Men of the Manor: Erotic Encounters Between Upstairs Lords and Downstairs Lads

Gay erotica veteran Rosen delivers 13 tales of masters and servants, dandies, fops, and schoolboy dalliances that carry into adulthood. They range from the playful, like Sasha Payne’s “Master Jeffy Learns a Lesson,” an erotic riff on Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories, to the pornographic, as in Michael Roberts’s “Manor Games,” where a servant secretly services his master’s opponents at a poker game to help him clear a debt. There is some exploration of the damaging nature of class-driven social structures, tangentially in J.L. Merrow’s teasing “Brass Rags,” in which a young lord rescues an unjustly terminated servant with less-than-noble intentions, and more seriously in Logan Zachary’s “Front Door, Back Door,” where a household servant who suffers the young heir’s unwanted attentions tries to spare the new chauffeur from the same fate and finds a new friend. The collection will appeal to fans of agonized internal conflict, unabashed raunch, and charming euphemisms such as the “joys of rear occupation.” (Oct.)