Boys in Heat

Richard Labonte, editor
Cleis Press

This scorching collection of erotica will make you forget all those other cookie-cutter anthologies faster than you can say, "fire in the hole." The impressive diversity of styles among the 16 contributors range from highly graphic to abstract, down to earth to surreally comic, and intense to playful. The common thread that makes each story exciting, as well as making for a well-chosen collection, is the purity of lust in each scenario. Every man here pursues his desire head-on, with no self-consciousness or beating around the bush. It's their very directness that makes the guys who seduce a Wal-Mart employee in Phillip MacKenzie's "Burlington," the naughty teachers in Andrew Warburton's "The Mirror" and the sexual philosopher in Arden Hill's "Telling a Switch's Story" raise the heat. There are virgins and neophytes aplenty, like the uptight college boy in Dallas Angguish's "Duffle," but they soon shed their inhibitions and revel in every taste, smell and sound of sex, like the bikers in Keith Peck's "Cockfighting." Only Clarence Wong's "Orbs" feels out of place, a nice enough story but with too much diffidence for this anthology of naked need.