Despite its title, this is about more than Sex

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