Gay Erotica From The 'Hood

Low-Hanging Fruit by G. B. Mann (Grapevine Press, 127 pp.)

Some words of warning to James Earl Hardy, Larry Duplechan, and E. Lynn Harris--watch your backs, fellas, a new black gay writer is right behind you. His name is G. B. Mann. And his debut book, Low-Hanging Fruit, a collection of erotic short fiction, is quite impressive for a rookie.

The book's title, writes Mann in his one-page introduction, "brings to mind various images" such as "flashbacks of Black men swinging from trees," the victims of racist Southern lynch mobs. But it is quite clear that the primary image Mann, a Los Angeles-based writer, wants to evoke is genital.

What is refreshing about these nine stories, set in L.A. or D.C. (where Mann was born), is that the sex in them is not gratuitous. (Unfortunately, the characters never use condoms.) In fact, a couple of them ("Head Game" and "A Love Deferred") barely contain any sex at all. For Mann, it's the plot, not the sex, that matters most. His stories are more than a celebration of black gay male sexuality, they are also a celebration of African-American life and culture. This is particularly evident in "Head Game," my favorite story. Except for the last scene, the rest of the story takes place in an L.A. barbershop with the unlikely name of Plumes. (The shop's name would be too lavender to survive in a black neighborhood.) Mann knows that the barbershop has been an important institution in many black communities. It has been the gathering place for men to swap gossip, baseball or basketball scores, jokes, tales filled with bravado. And if you're homosexually-inclined, as Jaymes, the protagonist, is, it is an opportunity to have your hair cut while "crotchwatching" in a place where "Lingering eye contact, flirtation, and self-adoration, all normally taboo, are acceptable."

Another excellent story is "A Love Deferred," which explains how Kuma Davis, at one time "a ball-playing legend at Ballou High School" ends up on the street "pushing a shopping cart and talking to himself," His descent into hell is linked to a cruel remark by his prom night date that questions his masculinity. This is the first time I've read a piece of fiction about a homeless gay man, and it makes me wonder how many Kumas I've unknowingly walked past.

Unlike the erotic stories found in gay men's skin magazines, the ones in Low-Hanging Fruit are more believable because the characters do not live in a word inhabited only by gay men. As in real life, they interact every day with all kinds of people. For example, the situation In "Busfare" is something that could happen on a city bus. The first-person narrator describes sitting in "the street-side window seat in the very back" of the bus masturbating behind a copy of the Washington Post "to create a shield" as a fellow passenger looks on. "His eyes stretched wide with amazement, then slitty with lust." As the bus makes a stop, he observes that the "People stood on the sidewalk just inches away, oblivious to the heat at the fringe of their awareness."

In "Steal a Way," set somewhere in the South, Mingo and Coye, both runaway slaves, near the end of the story make love in an attic of a "wood frame house" that "sat across the stream," the first stop on their journey north to freedom. Afrocentric historians will dispute the notion that homosexuality existed among African slaves, but I applaud Mann's efforts in writing an "historical" account. The scene in which their master "made them enter him" and eagerly watched Mingo and Coye "as they made love at his command, upon his marriage bed," however, will undoubtedly give the Afrocentrists enough ammunition to declare homosexuality as a white man's perversion. It would have been better if Mann had established their sexuality as something that existed before any encounter with Master Washington. Nevertheless, it is a pioneering story.

As in any collection, Low-Hanging Fruit has stories that are better than others in the same volume, but their cinematic style and pace make them all worth reading.

To sum up, the future looks bright for (the pseudonymous?) G. B. Mann.

This article was originally published in the Lambda Book Report (October 1997).