Table of Contents
Title Page
Foreword
Introduction
THE INVITATION
NOTHING IF IT FADES
CUCUMBERS AND CREAM
ANONYMOUS
WOMAN-TIME
KITTY AND THE CAT
SHE NEVER WEARS PERFUME
AMATEUR NIGHT
CRAVE
STELLA LOVES BELLA
HOMECOMING
POOL PARTY
DAFFODILS
WINNER TAKE ALL
LESSONS FOR LEONA
MORNING COMMUTE
AFTERMATH
I HAVE A THING FOR BUTCHES
LA CAÍDA
THE HORSE AND HOUNDS
UNDERSKIRTS
Girl Number One
The Housekeeper
The Lady
The Dinner Guest
Girl Number Six
The Lord
The Daughter
The Friend
The Girls’ Mothers
The Abbot
The Lady
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Copyright Page
FOREWORD
Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I would like to add that those who do remember it will come up with a great guest judge for Best Lesbian Erotica.
Among her many smart decisions, Tristan Taormino, the founder of this series, asked Jewelle Gomez to edit the 1997 volume. It was the second year of Best Lesbian Erotica, and getting Jewelle to select the stories was a major step in the growth and visibility of the book and the genre. This year, when we were discussing possible guest judges, I asked the folks at Cleis: “Could we do repeats?”
I’d had a chance to meet and work with Jewelle earlier in the year, when TOSOS (the LGBT theater company in New York, of which I am a proud member) produced a staged reading of her new play, Waiting for Giovanni. It’s a beautiful and challenging piece about James Baldwin, one of our great American writers, by an artist whose own voice is more powerful than ever. So we asked Jewelle to select this year’s stories and were thrilled when she said yes.
In the fifteen years since Jewelle last worked with Best Lesbian Erotica, the genre has become a mighty one, evolving into a full-voiced maturity, with a loyal audience, and writers whose work stands with the best in any genre. I was proud to pass the finalists on, and wondered which she’d choose: which writers would have their first story published, which of the emerging ones would keep blossoming, which grown artists would thrill us with a masterful tale.
One of the most important things we do as artists, one of our obligations, is to make it possible for others to tell their stories. So each spring when I begin to sort through hundreds of stories, I look and listen hard for the ones that are most necessary. What we do: naming and owning our desires, our loves, our fears, our deepest secrets, is essential. Saying, “No, I am HERE, this is who I am,” is crucial to living when scared, angry people try to erase us, deny us, legislate us out of existence, make us second-class citizens, third-class…nothing.
In Jewelle’s beautiful play about James Baldwin, the artist is pressured not to publish Giovanni’s Room: a book about two men, white men, who love each other. His editor begs him to consider another topic; many of his fellow African American writers think he should be writing about their struggle to achieve equality. And finally, Baldwin picks up his papers from the floor and says:…Still, I can do no more than bind my own wounds and remind them that not accepting love is where the end begins. Each book is my way of wringing life from death. And this story is one I…need…to tell and he is the one I wish to tell it. Unknown. Loving with the certainty of the tides.
And my life, my needs, my questions are my own to be examined by me…read by many. But judgment? In the beginning was the word…words made from the breath of life. It is the same breath whether we are singing a praise song or taking in the scent of our beloved who lies naked beside us. No matter how fierce my need may be; no matter how loud the sound of those who turn away—I am always me…inside here, looking out. Bearing witness. Preaching the word.
Kathleen Warnock
New York City
INTRODUCTION: ON OUR BACKS
Jewelle Gomez
Back in 1984, when I was asked to submit an erotic story to the magazine On Our Backs, I’d never written one before. Of course, I had fantasies like most people (I was, after all, raised Catholic!); but as for writing them down—it never occurred to me. As a lesbian feminist of color I wasn’t against erotic literature; I just wasn’t sure how one constructed a juicy story that wasn’t based on exploitation. But I was already formulating the ideas for my vampire novel, a story told through a feminist lens, so I had begun thinking about how to tackle a traditionally exploitative genre without traveling down the easy road of tradition. So I figured I might as well give erotica a go, too. The challenge of finding the “sweet spot” while creating engaging, multidimensional women who are not taking advantage of each other (unless that was mutual) was a challenge I enjoyed.
The other part of wanting to write the story was a response to a call to action by the Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce (FACT) which, in the 1980s, was providing a sex-positive political alternative to the very loud voices of conservative, antiporn activists. Women’s relationship to sexuality was and remains a complex territory. No matter how hip and powerful we feel, women have been and continue to be seen as the sexual receptacles for men. Male-produced images in popular culture still define us so narrowly it would be impossible for an extraterrestrial being landing on earth to actually recognize a female unless the being had landed in the offices of a fashion magazine where the women are dress-size 0, wear six-inch heels, and all look white, even when they have brown skin. Female images in popular media are crafted to pique the desire of middle-aged white men. And any women that seem to deviate from that are quickly slapped down—see “journalists’” comments about Kate Winslet or Kelly Clarkson being “fat.” Notice how few African American women with dark skin or Asian American women appear on magazine covers or on television series. This affects how we treat ourselves and our desire.
Mainstream pornography simply follows mainstream commercial images to their logical conclusion: women are not people…we’re soylent green. That is—like the eponymous movie—we are a packaged edible, human commodity to be used, abused and discarded at the whim of male consumers. The famous picture that antiporn activists used most often was that of a porn magazine cover in which women were being fed into a meat grinder, legs and high heels the only remaining indication that we were humans. There is no question that these images cause damage. But I’d venture to say that numerically speaking, many more people have their ideas about women shaped by going to auto shows; watching the Kardashians, the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders and children’s beauty pageants; all of the above being alarming cases where women contribute to their own objectification or that of their children, usually without a thought about the pornographic quality of their acts. All of it supports the idea that women are disposable and interchangeable items as easily killed off as changing the tires on your truck.
That said, it is just as dangerous for women to tamp down our sexuality in response to exploitation, and that is what conservative lesbian feminists of the ’80s were insisting on. Should we don the not-so-gay apparel of the cloister? Never enjoy our fantasies? Never experience orgasm because it frightens the horses? When President Ronald Reagan sent Attorney General Edwin Meese on a fact-finding mission, Meese traveled the country, holding meetings, trying to convince local municipalities to shut down “porn” operations. The commission engaged “expe
rts” who emphatically declared that if we didn’t fight this scourge we were Nazis.
A group of us—mostly lesbian—activists went to a courthouse hearing of the commission in New York City, smuggling in signs that said CENSORED and we whipped them out at one point, and sat quietly so it would look really bad if they tried to drag us away. The resulting Commission report didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know, and told us a lot that was totally untrue. The result of the Commission, its report and the so called “porn wars” was not a lessening in the profits of porn magazines or increase in the recognition of responsible human beings, but rather the clamping down on and sometimes ban of gay and lesbian literature (erotic and not) crossing borders.
I know what it’s like to have female sexuality abused. African women were used by slave masters as if they were one of the mules on the plantation; Native women were raped and eviscerated for sport; and every day in the news we see the reports of only a fraction of the rapes and domestic beatings that occur. But women do have a right to sexual expression that we control and we have to be suspicious of any male authority attempting to maintain control over our bodies, whether it’s about what we wear in public, what we do in bed or what we do or do not carry in our wombs: these things are connected.
It’s no accident that lesbians have been at the forefront of that activism trying to hold on to our right to be sexually active and exploratory. We have been declared outlaws for our sexual desire; or worse, told that we (as women) didn’t have any real desire. One of the last things I did before I left New York City was participate in a collective that created a one-day conference (in 1992) called Lesbians Undoing Sexual Taboos—LUST. It featured panels, readings, demonstrations (a lot of women found Annie Sprinkle’s G-spot that day), and it culminated in a dance at the Clit Club complete with a back room for experimentation. I am forever in debt to the women who engaged me in FACT and LUST for expanding my understanding of the significance of desire in our political lives.
I tell this history not to be downbeat, but to indicate how important these stories in this anthology are and celebrate them! I tell the history so that we don’t forget how easily and self-righteously some would take away our right to speak these stories out loud; and so that the younger writers included in this anthology know they are part of a heroic tradition. Women and lesbians are not having an easy passage into liberation and there are those who still believe our bodies are their own personal colonies; to paraphrase Maya Angelou…“and still we rise.”
The variety of stories here will testify to the breadth and variety of lesbian desire and the triumph of freedom of expression. Each one is my favorite, of course, because they all elicit the sense of anticipation or surprise or fun and the desire that makes life worth living. No one really knows what raises our blood pressure, engorges our sexual organs and gets our hearts pumping; it’s a complexity of biology, history and imagination. But each of these authors has created a singular landscape in which she has expert control over the facets of desire for her characters and succeeds in getting the juices flowing, figuratively and literally. Whether you’re listening carefully for the soft, tantalizing rustle of voluminous gowns in the sensual treasure “Underskirts,” by Kirsty Logan, or you’re moving with the hard-driving need of “Anonymous,” by BD Swain, you’ll find the core elements of erotica that are key to our lives as lesbians. These are elements we don’t give up easily even in the face of repression or censorship. On our backs we are not helpless like the crab or turtle; we are open and moist, ready for fulfillment. At the same time we’re ready to spring up to show the power of our desire. As Audre Lorde said, “Our visions begin with our desires.”
THE INVITATION
Maggie Veness
Dear Ella,
This is Stevie from two doors down. Sorry about leaving this under your door, but I was wondering, would you like to go out for coffee with me?
(You’ve been on my mind since last month when we spoke briefly at that carnival. At the time you had a small child asleep on your shoulder and I introduced myself while that worn calliope recording was crackling away in the background—told you I was sure we both lived here on the second floor at 151 Lincoln, me in Number 9. You smiled, said we’d passed each other on the stairs a few times, that you were in Number 7. That’s when I saw it…
I caught that split second when your shiny, green eyes swept from my lips to my flat chest, brushed down over my thighs, then flicked back to my face. That glance was like hearing the first few words of a tantalizing secret—whispered once, then locked away—and was so exciting that ever since then I’ve fantasized about feeling your amazing body surrender to my hungry hands and mouth. I think about you and get this long, slow pulse in my temples. It slides down my spine like a warm tongue, then moves to my belly and continues to grow until desire collides with opportunity—and my impatient fingers carry out an orgasmic exorcism.)
Do you have a favorite café? I’m happy to take you anywhere you like.
(I saw you yesterday from my kitchen window, chatting with neighbors down in the leafy courtyard. You looked pretty in that sky-blue satin blouse and denim skirt. I noticed the careful way you folded your washing as you talked, meeting corners neatly together, flicking and smoothing everything down with your slender, pointy fingers. I also noticed how the lean tendons in your arms flexed when you gathered that overflowing cane basket against your streamlined body.)
And, if you enjoyed our coffee date, would you consider having dinner with me?
(I also saw you last Saturday afternoon, when I took a shortcut home through Brayford Park after work. You were sitting on a wooden bench watching your son play, and I must confess to resting awhile in the shade of a nearby fig tree. After a few minutes you wandered down to join him. I saw your cheeks color and your eyes flash when you ran fast and low to the ground. You guys were having so much fun tumbling and rolling about together, in fact, just hearing all the squealing and laughter made me feel happy. By the time the chasing games were over and you headed home, there were a few wild, red curls fused to your damp forehead.
I want to play too, Ella. I want to take you by the wrists, swing you around and around and watch your aerodynamic body skim and soar. I want to see your skin blush pink as your excitement grows. I want to make you squeal.
After you’d disappeared from view I sat on the same park bench and imagined you next to me, radiating your own brand of pure sunburst energy, your smooth, bare legs so wide apart…so open to experiment. I swear I felt the warmth of your afterglow.)
Then, if dinner went well, would you come away with me for a weekend?
(I could drive you to the coast; take you up to my favorite lookout. We could hold hands and lean way out above the windy cliff face; breathe in the salt air while the sea breaks over the pebbled beach way below. If you wanted to, you could follow me along the overgrown track to this special place I know—a secluded, flat-roofed Spanish bungalow with lime-washed walls and two metal sunrays sitting like eyebrows over the small front windows.
In my favorite fantasy I lock the door behind us, tenderly kiss your mouth and begin to slowly undress you. After undoing the tiny buttons on your blue satin blouse, I slip my palms beneath the fabric and slide it off your strong shoulders. I gently bite your neck, stroke the rippling curve of your ribs, draw out your dark nipples and suck four of your fingers into my mouth. Eventually, I drag your skirt and panties to the floor.
After leading you to the low bed, I ease you down onto fresh cotton sheets, and use my tongue to wash your salty body. I shuck your oyster and hold your pearl between my lips until I hear you growl with pleasure, then turn my hand into a snake and wriggle inside you ’til the veins in your long neck protrude and your eyes roll back. Frantic by now, I scissor my legs and slide back and forth against your heat until we both arch and jerk and scream with ecstasy.
We fall asleep like that, with our warm, pivoted sex pressed together, our glistening fur tangled into one per
fectly woven female fabric.)
Sorry, Ella. I’m getting ahead of myself suggesting dinners and weekends away. Let’s start again. Will you join me for coffee? I promise it’ll be fun.
(Tonight, after you’ve retreated to the privacy of your bedroom, know that I’ll be nearby in Number 9 imagining those tapered fingers drawing circles between your wet thighs as you consider my invitation. And if my hunch is right and you find my invitation appealing, please withdraw those sweet-tasting fingers and write me your reply. Then, if you should find sleep eludes you, just take that note and tiptoe along our dim, quiet corridor and push it underneath my door—straight into my eager, wet fingers.)
I look forward to hearing back from you soon.
Stevie
P.S. A note under my door would be just fine.
NOTHING IF IT FADES
Nikki Adams
I dabbed the blood from his left shoulder blade, checked for gaps and light spots, then started switching out the three point for a single. “Gonna start the fines now. You doing all right, Dylan?”
“Uh-huh, I’m good.”
I cast a quick look around. Larry was in his groove, buzzing away on a walk-in I hadn’t seen before. The high school kid was somewhere up front, rearranging the flash, cleaning up or just plain goofing off. I leaned a little closer. “Sweetie, you look like you lost more weight. Sure you’re okay?”
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