So how come I don’t like it now that she’s a man?
Don’t assume—it’s not the cock issue, even though all my friends insist it is. All he really got was a bigger clit, and that’s just more for me to love. It’s like a Malibu Barbie dick. And I do love it. At least in theory I do.
When he was Mary, I wanted to live between her thighs. Her cunt was the sweetest thing I’d ever tasted. I ate her clit like a last meal and held her hips while she bucked into my face. I drank from her and made her weep and wail. She actually screamed with pleasure. I could have eaten her forever. My Mary. My girl.
Now, it’s so many things. He can’t seem to settle on a name. “Call me Jack, no, Phillip—no, do I look like an Alex? Try Alex.” And he’s so fastidious now. Last night, I felt him run the duster over me while I was sleeping. I wonder if his final surgery will involve implanting a squeegee in his arm. He asked me to call him Gunther this week. My Gunther, my surfer dude. I started to cry, and he used Lemon Pledge where my tears landed on the coffee table.
I fell in love with Mary at the beach, at a bonfire party full of drama-fucks with goatees. We volunteered to make a beer run, and walking up to her truck she’d stop every few steps to look at some strange treasure visible only to her in the sand. She picked up a broken sand dollar with more care than I would have thought possible and studied it as if it might contain the secret of life. If she looked at me that way, I thought, I might turn to gold. I brushed her shoulder.
“What would you do if you found me out here in the sand?” I asked, washed in shame and embarrassment the second the words were out. I held her gaze, though, and waited for her to laugh. Instead, her face grew thoughtful.
“You? Well, first I’d need to look you over,” and her hands were there, right on my shoulders, turning me so gently I almost burst into tears. She turned me so my back was to her, then ran her hands down my sides, resting them lightly on my hips and drawing me to her. My body was singing sweet gospel. I felt her breath on my shoulder.
“Then I’d need to sniff you—to make sure you’re fresh.” She giggled, but then her lips were grazing my neck as she breathed in, sending words like hot and wet into my bloodstream, taking my soul with her. We didn’t even kiss on the mouth that night, but we never made it back to the party.
The next morning, she brought me coffee and some daisies she’d picked herself, with obvious care.
He spent most of this week at the gym, snapping towels at other men’s asses, looking at his own ass in the mirror and comparing notes. Guy stuff. He asked me if I’d mind if he grew a goatee. “They can do it with hormones or hair plugs,” he said, “like Elton John has.”My little Elton Artfuck. I go into the bathroom, so I can cry over the sink.
She was my earthy whore when I loved her. Now he says, “Suck it,” and looks away. He gets off on it, though, and he still comes like a girl, all fierce but soft underneath. Still vulnerable. My sweet thing. It’s now, when I’m pinning him down, licking the length of his shaft and pushing the hood back with my tongue, that it feels like old times. I run my thumbs over his nipples—Mary was an A-cup, so he hasn’t bothered with any reductions yet—and watch him struggle with how good it feels. It feels good to me, too, to see him like this. I take his entire dick in my mouth and tell myself it is a dick, and yes, my girlfriend is a man, but instead of freaking out I am becoming more turned on, I think because he does look so beautiful right now, squirming and filling my mouth with that sharp secret taste. I run my hands all over him, teasing his curves, making him moan, thinking, my man, oh, my man. And something hidden deep in me is breaking up, a lifetime of theory converting into ragged need.
“Honey,” I say, taking a deep breath and hoping many things at once. “Honey, I need you to fuck me. Now.”
He is turned on by what I’m saying, but it’s obvious I’m not being clear. “I want you inside me.” And this time I dip down and lick his length once more, to illustrate my point.
He sits up and looks at me like he is from Mars and I am from Venus. My heart is thudding in my ears, the soundtrack to my brain, which is chanting fuck me fuck me faggot boyfriend girlfriend lover lover lover fuck me now. We are facing each other, and I never noticed what a strong jaw he has until now, and before that thought can get far he has grabbed my shoulders and pinned me to the bed and Lord help me Lesbian Feminist Collective but I am spreading for a man, and just thinking that is making me come. He has to push hard on me to get his cock between my labia, and the pressure is making me come harder, and he slides up until the tip strokes my clit on one side and now the other,andIamaslut,andIama whore, and I am divine.
When he was Mary there were easier ways to define things, even though nothing was ever simple between us. But we never did the things, or could have conceived of the things, we did last night. After our marathon, I made strong coffee and we stayed up the rest of the night talking, like old friends, which we are. And when we finally settled down for an early-morning nap I wrapped myself around him and kissed the back of his neck for luck, leaving my smile-print on his skin.
Honest
Cynthia Greenberg
I can’t tell stories. we really did those reckless things and we really did try. not to. to undo them. to smooth over the ruptures they caused. we really berated ourselves and shamed each other for the carelessness we shared. we really couldn’t stop. we really rented any number of hotel rooms and booked random flights. we really picked up in the middle of our days and lusted into the night. we really drove down winding highways in a drunken haze. we really fucked more than we rode. we really misbehaved in restaurants and theaters and shops. we really disregarded our entire lives. we really called in late or sick or didn’t show up at all. we really lost our jobs. we really stopped eating at regular times. we really soiled endless sets of sheets. we really forgot our pets, our politics, our friends. we really jonesed and lied. we really fettered ourselves to our fetishes. we really dressed up to lie down. we really sulked and pouted and whined. we really fled. we really hid. we really walked the streets of your city or mine. we really saw nothing but smut. we really spent all our dollars and borrowed on them. we really leaned, faltered, fell.
I can’t tell stories but you were a boy and I was a girl. or you were a man and I wasn’t. or you were where and how your cock was hung and I was always low and ready and not dry. you said things, I heard things, we crashed into each other. your body was the same and your mind is different, but we crossed the same lines. you have a fist and I hold your hand. you push and I resist. it doesn’t matter what names you call things because you call and I answer. I see you underneath your skin. you take flesh and make it fiction, and I invent what we lack. it doesn’t matter what was said or what people overheard. we were there and it will stay. our madness, our pleasures, our trusts. the fissures we played.
I can’t tell stories but I read myself each night: violence is not just something two bodies commit in the dark. it is a yearning and the danger of desire sitting up between us demanding a fare.
About the Authors
TONI AMATO is a thirty-one-year old Butch who lives in Boston. She has been a contributor to Best Lesbian Erotica 1998, 1999, and 2000. Recently accepted to Joan Nestle’s transgender anthology, Our Own Voices, Amato worships the ground Femmes walk on and firmly believes in writing for the love of a beautiful woman. She is completing her first novel despite these lovely distractions.
LAURA ANTONIOU is the author of the Marketplace series—The Marketplace, The Slave, The Trainer and The Academy. She is editor of the Leatherwomen anthologies, Some Women and Looking for Mr. Preston. Antoniou’s short stories and nonfiction have been widely anthologized. She is currently working on two more Marketplace books, The Reunion and The Inheritor, and a new book titled Serious Player.
ROBIN BERNSTEIN is an editor of Bridges, a journal of Jewish feminist culture and politics; author of Terrible, Terrible!, a children’s book; and co-editor of Generation Q, a 1997 Lambda Literary Award finalist.
Her fiction appears in Friday the Rabbi Wore Lace, Hot and Bothered 2, The Oy of Sex, Women on the Verge, and Best Lesbian Erotica 1997 and 2000. In 1999, Bernstein received Honorable Mention in the Astraea Foundation’s Emerging Lesbian Writers competition.
GWENDOLYN BIKIS is a white dyke living in Oakland, California, where she teaches literacy in adult schools. Excerpts of Cleo’s Back have appeared in The Persistent Desire, Close Calls, Hers3, Does Your Mama Know? and Best Lesbian Erotica 1998. Excerpts of her novel Soldiers have appeared in Catalyst, Conditions, Sleeping with Dionysis, and Sister/Strange. She is the recipient of the John Hay Preston Erotic Writing Award. She is completing a third novel, Cleave to Me.
LUCY JANE BLEDSOE is the author of Sweat and Working Parts, winner of the 1998 American Library Association Gay/Lesbian/ Bisexual Award for Literature. Her work has appeared in Fiction International, New York Newsday, Ms., The Advocate, Northwest Literary Forum, and Pacific Discovery. She is also the author of three novels for young people. Bledsoe teaches in the Masters of Creative Writing Graduate Program at the University of San Francisco.
KATE BORNSTEIN is a New York-based performance artist and author of Gender Outlaw (Routledge), My Gender Workbook (Routledge) and the novel Nearly Roadkill with co-author Caitlin Sullivan. Her stage work includes the solo pieces The Opposite Sex Is Neither and Virtually Yours: A Game for Solo Performer with Audience.
PAT CALIFIA is the author of seventeen books, including the Lambda Literary Award finalists Macho Sluts, Doc and Fluff, The Advocate Adviser, and Diesel Fuel. Califia also pens a monthly advice column for Girlfriends. Califia is a former editor of The Advocate, and contributes frequently to Out, Poz, and Skin Two. This prolific author lives in San Francisco with a very cute boy and an armoire full of cat-o’-nine-tails.
TERESA COOPER is a member of the cocksucking, big-dick-swinging, New York-based Back Door Boys drag king troupe. She is a writer whose fiction and nonfiction has appeared in various collections, magazines and journals. Teresa attended Columbia University’s MFA program in fiction writing, and she is at work on a novel, but who isn’t? Teresa is also the editor/publisher of The Fish Tank, which won a 1999 Firecracker Alternative Book Award.
BREE COVEN’s essays, fiction, poetry, and smut appear in the anthologies Best Lesbian Erotica 1997, The Femme Mystique, Generation Q, Pillow Talk II and the forthcoming Harrington Fiction Quarterly, Between Our Lips, and A Doorway, A Dusk: Queer Lives in the Theater. She originated the baby dyke column in Deneuve (now Curve) magazine, where she was a regular contributor for three years, and has also written for Pucker Up, Princess, and Masquerade. Bree lives in New York.
MEG DALY is the co-editor with Anna Bondoc of Letters of Intent: Women Cross the Generations to Talk about Family, Work, Sex, Love and the Future of Feminism. She is also the editor of Surface Tension: Love, Sex and Politics Between Lesbians and Straight Women. Her articles and book reviews have appeared in Tikkun, The Women’s Review of Books, Newsday, The Oregonian, and other publications. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
MR DANIEL is an African American writer, spoken word artist, and film and video curator and educator. She has curated visual media and performed her work throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. Her writing has also appeared in Hot & Bothered 2, Lip Service, and the magazine ISSUES: For Lesbians of Color. Whatever her current coastal location, she remains committed to writing on art, culture and, of course, sex.
JEANNINE DELOMBARD is a scholar, professor, and culture critic whose essays have appeared in Dyke Life, To Be Real, and Feminist Theory. “Steam” is her first piece of erotica. She is currently assistant professor of early American literature at the University of Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest, where she is writing a book on the racial politics of nineteenth-century abolitionist discourse, At the Bar of Public Opinion: Black Testimony and White Advocacy in Antebellum Literary Abolitionism.
JANE DELYNN is the author of the novels Don Juan in the Village, Real Estate, In Thrall, and Some Do. Her collection of stories and essays, Bad Sex Is Good, will be published in 1998 by Painted Leaf Press. She has published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Mademoiselle, Glamour, The Paris Review, The New York Observer, Redbook, Avenue, Christopher Street, and The Advocate.
DAWN DOUGHERTY lives and writes and works in Boston. She tempers her work as a domestic violence/rape prevention trainer with her burgeoning career as a smut writer and belly dancer. On New Year’s Eve, the butch of her dreams asked her to get married. She said yes.
LUCAS DZMURA’s lesbian erotica has appeared in Bad Attitude and Best Lesbian Erotica 1999. Lucas lived for a decade in Texas, and earned an MA in Biomedical Media Development. He currently works as an instructional designer in Pittsburgh. Lucas is also an artist whose recent work deals with gender identity, polyamory, pansexuality, and spirit. “Scrimshaw Butch” is dedicated to SAZ, the real-life inspiration for that incredible butch.
KELLEY ESKRIDGE lives in Seattle with her partner Nicola Griffith. Her fiction appears in Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers, Little Deaths, Nebula Awards 31, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Flying Cups and Saucers, and Women Of Other Worlds. She has published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Century, and Pulphouse. Her story “Alien Jane” was adapted for the Sci Fi Channel program “Welcome to Paradox.” Her first novel Solitaire is forthcoming (Avon, 2001).
SANDRA LEE GOLVIN is a Lesbian-centered psychotherapy intern, writer, mediator, and adjunct professor at Antioch University. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies including Opposite Sex, Looking Queer, Hers, Best Lesbian Erotica 1996, 1997 and 2000. A native Los Angelena who lives in Venice Beach, she is currently pursuing her doctorate in Clinical Psychology with a focus on the archetypal dimensions of Lesbian Psyche.
GERRY GOMEZ PEARLBERG’s book of poems, Marianne Faithfull’s Cigarette (Cleis), was a 1998 Lambda Literary Award recipient and finalist for a Firecracker Book Award. She also edited the Firecracker Award-winning Queer Dog (Cleis). Her work has recently appeared in The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, The World in Us, Global City Review, and Lesbian Fiction at the Millennium.
CYNTHIA GREENBERG is a displaced California poet and troublemaker living in Brooklyn. She has an abiding interest in activism, literacy, language and bodies of water. Her work has appeared in Nice Jewish Girls: Growing Up in America and several volumes of Best Lesbian Erotica.
KATHE IZZO is a poet working in many mediums: the page, performance, installation, film, mothering, teaching, community. Her poetry, memoirs and fiction have been published in numerous journals and anthologies including Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, Best Lesbian Erotica 1998 & 2000, Blood and Tears as well as others. She is currently completing her first novel, Hummer, a fifteen-year-old’s contemplation on art, numbness and gender at the turn of the twentieth century.
DORIAN KEY is a nice perverted boy living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has appeared in On Our Backs, Best Lesbian Erotica 1998 and 2000, Strategic Sex, and Wicked Women.
MICKEY LASKIN is a New York City based teacher, writer, musician and member of the Lesbian Sex Mafia. Her writing career began in academia and journalism, but while enduring a year of unrequited love and lust, she began “writing sex,” thereby transforming her sexual frustrations into virtual orgasms which she shares with her readers. Her writing appears (sometimes under the pseudonym Maria Santiago) in Venus Infers, Bad Attitude, Prometheus, Heatwave, The Second Coming, and Leatherwomen-III.
HEATHER LEWIS is the author of The Second Suspect (Doubleday) and House Rules (Nan Talese/Doubleday) which won the Ferro-Grumley Award, the New Voice Award, and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her fiction has appeared in Living With the Animals and Surface Tension.
RENITA MARTIN is a Boston-based writer, performance artist, student, and teacher whose work has appeared in Does Your Mama Know?, Best Lesbian Erotica 1997, and Ma Ka: Diasporic Juk. She has traveled nationally touring “Rhythm Visions Never Do Be Finished,” a choreopoem based on her poetry book
of the same title. She is founder/director of Rhythm Visions, a nonprofit devoted to producing significant works by artists of color. She is a playwriting MFA candidate at Brandeis University.
ELAINE MILLER lives in Vancouver, Canada with her yummy lover and her ever-expanding cat collection (the Writer’s Mews). Among other strange things, she has edited Lezzie Smut, owned/ published Diversity Magazine, and is now working on editing a queer erotica and photo anthology, Fusion. Currently she is harder at work on her editing than her writing, and expects that to change as soon as she has a free moment.
PEGGY MUNSON is editor of Stricken: Voices from a Hidden Epidemic, and has won fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Ragdale Foundation, and Cottages at Hedgebrook. Her work has been published in three of the Best Lesbian Erotica books, On Our Backs, Hers3, Literature and Medicine, and San Francisco Bay Guardian. She’s currently working on a collection of poetry and one of short stories, and fighting for the rights of people with CFIDS.
Best of the Best Lesbian Erotica Page 31
