Frat House Troopers by Xavier Mayne

I just finished Frat House Troopers by Xavier Mayne, which might sound like a silly name for a book, but considering that State trooper Ethan Brandt’s new assignment is to infiltrate a sex-cam operation that puts him in a very uncomfortable position, especially since he’ll have to perform naked on camera for his audition. Fortunately his partner and best friend, Donnelly, has his back—whether that means helping Brandt shop gay boutiques for sexy underwear or offering Jäger and encouragement while he researches porn.

Despite his mortification, Brandt gives the audition his best “shot”—and becomes an overnight sensation. But to meet the man behind the operation, he’ll have to give a repeat performance, this time live on webcam opposite the highest bidder. Donnelly makes sure to win that auction for his partner’s sake, but their plan has a flaw: faking it is not an option.

In the aftermath, Brandt is a humiliated mess trying desperately to come to terms with what he’s had to do for the job and his own mixed feelings. But Donnelly has been on a journey of discovery of his own. Suddenly everything the two men thought they knew about themselves and each other gets turned inside out. Meanwhile, they still have a case to solve… but it may not be the case they thought it was.

The “frat house” mentioned in the books title, seems to be based on fratmen.com’s web-cam house Fratpad. As Fratpad describes itself on its website, “There’s nothing quite like the FRATPAD. It’s the liveliest, sexiest, frattiest cam house in Cyberspace. No fake frat rituals here. Just a house full of college age guys walking around, working out and chatting on webcams, mostly naked, all day long. They create 24 hours of new content every day and there are 36 stationary cams all around the house so you can spy on them when they think you’re not looking.” This seems to be a pretty good description of the “frat house” in the book, as well.

But that’s not all the book is about. Officers Brandt and Donnelly are on a journey of discovery about themselves. Are they the firmly heterosexual men they’ve always believed themselves to be, or is there more to it? Can a man be straight one day and gay the next? Or do some gay men grow up like I did believing that there was no other choice until that day when our sexual awakening begins? In today’s day and age, young men have seen homosexuality more and more in the mainstream. The Internet is a great way to research things and feeling you don’t understand. I think for many young gay men, the option of following your desires are more acceptable. I think this book has a fresh perspective to show on this subject of sexuality. Though you might not be able to tell it from the title, there is something deeper than the superficiality of a very sexy story.

Furthermore, the descriptions of sex are quite fantastic. Mayne certainly has a way with words and knows how to describe sexual tension in a masterful and thoughtful way. Mayne is also able to write sex scenes in a way that doesn’t come across as pornographic, but the scenes are not chaste either. There is some incredibly hot sex scenes in this book, but this book by no means would be one that I would classify as gay erotica. They story and the emotional tensions contained within, far outweighs the amount of eroticism. It’s an almost perfect balance for a book that is just plain fun to read.

Xavier Mayne is the pen name of a professor of English who works at a university in the Midwest United States. Versed in academic theories of sexual identity, he is passionate about writing stories in which men experience a love that pushes them beyond the boundaries they thought defined their sexuality. He believes that romance can be hot, funny, and sweet in equal measure. The name Xavier Mayne is a tribute to the pioneering gay author Edward Prime-Stevenson, who also used it as a pen name. He wrote the first openly gay novel by an American, 1906’s Imre: A Memorandum, which depicts two masculine men falling in love despite social pressures that attempt to keep them apart.

I hope that you will read Frat House Troopers and hopefully you will become so hooked that you will do as I am currently doing, and read the sequel Wrestling Demons.