READING ROOM

Fifty Shades Of Gay: Hot Queer Erotica For The Steamy Days Of August

With the breeders still gaga for Fifty Shades of Grey, we thought it was time for someone to highlight good erotica for queer folks.

Little did we know managing to come up with a list of books that not only read well, but aroused passions, and maybe even expanded your mind, was so, well, hard.

But we think we’ve found som titles that’ll make your summer scorching in a whole new way.

Got a favorite dirty summer read? Share it in the comments!

Click through for some sexy summer reads!

 

 

Purgatory: A Novel of the Civil War
Jeff Mann
Bear Bones Books

What It’s About: Don’t call it bearotica, although Mann has certainly contributed to a growing sub-genre devoted to burly men with his beautifully crafted and sensual stories set in rural Appalachia. (Check out his History of Barbed Wire collection and the upcoming Desire & Devour: Stories of Blood & Sweat for more). Purgatory is historical fiction, focusing on a bloody Civil War battle in Virginia’s Shenadoah Valley. Did we mention it’s seen through the eyes of a young man discovering the joys of BDSM through torturous military training?

Just a Taste: “His thighs stiffen, his hands grip the back of my head, he heaves against my face, and my mouth floods with the milk of him, surge after surge I gulp down…”

 

Every Time I Think of You
Jim Provenzano
CreateSpace Independent Publishing

What It’s About: This a story of first love and self-discovery set in 1979 suburbia was a 2012 Lambda Literary Award finalist, and some may think it’s more romance than erotica. But it starts off with a hot-and-heavy sex scene in the woods and just builds from there.

Just a Taste: “Our prolonged wet kiss didn’t end until he’d clutched both our dicks to near completion. In a moment of inspiration, he tugged me by my erection closer to the tree, where we both spewed onto its trunk.”

History’s Passions: Sex Before Stonewall
Edited by Richard Labonte
Bold Stroke Books

What It’s About:
Four authors re-imagine the past, when “gay” wasn’t an identity but men often found comfort in each others arms.  In “Heaven on Earth,” Simon Sheppard delivers a vignette about young lovers on a murderous crime spree in the 1930s, while Dale Chase’s “Tender Mercies” sees a failed prospector sell his ass for nuggets.

Just a Taste: “My only stipulation: set your stories in the days before Stonewall. For Simon, that was Depression-era America and sex on the run; for  Jeff, the Civil War, where soldiers were more than bunkmates; for Dale,  California’s old-timey Gold Rush, where desperate fortune-seekers  found release with the camp “boy”; and for David, the very queer era of Sodom and Gomorrah—four worlds the authors never lived in, but which they researched with diligence.

The result? Lots and lots of sex,  to be sure, supplemented with an authenticity of settings that reminds us that queers are everywhere—and have been ‘everywhen.'” —From the introduction by Richard Labonte


The Healing & the Dying

L.A. Witt
Samhain Publishing

What It’s About? Tired of Twilight teasing you with its hetero love triangle? This is the second installment of a queer vampire-werewolf fantasy series written in a similar vein (sorry). That means that, though the boys will do stuff Edward and Bella only dreamed of, there’ll be a lot of protracted romance and drama before anyone gets down to fucking.

Fun trivia: L.A. Witt is a pen name the writer uses for gay smut—for bisexual/lesbian erotica, it’s “Lauren Gallagher.” (In reality, the author is a married lady who lives on a military base in the South Pacific.)

Just a Taste: “I fought my pack and my clan for the right to bond with Ian instead of Selena, and now what? Ian and I were no longer bonded. Ian was no longer human.” 

Take Me There: Trans and Genderqueer Erotica
Edited by Tristan Taormino
Cleis Press

What It’s About? This is erotica by, for, and about FTMs, MTFs, genderqueers, two-spirits, the intersexed and gender-variant people. Forget about passing—this is about embracing differences in a sexual context. Contributors include Pat Califia,Kate Bornstein, Rachel Kramer Bussel and Andrea Zanin, who gives us “The Perfect Gentleman,” a story of a baby butch dyke and the trans woman she picks up in a small town.

Just a Taste: “There was something about the way she touched me that made it clear she was touching the body I felt I had rather than the one I actually had. Oh, my god, her hands felt so good.” —from “The Perfect Gentleman”

 

 

City of Night
John Rechy
Grove Press

What It’s About? Published in 1963, this groundbreaking book changed the way many gay men thought of literature, allowing for generations to explore their lives in authentic ways. Sometimes called the rent boy’s On the Road, Night explored an urban underworld of drag queens and hustlers—from New York City to New Orleans and beyond. Not altogether anthropological, it does offer a glimpse into a world that feels long gone.

Just a Taste: The book served as an inspiration for Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, where the line “Once you stop going for money, you start growing wings” was directly lifted from Night

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