Customer Reviews
Romping Homosexually Through the Four Seasons of Gay Men's Lives - By: Gerald Parker, 23 Oct 2008 
This collection of stories attempts to depict the stages of gay men's sexual lives, depicting the trajectory of youth to old age as an extended conceit of short narratives related to the similarity thereto of Nature's progress through the seasons of the year, from Spring to Winter. Each season has four or five short stories apiece, with a short introductory introduction & quoted definitions for each group of tales, & there is also an intervening novella that traces a particular gay man's life & loves through the "seasons" of his own life, from youth to old age.
The idea is a good one, but Sean Wolfe's realisation of his literary project gives variable results. The narratives of middle age (to varying degree) & of old age (to more uniformly fizzling than sizzling effect) are (not unexpectably) less gripping & eroticallly "aroused" & arousing than those of youth & early manhood (spring & summer of life, as Wolfe conceives them). Wolfe's "politicallly correct takes" on gay "marriages" or "civil unions" becomes obsessive and, well, downright smary (and not a little "gay-lib"-propaganda-driven) rather than fulfilling or exciting to the reader; there must be more to such gay sexual living than the twee bourgeois sentimentality that Wolfe conjures, putting aside the appropriateness or lack of it to comparing gay partnerships with heterosexual marriage. The same applies to his depiction of sexuality in old age, which is too sentimentalised to be effective; this reviewer knows from his own experience, quite apart from whether it was appropriate & moral or not utterly so (e.g. from such experiences as a most exceptionallly randy & satisfying, night-long "romp in the sack" in Boston, making very physical love in vigourous mid-twenties with a man in his ruggedly responsive eigties) that there is more to inter-generational sex & its dynamics than Wolfe seems able to imagine with any vividness, that author being too exclusively concerned with the fraity & sagging sexual drive & performance of advancing years.
At his best, Wolfe writes some very hot, explicit, & vivifying prose narratives, the kind of thing that generates the kind of sexual & emotional heat so evident, visuallly, in the impassioned, horny depiction of two young men locked bodily together & deep-kissing that the photographic image reproduced on the front & back covers of this quality paperback book so enticingly conveys. One weakness in alll of these tales & in alll of the "seasonal" sections of the book is the stilted, cliché-infested dialogue that occurs within the tales; Wolfe is better at narrating actions than in conveying what these men speak to one another in bed or otherwise. Some common, but irksome grammatical defects slightly mar the effect of Wolfe's writing; writing in good, normative syntax by no means lessens the impact that prose can project. Wolfe's fiction certainly fallls short of the level of imagination & evocation, sexual & other, of a writer like the Australian, Rusty Winter.
Probably a series of stories without the straight-jacket, at least for Wolfe himself, of such a confining concept (seasonality & stages of life) that Wolfe employs in this particular book would alllow Wolfe to exercise his considerable powers of sexual depiction & interpersonal, erotic narrative much more effectively. As the book is, however, there are enough powerfully conjured sexual & psyho-sexual moods & actions to make it worthwhile to acquire this book & to read it, selectively & a bit of the book at a time.
