Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword
Introduction
TOUCHED
HEARTFIRST
REBEL GIRL
HUSH
BLOOD LUST
THE PRODUCE QUEEN
HOT YOGA
STUBBORN ACHE
MAID FOR YOU
THE LAST TIME
MY FEMME
HOW HE LIKES IT
VACATION
COME TO ME
ON MY HONOR
’ 5 0 s WAITRESS
SKIN DEEP
ENVY
WHEN YOU CALL
THE ELEVATOR MAN
NECK MAGIC
NEVER TOO OLD
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Copyright Page
For
Cheryl B. and Kelli
FOREWORD
I’ve never had such difficulty writing my foreword to this anthology. It’s not from lack of having something to say; rather it’s a matter of choosing the personal and historic landmarks as a jumping-off point for the remarks that you’ll no doubt skim over before plunging headlong into this year’s collection of erotica.
But when in doubt, say “thank you.” And I’ll start by thanking this year’s judge, Sinclair Sexsmith, for the outstanding job she’s done. I’ve known Sinclair for several years now; we’ve been between the same covers (in anthologies!), served on panels and shared evenings of readings, and in the last few months, I’ve grown to admire her more than ever for both her craft and eye as an editor, and her strength and courage as a friend and member of the community.
We had an excellent, invigorating exchange about the final choices for this volume, and even once we’d started the process, a detailed conversation (shouted, in a bar, on the night of the Lambda Literary Awards), that gave me more of an idea of how best to determine the stories to give her. Because we trust each other, and respect each other’s opinion, we got the lineup that follows. As I say each month after my reading series, “Drunken! Careening! Writers!”: I think this was the best one ever.
That Lambda Awards night, I ran into a friend in the East Village, and realized that one of the topics people were talking and blogging and tweeting about was the playwright Edward Albee’s speech at the Lammies (he got a Lifetime Achievement Award). In his speech, he identified himself as a WRITER, before identifying himself as gay. There was a lot of criticism of that stance (and my friend commented that Albee had been saying it for many years), and I found myself wondering at the critique. After all, I realized, I identify as a writer first.
I was well into adulthood before I came out, and it was a process that took years and a square tonnage of denial that could power a small city. And yet, during all those years, I was a writer, and had a craft, and worked at it diligently. Even after I came out, which did wonders for my writing, I still paid first dues to the craft. After all, it’s my chosen lifestyle.
A few years ago, I was in Chicago for a reading of one of my plays. It was Pride weekend, and I’d debated leaving New York on one of my favorite weekends of the year. I love to ride behind my sweetie on her motorcycle and wave to the cheering throngs, and stop for the moment of silence on Christopher Street, sometimes right in front of the Stonewall. And on the morning of my reading in Chicago, I got up and went to the venue, pausing as I saw a gaggle (an exaltation?) of drag queens on their way to Chicago’s Pride Parade, and my footsteps turned to follow them. Until I realized: I have to go to my reading. And I went. That doesn’t make me a bad queer, it makes me an artist, with all the accompanying ego and neuroses. And it’s not likely we’ll forget who we are: as Albee pointed out, Tennessee Williams was invariably referred to as a “gay” playwright while the likes of Arthur Miller are not referred to as “straight” playwrights.
Of course, identifying as queer first is no guarantee that everyone will love you. What moved me about Albee’s speech at the Lammies were his passionate tributes to two friends and playwrights who had passed away the month before: Doric Wilson and Lanford Wilson. I quoted Doric’s Street Theatre in last year’s introduction, and talked about how his depiction of outliers in the queer community ruffled the feathers of what can now be considered its mainstream. I often heard chapter and verse from Doric about the people, many of them gay and lesbian, who’d prefer that he just keep his mouth shut, and not write about leather people and transpeople.
And what’s all this have to do with Best Lesbian Erotica, Kathleen? (You might be asking). Well, I’ll tell you. I looked at some of the reviews (both published, and personal reviews on Amazon and the like) for last year’s volume, and found that everyone has her (or his) own idea of what is “best.” For some, anything with a cock, whether real or purchased at the toy store, is not lesbian; for others, anything with BDSM is beyond the pale; and still others consider anything “trans” either MTF or FTM, to be “not lesbian” (or erotic). And then there are the folks who love the variety of the work, and give it two thumbs up, four stars, and a “hip hip hooray.”
From within and without, people continue to nail themselves (so to speak) into boxes, paste the labels on the outside and try to find comfort in knowing exactly who they are and what they should and should not like.
Well, here’s some dynamite to blow up the boxes.
This year’s collection has a chronological arc to it. It starts with the story of two young girls in love: one embraces who she is, the other panics at the unknown. And so it goes through lifetimes: people fall in love some more, break up, have brief encounters, know each other better than anyone else, heal their wounds, have families, take vacations, find comfort, grow older, care for each other, continue their pursuits, and keep on keeping on.
I paid for a cable upgrade so we could watch the New York State Senate pass marriage equality in June 2011. That just seems to me to be one more step in the journey that recognizes me as an adult, a person with the maturity and responsibility (and the desire to take on the responsibility) of marrying, and having (and being) a spouse. Of course, there are many (including friends of mine) who see no need, have no desire to be defined as “married” and worry that the continued push for mainstream recognition takes away the identity (there’s that word again) of queer people, and pushes them/us into predefined roles.
There are no prerequisites for enjoying this book. There will be no judgment, no identity checks, no right or wrong side of the column, no test afterward, no grades. Rather, you might want to pretend it’s the first beautiful day of summer, and no matter what comes next, you’re walking outside and it’s warm and sunny out, and you feel great in your own skin.
As Sinclair and I were preparing this year’s edition, we lost a dear friend and colleague. Cheryl Burke was a wonderful writer and a past contributor to BLE. We’ll always remember and miss her. We’d like to dedicate this year’s Best Lesbian Erotica to Cheryl and her partner, Kelli Dunham.
Kathleen Warnock
New York City
INTRODUCTION
I know what I want.
I knew exactly what I was looking for when I read the submitted stories for this anthology: dirty, smutty, smart about gender, smart about power, packed full of sex with the barest of necessary descriptions of setting and context, and, oh yeah, good writing. It doesn’t have to be dirty in my personal favorite ways—with sultry accoutrements and costuming like stockings and strappy sandals, or with strap-ons and lots of fucking, or with blow jobs and dirty talk. I like stories where the characters are so turned on and lusty that I feel it too, even if it is not my particular kink or pleasure. I like stories with unique descriptions and rolling prose and insatiable
narrators and rising and falling action. I like stories where I want to recreate the action for myself, when I am inspired by the delicious positions and settings and words.
Yes, and the words, let’s not forget the words. That’s what these kinds of books are all about, really. If you wanted a quick, easy turn-on, you could load up any of dozens of queer porn sites—there is no shortage of real, good queer porn out there. But for some of us that is too crass, and a well-done turn of phrase gets us swooning and biting our lips and rubbing our thighs together even more than a dirty video.
I didn’t always know what I wanted. When I was coming out in the late 1990s, though there was a serious lack of queer porn in the video stores, there were plenty of people paving the landscape for what would become the blossoming queer porn of the 2000s. Diana Cage, On Our Backs magazine, Good Vibrations, (Toys in) Babeland, Annie Sprinkle, Susie Bright—and, of course, Tristan Taormino. It was Tristan’s 1998 Best Lesbian Erotica anthology that clicked something into place for me, something I could no longer pretend wasn’t there. I would hide the book in the back of the shelves at the bookstore where I worked, and I’d sandwich it between two others and sneak into the stock room to read when it was slow. I wore creases into the spine with Toni Amato’s story, “Ridin’ Bitch,” and Karlyn Lotney’s story, “Clash of the Titans.” I was genuinely confused as to why I liked these stories so much. What was this effect they had on me? Why did I love them so much? What did it all mean?
I began to find other books, short stories and essays that helped move my budding baby dykery along: Nothing But the Girl—oh, swoon. That essay by Anastasia Higgenbotham in Listen Up: Voices From the Next Feminist Generation. Cunt by Inga Muscio. Breathless by Kitty Tsui. And the Herotica series, which was erotica for women before Rachel Kramer Bussel’s prolific erotica editing career.
I bought one of the Herotica books at an indie bookstore—now gone—on Capitol Hill in Seattle when I visited one summer, before I moved there. But it proved to be too threatening to my boyfriend who, enraged one night after yet another argument about my sexuality, stabbed that book and two other lesbian erotica books with the wide-handled screwdriver that I’d used to masturbate with since I was a teenager.
These books are filled with three powerful things: Women who are empowered about their sexuality (which, by the way, does not involve men). Even the books themselves are threatening.
These books of lesbian erotica are not fluff. They are not nothing. They are not frivolous or useless.
For queers coming out and into our own, they are a path.
Fast-forward a few years and I’d managed to snag myself a lesbian bed death relationship, going out of my mind with desire and disconnection. I stopped writing, because the only thing I was writing was how miserable I felt, how much I wanted out of that relationship—a reality I wasn’t ready to face. I decided that to work off my sexual energy, I would either go to the gym or I would write erotica. Well, I ended up writing a lot of erotica, rediscovering this tool of self-awareness and self-creation that had led me to smut in the first place, and I began writing myself back into my own life, back into the things that I hold most important: connection, touch, release, holding, witness, play.
My first published smut story was in Best Lesbian Erotica 2006. Between the time I wrote it and the time the book came out, I was beginning to end the bed death relationship, in no small part because I’d reminded myself of the value of the erotic, of my own inner erotic world, of erotic words. Between the time I wrote it and the time it came out, I started Sugarbutch Chronicles, (sugarbutch.net) which has carried me through these last five-plus years, often being my sanctuary, support circle, best friend and confidant.
Writing these stories, for me, has not been frivolous. They have not been nothing. They are not fluff or useless.
For me, they were a path back to myself when I got lost.
When I was lost, I had no idea what I wanted, aside from the basic daily survivals: work. Eat. Pay bills. Sleep. Shower. But when I wrote, when I connected with my own desire, I felt a little piece of me bloom and become in a bigger way. I felt more like myself.
I turned again to the great books of smut to help me find myself, to help me find a way back to a partner, a lover, a one-night stand—hell, even an hour with a Hitachi was sometimes enough. The Leather Daddy and the Femme. Mr. Benson. Switch Hitters: Gay Men Write Lesbian Erotica and Lesbians Write Gay Male Erotica. Back to Basics: Butch/Femme Erotica. Doing It For Daddy. And Best Lesbian Erotica, always Best Lesbian Erotica. I still eagerly buy it every year to see what the guest editor’s tastes are, to see what the new trends are, to read the emerging new writers, to get my rocks off.
I rediscovered what I wanted through reading smut and writing it, through carving myself a path in connection with a lineage of sex-positive dykes and sex radicals and queer kink-sters and feminist perverts.
After six years of writing and publishing erotica, I am thrilled to be a guest editor for the series which sparked me into queerness in 1998, thrilled to be choosing stories for the same series that published my first piece, “The Plow Pose,” in 2006, and which helped spark me back to myself. It is so exciting to be contributing to this queer smut hotbed that Cleis Press has helped nurture all these years, and I’m so glad to continue to be part of it in new ways.
I know what I want now. And lesbian erotica, or as I prefer to call it, queer smut, has helped me not only visualize what is possible, but create a path toward getting what I want.
The stories in this book reflect my taste, my favorites, my personal hot spots, certainly, but they are also the best-written stories from a large pile of well-written stories by some of my favorite authors, like Kiki DeLovely and Xan West. There are some less-well-known writers in here whose work you may not be familiar with, yet, but who will leave an impression on you, writers like Anne Grip and Amy Butcher. I found dozens of moments of signposts, signals directing me toward myself, words illuminating my own meridians of ache. With each story, with each act of lust, with each dirty command or submissive plea, I rediscovered my own want.
I hope you find some of what you want within these pages, too.
TOUCHED
Amy Butcher
“I know it sounds wicked strange,” Sharon whispered, “but I think I’ve been touched.” Her thick Boston accent pressed a staccato emphasis into the final word. She rocked slightly as she said this, her heart moving toward me then away. Something ached inside me with each pull.
Sharon had been agitated, so we’d skipped fourth period French, escaping to the top of the bleachers overlooking the football field. We sat cross-legged, knee to knee, the September sun purring against our skin. We were hunched forward like old women, the weight of our emerging adolescence hanging around our necks, bending us forward.
Years of Catholic schooling had indoctrinated me into the war of Good versus Evil but never had the battlefield felt so tantalizingly close. I swallowed hard, daring to lift my eyes toward hers. “By the Devil?” I asked, a mixture of terror and thrill sliding out alongside the words.
“No. By God!” she said, fingering first the hem of her own plaid school jumper then moving across to mine. “By God…” she repeated quietly, taking a whole handful of the material and clenching it in her fist. I could feel her hand trembling through the fabric.
I sat back, relieved but confused. “Well, that’s great, right? First off, God is definitely better than the Devil, right?” I struggled to understand her distress. “And second, this means you’ve been chosen. That’s a good thing. I mean, Sister Abigail is always saying that only a few of us will be…chosen, that is.”
Sister Abigail, our gym teacher and self-appointed guard against all things pleasurable, regularly prowled the hallways to admonish every possible transgression: from patent leather shoes (boys can see the reflection of your underwear) to makeup, from hand-holding to straddle-vaulting over posts (you might slip and damage your “womanhood”). Her mission: to eliminate
everything that could lead us down the path of temptation.
“I know, it’s supposed to be a good thing, but it isn’t working out exactly as Sister Abigail described it.” Her rocking continued. She placed one hand on my knee as if to counter her own movement.
“Ow!” I flinched, “That’s the bruised one…remember? From when you tackled me the other day, jerk?” I stuck out my tongue toward her and gave her a wide-eyed stare. She lightened her touch in response but didn’t let go. “So what do you mean ‘isn’t working out’?” I asked.
“Well, you remember how she said that if you were chosen then you’d feel the Holy Spirit inside?”
“Yeah…”
“That you’d feel a calling, almost like a stick up your butt making you stand super straight?”
“Well, yeah, although I don’t remember Sister Abigail actually using the words ‘stick up your butt…’”
“I know, that’s just how I pictured what she meant.”
We both laughed and leaned forward, touching forehead to forehead, before sitting back again.
“Well, anyway, that you’d feel some sort of buzz or zing, like being struck by lightning. That God would call you, whisper in your ear, that all of a sudden you’d rise above it all and become detached from the material world.”
“Okay, I’m with you. Although I think if God ever decides to speak to me, he better speak up nice and loud. I’d hate to miss whatever he had to say but…” I turned and dug into my backpack for another piece of gum, held the packet out to Sharon, but she shook her head no. I chomped hard on the gum until it merged with the rest and I could blow a decent pink bubble that popped with a crack. “I mean, how would I ever hear him over this?” I asked, peeling the sagging bubble from my nose.
“Will you get serious for a moment?” Sharon said, placing her other hand on my other knee, nailing my attention in place.
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