MEN ON MEN 7

The latest addition to this now venerable series (the first volume was issued in 1986) offers once again a useful summary of current concerns and approaches in fiction dealing with gay experience. As editor Bergman (Men on Men 6, etc.) points out in his concise, lucid introduction, recent fiction by gay writers has begun to reflect a heightened interest in the experience of working-class gay life (represented here by stories like Keith Banner’s fierce and funny “Holding Hands for Safety” and Shawn Behlen’s precise, unsettling “Mullinville”), and a return to stories that include, but are not overwhelmed by, sexual explicitness, such as Michael Carroll’s “My Senior Senior Year.” More importantly, of course, Men on Men continues to maintain a very high standard of work; among the first-rate pieces here are Greg Johnson’s “The Death of Jackie Kennedy,” Ernest McLeod’s “Frankie’s Wedding,” and Kevin Killian’s deeply moving “Biography.” An instructive and admirably varied gathering of stories.