". . . what is all right for B may scandalize C,
For C is so very particular . . ."
-- from THE YEOMAN OF THE GUARD, words by
W. S. Gilbert, & set to music by Arthur Sullivan.
"There are nine and sixty waysA while back, over in ASSGM, someone objected to seeing too many gay-sex stories about rape, forced sex [which is technically rape], torture, or involve meddling with minors. He was concerned with the shift from gay-sex-as-a-fun-thing to gay-sex-mixed-with-perverted-practices, and seems worried that such fiction may lead from dark fantasy into even darker fact.
Of constructing tribal lays,
And every single one of them is right!"
-- Rudyard Kipling
However . . . [I have an endless supply of "however"s -- I get them by mail from a Post Office Box in Poughkeepsie . . .]
There's a short movie -- a couple of loops, really -- available on a videotape from Falcon: "The Brothers." Two beautifully hunky models enthusiastically go after each other in non-stop action. The film/tape opens with them already Going At It and ends with them relaxing into each other's arms, with no smoke breaks, time-outs, or conversation in between. Putting it to paper, it's sexy as all get out, especially if done right, taking the action from first thrust to last gasp, putting the reader firmly into one or the other participant's point of view, appealing to the senses (". . . hearing the slurp-slurp of . . . feeling the superb body under him squirm with increasing . . . watching his eyes as they both reached . . ." You get the idea).
Only -- once you've seen that movie\film, or read that story, what next? You can't just keep watching or reading that one episode, and repeating the episode with different actors just won't hack it. Next time 'round, you need a plot -- a story. And there is an example of that next step -- also a film\tape from Falcon: "When You Love." This time, instead of a matched pair, one of the pair is bigger and older than the other; the first with a rugged look, the other, more of a young-looking eighteen or so. The movie\film opens not in bed, but with the two in a home, standing on opposite sides of a rec-room bar. There's no sound track, but they are obviously having a friendly conversation. They are -- as the camera reveals as it pans downward and the guy on the far side of the bar comes to this side -- both naked and getting aroused by -- well -- by whatever they're planning -- which, of course, is a stroll to the bedroom, where they hop onto the bed and enthusiastically go at it. Here, though, the older stud is clearly in charge, for all that the younger is enjoying the action just as much or maybe even more; there's a contrast between the two characters, which brings both more to life on screen, video monitor, or paper . . .
. . . Okay, now we have the beginnings of a plot, some characterization, and a contrast between the players -- but the story's still pretty thin; there's no conflict to drive the initial set-up to a resolution; there's nothing in the movie\tape to indicate that this roll in the sheets has changed either character in any noticeable way, nothing to show this round is anything to the characters but a re-run of an oft-played script. Once you've written this story -- then what?
The way to break out of this (you should pardon the expression) rut is to introduce conflict -- not whacking each other with baseball bats, cavalry swords, und so weiter -- but simply a conflict between what one wants to do and what the other does (or doesn't), yet a conflict so strong that its resolution leaves one or (usually) both changed by the experience.
Hence, the popularity of the story about one's first experience with gay sex, where one of a pair is experienced and pushing the other to try it, you'll like it. Then, afterwards, of course, the first timer -- either explicitly on-stage or implied off-stage -- faces what he's found about his sexual identity. And from here, all kinds of interesting plots can be written into stories: the experienced stud is really pushy, from a playful dare on up to a full-scale rape.
All of these are built to some degree on the belief, often amounting to a delusion, among hets as well as gays, that "if I can only get into the pants of the person who's been ignoring me, that person will turn into a sex-fiend, or flip from straight to gay AND turn into a sex-maniac, and after that . . ."
What I see too seldom is the reversal of this standard, almost clich‚d setup, so that instead, it's the virgin who wants to get humped, or it's the smaller stud of the pair who's using other than brute strength to get the bigger one to co”perate, and ingenious permutations thereof. And then there's the all-too- seldom-seen setup: both guys are wholly inexperienced, and have to work out from somewhat fragmentary knowledge who does what and with which and to whom -- a setup, by the way, which can also be varied in almost infinitely many ways.
But here, we return to the initial concern, for the first- time story grades into either rape or kid stuff: it's quite believable that the one of a pair who lusts for the other's ass will push matters into something ranging from "forced sex" on down to standard-issue rape. But -- is it wish-fulfillment or just rape when it's the little guy who forces the big, hunky bodybuilder to spread his (well-muscled, of course) thighs? What if the guy being raped then insists on more -- and more ("You want me to tell the guys you went dry before I did?") -- until the initial aggressor collapses, waking later to find . . . but you can finish that one yourself. And just as the r“le-reversal story carries less baggage than the big-stud-rapes-little-guy story, so too the story of inexperienced youths experimenting awkwardly with each other.
However, rape in real life, and rape in much -- perhaps too much -- gay fiction is about control and domination far more than it is about shooting one's load, and certainly not about mutual satisfaction. And before someone interrupts, yes: I do know that some guys among us get more out of bringing off their partners than they do in getting brought off themselves.
And rape shades on into stories about master-slave relationships, or into torturers and victims (often willing ones! -- see the newsgroup rec.arts.torture for details), or even into cannibalism (where being eaten is sometimes the victim's idea, especially if he can watch some of the process, maybe even try a few bites of himself), self torture, and worse. (I'm sure there is worse, but that's beyong the scope of this discussion.)
No doubt, psychiatrists and psychologists have prepared ponderous papers on the practice of preying on pre-teens, but this is a phenomenon I really do not understand. One can guess that it's set off -- in some cases -- because pre-beard kids necessarily look -- to put it bluntly -- effeminate, compared to men with a five-o'clock shadow and enough chest hair with which to knit a sweater, hence are attractive to those who can't cope with grown women; one can guess that it's sometimes set off -- because the writer fixated on kids his age when he first felt the stirrings of sex -- and decades later, he's still fixated on whoever looks that age.
As for where to draw the line beyond which the hand of man should not set foot -- I don't know. Is it okay to respond to a horny sixteen-year-old who looks twenty? How about a fourteen- year-old who's six-feet-two and muscled to match, and who passed puberty a year and a half ago? A nineteen-year-old who looks fourteen? fifteen? The question of who's old enough to give consent varies wildly from country to country, less wildly from State to State, and really depends on the mental maturity of the kid involved -- which is kinda hard to pin down. (One person over in rec.arts.sf.composition, in response to a thread on age, admitted being well under the "age of consent," when that person first became sexually active with older people, said that it had been lots of fun at the time, and insisted that there were no lasting bad effects.)
In other words, I don't understand that subject At All.
An aside: I wrote a gay novel, published in paperback around 1970, in which the soldiers who staffed a torture research center were happily gelding their supply of victims in painfull and ingenious ways, and then eating those victims (properly cooked and served up tastefully as roasts, schnitzels, stews, and the like), but who mutinied when they discovered that their commander had been preying on local children who wandered too close to the place.
A question I understand even less well (in fact, not at all) is whether, averaged over all involved, stories about gay-sex- related violence drive imitators to try things out for real, or instead relieve tension that would otherwise be expressed in real blood and unwilling participants.
So: where does all this lead us?
What turns gays on is a far wider range of erotic activities than what turns on hets. There's no "standard" way for gays to couple, while hets have their near-universal missionary position, in bed with the shades down and no spectators beyond the two people involved. Hence, we start from a far richer range of ideas and experiences.
One result: gays are not a unified group, but rather a whole raft of groups, each shading into others. As the references (above) put it, people are different; there's no one "right" way to commit gay fiction.
But another result of all this is that there's no reason to feel you should like what's written by someone who has different tastes than yours. In the various gay-fiction archives, a range of stories appear, bounded by what the archivists think is Going Too Far.
If (a big "if") you're writing purely for yourself, none of this makes any difference: you won't push the archivists' limits. If, however, you want to write for a wider readership, on the net or on paper, you should move your stories more toward the center of the target audience.
Do consider, O writers of sexy gay fiction, the basics of any good fiction, touched on above: believable characters that are neither clich‚s nor standard-issue clones; picking the best point-of-view character from which to tell and enjoy this story; putting the reader firmly into that character's skin and mind and muscles and appendages, then appealing to the senses -- what the character hears and feels and tastes -- not just telling "what's happening."
Then, devise a plot which tests your principal players with a believable conflict -- one that is neither too easily solved nor one impossible to solve -- and the conflict whose resolution makes a real change in your principal characters. People don't change very often; a story in which a character makes a believable change in himself -- as by learning about himself, learning about what's outside himself, or falling in or out of love -- is therefore a story about something that is important to the character -- and thus, to the reader, who is -- for a few moments -- living in the story, being whoever the writer has chosen as point-of-view player here.
Begin the story when things have gotten interesting; put in biographical or dimensional details only when the point-of-view character naturally thinks of them while he's, for example, catching his breath between rounds. It's more effective to give an idea of relative size, if it's really relevant, when it becomes important at that moment in the story: "As they stood facing each other, Morganstern looked up a the big hunk he'd lured into his lair, a rangy stud who stood a head taller than Morganstern." . . . or: "As the stud in his late teens settled himself onto and into Morganstern's more solidly muscled body and . . ." See? Ten (or eleven or twelve) inches may be comfortably long to one reader, ridiculously improbable to another. If instead the participants pause to measure themselves against each other, ". . . an inch longer than Morganstern's own impressive . . ." lets each reader fill in whatever feels right to him.
Or another example: "Jon knew he looked years younger than his eighteen years, but the men that tried to pick him up all too obviously wanted to take advantage of him, and the ones Jon tried to pick up were scared off by his apparent age. He touched his shirt, felt his chest muscles, built up by hard workouts at the Westside Gym, tighten under his fingers. [start italics] If I could just get one of the guys to take a look at me with my clothes off, [end italics] he told himself . . ." Not exactly an action paragraph, but it introduces the main character from the inside (. . . felt his chest muscles . . .), gives something of his appearance -- again from the inside (Jon knew he looked . . .), presents the story's -- and Jon's -- main problem [getting laid], and hints how he'll try to solve it.
Of course, if you're really into dimensions, instead of a static opening paragraph, describing the character from the outside (he was this, he was that, his chest [expended] measured. and so on), the action of a story could begin with Morganstern measuring a rising bodybuilder in an otherwise-deserted gym: biceps, forearm, [pause while the stud doffs his tightly- stretched T-shirt] chest, neck [pause while Morganstern doffs his T-shirt with a comment about how hot it is in here], waist [after the stud slides his trousers part-way down -- hesitates, then drops them to the floor and steps out of them; without bothering to think up an excuse, Morganstern kicks off his own trousers], then Morganstern kneels, measures ankle, calf, and knee, then slides both hands and the measuring tape slowly and seductively up the stud's [insert no more than one adjective here] right thigh, tightens the tape, and calls out that dimension. Morganstern straightens up, lets his hands -- oh so casually -- brush the bulging front of the stud's briefs . . . and so on till he's gotten those and his own briefs off and he's reaching for the most recently risen part of the [maybe two adjectives here] stud and on to a comparison with Morganstern's own [one adjective, one appropriate noun a bit more colorful than the usual four-letter one] . . . and the rest of the story is left as an exercise for the writers among you. Note that there's no need to tell the reader that the body-builder's a bit shy; he hesitates before dropping his trousers; you show he's shy, rather than telling that he is.
Here -- as in any story, ya gotta pick what's important to this story: the preliminaries? the Main Event? how the seductee is reacting to all this? Morganstern's discovery that the stud is (or isn't) an already dedicated devotee of gay sex? Or the seductee's discovery, half-way through the Main Event, that this is more fun than -- whatever? Or even Morganstern's decision, when this round is over, that it's time he quit catting around and settled down with this [one adjective, describing personality rather than physique] guy? This choice, then, pretty well determines from whose viewpoint this story is best told; it determines what's essential, and what is merely corroborative detail, to add a touch of verisimilude to -- what we hope is not merely -- a bald and unconvincing narrative.
As for conflict: again, neither outrageous bows and arrows, nor clubs and spades, but sex-related conflict: "I want to get that beautiful specimen of magnificent manhood into bed, but he'll probably laugh at me" is a very believable conflict, though not a terribly exotic one. Again: consider reversing the standard clichés -- the five-foot-two, 120-pound youth winning a battle of who's-boss with a six-foot-three, 275-pound muscle-stud . . . Morganstern realizing he rather likes to cat around, but with this splendid stud [cute teenager, whomever] at hand . . . but you can think up things better'n I can -- so: do so!