Fucking Daphne

by Daphne Gottlieb

  That’s cool. I get that.

  I show her the buttons I made to promote her reading, with the “fuck yr heroes/i’m saving myself” tagline from her website merchandise. I wait quietly while she composes a response to her paramour. Then we go to my place, sit in my study, and talk books. “What are you reading? Oh?”

  “And you?”

  It could have happened.

  We shopped for ponygirl porn together. We went to a strip club together. We ate pizza together. We thrift-shopped together. All the elements of an affair were there.

  It could have happened.

  It could have happened like this: Daphne tells me she is reading Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir by Lauren Slater. She holds the book open, and I watch her dark mouth shape the words so that they come out sounding pornographic.

  “I think secretly each and every one of us longs to fall. . . . We know this, and that is why we have bad backs and pulled necks and throbbing pain between our shoulder blades. We want to go down, and it hurts to fight the force of gravity.”

  I clutch my right shoulder blade with my left hand, feel the tenderness. She flips further into her copy of Lying, reading to me, “Our stories are seizures.” Her hands are still shaking, and I walk from my side of the study to hers, take the book from her hand, lay it down on the table next to her chair. I close my hand around a chunk of her hair, pull it tight in my fist so that her chin rises toward the ceiling. With my other hand pinning her to the chair by the jaw, fit tightly in the V between my thumb and index finger, I . . .

  I know what you’re thinking: This would never work. Daphne is a top. Or, even if she identifies as “switch,” she would never bottom to such a straight-looking, bookish low femme as I.

  The point is, I didn’t even try. My erotic energy and psychological fixations lay elsewhere. I was using Daphne in a role secondary to that of my primary love interests. She supplied the material for various triangulations. I leveraged her in ways she doesn’t even know about.

  “Remember when we went out for drinks after the Daphne Gottlieb reading?”

  Evan and I are driving to Atlanta together, telling each other about times when we noticed each other, long before we ever kissed. Where our paths crossed, what we were wearing, how the stars were aligned. Standard infatuation routine. What we all do at the beginning of a relationship.

  “Oh my god, I had totally forgotten about that.” I really had completely forgotten that I had invited him and his girlfriend to join Daphne and me and a few other students for drinks. I like to put students and authors together in social settings. I feel like I am giving them something special, something they will remember in graduate school, like I remember getting Nikki Giovanni’s autograph when I was an undergrad. But it takes me by surprise to remember that I invited this student to that event six months ago.

  “You told her you wanted to lick the tattoo on her chest.” He smiles at me. “That was hot.”

  And it was hot. I don’t know why I said it, and I hadn’t thought about it since then. Maybe I said it to communicate my fangirl appreciation for her work, her kick-ass performance that afternoon, her San Francisco presence in our small Southern town.

  Maybe I said it for Evan. Said I wanted to lick Daphne Gottlieb’s tattoo for some reason that had nothing to do with Daphne Gottlieb. Something that had to do with my relationship with my students. My attraction to one of them. That would be an interesting way to explain myself, but I don’t know if it’s true.

  More likely it was my chronic social anxiety, my tendency to blurt outlandish things at people to amp up a slow conversation, move things forward. I doubt I thought about Daphne or Evan at all in that moment, weaving my way through the dark woods of my discomfort as host, teacher, event planner. But my comment stayed with Evan, and now he was bringing it up months later, at just the right moment.

  My memory of telling Daphne Gottlieb that I wanted to lick the tattoo on her chest is, for this reason, in my Evan memory file instead of in my Daphne memory file. It is a story about how a certain boy saw me in a certain moment, how it sort of distorted me, cast me in a better light than I really lived in, drawing out the fun and interesting elements of the conversation and dropping the anxious, self-loathing parts, or merging them in a generous way, so that the memory could become a fond one for both of us as we deliberately and inaccurately charted the meant-to-be-ness of our connection.

  Of course, the Evan thing threw the lesbian thing into confusion.

  Was I still a lesbian? my sister’s girlfriend wanted to know.

  Everyone knows sexual identity is a fiction. A story we tell ourselves about ourselves. All the different ways in which the contributors to Fucking Daphne see Daphne, experience Daphne, fuck Daphne, and are fucked by Daphne remind her readers of the postmodern dictum that our selves shift in relation to others’, that we are different people when we are with different people. That there is no stable sexual self.

  “Usually I’m a lesbian,” Daphne’s persona says in Stephen Elliott’s story.

  “Yeah, aren’t we all,” I want to say, as I think back to my male lover’s body stretching languidly in bed this morning, my hand on his sculpted chest; how he stands like a girl; how much I like that.

  When Daphne visited me last October, I pelted her with questions about sexual identity, sucked the San Francisco fluidity from her lips. She dates women who look like boys, and sometimes the female-born who have transitioned into men, and sometimes bio men. “So,” I ask her, longing for sage clarity that I will need in my own life much sooner than I realize, “How do you identify?”

  “Queer.”

  “Of course.” I feel relieved, widened, like I need her in my mind, carving more openings in the small-town pathways of my sexual brain.

  Who I am, who you are, what we do in bed, what we don’t do. We clasp these hard jewels to our chests, write them in big block letters on the blackboard and point to them. As Sarah Katherine Lewis perceptively writes in this anthology: “The real Daphne is—well, who knows? And that’s where the hotness lives. Because you can put whatever you want into your idea of Daphne Gottlieb, and everyone else is shoving their ideas in there, too, and it ends up that the real Daphne Gottlieb doesn’t even matter anymore because she’s just a glory hole that we’re all fucking—the idea of her; our wishes for what we desire.”

  Everyone else is a hot wet space we’re fucking, shoving our ideas of them into them, our sense of what they wish we were. How much we want to be what they desire.

  Our sexual identities, too, are glory holes, categories we can stuff all our hang-ups and insecurities into.

  “Usually I’m a lesbian.” I reach my ungloved hand into the cavern of this word, its shape elusive and elastic.

  Like all words are.

  I was standing elbow to elbow with an older man at a cocktail party on Friday night.

  “I read that essay you wrote. You really castrated the guy at the end.”

  Big smile, sparkling wide round eyes, super-high voice, like I am a stripper and he is a trick. “Surely you don’t really think so?”

  I stand frozen, giggle into my wine glass, let the conversation move on to another topic.

  Oh, how I want to “fix” his view of me, pull it in line with my own, show him how I see what I said, how I meant it, how to look at it so that I still come across as pleasant reasonable likable perfect perfect perfect, just what I ought to be what everyone wants of me exactly what you want and you and you and you.

  But I can’t.

  I flip back through the words that have been ascribed uncomfortably to me over the last couple of years: “selfish”; “flamboyant”; “indiscreet.” I used to imagine writing a poem about each word, revealing the fine line between the ways each one is true and not true. Would I really consider devoting a lifetime of creativity to correcting other people’s views of me?

  How much energy goes into image control. How it leaves us sleepless, our heads aching as we start the next day.
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  I admit it: The first thing that went through my mind when Daphne invited me to write this afterword was, What are people going to think of me?

  “That Lisa Johnson,” I imagined them saying, thinking they know something about me.

  “People are free to believe what they want to believe, regardless of how I would prefer to be seen,” Daphne tells me when she sends copies of the stories as they come in. I tuck her words away, know she is really talking about me, even if she doesn’t mean to be.

  I am bringing Daphne Gottlieb to campus again this year.

  A new year, a new campus, but I am telling the same stories: six feet tall, dreads, slam poet, San Francisco. Wait till you see her! A subtle listener could decode the messages in this line about who I am, what I desire, what I fear, how I think others see me. The rest will still think I am just describing Daphne.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book owes its existence to the goodwill and hard work of many. Thanks must go to Seal Press for their dedication to and enthusiasm for the book, and particularly to Brooke Warner for her strong editorial judgment and guidance, as well as her willingness to engage in serious conversations about the literary merits of various sexual practices. Deepest gratitude is due to all the contributors for their wild imaginations, faithful scribing, and patience. Thanks to all of you for your uncanny ability to find a kernel of truth under seven oft-fictitious mattresses. Special thanks to Nick Mamatas for his extra set of eyes, and to Sarah Katherine Lewis for her impeccable literary matchmaking. A kiss in the wind to the people I was in relationships with during the gestation of the book—I’m sure it was, as you told me, a strange time to be my girlfriend/boyfriend. Rob Arbo deserves so many thanks for helping find real-world solutions to impossible time crunches, and for doing so with absolute sweetness, gallantry, clean sheets, and buckets of fishy. Thanks to Claudius Reich and Kirsten Saxton for always having my back. Thanks to Connor Cook who makes everything I write here sound like a double-entendre. It might be. Finally, thanks to my sister and brother. I know you won’t read this, and I know you love me very much, as I do you.

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  CHARLIE ANDERS is the level boss you have to fight before you can get to the next level of literature. She wrote Choir Boy, a novel, and coedited the anthology She’s Such a Geek. Her writing has appeared in Salon, ZYZZYVA, and Mother Jones, on McSweeneys.net, the San Francisco Chronicle, Pindeldyboz, FreshYarn, and Strange Horizons. She’s the publisher of other magazine and the hostess of Writers with Drinks, a reading series in San Francisco.

  JAMIE BERGER lives in Turners Falls, Massachusetts. He is a student in the MFA writing program at UMass Amherst, where he also teaches eager frosh to write. He was raised in Albany, New York, and overeducated in and by New York City, after which he lived in San Francisco for a long time. His first book, Bo’s Arts (Evil Twin, 2006), is all about a soft dog. His essay “Peep Show” was published in the SUN and anthologized in Flesh for Fantasy (Thunder’s Mouth, 2005). He and Daniel Oppenheimer maintain a blog called “Masculinity and Its Discontents” (“M.A.I.D.”) that can be found at www.man-ifesto.com. He has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, McSweeneys.net, Watchword, Planet, and elsewhere, and is currently hard at work on a memoirish kind of thing called A Natural History of Lust: Girls, Women, Lusty Ladies, Friends, Lovers, Feminism, Porn, Strippers, Mom and Me. Please see also www.jamiebergerwords.com.

  HANNE BLANK is a writer and historian who retired from writing erotica following the release of her short-story collection Unruly Appetites (Seal, 2003). Her sixth book, Virgin: The Untouched History, was published by Bloomsbury USA in early 2007, and an anthology on menstruation entitled Breakthrough Bleeding (coedited with Moira Russell) will be out from She Devil Press in fall 2008. Find her online at www.hanneblank.com.

  DIANA CAGE is the author of Girl Meets Girl, Box Lunch, Threeways, and The On Our Backs Guide to Lesbian Sex. She lives in New York, where she hosts the Diana Cage show on Sirius OutQ.

  JUSTIN CHIN is the author of three collections of poetry, Gutted, Bite Hard, and Harmless Medicine (Manic D, 2001), which was a finalist in the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Awards. He is also the author of three collections of essays, Burden of Ashes (Alyson, 2001), Mongrel: Essays, Diatribes and Pranks (St. Martin’s, 1999), and Attack of the Man-Eating Lotus Blossoms (Suspect Thoughts, 2005). Gutted was awarded the Publishing Triangle’s 2007 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, and was a finalist in the Lambda Literary Awards.

  TRISTAN CRANE is a writer and photographer currently living in San Francisco. Tristan’s first graphic novel, How Loathsome, was nominated for a GLAAD media award in 2004, and his second graphic novel is forthcoming.

  STEPHEN ELLIOTT is the author of six books, including the novel Happy Baby and the short-story collection My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up. He is also the founder of the Progressive Reading Series, which raises money for progressive candidates through literary events nationwide. Stephen has written for Esquire, the New York Times, GQ, and other publications. He’s been anthologized in Best American Erotica, Best Sex Writing, and twice in Best American Non-Required Reading.

  COLIN FRANGOS plays guitar in the band Ovipositor and runs the existential void known as Nadir-novelties.net. He successfully dropped out of numerous colleges throughout the ’90s and has achieved little of note since. He lives in Oakland, California, with his wife and five cats. He regularly donates blood, and, if your blood type is A+, you live in the Bay Area, and you find yourself in a hospital, you may end up the recipient of a pint of his best.

  R. GAY is fascinated by strange and curious things, including first aid kits, miniature things, and poets. Her writing can be found in Best American Erotica 2004, several editions of Best Lesbian Erotica, Shameless: An Intimate Erotica, Glamour Girls, Slave to Love, and many others. Visit R. online at www.pettyfictions.com.

  MARLO GAYLE does enjoy beating the snot out of six-foot-tall bunnies in his spare time, but is such a skimp that he’d make sure he got his deposit back on the costume rental.

  ARIEL GORE is editor/publisher of Hip Mama and the author of a bunch of books, including The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show, Atlas of the Human Heart, and The Hip Mama Survival Guide. Click to www.arielgore.com.

  DELPHINE GOTHLEAB is often mistaken for Daphne Gottlieb.

  CAREN GUSSOFF is the author of Homecoming (Serpent’s Tail, 2000), a novel, and The Wave and Other Stories (Serpent’s Tail, 2003), a collection of short stories. Her work has appeared in some writing texts, a couple of magazines, and some great anthologies, and she was a 2001 nominee for the Village Voice’s “Writers on the Verge.” She received her BA from the University of Colorado and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

  MERRI LISA JOHNSON really is worried about what you think of her. She directs the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina Upstate, primarily so that people will love her and take her seriously. She has edited several books for the same reasons: Jane Sexes It Up: True Confessions of Feminist Desire; Jane Puts It in a Box: Third Wave Feminism and Television; and Flesh for Fantasy: Producing and Consuming Exotic Dance (coedited with Katherine Frank and Danielle Egan). She is already thinking of new ways to win your affection.

  TENNESSEE JONES lives in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of Deliver Me from Nowhere (Soft Skull, 2005), which was nominated for a Lambda Award in 2006. He is currently at work on a novel about three young women growing up in Eastern Kentucky.

  SARAH KATHERINE LEWIS, a ten-year veteran of the adult industry, is the author of Indecent: How I Make It and Fake It as a Girl for Hire (Seal, 2006) and Sex and Bacon: Why I Love Things That Are Very, Very Bad for Me (forthcoming from Seal, 2008). A surly recluse, she lives in Seattle, Washington, and makes her rent money by volunteering for paid medical experimentation and writing content for mainstream adult websites. In her spare time she creates creepy, overly personal audio content for Audio Accidents Records.
She has been featured on NPR, Playboy Radio, and Pirate Cat Radio.

  HEATHEN MACHINERY wishes to apologize to you because words are dumb containers, which sometimes spill over and mess everything up. She also wants you to know that she is a good person, that no exes were harmed in the writing of her Fucking Daphne story, and that hearts are also stupid containers that sometimes spill over and mess everything up. In addition to this book, she has been published in Lodestar Quarterly and has been seen several times trying not to vomit on a microphone while reading her stories out loud for actual people. She lives in San Francisco.

  JARED JACANG MAHER has written articles for Adbusters magazine, the Chicago Reader, and Alternet.org. He was an editor of the 2004 Soft Skull Press anthology Life and Limb: Skateboarders Write from the Deep End. He currently lives in Denver, Colorado, where he is a staff writer for Westword.

  NICK MAMATAS is the author of the novel of neighborhood nuclear proliferation (for kids!) Under My Roof (Soft Skull, 2007), the Bram Stoker Award- and International Horror Guild Award- nominated Lovecraftian Beat road novel (for shut-ins!) Move Under Ground (Night Shade, 2004; Prime, 2006), and the Bram Stoker Award-nominated Civil War ghost story (for Marxists!) Northern Gothic (Soft Skull, 2001). His pornographic fiction has appeared in the webzines Fishnet and Suicide Girls, and in the anthology of novellas Short & Sweet (Blue Moon, 2006). A native New Yorker, Nick now lives in Massachusetts.