Award-winning author Lawrence Schimel ’93 counts among his earliest influences “Gilgamesh” and the Yale polo team.

The former he read for RLST 407b, a senior seminar in comparative epics whose themes recur throughout the 30-year-old’s prodigious 45 volumes of original work.

The latter figures prominently in the form of Alberto (the olive-skinned fictional team captain aka “Mr. Drop-Dead Gorgeous”) in “Practice Pony,” the second story in Schimel’s newest collection of gay erotica called “His Tongue.”

Hugh Flick, dean of Silliman College and the religious studies professor who taught Schimel the Babylonian classic, did not remember his former student nearly a decade later. But, he said, he considers his teaching successful when his students “take these stories to heart and derive personal meaning from them.”

“If they go on to write their own stories with them,” he said, “that’s even better.”

If a student’s literary success is further evidence of a teacher’s ability, then Schimel has proved Flick quite talented. “His Tongue” is a finalist for the ForeWord Book of the Year Award and for the Lambda Literary Award, which is the Pulitzer Prize in the world of erotica, Schimel said.

According to the book’s dust jacket, Schimel has crafted “a thinking man’s pornography, a pornography with heart.” He has not shied away from confronting such historically taboo issues in this genre: “safe sex, monogamy, HIV and hemorrhoids.”

And in some cases — because personal experience gives his writing “verisimilitude,” he said — Schimel has looked, for literary stimulation, to the time he spent at Yale.

He came out in 1989, he said, during his freshman year here. By then, he had already sold his first story, a science fiction piece for a collection that specialized in strong female characters. He continues to write science fiction — primarily gay science fiction — to this day and said there is ample opportunity to discuss homoerotic themes in futuristic settings where gender is fluid and the reproductive imperative of heterosexuality is removed.

“If you have sex with a clone of yours, for instance, is that masturbation or is that sex?” he gave as an example of the place of homosexuality in fantasy.

In addition to 15 books of pornography (including the Jewish gay erotica collection titled “Kosher Meat”), gay sci-fi and an AIDS benefit cookbook that compiled recipes from gay celebrities, Schimel has devoted creative energies to vampire stories.

They too have gay undertones. And, occasionally, Yale backdrops.

In “Secret Societies,” Schimel’s protagonist is literally tapped in the Stacks (not too far from the Staxxx) of Cross Campus Library by a group of ancient Yalies, who rise from their tomb once every 100 years to induct a new member by, of course, drinking his blood from a Mory’s cup.

The piece is written in the first person, as are many of Schimel’s erotic works, and he said fans always ask if he has really had that much sex. Alas, no, he said. But they’re frequently informed with details from his own experience. For example, he was a member of the Yale polo team, but he did not have sex on the wooden practice horse in Payne Whitney Gymnasium.

“I write about sex that I should have had and didn’t,” he said. “Unfulfilled desire is a stronger place to write sex from.”

Amy Bloom, a Yale English professor and the author of a “500-word story about how I slept through losing my virginity” for Nerve.com, an online sex magazine, said erotic fiction is a genre like any other when it comes to inspiration and form.

Ultimately, she said, erotica has to be formulaic to some extent, in subject and plot. Schimel said his work has been recognized because it strays from the standard pornographic mold.

“Most pornography as a genre exists in a pseudo-real world,” he said. “You’re home, you’re bored, you call the pizza guy. I write about situations real men find themselves in.”

And Schimel proves himself a true Renaissance man by his varieties of pornography and also by the diversity of his literary interests.

In addition to being a world-renowned homoerotic writer, he has written a number of children’s books and a biography of Venus and Serena Williams.