ABSTRACT
While personal advertisements offer one site of desire for examining discourses surrounding the construction of gay identity, another possible area involves stories about gay people having sex. Such narratives can either be fictional or ‘true-life’ accounts of sexual experiences, and will differ from the personal advertisement genre in that they are even more liable to be based around ideals. While people who write personal adverts are likely to try to construct themselves and their potential partners in the best possible light, a balance still must be maintained between fantasy and realism. Erotic narratives, on the other hand, can be allowed to disregard realistic accounts of sex because their main purpose is to sexually arouse its audience. Therefore, erotic narratives tend to feature descriptions of the best, most exciting sex possible.1 They are important sites in revealing discourses of idealised sexual relationships between ideal participants of a particular gender or sexual orientation. An examination of gay male erotic narratives should tell us a number of things:
• the identity constructions and language use of those who are viewed as ideal sexual partners;
• important themes or narrative patterns within the texts which reveal the discourses of sexuality that the authors have accessed;
• the language that gay consumers/creators of erotic texts find to be sexually arousing.
