The Mammoth Book of Gay Short Stories
edited by Peter Burton
The Mammoth Book of Gay Short Stories has quite the tempting jacket photo. But we all know the old cliché, don't we? Trust me on this one: that lavender-tinted coverboy is mere studpup subterfuge for a madly trumpeting white elephant (or mammoth, as the case may be).
While there are fair amounts of decent writing and interesting ideas to be found in the book's 47 stories, the only way to find them is to turn yourself into the Forrest Gump of gay lit, randomly poking around amidst editor Peter Burton's random sampler of fictional bonbons until you find something that suits your fancy.
Working my way through this book, with its herky-jerky pacing, abrupt changes of pace and lack of a guiding vision, made me long for one of those nights when I curl up by the hearth with a glass of sherry and a good old-fashioned gay novel, glancing up to watch the flames dance as I toss another artistically pointless but commercially trendy queer anthology onto the fire.
In his introduction, Peter Burton explains that Mammoth features stories written in the 50 years since WWII, the end of which, Burton asserts (with scant explanation other than a quote from Quentin Crisp), was a turning point in gay culture. Fair enough, but then things get strange. Burton explains that when four friends from whom he'd solicited stories died he decided only to include authors who were still alive at press time. Burton writes that the loss of his peers "made it impossible to avail myself of stories by James Baldwin, Truman Capote, John Cheevers, Somerset Maugham, David Rees."
Through his odd tribute to his writer friends, Burton does inestimable damage to the book he'd planned to feature them in. Given its forced omissions, Mammoth cannot in any way purport to represent the "best" stories of its time frame and, in fact, old age , even more than AIDS, makes "post-WWII stories by still-living authors" a tough thematic proposition. As the collection breaks down (and believe me, it breaks down), there are one story each from the '40s, '50s, and '60s, two from the '70s, twelve from the '80s and thirty from the '90s. Some are terrific (David Patrick Beavers' pitch dark "Jonah," Colin Spencer's elegant "Nymph and Shepherd"); some howlingly awful ("'Paul, is that you?' I'd whispered through a mouthful of pre-cum" writes Peter Baker in "The Voyeur"). "For various reasons" Burton doesn't even present the stories chronolgically, but in alphabetical order of author's last name.
He suggests that this less-than-arduous structuring will provide "a literary kaleidoscope" leading to our serendipitous discoveries of fascinating themes and juxtapositions as we move from story to story. I, on the other hand, suggest that the organization of dramatic and thematic flow is a primary task for any anthology editor who wishes to be taken seriously.
The John Preston/Michael Lowenthal non-fiction anthologies have worked because they assembled pieces that shared specific themes. The Men On Men anthologies have worked because they are published as a series, each volume striving to capture the facets of a relatively concise moment in time. Brian Bouldrey's still toddling but appealingly precocious two-year-old Best Gay Fiction annual features some contentious choices, but in its series title—and well argued introductory essays—lays out a clear-cut reason for being. Somewhat less satisfying, because they set too broad a goal for themselves, are single-volume, historically-minded collections such as Edmund White's Faber Book of Gay Fiction and David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell's Penguin Book of Gay Short Fiction, but they still are made valuable by their assemblers' clearly articulated missions, layed out in strong prefatory essays. As much as the quality of its individual pieces, the quality of editorial vision can make or break an anthology.
There's a frightful number of broken anthologies out there. And while emerging writers are justifiably proud to be published even in the latest, most loosely Conceived Pen and Penis or Queernucopia collection, even they should recognize the difference between loose chunks of stew meat cellophaned onto a styrofoam tray and an expertly skewered shish kebab.
Mammoth goulash, anyone?
