Foreword
Foreword
When I first started writing, I avoided erotica. Not because I didn’t enjoy the genre, didn’t appreciate it, but because I thought I had nothing to add to it. I mean, it had been around a long, long time; what was there left to write about?
Suffice it to say, I thought wrong.
In any case, I wrote pretty much everything else. I wrote funny romances with no s*x. I wrote, actually, for several years, and then, one day, I saw a call for submissions from a publisher who had previously published my work. They were looking for dark fiction, s*x-filled. I shrugged and took a stab at it, the piece, Go f**k Yourself, quickly submitted—and almost as quickly rejected. It wasn’t dark enough, I was told. Again, I shrugged, and asked if they’d like to use it for their online literary site.
They took me up on my offer, and, a month later, my first stab at gay erotica was published online.
It might’ve ended there, had fate not stepped in—had leapt, in fact. Because, not another month later, I received an email from the editor of MEN Magazine. He’d read my story and enjoyed it. He asked if I’d like to write for them. Me. The me who had only ever written one erotic short before, now potentially writing for the most-read gay men’s erotic magazine on the planet. FYI, the me said yes. I mean, I was a writer, albeit one with almost no erotic writing experience, but I knew I had the chops for it.
I’d written almost nothing but romantic comedies prior to that. Now, I’d be writing erotic romantic comedies. Turned out, that was something new I could add to the genre. I could get people off while I made them grin, chuckle, laugh. It was a match made in heaven. And, by the time the magazine folded, I’d written for forty issues of MEN, plus its sister magazines, Freshmen and [2]. I also wrote for almost every gay publisher, culminating in more than two-hundred published short stories, almost all of them erotica, almost all of them romances.
Fate then stepped in again. Soared, in fact. Because I was then asked to edit the oldest and most-read gay erotic anthology on the planet, Best Gay Erotica, which has now been around for more than twenty-five years. Did I have experience editing an anthology? No. Did I let that stop me? Hell no. Did I have the chops for it?
Well, I’ll let you decide, seeing as you have this anthology yet to read, replete with twenty of my erotic romances, almost all of them from my early career, many from my years with the magazines. That said, dear reader, enjoy!
Oh, and when fate steps, and leaps, and soars in, grab its hand and go for it!
Worked for me.
Rob Rosen
San Francisco
