Girl Crush

by R. Gay

  They were watching me and I loved it. I wasn’t a theater major for nothing. Even audiences for Our Town got my juices flowing. What I hoped was the preview of Our Threesome was worthy of a standing O. Or a sitting O, or a lying on the floor, writhing O. They looked as turned on by my performance as I had been by theirs. They waved. I waved back. They gestured for me to come over. I didn’t need to think. I pulled on my tank and a pair of very short shorts, grabbed my phone and keys and ran across the street.

  The woman opened the door. Her naked body was glossy with sweat and her hair was damp, clinging to her face. She looked me up and down and slowly pulled off my tank top, then my shorts. Bypassing formal introductions, we kissed, pressing our hard nipples against each other. I had never kissed another woman; she instantly had me hooked.

  The man was sexy as hell, with a huge cock and a clear knowledge of how to use it. I usually love that in a man, but I really wished he would leave. Go to the movies, to a bar, to the grocery store: frankly, I didn’t care as long as he left. I wanted to explore her like an uncharted island, an ancient treasure chest, someone else’s house.

  The man reached around me and started massaging my wet clit with one hand while the other played with my nipples. He had long, thick, extremely capable fingers that quickly learned my body. I noticed the wedding band that matched hers and hoped I was this hot for my husband when I was married. I definitely hoped I’d be as adventurous. I pictured them together again and felt even more turned on, grinding my pussy hard against his hand.

  He sat on a chair and pulled me onto him, hands on my hips directing the action. He pushed his hard cock into me again and again. I threw my head back, reveling in the sound of his balls slapping against me with every thrust. “Yeah, grind that hot pussy into me. Squeeze my cock with your tight little pussy. Yeah. Oh, fuck, yeah.” He came like a shaken-up can of soda, the velocity almost knocking me to the floor. He held on to me but leaned back into the chair, snarling, head thrown back.

  I’d had enough of him so I moved to another chair. She knelt down, met my eyes for a moment, then put her face between my legs, targeting my clit. Her tongue felt different from a man’s, smaller and quicker, with a natural inclination to hit my sweet spot. She sucked and licked my now-aching clit, tasting his cum and my juices until I made my own animal sounds. We switched places. I used my own knowledge of the female body to eat her beautiful pussy, to explore her pink, sensitive folds and the hard nub of her swollen clit. Though I was a novice, I seemed to be a quick learner. I have always been good in school, head of the class. I saw gold stars in her eyes when she came, over and over. I was ready for more.

  We were exhausted and sweaty. He got us glasses of cold water. We lay on the floor in front of the window, satiated but still caressing each other.

  He broke the silence. “We’re Rob and Jess,” he said.

  I smiled. “Lisa.”

  “We’ve seen you and your boyfriend. You always have your hands all over each other. We once watched you out the window while Rob took me from behind,” Jess said.

  I felt a sharp twinge between my thighs. Damn, this woman was pure sex.

  “We broke up. That’s why I was taking care of myself.”

  Rob and Jess looked at each other and laughed. Rob said, “You’re welcome to join us anytime. Bring your ex, if you want.” I knew this would thrill Jason. I also knew Jess worked from home—looked like something to do with clothing design. My plans to visit wouldn’t always involve the boys—I had big plans for the dirty things we could do.

  “I’ll take you up on that but I should go now,” I said, not wanting to overstay my welcome. “You guys wore me out.” Beyond the smudged glass door, the sun was rising.

  We stood. I looked out toward my apartment. Jess pressed herself against my back and Rob cupped her from behind. Through the pale shafts of daylight, we could see the silhouettes of several neighbors standing at their own windows. Half the block enjoyed the show. I was glad to have taken center stage. I kissed them both, pulled on my clothes and headed for the door.

  “Come over for dinner tonight? Seven?” Jess looked she was already planning the recipes.

  My phone vibrated: a text from Jason. I want to fuck u. I’m a sucker for the guy; the thought of him and Jess together made me shiver.

  “It’ll be for four. I’ll bring dessert.” I smiled and headed home to rest up for what was in store.

  GIRL CRAZY

  Gina de Vries

  I am the girl who got run out of town because they worried about my influence. Something about their daughters and sons, my garter belt and stompy boots, my big mouth and piercing eyes. I am the girl who makes you nervous because I hold and keep your gaze when we’re talking, when we’re fucking. I am the girl who prefers your nervousness to your bravado, your hot desire to your cool aloofness.

  —Girl Crazy #1, Spider

  Okay, I realize that this is like Queer Girl Cliché number 573, but the first night I saw Spider was at a poetry reading her girlfriend organized at a feminist art gallery. I was twenty-one, spending my summer break from college doing an internship in San Francisco. I was fresh out of a miserable and controlling relationship and happy to be in a new and queer city. I was too naïve to realize I was fresh meat—the new girl in town who didn’t realize how cute she was, who was caught off guard when strangers flirted with her but also loved the attention. I was wide eyed and green and into everything—especially sex. I was free from my sourpuss possessive ex-girlfriend, and I wanted to play. Like, all the time. Sex was all I thought about and all I wrote about. Breakups and living in a new city full of possibilities will make your hormones rage like nothing else, I swear to god.

  I have been excess and lacking, too much and not enough all at once. I have been too slutty or too prudish, too fat or too skinny, too smart or not smart enough, too damaged or not broken down, too much like a boy or not enough of one. I am the queer, the whore, the freak, the geek. And whatever they might say about me, I know I have not failed.

  —Girl Crazy #1, Spider

  I fucked more people that summer than I ever have before or since. I kept a diary exclusively devoted to all the new people I had in my bed, at parties, in alleyways, in the backseats of cars, and once in the back room of a bar on a bar stool. It included a lot of dreamy adjectives and adverbs—every detail I could remember about these girls and boys and daddies and mommies. What they wore, how they kissed, how big their cocks were, how many cocks they had in the first place. Most of those folks, I’d need to look back at that diary to even remember their names, but Spider? Spider I still carry a torch for, after all these years and with three thousand miles between us.

  The kind of girls I like are sweet and mean and whip smart, lovely and vicious. They are bitch tops and bratty bottoms. They are fat girls with curves that wrap all the way around you and hold you up, hold you down, hold you. They are skinny girls with angles so sharp they will cut anyone who dares to fuck with the people they love.

  —Girl Crazy #2, Spider

  Is it cheesy to say I developed and kept the crush on her because of her writing? I mean, also because of her bright shock of blue-green hair and adorable fucked-up front teeth and septum piercing juxtaposed with big Elvis Costello nerd glasses. Also the fact that she rocked a men’s blazer and skinny tie with plaid pants and a fishnet shirt. Also the fact that her wheelchair was covered in stickers from Queer Nation, and being from the generation of queerness that came after Queer Nation, I just thought that was the coolest thing imaginable.

  But still it was mostly her writing. She read this poem the night that I first saw her that just slayed me, opened me up to what good honest writing could be. I was so hot, so intensely engaged, that I came home that night, took out my journal, stayed up writing till two, and then stayed up masturbating till three.

  Most importantly, the girls I like are the kind of girls whose femininity and queerness and very womanhood is hard-worn. Femmes get told a lot of lies in life
: You aren’t strong. Real femmes don’t act ballsy and brassy and tough. Femmes are really straight girls. Real dykes don’t look like you. Real dykes aren’t whores. Real dykes aren’t trans. Real dykes don’t have boyfriends. Real femmes need butches. Real femmes aren’t tops.

  But I love the girls who do not believe the lies. I love the girls who laugh in the faces of their deceivers.

  —Girl Crazy #2, Spider

  When I finally got up the nerve to talk with her at one of the open mics, she was so friendly—sweet and warm and she smiled at me so easy. She told me her name was Sal, and she asked me if I wanted a zine. I said of course I wanted a zine, and we just kept talking. We realized we’d both been riot grrrls at the same time—back when I was fourteen and she was twenty-two. “We might have been pen pals!” I said. “What was your zine called?”

  “Girl Crazy, and I wrote under the name Spider.”

  “Wow,” I said, “That sounds really familiar.”

  I went home that night and dug through the twenty zines I always packed with me no matter where I moved. Sure enough, there she was: A twenty-two-year-old disabled punk dyke who wrote beautiful and hilarious poetry under the pen name Spider Feminista. “God, I can’t believe I almost legally changed my name to Spider Feminista when I was twenty-two!” She laughed when I called her up to confirm that we had, in fact, known each other when I was a teenager. “I’m glad people grow up. And I’m so glad you liked my zines. I need to find yours now, too, they have to be in my collection!”

  I want to state for the record that I am glad that people grow up. I am for the most part annoyed by people who christen themselves things like Rex Anarchy and Octavian Sissypants. But I have to admit that I still think of her as Spider, still call her Spider in my head like it’s a secret sweet pet name. It jarred me a little when people called her Sal. She will always be Spider to me, always that amazing girl who wrote those amazing zines.

  This is not about narcissism. It is not about straight girls experimenting or “going wild” after one too many cocktails or joints, although one or both of us might have been straight, once. It is not about “taking a break” from boyfriends or husbands or the men we fuck, although one or both of us might fuck men sometimes, for fun or love or money or all three. It is about needing each other because we get each other. It is about being gorgeous, unbreakable, aweinspiring together.

  —Girl Crazy #3, Spider

  Even after the weird and serendipitous zine moment, even after running into each other at countless readings and cafés and punk shows and her always asking how I was and always asking about my writing, I was shy. I was convinced she couldn’t want me—because I was younger, because I was too nerdy, because I wore ballerina flats and sneakers with cats on them instead of Docs. She just seemed like the quintessential Tough Punk Dyke, and her girlfriend was smart and gorgeous with hair the color of summer roses, and purple fishnets, and the other lovers of hers I’d met were all spoken-word and zine superstars, and I was shy, not published anywhere except my zine.

  And then she saw me read at an open mic, and I got the email the next day. I remember it to the letter. I can still recite it from memory:Oh, pretty girl, I love the smut that you read at that open mic, about being sweet and submissive and hungry and dirty. I think you are so cute in your vintage dresses with your lovely curls and sparkly eyeliner. You are exactly the kind of girl I would love to take over my knee and spank with a hairbrush.

  Also, if you wanted to come by my house and look at my books sometime, we could just do that, too. I think you would very much enjoy my bookshelves.

  —email from Spider, August 2004

  Getting that email was like being struck by lighting: She wants me. And she likes my writing. Neither of those were small things when all I could think about was fucking her, when all I could do was read her work over and over till there were soft creases worn into the pages.

  I had two weeks left in San Francisco before I went back to school in New York. We made plans to play that weekend. There was a big pansexual play party being thrown at the Fourteenth Street House—a giant purple Victorian between the Castro and Mission that was taken over by the Radical Fairies back in the’70s and repurposed for sex parties. It had three floors, with a serious S/M dungeon, a deck, a hot tub, and big rooms full of couches and giant pillows to fuck on. It was my first time at the house and maybe my second or third play party; I’m sure my mouth was hanging open for most of the night.

  There wasn’t an elevator or a ramp, so we got stuck on the ground level, doing an S/M scene around all the soft pillows and couches. It was a funny setting, but it made everything all the more surreal.

  I didn’t realize how much Spider got off on my youth and the fact that I was still in college until that night. She made good on her promise to take me over her knee and spank me with a hairbrush. I squirmed and yelped and she went on about how cute I was. But at some point during the spanking, she started talking about Foucault—asking me really intense questions about the panopticon and sex theory.

  It occurred to me that she was pretending that she was an evil women’s studies professor. I started to laugh, and couldn’t stop. She talked a lot about “the importance of feminism awarding women sexual agency” while she hit me. The harder she hit me, the less control I had over my laughter. “Are you laughing at me?” she’d ask, and I’d nod, “Yes, I’m sorry! You’re funny!” and then she’d hit me more, harder. She pulled my hair at strategic moments and asked me complicated questions about Andrea Dworkin. I’m sure I got some of them right, but that didn’t really matter. Hitting was punishment for laughing and hitting was a reward for getting questions right, and I loved both.

  She pulled her strap-on out of her tweed pants, rolled a condom onto her cock, and said, the corner of her mouth turned upward into a beautiful sneer, “I think feminism has empowered you enough to suck my dick.” Ever since that night, I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to use that line on someone else.

  She wouldn’t even quit the professor talk when she fucked me. I remember her fingers, how she filled me slowly until almost her whole hand was inside me; nobody had gotten that much into me before. I remember telling her that between my moans, bracing my legs against the edge of the couch. I remember her murmuring back in time with her thrusts that I was a quick study, an apt pupil, a star student.

  Our sex is not kittenish or tentative or soft. Our sex might be vulnerable, it might be complicated, it might even be awkward at moments. But do not mistake me for soft. Do not mistake laughing or crying or asking for it harder, lighter, faster, slower, with soft-focus lighting, with fake nails that you could never dream of slipping inside someone.

  —Girl Crazy #3, Spider

  We only played that one time. I came back to school and stayed on the East Coast, never lived in San Francisco again. I’m what feels like a million miles from Spider and San Francisco. She still sends me her zines and chapbooks, and I still read them and feel moved. Sometimes, when I’m feeling a little blue—lonely or unattractive or just sad about the state of the world—I pull out her zines. I read about girls and sex and possibility, and I smile to myself.

  The kind of girls I like, they aren’t nice girls either. Maybe they grew up in the city like I did, love the feel of the brick wall behind their backs in the alleyway, the feel of gravel under their knees; maybe they are small-town girls who knew all the secret places to chase skirt and cock and dreams back home; maybe they are country girls who know what it feels like to fuck under a sky blooming with stars.

  The kind of girls I like, they are brassy and street smart and wise and bold. They know what they want, and they never, ever apologize for asking for it.

  PSYCHOLOGY 101

  R. Gay

  Vanessa Vicente is one of the few professors at Markham University who commands perfect attendance throughout the semester. She’s a striking woman—six feet tall, long red hair cascading down her back. Her blue eyes are wide and cat shaped. Her slender
arms are perfectly sculpted—toned enough to make you look twice but not so muscular as to scare you. Her real prizes, though, are her breasts and her ass, both firm and round and crying out for the right lover’s hands. Her mind is as amazing as her body. Vanessa’s psychology lectures make the human psyche seem like the most fascinating and unknowable place in the world. Sometimes students are so busy listening to her delve into the mysteries of the cerebral cortex or the depths of human darkness they forget to take notes. She commands exorbitant fees on the lecture circuit. She’s published seven books, two of which were New York Times best sellers. Vanessa Vicente is a rock star and she knows it.

  She teaches in the main lecture hall on campus—the one that holds nearly five hundred students. Every semester, the entire front row is populated by college boys and baby dykes wearing their baseball caps and dirty jeans, their Abercrombie T-shirts and flip-flops. They sit there, leaning forward, occasionally trying to wink at Vanessa or otherwise signal she has their full and undivided attention, reeking of boy and desperation. The futility of their efforts is nothing if not charming. I sit in the last seat of the front row, at the ready for anything Vanessa needs during class. I’ve been her teaching assistant for seven semesters now and I’ve gotten pretty good at giving her exactly what she needs.

  Today, Vanessa is lecturing about brain chemicals and sexual impulses and more than one student is blushing or squirming in his seat but everyone is looking at Vanessa like she’s the only thing that matters in the room. She’s talking about how our ability to control our impulses is all about deferred gratification—we do it in the hope that waiting will get us those things we want. As I listen to the lecture I’ve heard several times before, my throat goes dry and by the end of class, my eyes are glassy. My thighs are tingling and I worry I might leave a wet spot on my seat.