The many stories featured in this volume of Best Gay Stories focus on what we, as gay men have in common, what underlies and nourishes the roots of all that fabulous diversity. Stories about our shared experience of those oh-so troubling and conflicted pleasures: desire, longing and love. This is not in itself all that remarkable given one is a gay man - fundamentally -because one desires other men. Desire is constituent of our identity. Acknowledging the truth of that assertion, however, shouldn't be taken as limiting the possibilities of desire itself; editor Peter Dube doesn't mean to suggest that every one of the stories in this year's collection is necessarily erotic (though some are.) These stories are more complicated than that and they vividly demonstrate that love and longing are both subtle and protean. They point to how human beings desire so much and for so much.