Since it began in 1996, this groundbreaking series—hailed as "consistently outstanding" by the Lambda Book Report and as "literally orgasmic" by HX Magazine—has delivered the hottest gay male sex writing anywhere. In Best of Best Gay Erotica 3, editor Richard Labonté brings together the most daring, intense, and memorable stories from the series’ past five years. To pull together these intense, insightful stories, Labonté worked together with an impressive panel of judges, making sure this volume was a landmark in gay erotica.
Review
The anthology Best of Best Gay Erotica 3, edited by Richard Labonté, generally lives up to its promising title and definitely will not disappoint. Culled from the last five volumes of the annual publication Best Gay Erotica, these stories, all written by different authors including a woman, have a satisfyingly broad range of styles and varying levels of “hotness.” There is also a long and humorous doggerel poem about the night’s events at a bathhouse and a very sexy brief entry, done in graphic novel style, picturing the reunion of two lovers. The very first story, A Retired Writer in the Sun, is an engagingly literate account of an interview with an aged porn writer named Quilty (consult your Vladimir Nabokov), that sets the tone of the whole anthology. There are stories about bondage, one of which, the blandly titled Orange, will make you think twice about whom you go home with. Other entries explore the pangs of first love, a menage-a-trois, all-too public subway sex, and men with military fetishes. The real theme of one of the most surprising stories, The Pancake Circus, will likely sneak up slowly on the unwary reader. Probably the most poignant entry is The Stray, about a mysterious homeless boy who may or may not be entirely human. Another stylish one is Remembered Men which is related in a stream-of-consciousness style.
