So Cool, It's Hot

William Burroughs. Gore Vidal. Clive Barker. Rupert Everett.

From literary icons to dime store novelists (and even, um, celebrity tell-alls), there is no shortage of writers within the LGBT community. As with all forms of media, new generations of artists are required to keep gay fiction fresh, but in a world where the Next Big Blog has replaced the Great American Novel it often seems that there are precious few opportunities to discover young out voices with something substantial to say.

Enter Cool Thing: The Best New Gay Fiction from Young American Writers. Edited by 30-something scribes Blair Mastbaum and Will Fabro, the collection pulls together 18 short stories as diverse as the community fabric they represent: some are sexy, some are funny, some are neither. But what is perhaps most surprising about the compilation is that the submissions received from young gay writers eschewed many of the drearier aspects of LGBT fiction: there are no heartbreaking coming out tales here, precious little self loathing, and a general absence of tortured gay malaise. That's not to say the tales utterly ignore the stormy clouds that precede every rainbow - in fact, this pot of literary gold runneth over with sex, drugs, and social satire - but unlike work produced by writers that honed their craft in less tolerant times, the darkness reflected in Cool Thing is presented mostly as a side effect of being human, not as the unique woe of the repressed gay soul.

"It's amazing," says Mastbaum, reflecting on the dearth of submissions that traded in tragedy. "All these boys were living the life they wanted to live. They weren't being repressed by anything. Their unhappiness was based in other stuff, not based on being gay or feeling isolated... it was the unhappiness that everyone can experience."

Mastbaum's debut novel, 2004's Clay's Way, won the Lambda Literary Foundation Award for Debut Fiction for its realistic portrayal of the romantic relationship between a 16-year-old skateboarder and a surfer. He says that many of the young authors whose work he included in Cool Thing also hail from a generation where coming out as a teenager has become the rule rather than the exception; as a result, inner turmoil and conflict over sexuality, while certainly not universally absent, is less omnipresent in the craft of young gay writers.

"I know a lot of the writers that are included; a lot of them were out by the ninth grade," says Mastbaum. "There was nothing about coming out [among the submissions]. It just wasn't an issue for them."

"There was a lot of stuff about sex and drugs," adds Mastbaum. In fact, his own contribution to Cool Thing, titled "New Year's Eve 2000," details a heroin binge among a quartet of gay chums. In the course of getting high, the story's protagonist comes to a somewhat unflattering reappraisal of his boyfriend, a hard-edged tough who is full of machismo except when it comes to standing up to his homophobic father. That this character's suppliant behavior is viewed with derision, rather than sympathy, says plenty about the cool, comfortable way in which these authors inhabit their sexual skin.

"I'm losing respect for him fast," opines one character in "New Year's Eve 2000." "When he was twelve, I understood he had to do what his dad said, but at seventeen, he should be standing up for himself."

Ironically, this collection of fiction that aims to capture the zeitgeist of a young generation was the brainchild of a literary veteran: Don Weise, a former editor at the publishing company Carroll & Graf. In his editor's statement, Mastbaum's co-editor Will Fabro describes how the elder charged these young writers with creating a collection that captured the voice of the next gay generation.

"[Don Weise] approached Blair Mastbaum and me with this project, under the idea that it would portray a new sense of the gay male voice - specifically the young," wrote Mastbaum. "Mr. Weise should be commended for his dedication to the cause; after a feverish period in the 1980s in which gay and lesbian writers cultivated both a sense of community and audience, much of these inroads would come to be decimated by AIDS."

But while saluting the work done by gay writers of the past, Fabro concurs with Mastbaum's estimation that much of the territory covered by those greats is no longer relevant to those of his generation. "What inspires about the writing contained in this anthology is how the aspect of sexuality is attacked, deconstructed, manipulated, or even dismissed," he continues. "Gay sexuality here is not an internal struggle; the coming-out narrative, a necessary and important archetype of gay fiction for the past thirty-something years, is almost a relic to these writers."

He concludes, "It is instead a matter of fact: wildly external and exuberant, sometimes a banal secondary issue, at other times barely acknowledged or even existent, and in a few cases so confrontational as to rub your face in its flesh, hair and musk."

Speaking by phone, and without the benefit of time to reflect on his choice of prose, Mastbaum captures the spirit of Cool Thing with an air of casual eloquence that befits the tome.

"There is a lot of stuff that is full of irony, a lot of stuff that didn't take itself too seriously," says Mastbaum.

"It was mostly issue-free, which is kind of... cool."