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Manhandled
Gripping Tales of Gay Erotic Fiction
Edited
By Austin Foxxe
AOL/Time Warner
334pp
Book Review
Get
a Grip
By
Kemble Scott
Editor - SoMa Literary Review
The Pride season is here to remind us how far we’ve come. No one’s
gonna push us around anymore. Even the US Supreme Court has taken our
side! Now that we’ve fought so hard for our rights, what do we want more
than anything else?
Well, uh, we want to be pushed around. Sir!
That’s the premise behind most of the stories in the new gay erotica
collection
Manhandled from AOL/Time Warner. The book plays to the idea that
deep down what we’ve always really wanted is for some straight guy to
grab us by the ears, confront us with an opened zipper and hear those
loving words, “Eat it, faggot.”
You’ve come a long way, baby.
Not!
These are stories about aggressors and victims, where it’s accepted that
we all crave to be raped and abused. To a lesser extent, this isn’t
entirely untrue, of course. It’s part of our erotic nature to sometimes
enjoy being taken – that we are the object of a lust so strong that it
turns our lover into a demanding brute.
Manhandled plays to those fantasies with often excessive tales
of construction workers, cowboys and jocks.
Taken as a whole, however, it’s a bit depressing to think that these
worn stereotypes are what some publisher believes we are still buying. In
the world of erotica, we’ve failed to progress beyond the pulps. Even
the language here is a tired throwback to the paperbacks of the closeted
1960s. Granted, it’s difficult for any writer to come up with words to
describe the male organ that aren’t silly. But
Manhandled is downright sophomoric with expressions like honker,
pisser, poker, monster, putter, scepter, piston and schlong.
Haven’t any of these writers read Anais Nin? She aroused generations of
readers without ever once using the phrase
meat tube.
The only effort to bring these stories into the current millennium is one
that turns out to be a mood kill: political correctness. In an apparent
effort to promote safe sex, it looks like someone dropped into many of the
stories requisite moments where (in the middle of a rape!) condoms and
lube magically appear out of thin air. These inserts are nonsensical and
ill-placed - the rubbers just as quickly evaporate in subsequent
paragraphs, forcing the reader into a puzzle right at the moment he’s
supposed to be experiencing climax.
There’s one exception to this mess. The short story “Critics Choice”
by Ken Taggart introduces us to a writer who takes on a powerful literary
critic. Besides creating an unusual context for sexual conquest, it is the
only tale that is well written.
Unfortunately, there are twenty-six other lesser stories here, too many
that prey on tired concepts of gay sexuality. Perhaps at this time of
Pride we should celebrate the fact that we can have these fantasies, as
old as they are, without guilt that we are dirty degenerates. Still, we
can do better.
Copyright © 2003 Kemble
Scott
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