As promised, this is my second of two reviews I'm writing about finally reading the work of Zane, a Black erotica author whose books were especially prominent in the 2000s, when I was too young to read them. This review covers a pair of anthologies that Zane curated around the theme of Black online dating. Blackgentleman.com was published first, and contains five novellas by Black female romance/erotica authors (the first and last ones written by Zane herself), exploring how different characters approach finding love on the titular fictional dating site. Conversely, Sistergirls.com contains five novellas written by Black male authors. In other words, Blackgentleman.com is written by Black women for Black women, and Sistergirls.com is written by Black men for Black men (but in a way that still appeals to a female audience, since Zane is curating it all). When I found these two anthologies at my library's book sale back in the spring, I insisted on taking them home regardless of their contents simply because they each have the most unsubtle covers I've seen in a very, very long time! Kudos to illustrator Andre Harris for painting these beautiful, moisturized, and scantily clad trios of Black men and women, who are seductively posing in bodies of water for some unknown reason. The paintings seem out of sync with the .com theme of the books, but they're also so perfectly suited to the 2000s and the erotica genre that I can't even complain. Maybe chuckle at the unabashed lack of subtlety, but certainly not complain. Well done.
For the sake of brevity I will mostly be referring to the respective fictional websites as BG.com and SG.com from this point forward. While there was a real Blackgentleman.com presumably created to promote this two-book series (as referenced in the "About the Authors" sections of both BG.com and SG.com), it does not exist now, and there is no indication that Sistergirls.com was ever a real website. It's also curious that while BG.com opens with an acknowledgements section of paragraphs written by each contributing author, SG.com contains no acknowledgements at all. Was it a cost-saving measure, seeing as how SG.com has the same amount of stories but is 80 pages shorter than BG.com? Did the men not feel like they had anyone to thank or acknowledge for their support? I guess we'll never know.
Blackgentleman.com by Zane
"Lessons Learned" is a harrowing yet sweet story about pivoting from colossal mistakes and taking advantage of second chances. Years after breaking up with her high school and college sweetheart due to a misunderstanding, an unhappily married woman in her late 20s named Clarissa happens to see her ex's profile on BG.com after her best friend mentions the site to her. With some helpful interference from her bestie, the woman is able to have a romantic reunion with her ex in New York, learn the truth behind how their messy break-up was orchestrated by her rebound-turned-husband, and swiftly move her life from Atlanta to NYC to start over anew with her true love, leaving the raggedy (and abusive) first husband behind.
None of the women in BG.com are "catfished," as we would say today, but Zane
does provide an entertainingly chaotic alternative to all the happily ever afters by
closing the collection with "Delusions." Here, a DC area woman named Tasha meets her
internet boyfriend for the first time when he visits from California, and
while he is who he presented himself to be looks-wise, he's a much more
terrible and terrifying person than she bargained for. The man's a liar and a temperamental one at that, but Tasha's too fixated on how good-looking he is to see it. In a matter of weeks, their in-person encounters literally go from him fingering her and banging her out on the hood of her car in the airport parking lot, to her needing to bite his penis hard enough to draw blood so she can flee for help after he assaults and abducts her for discovering his status as a murderous criminal wanted by the FBI. It seems much too soon and incredibly unhealthy for Tasha to then perform a singing telegram to ask a man she'd previously rejected on a date instead of, say, taking more time to heal from her traumatic experience and learning how to not be so consumed with finding a man. However, I can also appreciate Zane throwing a bone to internet-wary readers by giving them a story that confirms how they already assume online dating works: a desperate woman learns to leave dating sites alone the hard way, after getting taken advantage of and almost killed by a violent man she really didn't know as well as she thought.
But the real jewel here, the best novella in BG.com by far, has got to be "Your Message Has Been Sent" by J.D. Mason. A widow and single mom named Mo is a community center director in the Black part of Denver, and she brings on a handsome new volunteer named Kevin to substitute teach the center's photography class. They're interested in each other, but Kevin thinks she's married (because she still wears her wedding ring), and despite finally getting the urge to start dating again now that it's been three years since her husband's passing, Mo is unconfident about anyone wanting her. After her younger brother Troy encourages her to give BG.com a gander, she coincidentally finds Kevin on there and starts communicating with him anonymously, toying with him as a coy secret admirer online while being too scared to talk to him at work. "Your Message Has Been Sent" ends somewhat abruptly, but it is undoubtedly the best-written of all the BG.com entries, and there's a BDSM fantasy Mo emails Kevin about that comes to life in a clever way once Kevin realizes that she's his secret admirer. What's most impressive about this story is how it humanizes Mo's brother Troy as a love-obsessed gay Black man and drag queen, emphasizing the supportive relationship that Mo and Troy have (with Mo being a true and loyal ally to him since childhood). Troy isn't merely the tropic sassy "gay best friend" helping the female lead with her woes; he is a complex person surrounded by folks who love him, who are concerned for his safety, who support his performances, who value his insight, who are willing to fight for him. For something published in 2002, that is hugely progressive!
I was so caught off guard by how good the story was that I looked up what else J.D. Mason had written, and realized that my mom already had a copy of Mason's novel One Day I Saw a Black King that's been waiting to be read since 2003. Ma agreed to let me "borrow" it, I flew through the first half of the book in a matter of days (had to take a break to write these Zane reviews), and now I'm having Nowhere Is a Place flashbacks, newly discovering and devouring yet another masterpiece about Black women written by a Black woman, that I wish I would've known about sooner, that should've been heralded as a classic within the Black American literary canon but was not. So rest assured that I will be writing more about Mason at a later date, and that Ma will not be getting her copy back!
Read this book even just for a taste of J.D. Mason's writing. You're welcome!
"You need to learn to be whole all by yourself, Mo... You were born alone and you're going to die alone. You ain't never supposed to make a man your whole world, 'cause he ain't nothing but human like you human and there's no guarantee he's always going to be there." ("Your Message Has Been Sent," p. 143)"The tiny voice inside her begged, 'Please. Please, Mo. Do something before it's too late. Spoon me up something besides this rut you've been force feeding me all these years. Give me something to look forward to. I'll pay you back, Girl.' Her tiny voice sounded pitiful and it broke her heart to have to listen to it, which is why she ignored it most of the time. But not this time. This time, her tiny voice warned, 'If you keep ignoring me, eventually I'm going to stop talking to you, Maureen.'" ("Your Message Has Been Sent," p. 167)"'What's supposed to work, Baby? Everything isn't all or nothing, Mo. How many times I gotta tell you that? It's not about working or not working. Shit, sometimes, it's just about checking it out. Sometimes, you just got to learn to make the best of the in-between.'
'Yeah, why can't you just do something for the sake of doing it, Sis?'" ("Your Message Has Been Sent," p. 190)"Don't strangle [love]. Don't try to hold it down or lock it up. You need to let me be me." ("Your Message Has Been Sent," p. 204)"Yes, I saw him, and you know just as well as I do that fine don't mean shit when it comes to men. The finer they are, the louder their bark." ("Delusions," p. 284)
Sistergirls.com by Zane
I skipped "Somewhere Between Love and Sarcasm" by V. Anthony Rivers. I
just couldn't get into it, and it didn't seem worth my time.
And Rique Johnson makes such bizarre choices in "Life Happens" that I
honestly regret reading it at all. A well-substantiated distrust of men is
repeatedly referenced as the reason why Jessie (the female lead) is slow to dive into
the relationship she's been forming with Tyrone (a man who finds her on SG.com),
only for Johnson to reframe her lesbian experiences as
the real obstacle to the couple's romantic progress. "I thought I was gay, but I
was really just boinking my female boss because she was there for me
after I annulled my marriage, and also because I wanted to get back at
my ex-husband for cheating on me during his bachelor party. Now my boss
won't leave me alone because she's obsessed with me despite being
married to a man herself, but don't worry because I got the gayness
out of my system, even though I only managed to properly break up with my
boss just now. And I really do want to marry you, the man I've been
dating for nearly 2 years and slept with for the first time 3 months ago
and got engaged to today," is... perhaps not as unrealistic a narrative
as it might sound, especially if a decade of hearing listener letters
on The Read has taught me anything. However, in this context, the
homophobia is loud. Tyrone even asks Jessie how she could've "turned
that way" despite being so beautiful, and it's posited that Jessie
wouldn't have considered having a sexual relationship with her boss if
her husband hadn't cheated on her and also drugged her into having a
non-consensual threesome with a woman. All of this furthers the idea
that lesbianism is something thrust upon women due to circumstance or
being preyed upon by other women; it's merely a temporary phase or an
act of rebellion that scorned women resort to until they can get back on
track and pursue men again. Make no mistake, people are allowed to be fluid, to experiment sexually
and leave it at that, but it's so ignorant and dangerous to frame
lesbians either as jealous and predatory (Jessie's boss and the
threesome lady), or as wounded straight women who simply haven't healed
enough to remember that they're straight yet (Jessie).
Now, on to the somewhat positive."You're Making Me Wet" by Earl Sewell is eye-opening in its exploration of how older people might do online dating differently, mainly by cutting the "online" part very short. As 40-somethings who are disinterested in online dating and only try SG.com because their respective 20-something children are overly worrisome about them dying alone, Sam and Sandra don't waste time with a whole lot of back and forth, and to them meeting in person actually feels like a safer and more accurate way of getting a feel for a person. Their first interaction on SG.com leads to them staying up late conversing via instant messenger that same night, they exchange phone numbers and then make jazz brunch date plans over the phone the very next day, and by the weekend they're meeting for the first time at said date. They later find out, as the reader has known all along, that their children are also dating each other, which is resolved by the quartet basically shrugging (and I paraphrase), "Welp, we grown and we'll keep our business a secret." I know this situation isn't technically incest, but that doesn't change how unsettling it is that future implications are casually brushed aside just so the story can end on a happy note. Still the best-written story in this anthology though.
Also to this anthology's credit, to be fair to readers who have valid concerns about meeting people from the internet, SG.com ends with an example of that going criminally wrong in a similar way that BG.com does. "The Wanting" (Michael Presley) features a corporate guy named Ron who gives up his wife and kids for a woman from SG.com whom he has fallen in love with via chats and email, has sent money to, and even believes he shared a night with in a hotel room. Police have to be the ones to inform him that he was one of numerous victims of a teenage white girl's catfishing scheme, employing a ring of sex workers to cyber scam grown professional Black men out of tens of thousands of dollars each.
Once again, my first mind is telling me to tell y'all to leave this book alone. But I don't want to be a hater, so I'll just say read it at your own risk.
Favorite quotes:
"Missy Elliot was singing her hit 'Get Your Freak On'... Sandra got caught up in the music and began dropping her ass like it was hot. 'That's right, girl! Represent for the big women because we know how to get our freak on.' Sandra laughed out loud to herself. 'I got my freak on, damn it!'" ("You're Making Me Wet," p. 106)
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