Revisitation: Men on Men: Best New Gay Fiction (1986)
Background I have begun a project to read all eight volumes of the Men on Men series of anthologies published between 1986 and 2000. (I hope also to read various other such anthologies — for instance, there were three [I think?] Women on Women anthologies from 1990-1996, the His: Brilliant New Fiction by Gay Writers and Hers: Brilliant New Fiction by Lesbian Writers series, etc. — but I am not a fast reader, so need to take this one step at a time.) I am interested in looking at queer short fiction in the last two decades of the 20th century, for a variety of reasons. The first reason is recuperative: a lot has been forgotten because of changes in the publishing industry, changes in society, the inevitable effects of time, and the fact that a significant proportion of these writers died early in their careers because of AIDS. That links to another reason for this reading: curiosity about how much of this material holds up, either as historical artifact or a...