GUEST POST: Best Gay Erotica of the Year – Edited by Rob Rosen

You wanted the best, you got the best! Best Gay Erotica of the Year, that is. Hotter than ever and featuring the brightest stars the gay literary galaxy has to offer, this iconic collection never fails to impress. With no themes, no boundaries, BGE encompasses the steamy past, the on-your-knees present and the sweat-soaked future, covering every genre and every kink—plus a few you probably never saw, uh, coming—all with a style and a panache that leave those other anthologies in the fictional dust. And get ready for a stunningly original android story that’s sure to blow your circuits!

Yep, this really is the best. And the best just keeps getting better

“Best Gay Erotica of the Year, Volume 1 takes you across time and space as you follow a variety of men seeking the erotic core of their being. From the ancient past to the distant future, from dusty deserts to rumbling busses to seedy mid-town alleys, each journey ends in discovery―sometimes just in the nick of time―of a soul-mate or a devilish spirit or even an android with remarkably precise techniques. These tales will tickle your imagination, tug at your heart, and probably stretch much more than your imagination.” — Louis Flint Ceci, author of Comfort Me

“This rich collection reminds us of how valuable erotic fiction can be: it gives us worlds far more gratifying and delicious than the realities most of us inhabit. Thanks to Rob Rosen and his stable of talented authors for this libidinous gift!” — Jeff Mann, author of Purgatory and Salvation

Hello, I’m Rob Rosen, author, editor, short story writer and anthologist. I split my time evenly between the four, but it’s the anthologist part that brings me a special joy, not to mention a certain amount of dread. Let me explain both.

Best Gay Erotica of the Year, Volume 1 is the fifth anthology I’ve been fortunate enough to helm. It’s now in its twenty-first year, though, yes, it has picked up a snazzy new moniker. As to the joy of putting this together, that comes from being able to interact with the amazing talent that a collection like this draws, to read stories that fairly leap off the page, to read, quite literarily, the best of the best. You see, every erotica writer wants to be included in this, which is why it always ends up being such a spectacular anthology, year after year.

Writers from all over the country, and many countries beyond, send in their stories, dozens and dozens and dozens of them. Then it’s up to me to dwindle them down to fifteen or so. That’s the first part of the dread, because for every great story there’s an even better one waiting in the wings for me to get to. Then I have to pick between them all. Plus, I have to have variety within the final fifteen, choosing stories that are strikingly different from one another, so that the end product is unique and, like I said, spectacular. I mean, it’s not called Best Gay Erotica for nothing!

The second part of the dread is when I have to send the rejection letters out. And since these far exceed the acceptance ones, it’s a chore that fills me with a tremendous amount of sadness. Still, the thrill of sending the acceptances out, at reading the elation from the writers when they reply, makes it all worthwhile. Well, that and the finished product. And this finished product is amazing, stretching from the remote past to the distant future, with tales of androids, archaeology, Fidel’s Cuba, Ancient Rome, Colonial Arizona, bus rides, horny ghosts, federal lawmen, and on and on. Yep, the pages are packed full with hot men and even hotter stories.

Obviously, I’m exceedingly proud of this, proud of the writers who contributed to it, and eager to get it into the audience’s hands. I hope you can pick up a copy and hope even more that you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed putting it all together for you!

Excerpt

Taken from The Real Thing by Dale Chase

Explaining how it got down to just me is impossible. Suffice to say, it was the worst planetary fuckup of all time. Give the androids control of their own destiny, somebody said. Yeah, right.

So what we have after a very messy couple of millennia is a world full of constructed people. Make more as needed and dispose of the malfunctioning. Efficient and less costly than maintaining humans, which are subject to problems. Except they missed one thing. Like all great ideas implemented before they were thought out, nobody considered how much we liked humans. And how even androids would experience a surprising shift to that mindset.

Where am I in all this? Not a droid, that’s for damn sure. No, I’m probably the last human guy in the world, an oversight to be exact. I’ve been on the run for years because I’m a wanted man—in more ways than one. Illegal, yes, but also possessed of the last real flesh-and-blood cock. And they want it. They won’t admit it, though. They say they brought me in because I’m a renegade, a criminal, living outside society, but the truth is they want what I have. They want to get their hands on it, their mouths on it. They want to spread their cheeks and take it up the ass. I’ve been in this cell for just a week and have lost track of the number of droids I’ve fucked and who have fucked me.

They won’t let me have any clothes, and the cell has a window in the door, so more often than not there are faces peering in. Like now, a good-looking droid is watching me stroke my meat. I play with it so he can watch it get hard, squirt a load, then soften. Theirs won’t do it quite like the real thing. More of a mechanical spring-like inflation and not at all fleshy. Too hard, actually. Unreal. And they never did get the come mechanism right. A droid once confessed that it’s a gentle wave, a kind of ripple, and they greatly covet my pulsing shots and the obvious charge they bring. How on earth the creators could have made coming so mild is beyond me. Who in the hell was in charge?

My ass is also coveted, although droid asses are pretty close to human. Except, of course, theirs are only for sex. They can’t imagine our multi-purpose chute, say over and over again what a disgusting place it is, but when one of them gets near me and hits his arousal switch, he’ll invariably want to get his nose down there for a sniff and maybe even his tongue for a taste. I sometimes think the great droid creator way back when put a few glitches in on purpose, a human failing here and there to maybe soften the perfection.

When I was young, there were three of us left, locked into a controlled environment. It was a perfect life—cultivated humans, our every whim seen to—but when we discovered sex, we were separated, walled off from each other for fear we’d prefer ourselves to them. At nineteen we all escaped, went our separate ways, of necessity, and I know one of the others survived because we met up later, on the run.