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Sodomy!
Award-winning author Simon Sheppard serves up his third collection of erotic stories, tales that are smart, edgy, and very, very hot. From wrestlers to writers, fratboys to buccaneers, the men in Sheppard's stories lust, love, and link up with erect abandon. No one else writes about queer sex quite like Simon Sheppard. Dive into Sodomy! and see.
- GenresEroticaAnthologies
210 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2010
29 people want to read
About the author
Simon Sheppard
66 books17 followersSimon Sheppard is a writer of gay erotica and a sex-advice columnist from San Francisco. He is the author of many highly acclaimed works of gay erotica/pornography, including the books Kinkorama, In Deep, and Sex Parties 101. He is also the editor of Homosex: 60 Years of Gay Erotica, winner of the 2007 Lambda Literary Award for LGBT erotica; the anthology Leathermen; and is the coeditor of the anthologies Rough Stuff and Roughed Up. Sheppard's work is wide-ranging, often combining history, philosophy, or culture — high and low — with hardcore sex. His first book, Hotter Than Hell and Other Stories, won the Erotic Authors Association Award for Best Collection of the Year, and the title story of In Deep was shortlisted for the Rauxa Prize for Erotic Fiction. His work has appeared in over 250 anthologies and he writes the columns "Sex Talk" and the online serial "The Dirty Boys Club." Sheppard is openly gay, active in the queer artistic, political and AIDS-activist communities, and has publicly opposed the Iraq war. He lives in San Francisco, where San Francisco dubbed him "our erotica king."
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
March 11, 2011
Simon Sheppard, in case you don't know, is a wry, witty and savvy product of the San Francisco queer literary scene. He writes male-on-male erotica which often has a BDSM flavor without being heavy on the accoutrements. (Readers looking for the detailed product lists featured in some BDSM erotica would do better to look for a catalogue.)
In his introduction to this volume, his third short-story anthology, Sheppard explains: "many of the pieces in this book have to do, in one way or another, with authors."
Having compiled this collection, the author himself sounds both amused and surprised to find patterns in his work that he wasn't aware of while writing. He goes on to analyze the prevalence of author-characters:
"See, what I think is that each time we have sex, we are, paradoxically, not only letting go of our egos, of who we are, but we're also reinventing ourselves, creating personas. Telling stories to both ourselves and our sex partners, even if those narratives are wordless, even if we never even see whoever-he-is's face. Even beating off is about the stories the world tells us, the stories we tell about the world."
The personae in these stories are memorable. The opening story, "A Retired Writer In the Sun," is about an over-the-top gay man known as "The Witch of Capri," a legendary writer of erotica as well as mainstream fiction under various pen names. He is being interviewed over several days by Quilty, a younger man who is writing a Ph.D. thesis on him. The Witch expounds:
"And if there's one thing, my son, that life teaches one, it's that narrative coherence--hell, coherence of any sort--is largely an illusion, the fretful workings of a mind struggling to superimpose order on this squalid mess we call life."
The author's (Simon Sheppard's) joke, of course, is based on the reader's expectation that the suspense will lead to a sexual and narrative climax. The Witch makes it clear that he does not expect sexual service from Quilty as payment for the interview: "'I'm an egomaniac, yes, but I would so like to think I'm not that sleazy."
Quilty, however, follows the Witch's command to strip down to his underwear, hoping to achieve "immortality" of a kind by inspiring a character or a passage in the Witch's work, even though he no longer writes erotica. A sex scene does occur, but it's not exactly what Quilty or the reader expects.
By far the most hilarious story about an author in this book is "I Was JT LeRoy's Buttboy." There is no way to know how factual it might be, and of course, that is the point. "JT LeRoy" was the writing persona (or hoax) of an author named Laura Albert. Before the hoax was publicly exposed in 2005, JT LeRoy was considered a great literary find, a transgendered hustler from a background of poverty and sexual exploitation with immense writing talent, who could rarely be persuaded to appear in public.
JT's novel, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, was turned into a movie.
In Simon Sheppard's story, JT initiates an email correspondence with him, then invites himself to Sheppard's apartment.The person who appears at the door is a surprise:
"I damn near fell over. I'd been expecting a shy, sexually ambiguous little alterna-boy, probably in a blonde wig.
'Hi. I'm JT LeRoy.'
There in my doorway stood a handsome, bearded, middle-aged man, really tall-maybe 6 foot 5--and dressed head to toe in gleaming black leather." Simon Sheppard, the narrator, is impressed although not convinced.
The man in leather responds to Sheppard's bewilderment: "'You know how damn hard it is to get published. And how little you get paid when you do." I thought of that publisher telling me to take fifty bucks or get fucked. . .
'And I'm sure you're postmodern enough to understand that "the author" is just a construct, right?'" Sheppard sputters about the imposter's exploitation of AIDS, homelessness and hustlers, but the impostor is unmoved.
"'Simon, you can either forget your fucking principles and accept my honest praise--because I think you're a helluva writer, really--or you can suck my dick.'"
Sheppard takes the offer literally, and thus begins a stranger-than-fiction sexual relationship. Sheppard continues to receive emails and telephone calls from a femmy-voiced "JT LeRoy," containing no mention of their real-life coupling. Sheppard muses: "it made me wonder whether the man who showed up at my door was the real fake JT, or a poseur posing as a poseur. Now that was postmodern."
"Lorca" is a story about a beautiful young man named "Federico," like the gay Spanish writer Federico Garcia Lorca. Interspersed with the narrator's story of picking up Federico from the grocery store where he works are scenes from a darker story about a beautiful, unself-conscious young man who swims alone in a lake, unaware that he is being watched. The narrator hints at the darker plot in the first paragraph: "There will always be young men like him. And there will always be those who hate them."
In "Marcos y Che," a writer named Bruno accepts the challenge of a straight female friend, a writer of slash fiction, to write a sex scene between Che Guevara, leader of the Cuban revolution of 1959, and Marcos, leader of the Zapatista revolt in Mexico. The contrasts between Bruno's story and his actual life are poignant. And as he knows, his story is unlikely to get published in the United States in a conservative era.
Sheppard's historical stories of forbidden love between men are heartbreaking. In "The New World," two lonely young men, European Jewish immigrants, meet on the ship that is carrying them to New York. Appalled by the sinful nature of what he has done, Jakov avoids Simcha in the city until Simcha finds him and declares his love. The schmaltz is shameless and effective.
In "The Hula-hula Girl," a stevedore hooks up with a fun-loving tattooed sailor in San Francisco on the eve of the Japanese attack on the American fleet in Pearl Harbor in 1941. The reader knows the sailor's probable fate, but he is full of life and hope for the future.
The most daring historical story in the book, "Salt," retells the story of Lot (from the Old Testament or Jewish Bible), patriarchal follower of the one God, and the pagan men of the city where Lot is a heretic. Here the narrator introduces Aram, a visitor to the city, to its sacred rites:
"A corps of naked drummers entered the courtyard, lending an all-encompassing beat to our song, a hymn of praise to the earth and to the Goddesses who are its guardians and our guides. As the song grew in power and splendor, many of us formed a large circle and, arms around each other's shoulders, danced in joyous unison. In the center of the ring, the high priests laid their flaming lamps upon the ground and shed their robes in order to begin the sacred rites of Union."
In this culture, blow jobs (to use the vulgar term) are a form of holy communion, and Aram feels as if he has come home. Lot, with his cowed wife and exploited daughters, leaves town and is never seen again; rumor has it that he and his family turn to salt in the desert. At the end, the narrator welcomes the male reader to Sodom, the City of the Plain.
Most of these stories have appeared before in anthologies of gay-male erotica including Leathermen, which was edited by Sheppard. Seeing all these stories in one place enables the reader to get a sense of the author's world-view and the philosophy underlying hot scenes of male-on-male action that look deceptively artless and sweaty. Simon Sheppard is topped by a worthy Muse.
--
In his introduction to this volume, his third short-story anthology, Sheppard explains: "many of the pieces in this book have to do, in one way or another, with authors."
Having compiled this collection, the author himself sounds both amused and surprised to find patterns in his work that he wasn't aware of while writing. He goes on to analyze the prevalence of author-characters:
"See, what I think is that each time we have sex, we are, paradoxically, not only letting go of our egos, of who we are, but we're also reinventing ourselves, creating personas. Telling stories to both ourselves and our sex partners, even if those narratives are wordless, even if we never even see whoever-he-is's face. Even beating off is about the stories the world tells us, the stories we tell about the world."
The personae in these stories are memorable. The opening story, "A Retired Writer In the Sun," is about an over-the-top gay man known as "The Witch of Capri," a legendary writer of erotica as well as mainstream fiction under various pen names. He is being interviewed over several days by Quilty, a younger man who is writing a Ph.D. thesis on him. The Witch expounds:
"And if there's one thing, my son, that life teaches one, it's that narrative coherence--hell, coherence of any sort--is largely an illusion, the fretful workings of a mind struggling to superimpose order on this squalid mess we call life."
The author's (Simon Sheppard's) joke, of course, is based on the reader's expectation that the suspense will lead to a sexual and narrative climax. The Witch makes it clear that he does not expect sexual service from Quilty as payment for the interview: "'I'm an egomaniac, yes, but I would so like to think I'm not that sleazy."
Quilty, however, follows the Witch's command to strip down to his underwear, hoping to achieve "immortality" of a kind by inspiring a character or a passage in the Witch's work, even though he no longer writes erotica. A sex scene does occur, but it's not exactly what Quilty or the reader expects.
By far the most hilarious story about an author in this book is "I Was JT LeRoy's Buttboy." There is no way to know how factual it might be, and of course, that is the point. "JT LeRoy" was the writing persona (or hoax) of an author named Laura Albert. Before the hoax was publicly exposed in 2005, JT LeRoy was considered a great literary find, a transgendered hustler from a background of poverty and sexual exploitation with immense writing talent, who could rarely be persuaded to appear in public.
JT's novel, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, was turned into a movie.
In Simon Sheppard's story, JT initiates an email correspondence with him, then invites himself to Sheppard's apartment.The person who appears at the door is a surprise:
"I damn near fell over. I'd been expecting a shy, sexually ambiguous little alterna-boy, probably in a blonde wig.
'Hi. I'm JT LeRoy.'
There in my doorway stood a handsome, bearded, middle-aged man, really tall-maybe 6 foot 5--and dressed head to toe in gleaming black leather." Simon Sheppard, the narrator, is impressed although not convinced.
The man in leather responds to Sheppard's bewilderment: "'You know how damn hard it is to get published. And how little you get paid when you do." I thought of that publisher telling me to take fifty bucks or get fucked. . .
'And I'm sure you're postmodern enough to understand that "the author" is just a construct, right?'" Sheppard sputters about the imposter's exploitation of AIDS, homelessness and hustlers, but the impostor is unmoved.
"'Simon, you can either forget your fucking principles and accept my honest praise--because I think you're a helluva writer, really--or you can suck my dick.'"
Sheppard takes the offer literally, and thus begins a stranger-than-fiction sexual relationship. Sheppard continues to receive emails and telephone calls from a femmy-voiced "JT LeRoy," containing no mention of their real-life coupling. Sheppard muses: "it made me wonder whether the man who showed up at my door was the real fake JT, or a poseur posing as a poseur. Now that was postmodern."
"Lorca" is a story about a beautiful young man named "Federico," like the gay Spanish writer Federico Garcia Lorca. Interspersed with the narrator's story of picking up Federico from the grocery store where he works are scenes from a darker story about a beautiful, unself-conscious young man who swims alone in a lake, unaware that he is being watched. The narrator hints at the darker plot in the first paragraph: "There will always be young men like him. And there will always be those who hate them."
In "Marcos y Che," a writer named Bruno accepts the challenge of a straight female friend, a writer of slash fiction, to write a sex scene between Che Guevara, leader of the Cuban revolution of 1959, and Marcos, leader of the Zapatista revolt in Mexico. The contrasts between Bruno's story and his actual life are poignant. And as he knows, his story is unlikely to get published in the United States in a conservative era.
Sheppard's historical stories of forbidden love between men are heartbreaking. In "The New World," two lonely young men, European Jewish immigrants, meet on the ship that is carrying them to New York. Appalled by the sinful nature of what he has done, Jakov avoids Simcha in the city until Simcha finds him and declares his love. The schmaltz is shameless and effective.
In "The Hula-hula Girl," a stevedore hooks up with a fun-loving tattooed sailor in San Francisco on the eve of the Japanese attack on the American fleet in Pearl Harbor in 1941. The reader knows the sailor's probable fate, but he is full of life and hope for the future.
The most daring historical story in the book, "Salt," retells the story of Lot (from the Old Testament or Jewish Bible), patriarchal follower of the one God, and the pagan men of the city where Lot is a heretic. Here the narrator introduces Aram, a visitor to the city, to its sacred rites:
"A corps of naked drummers entered the courtyard, lending an all-encompassing beat to our song, a hymn of praise to the earth and to the Goddesses who are its guardians and our guides. As the song grew in power and splendor, many of us formed a large circle and, arms around each other's shoulders, danced in joyous unison. In the center of the ring, the high priests laid their flaming lamps upon the ground and shed their robes in order to begin the sacred rites of Union."
In this culture, blow jobs (to use the vulgar term) are a form of holy communion, and Aram feels as if he has come home. Lot, with his cowed wife and exploited daughters, leaves town and is never seen again; rumor has it that he and his family turn to salt in the desert. At the end, the narrator welcomes the male reader to Sodom, the City of the Plain.
Most of these stories have appeared before in anthologies of gay-male erotica including Leathermen, which was edited by Sheppard. Seeing all these stories in one place enables the reader to get a sense of the author's world-view and the philosophy underlying hot scenes of male-on-male action that look deceptively artless and sweaty. Simon Sheppard is topped by a worthy Muse.
--
December 26, 2021
Review is taken from my bookstagram account @descanto2
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September 5, 2012Simon Sheppard is one of my favorite authors. I was disappointed - but not surprised, given my library - to discover I had already read half of the stories in other erotica collections.
May 8, 2013
Most of the stories were OK, but based on the title I was hoping for less artsy and more skanky.
December 2, 2021
Like all short stories some are good some are mediocre and some are dull. Nothing in this collection that was memorable and the title is a little misleading
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews