Shadows of Love

Freelance critic Jurrist meets his goal of assembling an ethnically and geographically diverse group of writers (including a black and natives of Arkansas and Chile), but most of these descriptions of gay love are riddled with cliches. There is a gay version of ``true romance'' (``He wore a bathrobe open enough to revealyesthe most perfect body in the world''), a gay nautical ghost story with vampire overtones (the narrator encounters a ``handsome youth . . . draped with long strands of kelp'') and a prurient riff on masturbation (a young man seeks to achieve climax by making an obscene telephone call to a priest, while his grandfather waits impatiently to use the phone). Occasionally a story reaches a higher plane (one moving tale recounts the platonic relationship between a woman who is unlucky in love and her gay friend who is dying of AIDS) but even then the prose has an amateurish quality (``AIDS, this ominous stranger, had cast its shadow into the bright light of a life so full of red peppers''). (Jan.)