Grab Bag 7

Habu’s Grab Bag 7, representing standalone short stories habu wrote in the winter of 2014–15, is the latest in a series of short story anthologies with eclectic gay male settings and plotlines presented in the order in which they were delivered to habu by his muse, within the period since the previous Grab Bag collection was assembled. Variety and setting are always important in habu’s stories, and, as usual, the settings of these stories span the globe, from such settings as the Carolina coasts; Mystic, Connecticut; the Mid-Atlantic states; Ohio; the Colorado Rockies; and Albuquerque in the United States to the United Kingdom, Australia, and China. The time periods also vary. Although most of these stories are set in the present, one moves to cowboy country in the early 1900s and others take the reader to Broadway in the 1960s and Allentown, Pennsylvania, in the 1970s. And, as always, there are unusual stories that take fresh approaches to men taking their pleasure with other men.

The overarching motivation for a habu story is that it try to be different in some way from ones he has written before, a tall order for a writer who has some 800 short stories published, but a goal we think has been achieved here. As with the previous Grab Bag series, we hope that readers will find stories to entertain, arouse, and evoke thought in this collection.

The collection kicks off with “The Invisible Missing” set at Halloween time, with young migrant workers going missing from a North Carolina gay-employee-friendly produce farm. “Snowbound” moves the action out to the Colorado Rockies in the early 1900s, where one bottom and two randy tops are trapped up in the mountains together in the snow. “Make Me a Star,” set in New York City in the 1960s and an excerpt from habu’s novella Danny’s Choice, provides a cynical look at the price paid for a place on the Broadway stage. “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” moves on to the mid 1970s, where a young man on the make in Allentown, Pennsylvania, is served up at a snowbound Christmas Eve party for three. The theme of “party from hell and heaven” continues with “The Blind Date.”

“Rain Check,” set in any U.S. southern beach town in the present shows that hookups are even possible in the paint section of a hardware store. “Blue Dragon” moves the action to the Midwest, to a small, dying town in Ohio, where a café waiter dreams of adventure—and finds it. Turning from gay BDSM to romance, “Simpatico” tells of a perfect lover’s loving Valentine’s Day present. In “Noah Flip Flop,” an excerpt from habu’s novella Tramp Steaming, an American college student on winter break wraps up a South Sea adventure by hooking up with an Australian street musician in Sydney. A young Smithsonian Museum curator in Washington, D.C., uses an online threesome dating service in “Three on a Date” to find something more than vanilla sex—and certainly finds it.

A young guy down on his luck is picked up off the streets of Albuquerque by a man with a secret in “Sarge.” The American protagonist of “Unexpected Inheritance” discovers that what he had thought were fantasy UK pen pals in a threesome turn out to be a real couple who believe he actually had done what he’d only written as a fantasy. The experience of being initiated in China, bound by red silk, leads to Chad’s building of a South Carolina porn empire in “Shanghai Silk.” In “Confessions,” a young Englishman acquires a farm, a new wife, and a baby that’s not his in an unsuccessful bid to escape his past. The collection ends with a romance in which a young man returning to Mystic, Connecticut, for the funeral of his mother learns that you can, in fact, go home and again take up what you once enjoyed.

Tags: anthology, short story, cowboys, hispanics, rituals, first time, big cocks older-younger, cruising, gay romance, seduction, gay anal, barebacking, interracial, transvestite, double penetration, college, drugs, tattoos, piercings, threesomes, satyrs