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SHOP STUD & Other Tales of Gay Male Lust and Love
Short stories best suited for one-handed reading. Christopher Morgan, the well-known author of some of the hottest male-male erotica ever to grace the pages of a 'zine or anthology, comes out of the closet at last! Christopher is really Laura Antoniou, author of the very popular Marketplace series of erotic novels and editor of the Leatherwomen anthologies. So here's a collection of stories, drawn from a wide range of gay male publications, ranging from rough and ready tales of manly brutality to vignettes of homage to the masculine body. The author say, "I wrote them thinking of men at work and at rest – for powerful masters of destiny and eager bottom-boys who were desperate to be taken. I wrote them for magazines, under another name, because that's the business I work in. Now, they can be recognized as mine, gathered together, my own collection of hot men and their adventures."
- GenresM M Romance
136 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 11, 2010
1 person is currently reading
16 people want to read
About the author
Christopher Morgan
64 books3 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 16, 2011
This collection of fifteen stories of man-to-man lust is vividly written, but doesn't pretend to be literary. These stories first appeared in the 1980s and early '90s in stroke magazines and anthologies. As the author explains in her introduction, a widespread belief of the time was that no self-respecting gay man could get it up or get off to words written by a woman -- at least if he knew. And thus "Christopher Morgan," a name meant to suggest an approachable man's man, was born as one of the author's personas.
Laura Antoniou's diverse body of work is being collected, edited and republished in shiny new formats, which makes it easier for fans of her writing to find it all. She is probably best-known for her omni-sexual "Marketplace" novels about a fictional organization for the training and leasing of voluntary slaves in various countries. This novel series as a whole has a complex plot with plentiful sex scenes involving every gender, orientation and implement a reader is likely to have met or heard of. The imaginary world of these novels is absorbing, and even the most minor characters are three-dimensional; their doubts and confusion are sometimes as intense as their desires, whether they are male, female, transgendered, Dominant, submissive, or any combination of the above. There was nothing else like this when these books first appeared, and there still isn't.
Compared to the world of the Marketplace, Antoniou's porn stories are simple vignettes, peopled by social types that barely escape being stereotypes of the genre. It is easy to see why the earliest readers of these stories didn't associate them with The Marketplace or with the lesbian-oriented Leatherwomen anthologies written by Antoniou under yet another pen name.
Now that the author of all these works is "coming out" (her term) as one person, certain characteristics of her style can be seen running through all her work. The narrative voice in her fiction (even when it is third-person omniscient) tends to be direct, unpretentious, attentive to detail and (before her work was seriously copy-edited) sprinkled with grammatical mistakes. A few errors have survived the polishing process, but the reprinted versions of her works look better than the originals.
Here is the author's explanation of her methods and goal as "Christopher Morgan:"
"Short story work is best suited for one-handed reading. Just long enough to catch your interest and get you going before you have to go to work, or out to the bars, or back to sleep. Novels require plots, and time spent not having sex. Short stories get right to the point. They meet -- they screw. It's easy, quick -- and fun."
These stories all feature oral and anal sex, and nothing more complicated. The title of the collection refers to one of three stories named "Dream Lover Interlude," each with a different subtitle. The first "interlude" is about an imaginary "shop stud," an unself-conscious working-class hero. The narrator imagines his crotch:
"I can always see that special worn out area, that long, narrow tube down from the button fly, where my man's heavy cock rests during the day, rubbing the inside of those pants until there's a clear outline of pure sexmeat, showed like the finest craftmen's work."
The description of the dream-man, a fantasy within a work of fiction, combines physical characteristics with markers of occupation and social class:
"His ass is tight and round in those heavy jeans, a shop rag or bandanna sticking out so he can get at it to wipe the sweat from his hard pecs, his thick arms, and his cut stomach. When it's really hot, he'll tie it around his forehead to keep the hair and sweat out of his deep blue eyes, and he'll look like an almost primitive man, a blacksmith or a woodworker, alone with his tools and his work, every pulsating inch of his body used and flexed through a long day."
The dream-man is generic and idealized, but he serves as a model for several of the other characters in these stories who appear just when the narrators wonder if they will ever get laid in the real world.
In every case, the admired "stud" turns out to be gay himself, or he is willing to be initiated into gay life. Each story is told by a first-person narrator who sometimes wants to run the fuck, sometimes wants to surrender to a charismatic Man, and sometimes wants a buddy who is willing to take turns.
The danger of lusting after a "real man" who doesn't seem "queer" is that he might not be. In one of the more realistic stories, "Looking for Bubba," a young man from the urban, white middle class travels through the American South alone in search of a "Bubba," a genuine southern redneck who will fuck him roughly. The narrator gets more than he wants when he exchanges a look with a man at a revival meeting, thinks he recognizes an invitation, then is threatened with rape by two men who call him a "faggot." They make it clear that it is not a term of endearment. The narrator is held by force, hit, kicked, taunted and threatened. To his great relief, he is rescued by a neatly-dressed black man who takes him home to be nursed back to health. As it turns out, this man is gay and well-hung as well as decent and considerate: exactly what the narrator needs.
Compared to the irony, symbolism, social commentary and virtuoso writing that have slipped into male-on-male erotica (including the annual Best Gay Erotica), these stories look as charmingly naive as small-town boys from yesteryear. One can imagine "Christopher Morgan" stroking his own dick while writing his fantasies with the other hand. How postmodern.
----------------------------
Laura Antoniou's diverse body of work is being collected, edited and republished in shiny new formats, which makes it easier for fans of her writing to find it all. She is probably best-known for her omni-sexual "Marketplace" novels about a fictional organization for the training and leasing of voluntary slaves in various countries. This novel series as a whole has a complex plot with plentiful sex scenes involving every gender, orientation and implement a reader is likely to have met or heard of. The imaginary world of these novels is absorbing, and even the most minor characters are three-dimensional; their doubts and confusion are sometimes as intense as their desires, whether they are male, female, transgendered, Dominant, submissive, or any combination of the above. There was nothing else like this when these books first appeared, and there still isn't.
Compared to the world of the Marketplace, Antoniou's porn stories are simple vignettes, peopled by social types that barely escape being stereotypes of the genre. It is easy to see why the earliest readers of these stories didn't associate them with The Marketplace or with the lesbian-oriented Leatherwomen anthologies written by Antoniou under yet another pen name.
Now that the author of all these works is "coming out" (her term) as one person, certain characteristics of her style can be seen running through all her work. The narrative voice in her fiction (even when it is third-person omniscient) tends to be direct, unpretentious, attentive to detail and (before her work was seriously copy-edited) sprinkled with grammatical mistakes. A few errors have survived the polishing process, but the reprinted versions of her works look better than the originals.
Here is the author's explanation of her methods and goal as "Christopher Morgan:"
"Short story work is best suited for one-handed reading. Just long enough to catch your interest and get you going before you have to go to work, or out to the bars, or back to sleep. Novels require plots, and time spent not having sex. Short stories get right to the point. They meet -- they screw. It's easy, quick -- and fun."
These stories all feature oral and anal sex, and nothing more complicated. The title of the collection refers to one of three stories named "Dream Lover Interlude," each with a different subtitle. The first "interlude" is about an imaginary "shop stud," an unself-conscious working-class hero. The narrator imagines his crotch:
"I can always see that special worn out area, that long, narrow tube down from the button fly, where my man's heavy cock rests during the day, rubbing the inside of those pants until there's a clear outline of pure sexmeat, showed like the finest craftmen's work."
The description of the dream-man, a fantasy within a work of fiction, combines physical characteristics with markers of occupation and social class:
"His ass is tight and round in those heavy jeans, a shop rag or bandanna sticking out so he can get at it to wipe the sweat from his hard pecs, his thick arms, and his cut stomach. When it's really hot, he'll tie it around his forehead to keep the hair and sweat out of his deep blue eyes, and he'll look like an almost primitive man, a blacksmith or a woodworker, alone with his tools and his work, every pulsating inch of his body used and flexed through a long day."
The dream-man is generic and idealized, but he serves as a model for several of the other characters in these stories who appear just when the narrators wonder if they will ever get laid in the real world.
In every case, the admired "stud" turns out to be gay himself, or he is willing to be initiated into gay life. Each story is told by a first-person narrator who sometimes wants to run the fuck, sometimes wants to surrender to a charismatic Man, and sometimes wants a buddy who is willing to take turns.
The danger of lusting after a "real man" who doesn't seem "queer" is that he might not be. In one of the more realistic stories, "Looking for Bubba," a young man from the urban, white middle class travels through the American South alone in search of a "Bubba," a genuine southern redneck who will fuck him roughly. The narrator gets more than he wants when he exchanges a look with a man at a revival meeting, thinks he recognizes an invitation, then is threatened with rape by two men who call him a "faggot." They make it clear that it is not a term of endearment. The narrator is held by force, hit, kicked, taunted and threatened. To his great relief, he is rescued by a neatly-dressed black man who takes him home to be nursed back to health. As it turns out, this man is gay and well-hung as well as decent and considerate: exactly what the narrator needs.
Compared to the irony, symbolism, social commentary and virtuoso writing that have slipped into male-on-male erotica (including the annual Best Gay Erotica), these stories look as charmingly naive as small-town boys from yesteryear. One can imagine "Christopher Morgan" stroking his own dick while writing his fantasies with the other hand. How postmodern.
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May 3, 2020
I read this back in the 80’s. One of the finest collections of dominant/submission gay erotica available. If this is your interest this is a must read. Every story is beyond hot. Highly, highly recommended.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews