Best Lesbian Erotica 2005

by Tristan Taormino

  “You look so sacrificial in those savaged clothes,” J. Monarch Young exclaimed. “What will you do when all these mechanical illusions drive away?”

  “I will go home to Daddy and my real life. Why do you ask?” I touched his face.

  “Because my cock wants more of you. I think you want it too.”

  For just a moment, I felt something rising from the beaten fairgrounds, a construction not of steel or fantasy but heart. Young braided grass into a ring. I broke off little sticks and made a tiny raft. “Look at the waist-high fields out there,” Young said. “I always thought their layout looked like squares on calendars. And yet, you shouldn’t have to feel boxed in.”

  “What if I do?” I asked. “The Fun House has to end.”

  “Well, sure, but think of the alternatives. Perhaps you need a carnival that doesn’t end, with a defector from a land of freaks,” he said, and looked at me so earnestly. “I’ll stay and be your Tilt-O-Whirl. I’ll give you tickets. You can ride on me all day.”

  The crickets turned their legs into string instruments just then. Something so usual seemed capable of reinvention. I realized why people ran away to join the carnival, and then ran back again: to make the axis turn. “All’s fair in love and fairground whores,” I said, and took Young’s hand and led it to my ragged hem and slid it in.

  About the Authors

  D. ALEXANDRIA, a Gemini child and a Jamaican descendant, hails from Boston. A self-proclaimed “Boughetto Princess,” she will be the constant thorn in the right wing’s “perfect world.” A regular contributor to Kuma2.net (pseudonym Glitter) and Queer Ramblings, she is working on her first novel and a collection of black lesbian erotica.

  TARA ALTON’s erotica has appeared in The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica, Best Women’s Erotica, Guilty Pleasures, Cleansheets.com, and Scarletletters.com. She lives in the Midwest and writes erotica because that is what’s in her head and it needs to come out. Check out her website at www.taraalton.com.

  CHERYL B. is a writer who has performed her work throughout the United States and internationally. Her writing has appeared in numerous anthologies, literary journals, and magazines. She has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. A native New Yorker, she lives in Brooklyn and online at www.cherylb.com.

  S. BEAR BERGMAN is a theater artist, writer, book reviewer, and pornographer; touring hir award-winning show Ex Post Papa around the country to colleges, universities, and theater festivals, including the National Gay and Lesbian Theater Festival and the National Transgender Theater Festival. Ze has been heard and published in a variety of places, lives on the web at www.sbearbergman.com, and makes a home in Northampton, Massachusetts, where ze is the very lucky hus-bear of a magnificent femme.

  BARRETT BONDON has two surprisingly well-behaved cats and a beautiful girlfriend. She is working on novels that will be ready for publication as soon as a compelling deadline can be found. Though she is inordinately proud of growing award-winning vegetables (don’t get her started on the cutthroat competition in the “cabbage” class), her actual goal is to write lesbian fiction that someone like William Wyler could have directed for the big screen.

  RACHEL KRAMER BUSSEL (www.rachelkramerbussel.com) serves as senior editor at Penthouse Variations. Her books include The Lesbian Sex Book, Up All Night: Adventures in Lesbian Sex, Glamour Girls: Femme/Femme Erotica, Naughty Spanking Stories from A to Z, and A Spanking Good Time. Her writing has been published in more than forty anthologies, including Best American Erotica 2004 and Best Lesbian Erotica 2001 and 2004, as well as AVN, Bust, Cleansheets.com, Curve, Diva, Girlfriends, On Our Backs, Oxygen.com, and The Village Voice.

  L. SHANE CONNER is a thirty-year-old lesbian living in the heartland. She followed her lover of over three years to Cleveland just a few short months ago. She’s never had any fiction published unless you count her high school literary magazine, but, after a late-night drunken discussion with several of the better influences in her life, she decided to try writing erotica. After several attempts, she selected their favorite story and, for the time being, hers.

  SHANNON CUMMINGS was almost kicked out of her midwestern elementary school for chronic masturbation. Since then, she has been writing and performing as an alternative to keeping her hands in her pants. Despite her name, she now passes as a shy, prudish dyke in the San Francisco Bay area.

  ANDREA DALE lives in Southern California within scent of the ocean. Her stories have appeared in Dyke the Halls, Sacred Exchange, and Erotic History. Under the name Sophie Mouette she and a lover have cowritten stories for Best Women’s Erotica, Erotic Women, and Erotic Mythology. In other incarnations, she is a published writer of fantasy and romance.

  SCARLETT FRENCH feels very lucky. Originally from beautiful Aotearoa, New Zealand, she has chosen to settle in London for now, where she works a job she actually likes, lives with her partner and an irascible marmalade cat, and indulges her love of increasingly ridiculous shoes. She has written poetry for seventeen years, but recently discovered the joy of writing erotica. She is a rabid feminist, social theorist, and chocolate connoisseur.

  R. GAY is a trash talker in her own right. Her writing can be found in Best Lesbian Erotica 2002 and 2003, Best American Erotica 2004, The Mammoth Book of New Erotica volumes 3 and 4, and many others. She is also in love with her best friend, only with a happier ending.

  ZANE JACKSON is a queer, genderfluid switch who loves female-bodied boys and the cyberskin dicks that come with them. A gender dissident, a survivor of queer domestic abuse, and an outspoken activist for genderqueer visibility, Z writes about people who live, love, and fuck outside the gender mainstream. Z lives with his big boy partner in Lesbianville, USA.

  TERESA LAMAI lives in the Pacific Northwest, where she finds inspiration in the area’s vibrant artistic communities. She started writing fiction a year ago, and it’s swiftly become a full-blown obsession. In her other life, she’s worked in refugee advocacy throughout North America and abroad. Her work can be found in Best Women’s Erotica 2005 and online at both Cleansheets.com and the Erotica Readers and Writers Association website.

  CATHERINE LUNDOFF lives in Minneapolis with her terrific girlfriend and tests software when not writing or teaching. Her writings have appeared in a number of anthologies, including The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica, The Big Book of Hot Women’s Erotica 2004, Erotic Travel Tales II, Shameless, Below the Belt, Zaftig, Best Lesbian Erotica 1999 and 2001, Electric, and Electric 2.

  ERIC(A) MARONEY writes poetry, fiction, and erotica. S/he has studied erotic fiction at New York University with Jamie Callan and in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with Amie Evans. S/he is an undergraduate in the Southern Connecticut State University Honors College and spends much of her time screwing with the binary gender system and being pissed off about the corruption in the U.S. government. This is her first published story.

  SKIAN MCGUIRE is a working-class Quaker leatherdyke who lives in the wilds of western Massachusetts with her dog pack, a collection of motorcycles, and her partner of twenty-two years. Her work has appeared in On Our Backs, Best Bisexual Erotica 2, Best Lesbian Erotica, HLFQ, and a variety of webzines, not to mention the On Our Backs anthology and The Big Book of Erotic Ghost Stories.

  ANDREA MILLER hails from Canada’s East Coast, but at the moment she is teaching English at a university in Mexico. Her smut has appeared in Hot and Bothered 4, Best Lesbian Erotica 2004, Best Women’s Erotica 2005, Working Hard, and Velvet Heat. When not thinking about sex, she likes to cook and practice yoga.

  ELAINE MILLER is a Vancouver leatherdyke who spends her time playing, learning, educating, performing, and writing. Her work has appeared in Skin Deep II, Brazen Femme, Best Lesbian Erotica 1998 and 2001, Best of Best Lesbian Erotica, On Our Backs, Paramour, Anything That Moves, The No Safe Word Anthology, and quite a few tawdry porn sites. She has a regular column in both the Xtra West newspaper and Desire, a new Canadian lesbian magazine.
<
br />   PEGGY MUNSON has published in every edition of Best Lesbian Erotica since 1998, as well as Best of Best Lesbian Erotica. Her work can also be found in Best American Poetry 2003, Lodestar Quarterly, Blithe House Quarterly, On Our Backs, Genderqueer, Best Bisexual Erotica 2, Tough Girls, Sinister Wisdom, Margin: Exploring Modern Magical Realism, and other collections. Visit www.peggymunson.com for news on her latest publications and projects.

  MADELEINE OH is a transplanted Brit, retired teacher, and grandmother now living in Ohio with her husband of thirty-four years. She has published erotic short fiction, novels, and novellas in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia. Visit her website at www.madeleineoh.com.

  JACK PERILOUS is a New York–based journalist whose work has appeared in Best Lesbian Erotica 2003, Glamour Girls: Femme/Femme Erotica, The Time Out New York Guide to Bars and Clubs, and The Rough Guide to New York City, among other titles. She writes for the gay and lesbian press, and contributes regularly to The Village Voice, Girlfriends, Curve, Lambda Book Report, On Our Backs, POZ, and Heeb. Her otherwise evil grandma, whom she suspects strongly of lesbianism and perhaps incest, gave her the rocking horse, and her kind parents knocked first.

  RENEE RIVERA is a member of the San Francisco–based group Dirty Ink, a collective of dyke writers who come together around their passion for language, voice, and sex. She has read in the National Queer Arts Festival and has been heard on Outright Radio, a syndicated PRI show on queer life.

  JEAN ROBERTA teaches English at a university in the Canadian heartland, sings alto in the local queer choir, and writes in several genres. Her erotic stories have appeared in several editions of Best Lesbian Erotica (2000, 2001, 2004) and Best Women’s Erotica (2000, 2003, 2005), as well as numerous other places. Her reviews and opinion pieces appear regularly on several websites, including her column “In My Jeans” on Bluefood.cc. She looks younger than her years, but does not survive on the blood of virgins.

  RAKELLE VALENCIA loses control when smelling fine leather and feeling supple hide. Though riding and roping call to her, she has written short stories for Best Lesbian Erotica 2004, Ride ’Em Cowboy, On Our Backs, and Sextoytales.com. With Sacchi Green, she will coedit the anthology Rode Hard, Put Away Wet: Lesbian Cowboy Erotica, to be published by Suspect Thoughts Press in 2005.

  KYLE WALKER’s work has appeared in Best Lesbian Erotica 2003 and 2004, as well as A Woman’s Touch and Friction 7. “Boiling Point,” like her previous appearances in Best Lesbian Erotica, is a chapter from a novel in progress, What People Want.

  KRISTINA WRIGHT lives in Virginia with her husband, Jay, and a menagerie of pets. She is published in a variety of genres, and her erotic fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Best Women’s Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica 2002 and 2004, Ripe Fruit: Well-Seasoned Erotica, and Bedroom Eyes: Tales of Lesbians in the Boudoir, as well as online at Goodvibes.com and Scarletletters.com. Visit her website (www.kristinawright.com) for more about her and her writing.

  About the Editors

  TRISTAN TAORMINO is the award-winning author of three books: True Lust: Adventures in Sex, Porn and Perversion; Down and Dirty Sex Secrets; and The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women. She is director, producer and star of two videos based on her book, Tristan Taormino’s Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women 1 & 2, which are distributed by Evil Angel Video. She is a columnist for The Village Voice and Taboo Magazine. She has been featured in over three-hundred publications including the New York Times, Redbook, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Playboy, Penthouse, Entertainment Weekly, Vibe, and Men’s Health. She has appeared on CNN, The Ricki Lake Show, NBC’s The Other Half, MTV, HBO’s Real Sex, The Howard Stern Show, The Discovery Channel, Oxygen, and Loveline. She teaches sexuality workshops around the country and her official website is www.puckerup.com.

  FELICE NEWMAN is the author of The Whole Lesbian Sex Book: A Passionate Guide for All of Us (Cleis Press). She is the resident sex expert on ClassicDykes.com. As publisher of Cleis Press since 1980, she has developed and edited books on sexuality and gender by Annie Sprinkle, Joan Nestle, Violet Blue, Patrick Califia, Carol Queen, Loren Cameron, and Tristan Taormino. A writer and sex educator, she lives in the San Francisco Bay area.

  Copyright © 2005 by Tristan Taormino. Introduction © 2005 by Felice Newman.

  eISBN : 978-1-573-44854-3

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  “Frozen” © 2003 by Andrea Dale first appeared in Dyke the Halls edited by Cecilia Tan (Circlet Press, 2003); “Envy” © 2004 by Teresa Lamai first appeared online at www.erotica-readers.com (March 2004); “My Debut as a Slut” © 2004 by Jean Roberta first appeared online at www.sliptongue.com.