Table of Contents
Title Page
Foreword
Introduction
Loved It and Set It Free
Breathing Water
In the Beginning There Was a Fantasy
You Can Write a Story about It
1.
2.
3.
Stazione
Soap City
Unraveling the Stone
To Fuck or Get Fucked
The Way She Does Me
Penny, Laid
Tattoo
Look but Don’t Touch
Never Say Never
The Chick Magnet
Wire
Educating Billie
The Lost Blackjack King in My Eyes / El Perdido Rey del Tahúr en Mis Ojos
Carving a Woman
Class Struggle
A Tangle of Vines
Paisley Comes Back
The Devil’s Dew
Last Pan of the Season
A Bushy Tale
Learning the Present Perfect
Blowing Across America
The Panhandle Straddle
The Cleveland Cleave
The Ivy League Incantation
The Lakeshore Lick
The Bloody Castro
The Brothel
One
Does She Look Like a Boy?
About the Authors
About the Editors
Copyright Page
Foreword
When I came out as a dyke more than a decade ago, I felt truly liberated. As clichéd as that sounds, it’s true. When I began getting it on with women, I felt freed from the script of heterosexual sex that defines sex as cock-in-pussy intercourse and labels anything and everything else as appetizer to the main course. The delicious things I started doing with my girlfriend—oral sex, jerking off, finger-fucking, playing with toys—were considered merely “fooling around” when I was straight. But what we did between the sheets did not feel like dabbling in foreplay, it felt like sex—bigger, better, and more intense than I’d ever had it. As quickly as I could purchase my first purple leather strap-on harness (it was the early ’90s), everything I thought I knew about sex was out the window. Suddenly, all body parts, erotic acts, and desires were fair game. I experienced firsthand what Joan Nestle, Amber Hollibaugh, Pat Califia, and others were raving about: lesbians were on the cutting edge of sexuality.
Our foremothers packed, pounded, and paved the way, the next generation grabbed the veritable dildo-cum-baton, and we continue to run with it. I believe, in fact, that queer sex has revolutionized the sex all people have, including those who consider themselves straight. Part of what gives lesbian (and all queer) sexualities such radical potential is that we create our own vision of what sex is and what it can be. We invent it, we name it, we practice it.
And we put it down on paper: one of the ways we document our unique carnal visions is through erotic writing, and that documentation is critical to our cultural history. If we don’t share our authentic stories that spring to life from our cunts and our minds, others will do it for us. If it weren’t for collections like this, there would be nothing to contradict—or at least complicate—mainstream media images of lesbians. On television, queer girls can be wacky but asexual (hello, “Ellen”), fantastical vampires like Buffy’s Sapphic friends, or motherly and argumentative (example: while the guys on “Queer As Folk” are going at it like crazy, the lezzies are adopting children and fighting). In porn, we’re blonde, busty look-alikes with long fingernails licking each other for the pleasure of men. This book is less slick and ambivalent, more glamorous and bold about women fucking women.
The contributors to Best Lesbian Erotica 2004 have transformed heat and passion into words, and had the courage to share their tales with the world. They have captured an incredible variety of sexual moments we have all experienced in one way or another: experimenting with a first sex toy; daring to pick up a stranger; indulging in a secret fantasy; and pushing boundaries, our own or those of others. The characters in this book have short nails, and they know how to use them. The stories reflect our experiences, our fantasies, our fears, and our hopes about all things horizontal. They are ready and waiting to get you off, but they have another mission as well: to influence what we wear and want, how we flirt and fuck. That’s why it is important to keep writing, reading, and supporting lesbian erotica: not only does it inspire our desires, but it alters the landscape of sexuality for everyone.
Tristan Taormino
New York City
August 2003
Introduction
When I was around twenty-one years old I began to understand that I could probably look forward to a lifetime of backbreaking, soul-cracking shit-paying employment. It was a tradition I inherited from both my workaday family and the bummed-out town that had nurtured me in the style of Rappaccini’s daughter, raising me in a greenhouse of bleak expectations until I was virtually allergic to opportunity.
The next revelation clocked the first one in the jaw—having sex with girls could elevate my inconsequential existence to the mythology of an outlaw. Because it was romantic, because in most places it could straight-up get your ass kicked, because it was dangerous. All filled up with outsider thrill, inspired by these tough and vulnerable girls who kept letting me fuck them—the tunnel between their legs that seemed to wind darkly toward their hearts; the complicated, twisty walls that guarded that same raw place—I thought, if I could write it all down it would be real, it would be that myth, that dangerous and true story. If I could just get it all down my life would be way less meaningless, way less pointless than what it felt like right then—when I was hustling shitbum jobs, pretending I gave a rat’s ass about the work, hoping they wouldn’t send me home for my clothes being ripped up or simply too strange. Capitalism owned my body until the time clock bit its evening chunk from my card; after that it belonged to girls.
I remember casting a desperate, unemployed glance around Boston, looking for a place I could trick into hiring me. I didn’t feel like I had a lot going for me—no school, raised too poor to know how to pass as middle-class, lacking the clothes or the confidence or the ambition. I was inside a cavernous and run-down mall and all that was hiring was the Taco Bell. I knew enough to understand that working at a fast-food joint was a concession to failure, maybe reaching the bottom of the workforce, like you were too stupid to figure out how to get on welfare. The girl behind the counter had smudgy blue rings around her eyes, from eyeliner smeared away in the steamy heat of her job; blue-rimmed eyes, the whites shot with red, hungover red or overworked red, maybe freaked-out-crying-jag red; her red-white-and-blue, totally American, fast-food wage slave eyes. I was in love with her. I thought: we could save each other with our bodies. It was so simple it made me manic and gleeful. We could fuck in the back behind the racks of chrome and frozen bulk foods, we could fuck in the desolate mall bathrooms, in the roomy handicapped stall or precariously close to the slimy stinking toilet in the narrower ones. By the time I handed in my application I had intricate visions of us living together in a tiny, lousy apartment, fucking on a mattress, one square window open to the night and sucking a breeze in to cool us, us churning hot and churning humid over and under and inside each other’s bodies. And the next morning at the mall her eyes would have a new streak of crimson marring the whites, the up-all-night-fucking red, and on my break I would write her poetry, I would write out the story of us together and make us the heroes that I knew we really were, write it so the world would know and we would be okay, so we would have lives that actually mattered.
Okay, none of this happened because Taco Bell didn’t hire me, but the point is I believe that sex
and writing can save people, especially queer people, because it shoots our lives up with hot, crucial meaning and gives us the power to create and recreate that meaning, even after the girl is gone and your heart is broken and your sheets are ruined forever. I loved Debra Hyde’s “Last Pan of the Season” because it’s a working-class story, plus it’s messy and a little gross, my favorite kind of sex. Lisa Archer’s “Loved It and Set It Free” is Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret–era lesbionics, and its realness makes it both hot and hilarious. The play party Rachel Kramer Bussel takes us into in “Never Say Never” is vivid queer-girl territory, a place where sex dramas get made into myths, just like the dirty peep-show booth in Sparky’s “Look but Don’t Touch” and the women’s coffee shop that spawns some bestial role-playing in Jean Roberta’s “A Bushy Tale.” Tattoo parlors and boozy nightclub bathrooms—our landscape. All of the stories selected have elements, slight or overwhelming, of queer outlaw culture—Jeni Wright’s daddy-play in “In the Beginning There Was a Fantasy,” queer sex worker meets gender-fucking trick in Tara-Michelle Ziniuk’s “Does She Look Like A Boy?,” the extravagant queer freak-show underworld existing in a Las Vegas of Tina Cristina Maria D’Elia’s imagination, shared with us in “The Lost Blackjack King in My Eyes.” I could write essays on many of the stories in here—how fantastic and mythical America looks from Peggy Munson’s knees in “Blowing Across America.” I could keep prattling on and on about our righteous outlaw legacy and how girls fucking girls—and girls who’ve become boys and boys who are most definitely girls—is still radical, still crucial, but there’s a whole book in front of you that makes that point super clear, so I think I’ll just let you get to it.
Michelle Tea
San Francisco
July 2003
Loved It and Set It Free
Lisa Archer
In 1985, my first dildo drifted out into the Baltimore Harbor on a broken bookshelf. I’d owned this dong for less than a day, but we’d been through a lot together. The night before, I’d eased it inside me, while my high school best friend lay next to me faking sleep. Most people keep their first dildos until they rot. But I was different. I loved mine and set it free.
“The Boss” was a single piece of beige rubber shaped like a billy club or toy sword—with a handle, a cross-guard, and a ten-inch dong in place of a blade. The label on the package said “anatomically correct,” but even then I knew ten inches was a little on the long side.
I first laid eyes on The Boss when my friend Kim took me to a porn shop on East Baltimore Street. Kim was a born comic with gawky limbs and a wide, pouty mouth. The summer before our senior year, she carried bottles of Sun-In and hydrogen peroxide wherever she went. When we weren’t swimming, she poured them over her head and lay in the sun.
By the time we went back to our all-girls school that fall, Kim’s hair hung in clumps like bleached snakes. People said she dyed her hair orange to match school colors—orange and green. So she dyed it green for one of the field hockey games. This was in the mid-’80s, before Grunge Rock.
Around that time, Kim and I were playing “I Never”—one of the few games you can win through sheer inexperience and naïveté. In “I Never,” players take turns confessing things they’ve never done. If the other player has done something you haven’t, she owes you a penny. I won two cents easily, because I’d never bleached my hair or dyed it green.
It took me a bit longer to come up with my third confession. Finally I said, “I’ve never really gotten a good look at another person’s genitals.”
This was true: Although I’d made out with both boys and girls, we rarely took off our clothes. Instead, we groped each other in dark, semipublic places—fumbling with buttons, bras, belt buckles, and zippers, and glancing over our shoulders every few seconds, expecting our parents to catch us in the act. I’d even lost my virginity in the classic sense on the floor of a toolshed. In short, I’d had plenty of action, but little chance to look at naked bodies or genitalia. I had rarely ever seen boys naked, except when our neighbor little Billy ran across our backyard with his babysitter chasing him. I saw girls’ bodies in locker rooms, but felt much too self-conscious to stare.
I expected Kim to question my confession, but she just nodded and tossed me another penny.
“You should come over and watch porn movies the next time my parents go away. That’ll give you plenty of chances to check out other people’s genitals.”
Unlike my parents—the last in town to buy a microwave or any new appliance—Kim’s family owned a VCR. When her mom and dad went out of town, Kim rented porn. We planned our porn adventure months in advance and waited for her folks’ next vacation.
Kim rented porn videos from a seedy shop on “the Block.” The Block—the 400 block of East Baltimore Street—is Baltimore’s red-light district, where the locals go to see naked girls dancing and buy porn. Growing up in the sub-suburban sprawl of Baltimore County, I’d never been to the Block, so we drove me past it one night, when Kim borrowed her mom’s Honda Civic.
“That’s the Block.” Kim pointed out the window. “Look now, or you’ll miss it.”
I pressed my face against the passenger window. Neon lights danced against the starless sky; then darkness swallowed the neon, as we dove back into the night.
“Was that it?”
“Yeah. It’s only one block. I’ll go around again.”
The second time, she drove more slowly, so I could read the neon signs: Golden Nugget Lounge, the Crystal Pussycat, Gresser’s Gayety Liquors, Savetta’s Psychic Readings, Crazy John’s, and the Plaza Saloon. Glamorous names—at least for kids growing up in Baltimore.
We didn’t rent videos that night. We just drove by, and Kim pointed out Sylvester’s Videos, the store where she rented porn.
“They have booths in the back where you can watch videos, but you don’t want to go in there. The walls are sticky and gross. Let’s just wait until my parents go away, and we’ll rent videos to take home.”
Finally Kim’s parents scheduled an overnight camping trip. They left on a Friday; my heart and stomach fluttered all day at school. After our last class, Kim and I met in the locker room and changed out of our school uniforms and into jeans.
“Hurry up,” said Kim. “I want to get down to the Block while it’s still light out, so no one will break into my mom’s car.” Kim had her mom’s car for the weekend. We slung our backpacks over our shoulders and walked out.
As we drove downtown, I pressed my face against the window and marveled at the dirt on the streets. City dirt is different from country dirt. Where I come from, dirt is brown like mud or red like sandstone. In the city, black grit cakes under your fingernails and sticks to the concrete. The wind writes messages on the sidewalk with black dust and dead leaves. I soon realized we were driving in circles, passing the same buildings.
“Are we lost?”
“No, I’m looking for parking.”
“Where are we?”
“The Block, silly.”
I winced. “It looks different by day.”
While night had hidden everything but the neon signs, the sun exposed gray concrete buildings and trash in the street. Turned off, the neon signs were only pale plastic tubing and dusty electrical cords. We passed the same ones I’d seen at night—the Crystal Pussycat, Savetta’s Psychic Readings, the Plaza Saloon. At night, they had seemed intimidating, but seeing them by day was like watching a flashy porn star sleep in her underwear and snore.
“Why didn’t you take that parking space we just passed?” I asked.
“I want to park in front of the porn shop so I can keep an eye on the car.”
After we’d made several more loops, a car pulled out right in front of us, across the street from Sylvester’s Videos. Kim pulled up alongside the space.
“That’s tiny. You can’t fit in there.”
“I’m going to try.” She cranked her steering wheel all the way to the right and backed into the space much too fast.
As her back tires rammed the curb, her elbow struck the horn with a loud honk. A siren squealed in the distance. Across the street, the door to Sylvester’s Videos creaked open, and a guy with beady eyes and slicked-back gray hair stepped out of the store and glared at us.
“Shit, Kim. Let’s get out of here.”
“Get out and direct me,” she said calmly.
Trembling, I climbed out of the passenger seat and motioned her into the space. When I glanced over my shoulder, the beady-eyed man had vanished. Kim got out of the car.
“That’s the first time I’ve parallel parked since my Driver’s Ed test,” she said.
I followed her across the street. The door to Sylvester’s Videos was covered with ripped, faded posters and random thumbtacks. The paint was chipped. It hadn’t been painted in years.
I looked at Kim.
“Come on, let’s go in.” She hoisted the door open—revealing a heavy black plastic curtain. Glancing at me, she pulled aside the curtain and slipped inside. I followed her into a dimly-lit square room. Videos lined the walls floor to ceiling.
The beady-eyed man—the same one who had glared at us outside—sat behind the cash register.
Best Lesbian Erotica 2004 Page 1
