Copyright © 2014 by Tristan Taormino.
Introduction copyright © 2014 by Ali Liebegott.
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or online 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.
Published in the United States by Cleis Press, Inc.,
2246 Sixth St., Berkeley, CA 94710.
Cover design: Scott Idleman/Blink
Cover photograph: Celesta Danger
Text design: Frank Wiedemann
First Edition.
10987654321
E-book ISBN: 978-1-62778-081-0
“X-Rated Exes” © 2006 by L. Elise Bland first appeared in Naughty Spanking Stories from A to Z: 2 edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel (Pretty Things Press, 2006); “Domme’s Games” © 2007 by Rachel Kramer Bussel was previously published in Fantasy: Untrue Stories of Lesbian Passion edited by Barbara Johnson and Therese Szymanski (Bella Books, 2007); “Native Tongue” © 2007 by Shanna Germain first appeared in E Is for Exotic edited by Alison Tyler (Cleis Press, 2007); “The Ant Queen” © 2006 by Roxy Katt first appeared on the Erotica Readers and Writers Association website (October 2006); “Spoonbridge and Cherry” © 2007 by Catherine Lundoff is from her book Crave: Tales of Lust, Love, and Longing (Lethe Press, 2007); “Sweet No More” © 2007 by Radclyffe first appeared in H Is for Hardcore edited by Alison Tyler (Cleis Press, 2007).
CONTENTS
Foreword • TRISTAN TAORMINO
Introduction: Dumpster Diving • ALI LIEBEGOTT
Different Girls • TAMAI KOBAYASHI
Paradise • VALERIE ALEXANDER
When She Was Good • BETTY BLUE
Chronic • ANNA WATSON
The Bridge • ISA COFFEY
Spoonbridge and Cherry • CATHERINE LUNDOFF
The Waiting Is the Hardest Part • CHANDRA S. CLARK
Where the Rubber Meets the Road • AIMEE PEARL
Shine • JACQUELINE APPLEBEE
Sweet No More • RADCLYFFE
X-Rated Exes • L. ELISE BLAND
Playing with Toys • D. ALEXANDRIA
Undone • MIEL ROSE
The Ant Queen • ROXY KATT
Top Girl • NAN ROGUE
And the Stars Never Rise • MISSY LEACH
Angie’s Daddy • A. LIZBETH BABCOCK
Domme’s Games • RACHEL KRAMER BUSSEL
The 231st Anderson Vampire Family Reunion Is a Thrall-Free Zone • ALICIA E. GORANSON
A New York Story • D. L. KING
Native Tongue • SHANNA GERMAIN
The Storm Chasers • PEGGY MUNSON
About the Authors
About the Editors
FOREWORD
Tristan Taormino
Transgression can be a powerful aphrodisiac. As queer people, we have already challenged one powerful norm by claiming our queerness. So when we tell stories of longing, desire, love, affection and sex, those stories are, by definition, outside of dominant mainstream culture. But the college kid, upper-crust society lady, pro-domme, bootblack boi, female cop, butch Daddy, grocery store clerk, and others who inhabit the twenty-two stories in this book go way past the point of queer lust and fucking. They push even further beyond what’s “normal,” expected and acceptable.
For example, people in stories like Chandra S. Clark’s “The Waiting Is the Hardest Part” and Anna Watson’s “Chronic” eroticize emotions we’re not supposed to think of as sexy, like anger, jealousy and revenge. Others find pleasure in ordinarily nonsexual objects and activities, like the boi who shines shoes and also fucks dildos strapped to them in “Shine” by Jacqueline Applebee.
In some cases, transgression is embodied in the boundaries characters cross with the objects of their desire. It may take the form of seducing a woman under the guise of protecting her from the paparazzi in Missy Leach’s “And the Stars Never Rise” or hitting on a friend’s mom, then taking it one step further into delicious dominance and submission in “The Ant Queen” by Roxy Katt. Miel Rose’s narrator travels a similar path to Katt’s as she finds herself in the stockroom with a coworker who says, “Damn, girl, I’m old enough to be your mother.”
In other stories, the traditional form of the couple is rejected as women explore their sexuality with more than one person at a time, played out in various configurations in “Playing with Toys” by D. Alexandria, “The Bridge” by Isa Coffey, “Spoonbridge and Cherry” by Catherine Lundoff, “The Storm Chasers” by Peggy Munson and “Angie’s Daddy” by A. Lizbeth Babcock.
Sometimes, it’s not the who but the where that embodies the boundary crossing, when someone literally steps outside the confines of the bedroom into public places, places we shouldn’t have sex in or aren’t allowed to, like downtown London, the Coronado Bay Bridge in San Diego, a San Francisco back alley, or in a famous Minneapolis sculpture garden.
In Rachel Kramer Bussel’s story, a professional dominatrix begins to play with her date at a restaurant. When they eventually go somewhere private, the domme dishes out skills her male clients normally pay for. It’s one illustration of how we can and do insert our selves and our queerness into traditionally heterosexual sex spaces. This theme is echoed in scenes set in a strip club in L. Elise Bland’s “X-Rated Exes” and at a high-end escort agency in Nan Rogue’s “Top Girl.”
Another form of transgression can be about the connections we form that defy societal expectations, like the pair in Shanna Germain’s “Native Tongue,” who find their common language is not one of words. Or Valerie Alexander’s lovers, who become so focused on one another that the rest of the world just melts away in their own version of “Paradise.” Two stories take it to another level, toying with the lines between life and death: Alicia Goranson’s vampire story and D. L. King’s modern-day lesbian ghost story.
Like the woman headed to a sex club who wants to shed her sweet image in Radclyffe’s story “Sweet No More,” some of these characters’ transgressions are entirely deliberate. Likewise, in “The Storm Chasers,” Peggy Munson’s narrator knows what she’s doing when she says of the Amish girl she’s fucking, “We want to make Ellie so dirty she can’t go back.” Some transgressions are more circumstantial, but the difference of what these women are doing is known, as with the two girls exploring their newfound desire at summer camp in Tamai Kobayashi’s “Different Girls.” Others are almost accidental, like one character’s revelation of her bisexuality and its unexpected (and unresolved) consequences in “When She Was Good” by Betty Blue.
Ultimately, what ties all these stories together is the desire to push something perhaps a little too far, to give the middle finger to “polite society.” These writers have given us vibrant characters who defy roles and expectations and challenge traditions and norms. These characters don’t just go against the grain—they rub their leather-clad thighs, cum-soaked fingers, drenched pussies and saliva-coated cocks right up against the grain, leaving a mark so you know they were there.
Tristan Taormino
The Hudson Valley, New York
INTRODUCTION: DUMPSTER DIVING
Ali Liebegott
I spent the summer I turned nine riding my bicycle in circles in the small streets of an industrial park behind my house with all the kids in my neighborhood. My best friend Natalie, a huge daredevil and troublemaker, had the idea one day to look for lost treasures in the industrial park Dumpsters. I don’t even know what we were expecting to find. Maybe beer. Or some type of portal to a universe that didn’t have divorce or molestation or loneliness. Natalie climbed into the Dumpsters, one at a time,
while the rest of us waited in clusters, watching her head dip up and down over the green metal side as she sifted through garbage.
After climbing in and out of three or four Dumpsters Natalie cried, “No way.”
Her head disappeared and she sat down in the Dumpster. We all waited and listened to her rustle through what sounded like trash.
“What’s in there, what?” we begged to know.
Then one at a time, Natalie started hurling what she had found over the side of the Dumpster to us. Each magazine landed with a slap on the pavement and featured a close-up cover of some disembodied female mouth sprayed with a face full of come.
“There’s like hundreds in here,” she cried. “They must make the magazines in one of these offices.”
I’d never seen hard-core porn before and stood quietly next to the other kids as they flipped the pages. I remember being astounded at how glossy the pictures were. The pages were thick and the paper seemed really expensive.
“Let’s get out of here before we get busted,” I said.
Natalie climbed out of the Dumpster and we all divvied up the magazines and crammed them in our pockets. Then we rode our bicycles to a nearby park to further examine our literal booty. There were pages of huge pink pussies spread open and spilling pussy innards and giant veiny cocks and huge pancake-sized nipples dripping with buckets of milky come. In other words, the pages were filled with what seemed to be exercises on how to use a zoom lens. When I think about that day I can distinctly remember how the sun felt on my arms as we sat in the park flipping through those magazines, our bicycles scattered on the grass around us.
So this was sex. Giant floating body parts. I felt confused.
Natalie instructed us to bury the magazines in the park so we could come back and look at them whenever we wanted, so we all started burrowing tunnels into the hillside like gophers. Then we rolled up the magazines and shoved them into the holes we’d made. The next day when we came back, we couldn’t find them.
“Someone probably stole them,” Natalie complained.
I loved the idea of someone randomly coming to the park and digging up the landscape to pull out our porn stash. My father had spent my entire childhood walking across parks and beaches with a metal detector, finding thousands of pulltabs and a few nickels. I could understand the desire to find things. Except for my confusing yet long-standing crushes on Bob Barker, Gumby and Aquaman, even at nine I had a sinking feeling that I might be something weird like a lesbian. I wanted to find lesbians in the way that a nine-year-old could want that. I wanted to find something that felt true like the smell of dirt on my fingers after we’d dug the holes for the porn. Or something real like the amazing sun on my arms as we sat in the park, or the honesty of how concrete smells when it gets hot and wet and we all lay down on it after swimming at the public pool. Truth and realness and honesty. What can I say: I still had a tiny fire of hope at nine.
The next few years solidified each demon in our varied neighborhood kid souls. The future alcoholics made sure to start drinking every day. The eating disorder girls started looking at food as an enemy. The runaways got really good at packing their duffel bags and the future wife beaters and rapists practiced tying girls up in toolsheds and shooting the heads off lizards with BB guns. Natalie’s older brother was a future wife beater. One day he promised to show us his porn magazines if we agreed to lock him in a lay down freezer in the garage and sit on the top of it while he tried to get out. He was thinking about becoming a Marine and this was his version of physical fitness training. Everyone knew locking a person in a freezer was stupid, but Walter was convincing when he insisted he was strong enough to get out of it. So we sat on top of the freezer, feeling afraid, as Walter scrambled on top of bags of frozen vegetables inside the freezer beneath us. As long as we could hear the bags of frozen vegetables shuffling around then he must still be alive, I reasoned. It was a miracle when Natalie’s older sister came into the garage to get a soda. She’d been inside the house watching soap operas while we were about to kill her brother, if you can even imagine that.
“Where’s Walter?” she said.
We sat stunned for a second and then thank god we pointed to the shuffling sound of vegetable medley bags beneath us. We were big-time busted, but Walter was alive and not brain damaged, and he did keep his promise and showed us his porn collection. The “lesbians” in his Playboys sat naked across from each other and touched each other’s nipples with their snowcone-pink acrylic nails. I remember pages of women with really round asses. I wanted real women. I wanted women with dark sunken eyes who would sit despondently with me on a curb and understand the beauty of fingertips that smelled like the earth after digging holes in the park to bury found porn. I wanted the obvious signs of fucked-up train-wreck women. But it seemed the train wreck in every woman I found in porn magazines was airbrushed out.
When I was eighteen I got the courage to buy my first bit of lesbian erotica. I was nervous so I just darted into A Different Light Bookstore in Santa Monica and then darted out. Unfortunately, I ended up with lesbian erotica poems. Tons of dolphin and mango imagery. Dolphins simultaneously leaping and diving into waves. Couples creepily, catatonically sucking on mangoes in front of each other. I remember trying to jerk off as I was driving home with my new book, but I was unable to find anything stimulating as I turned page after page. I thought that drive home had marred the words lesbian erotica in my brain forever…until I started reading the submissions for this anthology and that idea was smashed. When I got the email from Tristan asking me to be a guest editor I was a little skeptical of my ability to do the job, as I haven’t read much erotica in my life. I expected to find hundreds of pages of leaping dolphins in my mailbox. Maybe the dolphins will eat mangoes, I thought hopefully.
But it turned out even better than that—the stories were filled with the real lesbians I’d been looking for my whole life. Peggy Munson makes me want to push my tongue into each of Ellie’s cigarette burns in her brilliant story “The Storm Chasers.” Roxy Katt makes me wonder why I’m not congregating more often with spoiled upper-class poolside mothers in giant ant costumes. Reading Anna Watson’s “Chronic,” I remember the gift of health and desire. Shanna Germain reinforces the sexiness of wordless affairs. It was an honor to read and select the stories in this anthology. I feel like I’ve waited my whole life to see the many sides of my lesbian self reflected like this in literature.
Happy reading!
Ali Liebegott
Los Angeles, California
DIFFERENT GIRLS
Tamai Kobayashi
It is on the third day at Japanese language summer camp that Susie meets Yoshi, one of the tough girls who smoke behind the equipment shack by the lakeside. They are counselors from the city school but from different sides. Sues is Westside cardigans and saddle shoes, Yoshi railway denim and sneakers. Sues has always fancied the tough girls, feared them, their careless mockeries; uncertain of their loyalty, as if in a high stakes game of angel/devil. Yoshi has muscles, and a scar on her shoulder, like a gladiator or some kind of ancient warrior. She’s not like the girls who squeal at tadpoles, who shriek and shrivel at cobwebs floating on the ceiling of the dorms. Yosh plays chicken with her jackknife by the canoe shed. Yosh plays chicken but Sues is afraid.
Sues is not a tough girl. She steels herself against the lake scum that squishes between her toes and tries not to flinch at the spiders floating down from the rafters. Her skirts are pleated and her pencils are always sharp. Sues knows all of the rules but watches with envy the tough girls’ swagger, their fearlessness and pride. Sues is afraid. Sues is afraid of Yosh. She tries not to notice as Yoshi swings the canoe easily onto her solid tanned shoulders. She glances away as the soap suds bubble down the groove in Yoshi’s back. Yoshi is two months older, her breasts blossoming out; the hairs dark between her legs, under her armpits. Sues at seventeen feels the shifting time. The Beatles sing Yeah yeah yeah on the flickering television and She’s got a t
icket to ride. At seventeen, Sues is lost and far from home.
The fourth day at camp, Sues asks Yosh for a cigarette behind the equipment shack. The other tough girls laugh but Yosh holds out the cigarette, lights it with a wooden match struck from the tread of her shoe. Sues sputters with her first puff, the girls scoffing, but Yosh just smiles.
Yosh has the most beautiful smile.
After that day Sues follows Yoshi everywhere. Shadow, the other girls snicker but Sues pays it no mind. Yosh teaches her about the curl of the canoe paddle, pull of water and motion, the art of steering and the nature of currents. Sues is lost in the ripple of muscle, the curve of Yoshi’s shoulders, the quirk in Yoshi’s eyes.
Yosh carries Sues’s lunch tray, holds her a place in line. The other girls growl and mutter; one of them has left the fold.
That night the storm blows in, midsummer heavy, the air humid and burdened with the strain. Thunderclouds towering but Sues can only see the darkness; the sky cracks open in a blinding, slashing wrench. The lake is dark and the lights in the cabins wink off, on, then off. Black night. Even the sky has fallen.
Sues shivers. She can’t see the palm of her hand and the air quakes and rumbles. Too dark, then flashing, too bright, ghost sheet white, her eyes cannot leap between the extremes. Sues has never liked the thunderstorms, fears nature out of control, she feels like crying and she wants to go home.
An arm slips over her shoulders, Yoshi’s arm. Warm and strong and muscled. The scent of cedar and cigarettes. Sues’s heart is pounding, over the clouds that clash above, her nerves jump and scatter as Yoshi stands and holds and leans. Sues can feel the swell of Yoshi’s left breast pressing along her arm, the cup of her hand against her shoulder. She is touching me, she is touching me, Sues repeats, her mind flooded with the miracle, and she wonders at such fearlessness.
Yoshi is tough, Sues thinks, and needs nobody.
At least not until the day they set the snare traps.
When She Was Good Page 1
