Bite the Pillow: Six on Sex by Phillip MacKenzie Jr.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A solid 5 stars for the first story.

After an overdose of mm romance, it was great reading more believable scenarios of young gay men as friends, lovers, enemies, frenemies who hang out together despite their faults and foibles. In their world, sex is an extension of themselves and can be good and bad at the same time.

I wondered if I would ever enjoy fucking, because it seemed like nothing but pain. But falling asleep made it worth every inch he forced into me.

Doesn't that tell you about how lonely he must have felt at night alone in bed before that encounter?

I'll add to this review later as some of these stories need thinking about. Since reading it, I discovered that the first one is autobiographical and that alone makes it worth a reread. I loved this bit:

I was scared of what I wanted.

Because wanting to have sex with another man is what makes men gay. But this admission was immediately followed by a desire for everyone around him to disappear, even to the extent of killing them off mentally to allow the freedom to explore this longing which:

I didn’t want to know that that was what I wanted.

On the surface, these are six stories about gay sex, so the sex is important, not just for how wonderful it makes the character feel (or not as the case may be) but because it just “is.”

Sex was penance for lying and payment for safety, and when I got caught I did it again, and again. Until it stopped working, and I found myself again chasing the blue flame acorss the horizon.

Underneath the description of this physicality, the writer subtly explores the relationships and reasons behind the couplings, giving readers an insight into what gay men faced on a day to day basis. But in the first one, it is up to the reader to interpret what is not said as much as what is said. Each encounter is a story in itself.

He builds on these real encounters in the stories that follow. Using the characters and probably giving the essence of the individuals or relationships, if not the facts.

The first, though, is pure poetry.

Along the silent paths of years I returned to the fires, and to the men who light them. We are older, and our passion is more complex and less easily tossed aside. We have worked and earned the right to ask for what we want.

Era is everything when reading gay fiction. Until recently, society's attitude to homosexuality forged fear, frustration and confusion in the minds of men who "discovered" they were gay. They hung out together even if they had nothing else in common because like-minded men were the only people they trusted.

Although no time frame is given, I suspect many of these stories were set twenty or thirty years ago. There is none of the current acceptance by either society or gay men themselves at discovering they are gay.

Desire is a mirror and I am nothing or no one without its reflection.

This line conjures up images of someone still coming to terms with who he is. Seeing this love for men as being vital to his being, but a part of him wistfully rejecting that notion. The current "gay man" refuses to let himself be defined by his gayness and fights against that classification. He is more than who he chooses to have sex with. In those days a "gay man" often had little choice and questioned why he made that particular choice and why some encounters that shouldn't have worked did and others which should have worked didn't.

This confusion was touching and possibly due as much to age and a lack of positive role models. Not really knowing what or who you want because you're not yet sure who you are.

The book is worth reading just for the first section alone. I loved the images the segments conjured up in my mind.


View all my reviews

A Romantic Mann by Jeff Mann
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

So far, Jeff Mann has made me eat my prejudices against present tense and shifter stories. Now he’s added another former pet hate to the formerly unpalatable mix: poetry.

Poetry always reminds me of school essays and forays into incomprehension. Of words tortured until they fit a required pattern. My analytical brain screams if it can’t push the meaning into neat little slots.

But I quickly had to eat another helping of humble pie as I gradually learned to relax and listen to the words. Sometimes their meaning was as clear as a bell, but at other times, it was the roar of a symphony when each instrument added its own presence, and I had to content myself with listening to the overall sound rather than try to pick out each instrument’s contribution.

As I read them out loud I was reminded that sometimes poetry is best experienced that way. Then we don’t get hung up on words but rather the feelings that the phrases and sounds invoke.

All of the pieces in the collection were outpourings on subjects that inspired the writer to see them from a different angle or at least pay tribute to them. September 11 prompted musings on the bravery of Mark Bingham, the gay rugby player who helped ensure the final plane did not find its target. As an associate professor at Virginia Tech, Jeff’s anger could also be felt as in his poem he dreams of carrying out a preemptive strike against the perpetrator of the massacre of 32 students and staff.

But his poems don’t just deal with outside events like these and the rape of the countryside, they also mourn the inevitability of ageing, the end of relationships, the lust after the sexiest man in Europe.

Poetry allows intensity of feelings to shine through. Anger reverberates in his hatred of the rape of the landscape in his beloved mountains as mining decapitates mountains.

But probably the one that best exemplifies Jeff’s work is “Alan Turing Memorial—Manchester”. Here, poetry allows a degree of artificiality that can detract from a prose story but beautifully links the connotations of the word “Apple”: “Apple of the golden Strongbow cider pints I sip on Anal Treet, reddened buttocks of a muffled bound-down boy marked by sadist’s teeth, plump apple of the wisdom tree, of “Snow White,” your favorite fairy tale, apple plump and bitten on my laptop lid, found half-eaten by your body, by your bed.”

His trip to Europe and Amsterdam, the gay capital of Europe, inspired another moving poem: “Homomonument, Amsterdam” in this, he has the classic line: “Those deaths become our whetstone.” Because this is how I believe Jeff sees himself. The words of his poetry and books are a sword to strike down existing prejudices, to avenge the honor of those who have fallen by the hatred and ignorance of the past and to fight for a fair future for his fellow gay brothers.

I’m glad I had read his essays and books prior to this as themes appeared that I was already familiar with. The obsession with Tim McGraw, the dreams of kidnap and bondage, the love of traditional Appalachian cooking. All these themes are revisited in his poems. But there is so much more here.

Like many poets he is disillusioned and disenchanted with the ordinary world around him. “The earth is beautiful, its people unaccommodating.”
He beautifully encompasses the regretful memories of a past lover: I sit in the sun, nibbling and sipping, wondering how love survives betrayal, how passion remains, decades later, for those who can never forgive. How we diminish, thankful for comfort, uneven, kindness, sunlight on October-orange maple leaves. How we mature, tired of romancing pain.”

Like all good poetry, I was taken out of my comfort zone. In this case trying to analyze things I probably wasn’t meant to and slapped back into appreciating what I was listening to instead. As usual it expanded my knowledge. In this case, I had to research words and phrases: Aeloian, Locrian, Phyrgian, Lydian and Mixolydian (musical terms depicting different progressions of notes). I was momentarily confused by Ionian and Dorian seeing them initially as eras of Greek architecture until I realized they were also being used in their musical context. Strappado was a new word for me but beautifully conjured up the torture he wanted to inflict on the perpetrator of the massacre. Followed by the beautiful alliteration in “God’s glowing grindstones, keen-edged eviscerations.” However, I’m still working on eg: apotropaic as buckeye.

And to borrow again from his ode to Alan Turing: “I will speak again and again of what men like you could not.” To me, this sums up the essence of what drives Jeff Mann. Hopefully, his poetry will last long after all of us are no longer walking this earth. His words can remain behind like mythical swords that readers can take up and wield, or whose sharpness can cut those who stumble on them, unable or unwilling to grasp their meaning.


View all my reviews