Honestly, there’s not too much to review on this book. This one is more of the stereotypical gay pulp book, where the plot is minimal, and all plot devices and dialogue are just there to lead to a sex scene as quickly as possible. However, there are still a few notable things.
The plot is simple… a high school guy has a crush on his coach, and has a lot of sex with both him and his teammates. The sex with his teammates is relatively vanilla.
One nice surprise is that the coach turns out to be kinky, and does hit many fetish buttons: bondage, verbal, and humiliation. This is actually a bit of a surprise, because many gay pulp books promise bondage and kink, and often either don’t really deliver, or it’s the novel version of pink fuzzy handcuffs–the kink is mostly a “barely there” afterthought. I would say about 80% of the sex in the book is pretty vanilla, but 20% would still hold up in a decent kink scene (albeit more of a novice one), even today. Given the book was written in 1984, that’s fairly impressive.
At times, it does get a bit much. At one point, the coach ties up the student and pisses on him, but then also squats on his chest and defecates on him. Most books of this type don’t really get to that more taboo sort of stuff. It is the only scene like it in the book, and it’s quite short, but it was fairly jarring.
While ages in this book are (as far as I recall) never mentioned, the fact the main character is in high school certainly implies he’s underage, which would not fly today. At least they do say that the coach is relatively young, maybe only about 10 years older than the students. I basically chalk it up to the time period it was written (the early 80s), as well as being a fantasy novel. I do not condone underage at all.
In fact, one of the more impactful non-sex scenes is towards the end of the book, the young blonde twink student Shane Hunter, says that his mother had gotten a hold of some sexy love poems he had written about the coach and had freaked out. The coach shows some genuine concern at this, but does go ahead and have sex with him anyway.
However, in the next chapter, it’s revealed that the coach has disappeared, and no one knew where. During that time, Shane has sex at work with a customer in the bathroom, but is caught and fired. He then cruises a porn theater in the Tenderloin district (the book is set in the San Francisco area), and later at a porn bookstore off Polk Street. He later runs into an old teammate from school, who lets him know that the coach had moved to Washington, D.C. They have sex and live happily ever after.
Not a super literary book, and I do appreciate the variety in the sex scenes, which range from more vanilla to fairly raunchy. There are some minor attempts at plot, but it’s pretty clear that it’s no the focus of the book.
