The Lure of the Library
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The strongest threads binding the collection together are, in fact, reminiscences of school-age awakenings, of the private yearnings of burgeoning gay boys and young men that find physical and intellectual affirmation in the classrooms and libraries of grade schools, high schools, and universities. The anthology proceeds on the premise that there is a connection, at least for would-be writers, between books and the process of coming out.

Richard Labonté provides an eloquent summary of this phenomenon in his brief but illuminating contribution. The school library of his youth, he recalls, was “where I learned the language of being queer. … Books gave me the words and the ideas with which to express my young gay self, without guilt.” This state of literary arousal to queer consciousness preoccupies other noted contributors, as well. In a clever essay by Don Shewey, the writer describes an adolescent thrill at finding the word “homosexuality” in the dictionary, which leads to an induction into a specialized community of reading, one formed around the hieroglyphs of a library bathroom stall. Stephen Greco, on the other hand, transforms the epiphanic moment of his discovery of literature into an elegy for the lost college paramour who helped turn him on to the poetry of Milton.

The head is not the only body part to which Bentley caters, however. While the aforementioned writers establish a certain mood of intellectual sobriety, Sex by the Book also doubles as an assemblage of fun, above-average erotica. The cover of the book, after all, features a photo of a hunky, naked model who’s using a copy of the anthology itself to shield his genitals from the viewer’s prying eyes. (This sets up an infinite regress of the book’s cover, but the model’s hand covers the third iteration.)

The most accomplished of the more erotic tales are ones whose authors took the teacher’s assignment seriously and put it to creative use. In “Secret Shoppers,” for example, Lou Dellaguzzo nods with a flirtatious wink in the direction of “meta-fiction.” Cruising the adult literature section of a bookstore, his graduate student protagonist pauses to meditate on the curious relationship between the made-up characters and the real consumers of gay porn anthologies. The story is meant to draw attention to the ways in which the reader himself, with all his predilections, literary and otherwise, participates in the process of creating this volume, implicated as he is within its very structure and purpose (as the book’s cover also suggests).

Not all of the pieces ascend to such lofty heights, of course. Some resort to cliché and purple prose, achieving little more than the clumsy fantasies of disgruntled bloggers. Luckily, though, the majority of the contributors to this collection were up for the challenge of the assignment. Sex by the Book, in the end, stands as a fine miscellany, capable of engaging the mind and steaming up the glasses of every hardcore bookworm, fretful freshmen and wizened scholars alike.
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Jules F. Hurtado is a doctoral candidate in English at Princeton.