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Review

The middling-quality short story anthology I Like to Watch: Gay Erotic Stories, edited by Christopher Pierce, is exactly what it purports to be, a virtual catalog of voyeurism in all its possible permutations. There is almost no place so remote that men can have sex where they will not be observed by eager eyes, including the bottom of an airshaft (“Shafted”) and during a pseudo-religious experience in what appears to be outer space (“And Then I Held Him Tight”). In many of the stories the watching is supposed to be unobserved but is ultimately detected, making for hot sex scenes. In the final tale, the interestingly named “Compersion” (look it up, it is a real word), the voyeurism is an open part of an S. and M. session that turns increasingly violent and may be uncomfortable for some readers not into the scene. Possibly the most rewarding story is the longest, “The Rookie,” in which a besotted young man spies on his new neighbor, a hunky fireman. The most amusing is “God’s Own Exhibitionist,” where a man prides himself on having solo sex in all the great public places of the world, including the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower. The majority of the 17 stories are rather uninspired and seem to exist only for their numerous descriptions of slow self-pleasuring while watching others having sex or indulging in their own exhibitionism.

 -- Roy Liebman