of the internal freak. Handsome young men walk on all fours pulled along by leashes held by arrogant, ugly, older men. Mean-looking punks walk along the street shirtless with pierced nipples and spiked colorful Mohawks. Men who are practically naked lumber through the crowd wearing spiked masks that entirely envelope their heads. Elaborately made-up drag queens wearing policewomen's uniforms give high-pitched screams. A black man wearing a white tuxedo drags behind him a chained white man wearing a black tuxedo. Women wearing tight latex pants bare their breasts with their nipples covered only by sparkling jeweled caps. Some men and women are decked out in elaborately detailed full Victorian garb. People either go to extreme lengths to pose or are entirely lost in looking, a bewitching, sexually exciting exchange.

It becomes evident fairly quickly that no one is noticing us with our clean-cut look. This annoys us. We walk impatiently among the crowd searching for Matt's online hookup, eyeing up
the stalls flaunting their wares: Fetish gear. Disciplinary equipment. Dildos. Lubricant. A shirtless man in his late forties saunters past wearing a blood-flow-strangling-tight pair of leather pants, his voluminous stomach spilling over the studded waistband of it.

“Check out the muffin top,” Sylvan says.

“Not so much muffin top as stuffed crust,” is Jay's retort. We all giggle while the fat man barrels past.

“Sergei!” Matt calls to a bald, muscular, bearded man in the distance. He is holding a clipboard and talking frantically to two guys in leather kilts. Matt strolls up to him. The rest of us follow cautiously behind. Sergei points to a map of the streets and says to the men, “Just make sure this area is kept clear for the next act.” The kilted men leave and Sergei looks at Matt's face, showing only a couple of brief seconds of uncertainty before his face lights up in recognition. “Matey 77 isn't it? Hey, buddy, how's it going?”

“Cool!” Matt chirps excitedly. He sucks in his already concave stomach.

“So you made it. That's great.” He tucks his arm around Matt's waist in a familiar way and takes a long drink from a plastic cup filled with beer.

Sergei has a wide inviting smile, clean-shaven head, short facial hair, dark bold eyebrows and bright blue eyes. He wears a tight, solidly black uniform shirt that strains against his broad chest and muscular arms. A hint of what looks like a dark blue comet tattooed on his left arm creeps out from under the sleeve. His stern face is filled with compassion. It's obvious that numerous lovers would eagerly bare themselves for this god of the heavens and earth.

“Yeah, we've been looking around,” Matt laughs derisively, scanning the scene around us. “This is…quite the crowd.”

“Yes. Have a blast, you guys,” he nods to us before Matt can do introductions. “I'll catch up with you later.” He pats Matt on the back and rushes off to speak to a DJ.

Sergei glances at me while he goes past and hands me his cup of beer. I know in an instant that he can give me what I need. Watching him walk away, the guys turn to Matt with faces contorted in quizzical humor as if to say,
This is what we came all the way here for?
Clearly the masculine busy man doesn't meet our standards. Matt says, “Let's have a look around. I'll see if I can get a minute alone with him.” I sip from the cup, savoring the wet half-moon ring on the cup's rim where Sergei's lips have been.

Matt wants to linger, hoping to catch another moment with the healthy, energetic event organizer and seduce him. Our group stations itself beside one of the drinks tents, sipping mojitos while scanning the crowd and making catty comments. We are like explorers lost in a foreign land. I try to take Sylvan's hand and put it around my waist to protect me, but he's too busy checking the news headlines on his BlackBerry. Looking at the crowd it's difficult to distinguish the meeting between two old friends who vigorously embrace and squeeze each other's butts from that of two new friends who spontaneously give rough kisses and quick, hungry gropes. At one point we spy Sergei in the distance smiling amid a jostling group of excited leathermen. He is holding a flogger aloft like a thunderbolt. Matt tries to make his way through the crowd to him. But, by the time he arrives at the group, Sergei is nowhere to be seen. The air is humming with possibility. There are strict rules and no rules at the same time. The vulgar and obscene are admired as beautiful by the majority of the crowd, whereas we find it laughable and sad. Soon we pick up on common signs, especially among the older leathermen. We see men with sunken cheeks and sickly
looking emaciated bodies that signal that they have consumed spoiled fruit and might soon pay for it with their lives.

“This isn't funny anymore,” Jay says emphatically. “I've had enough of this fucking AIDS death camp.”

Signs of death offend us. We return to L.A.

 

Weeks pass. During this time my erotic imagination begins to filter the atmosphere that I had witnessed at the fair into an entirely new sensibility. I begin to see through Sergei's clear blue eyes. Mysterious elements within me erupt to the surface. Staying late at work to compile a report analyzing statistics on global precious metals, I find myself conducting an extensive and frantic Internet search on this man I'd only glimpsed briefly. I study the fetish fair's website, fan sites and social networking sites, tracking down information and pictures of Sergei. Every detail I collect adds to my craving for him: he is of Russian heritage; he took a vacation to Australia; he's had a boyfriend for six years; he is a fan of British sitcoms; he's worked at Folsom for three years helping to raise thousands and thousands of dollars for charities while throwing a massive fetish party out in the open; in early photos he has small simple tattoos on his arms. but these have recently developed into full blocks of intricately designed patterns and color. Finding a public conversation between Sergei and a friend of his on one social networking website, I discover a casual comment he made about a kinky dating website. I quickly join this website and scan the profiles of San Francisco members. Finally I find his profile. By now it is three in the morning in our starch-white open-plan office, but I still spend another hour drinking the gold mine of information contained in his pictures, personal description and lists of fetishes. He prefers being a top; he likes it sweaty; he is HIV positive: each revelatory fact makes him more perfect in my feverish imagination.

Sergei invades my daytime thoughts and my nighttime self quickly smothers my efficient lively everyday persona. The small motions of daily life are infused with a perverse devotion for this virtual stranger I've inexplicably become obsessed with. I jostle through papers on my desk without noticing their contents. I stand beside the water cooler with my coworkers listening to complaints about the new intern who can't spell and laugh with disinterest. I sit at a table in a fashionable new Asian-American restaurant with my friends sipping warmed sake and discuss the dishiest waiters. All the while, I think about how to alter my appearance, modify myself to become more desirable to him. My mind is polluted by passion. Suddenly, I declare to my friends that I want to grow a beard and get some leather pants. Their eyes are filled with disgust, and Sylvan's arched eyebrow lets me know how disposable I am.

Later on, fresh out of the shower, I practice posing in the mirror inhabiting a tough-guy persona and snap photos of myself. I spend some time creating a gallery of sexually suggestive pictures and upload it to my profile on the kinky website. Then I laboriously compose a profile description that I think will cater to Sergei's tastes:
New masculine sub hungry to explore: very obedient, very fit, very frisky.

It's some indeterminable time in the night. I send Sergei a quick flirtatious email through the dating website's messaging system. Then I jerk my hard cock while imagining Sergei's boot stepping on the small of my naked back, lifting my head with an iron-gripped fistful of hair and hearing the muscular god whispering what a dirty cunt I am. I want to crawl along the grimy floor struggling to kiss his toes, bare my ass to him for a whipping, sleep chained to the foot of his bed waiting for the tiniest sign of affection. I crave the feel of his hand around my throat while he forces his lips upon mine and then wrenches open my mouth to
swallow his thick dick so far that I gag, a punch to the gut and his knee in my balls. I want him to beat me, leaving me gasping for breath and begging to sniff his sweaty armpits. He'll clean me by pissing on my naked form in a ghetto's concrete alleyway, then force my face into his ass to lick his hole out, and he'll fuck my cold trembling body and leave me covered in grime for passersby to spit at. Enslaved, I'll run my tongue along the dirty underside of his toilet seat, offer him all my money and possessions and suck his dick clean after he's fucked his boyfriend. He'll screw my faggot ass at a second's notice, pounding me with such force that my bent naked body will snap in two and my face will be rubbed raw against the floor. I will abstain and deny myself all comforts so that any sensations of pleasure or pain I feel will be because he deemed it…. Sylvan is sleeping peacefully in our four-poster Queen Anne mahogany bed under ivory silk sheets. The streetlamps cast an amber glow that penetrates our blinds. Sticky semen oozes between the fingers of my clenched fist, and my body smarts from innumerable imaginary bruises. It's almost time for me to get up for work.