I Like It Like That: True Stories of Gay Male Desire

Title: I Like It Like That: True Stories of Gay Male Desire
Edited by: Richard Labaonté and Lawrence Schimel with 34 contributors
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Genre: M/M erotica, memoir
Length: 239 pages
Rating: 5 stars out of 5

A guest review by Leslie

THE BLURB

From the editors of the Lambda Award-winning First Person Queer come these intelligent, sexy, true-life tales of gay men’s desire. The stories push at the parameters of queer erotic life, featuring contributors both novice and well-known; subject matter ranges from single, significant encounters to the ephemera of emotional desires that never lead to physical pleasure. Throughout, the book deals with the essential erotics of queer male life, to be used as a launching point for exploring the queer male condition: essays that delve into the diverse manifestations of desire between and among men.

I Like It Like That features smart, savvy writing about desire and sex. Unlike mainstream porn imagery that by default dominates our cultural (and therefore personal) references, contributors reach into the far reaches of memory to tell true tales about personal erotic space.

REVIEW

I have discovered I have a reading fetish, or kink, if you will. I like to read forbidden books. Books that I am not supposed to be reading, for whatever reason. Those are the books that give me a thrill, make my pulse race a little faster, my breathing become a little a shallower. They even create a tingling in my groin. Yes, those are the books I like.

I probably realized this when I was about 8 or 9 and discovered a book called The Importance of Wearing Clothes. It had a chapter on nudist colonies and oh my God, that was the greatest thing ever! All those naked people! I’d sneak down to the living room and read that chapter over and over again, under cover of darkness, when the rest of the house was asleep. Talk about living on the edge.

As I got older, I graduated to evermore illicit books: Catcher in the Rye, Portnoy’s Complaint, In Cold Blood (which I read when I was 11). My mother hit the roof when she caught me reading Rabbit, Run by John Updike and confiscated it. I’ve never finished that book.

I bring this up because at the ahem, rather mature age I am now, I can read anything I want and thus it’s pretty hard to come across forbidden books. So that illicit thrill has been largely gone from my life for many years. Occasionally I’d try to recapture it by reading alt.rec.sex on the Internet, but it just wasn’t the same.

Then this week, unbidden and unasked, I Like It Like That appeared in my mailbox. I removed it from the padded mailer and noticed the fabulous cover (for once, I was glad to have the book, not the ebook!). “True stories of gay male desire,” I read. I flipped it over. “The book deals with the essential erotics of queer male life…essays that delve into the diverse manifestations of desire between and among men.” Oh, a book written by gay men for gay men? And they sent it to me, straight married lady in Maine? I was an instant puddle.

Let’s get the facts out of the way. This is a series of 34 essays, written by a variety of authors, some well-known, others up and coming in the writing world. The stories are short—1000 to 3000 words each—and all come from “the contributors’…sexual memories to tell true tales about personal erotic spaces.” The back cover says erotica and that’s true, but it is literary erotica. I’ve tried to read random-ass porn and it doesn’t work for me. At the end of the day, I’m a reader and I need good writing, even if I am looking for a little titillation.

So, straight woman reading about gay male desire? Is there a disconnect? Absolutely not. I like men and all their body parts and gay men do too. They find cocks endlessly fascinating and since that’s one thing I don’t have, I find that discussion to be—well, endlessly fascinating. And on that level, this book really, really works for me.

My original goal for writing this review was to read every essay but after I got through about half of them, I decided to stop. It was clear that the editors had done their work. The essays are uniformly well written and edited and clearly selected for their literary merit. So I don’t need to read every one to tell you this is a good collection. My sampling has verified that. So, why did I stop? Because I wanted to be able to savor and enjoy. See my earlier comment. I don’t get many books like this nowadays. I take pleasure in the thrill. I realized I wanted to make this last and not buzz through it in a day or two. I hope everyone understands.

As to what the stories contain…these are about male desire and how that comes in all its forms. Different themes will resonate with different people. A few of the essays I read, I said, “interesting, but eh” at the end. Others stand out in my mind, such as The Eroticism of Football: Thank You, Jim Harbaugh by Aaron Hamburger. Like Aaron, I like quarterbacks and I have watched a lot of football over the years, even though I still, to this day, don’t completely understand all the nuances. (I watch baseball for the same reason and I see there is a baseball essay included in the book. I am saving that one for later.) The author’s description of quarterback Jim Harbaugh—meeting him on the beach in Waikiki when he was 13—I ached with the longing of young adolescent desire. I remember it well. Another essay I loved was The Telephone Line by Jerry Wheeler. Clint/Curt/Chet arrives at Jerry’s home to install a second phone line and Jerry decides, “I was determined to have his dick in my mouth before the paperwork was done.” Sigh. It brought back a whole slew of erotic fantasies about when the gas man was here hooking up the propane line to our grill and I was determined to be doing the nasty with him before the service call was over. Unfortunately, I wasn’t successful. Jerry was.

And that’s what this book is. A collection of really sexy, well written stories, some sweet, some not so, that have the ability to simultaneously turn me on and make me think—and that, for me, is the biggest turn on of all. This book has earned a place on my bedside table, to be savored as an amuse-bouche before the more entertaining main course (aka, my husband). I look forward to reading the unread stories and re-reading some of my favorites. I hope that everyone here who reads this review and decides to buy this book has the same pleasure.

NB: In the interest of research, this book might be useful to m/m writers who endeavor to be realistic in their depictions of sex scenes and struggle, at times, with coming up with the right words to describe the action. This book could be, in that context, very informative. If you need an excuse to buy it, that is.