Table of Contents
Title Page
Foreword
Introduction
How I Do It
Two Girls in a Basement
Our Women Know What to Do
Roulette
Envy
Una
Sno Ball’s Chance in Hell
Sound Check
Blue Suede Shoes
Flirting into Cami
Doing the Dressage Queen
Pointed
The Second Hour
Fags Like Us
Lessons
Fee Fie Foe Femme
Boxer Briefs
Eros in Progress
Boiling Point
An Incident in Whitechapel
My Debut as a Slut
Frozen
The End
Trash Talkin’
The Trick
Fairgrounds
About the Authors
About the Editors
Copyright Page
Foreword
Tristan Taormino
I wrote my first piece of lesbian erotica in 1992 accidentally. I was a junior in college and had just come off a crazy summer in Los Angeles where I did a stint as a go-go dancer at a lesbian bar. It was full of skimpy outfits, hot butches, and dyke drama. I wanted to capture the intensity of the experience, the exhibitionism, the power exchanges. I wanted to convey how the story was written in and on my body. Sexual desire and awakening lay in every blue sequin of the narrator’s bra, in every sweaty encounter, yet I didn’t start out to write erotica per se. But there were fingers shoved in pussies, cocks strapped on, and shuddering orgasms…so it became erotica. After I graduated, I worked on the piece and submitted it to On Our Backs, where it was rejected. I kept writing. A year later, the story was accepted by Lesléa Newman for an anthology, and in 1995 it was first published in The Femme Mystique.
That year, my friend Michael Thomas Ford, a fellow writer, and I had sent a joint book proposal to Cleis Press for an annual his-n-hers anthology series called Best Gay Erotica and Best Lesbian Erotica. Our idea was to collect the top erotic writing of the year culled from self-published zines, open mikes, and the libidinous minds of a growing network of writers whose sexually explicit work deserved a bigger audience. Store bookshelves held plenty of gay male smut, we argued, although most of it was not very well written, edited, or marketed. Its lesbian counterpart was harder to find, with a few notable exceptions. Naiad Press romance novels featured little explicit sex except for the novels of Robbi Sommers. Boston-based Alyson Books published a couple of anthologies with unfortunate titles like Bushfire and A fterglow (my apologies to whoever named them; they just didn’t sound like they had hot sex waiting between the pages). Alyson also published the groundbreaking erotica of Pat Califia. There had to be other Pat Califias out there in the queer universe, and I was determined to find them. Susie Bright had just published Best American Erotica. Susie kicked major ass with the Herotica series and the then-new Best American Erotica series, but I could find no by-dykes-for-dykes-about-dykes equivalent. I wanted to put together a book of sharply written (literary even!), well-edited, intelligent, sexy stories unafraid to be sold with a dirty cover and to embrace its smutty self out loud and proud, a book that refused to be relegated to the top (unreachable) shelf, the bottom (out of sight) shelf, or only the shelves of adult bookstores.
Cleis Press publisher Frédérique Delacoste invited us to lunch to discuss our idea. When Mike and I scheduled a trip to the Bay Area and confirmed our meeting, we didn’t realize that “lunch” meant we’d be sitting in her living room chatting over homemade food. Ever the gracious host, she fed us fabulous breads and cheeses, a vegetable pâté, and a huge salad. With her sparkling eyes and French accent, she was warm and inviting, but I knew then she was a shrewd businesswoman. She hadn’t come as far as she had based on bad decisions. She offered us dessert—the tiniest piece of some of the richest, most delicious chocolate I’ve ever tasted—and then told us the projects were a go.
Putting together the very first collection proved to be quite a struggle. Although lesbian erotica was in its infancy as a genre, everyone seemed to already have a clear idea of what it was, and how their work wasn’t it. I coaxed, coddled, and convinced until I got a group of amazing stories. Best Lesbian Erotica 1996 came out in January, with a stunning photo on the cover: no well-lit piece of fruit with vulvic implications or mysterious hand on murky body part, but instead a shot by dyke photographer Phyllis Christopher of the real-life lesbian couple Shar Rednour and Jackie Strano unmistakably having sex.
It’s been a decade since this series debuted, and cover dykes Shar and Jackie are still together and, in my humble opinion, hotter than ever. But their union remains one of the few elements of that first book that is the same as it was. Best Lesbian Erotica has evolved amidst a backdrop of huge changes in the dyke world: the relaunch of On Our Backs, a new dyke sex and porn revolution, the coming out of celebrities and public figures, and unprecedented mainstream media inclusion and visibility—to mention just a few.
With each year, the number of submissions I receive for the series increases, as does the quality and creativity of the writing. The sheer volume of lesbian erotica—in magazines, in books, and on the Web—has increased tenfold. A genre that was once fringe and underground not only has found its way into major bookstore chains but has its own section; in addition, lesbian erotica has spawned writing classes, warrants reviews in literary journals, and has been recognized by the LGBT community as a vital, valuable contribution to queer literature. We even have our own category at the Lambda Literary Awards, the significance of which cannot be overstated. I believe these forms of recognition have given people permission to write what they want without fear of being pigeonholed or branded a lightweight or hack because they write erotica, and have even made it possible for some writers to concentrate on sexually explicit writing and publish widely.
It’s not just the numbers and the acknowledgments that have grown. I believe that the very notion of what constitutes erotic writing has expanded as well; for over the years, in addition to short stories, Best Lesbian Erotica has featured novel excerpts, poetry, and performance art texts in an eclectic range of subject matter. The different themes that emerge each year are fascinating. In 1996, many of the stories had a dark, dreamy, other-worldly quality, as if lesbian desire existed in an alternative universe (sometimes it sort of does). By the time of the 1999 collection, I could see how butch/femme, an iconic dynamic in dyke relationships, was thriving, in all its complexity and glory. By 2002 I was struck by how powerful emotions—adoration, longing, love, obsession, revenge—fueled the year’s best stories. This year, I felt overwhelmed (in a good way) by the number of submissions I received that featured cocksucking as a central plot point. (Felice Newman, this year’s judge, believes initiation stories, her personal favorite, topped the list of erotic scenarios.)
I believe that all the submissions I receive do reflect lesbian sex in America and that lesbian erotica does take the pulse of what is making our cunts wet and our hearts beat a little faster. I also think that the relationship between sex and sex writing is symbiotic: Our writing has changed as a reflection of our sex lives’ evolving, and our sex lives have shifted because of the proliferation of sex writing.
Undeniably, the writers behind the stories—their experiences, their writing, their courage, their vision—form the backbone of this series. They make it layered, insightful, seductive, inspiring. They make the whole thing worth doing and reading. Over the years, this series has showcased the writing of literary legends like Dorothy Allison, Pat Califia, Chrystos, Cheryl Clarke, Cherríe Moraga, Joan Nestle, and Carol Queen.
It has given voice to writers who’ve gone on to their own successes, writers like Lucy Jane Bledsoe, T Cooper, Alison Smith, Elizabeth Stark, and Terry Wolverton. It has spawned a new generation of erotica writers, each with their own growing body of work, including Rachel Kramer Bussel, Skian McGuire, Peggy Munson, and Alison Tyler. Several writers published in this series have gone on to write their own books, become professors, transition from female to male, become parents, get married, and it’s exciting to watch their careers and life-changes from afar.
I would like to pay tribute to three very special contributors. Nancy Stockwell, whose story “Lucky Girls” appeared in Best Lesbian Erotica 1996, died of complications from a double-lung transplant in 1999. In 2001, Susan Rosenberg (a contributor to Best Lesbian Erotica 1999) was released from prison—where she was incarcerated for sixteen years—after her sentence was commuted by President Bill Clinton. Heather Lewis—who was guest judge of the first anthology, a contributor to the 1997 edition, and my friend and mentor—took her own life in 2002. I dedicate this book to Heather, who helped me get this series off the ground, and whose talent, generosity, wit, and candor I will miss forever.
Editing this collection has brought me into contact with some of the most talented, eccentric, mesmerizing, challenging people I will ever know. It has been even more rewarding to meet in person the scribes behind the stories. When I travel to do a reading and get to greet people in the flesh, I find it tremendously exciting. I sometimes also get the scoop on the back story of the story I selected for the book. It’s fascinating whenever I find out that a story I love is all completely true, or totally made up. It’s always unexpected, the way it goes, which I think points to the fierce complexities of our sexual realities and the sheer depth of our collective erotic imagination. Wherever these tales come from, they are built on our erotic truths, real or imagined. These are the stories of what keeps us up at night, what drives us, what haunts us, what turns us on, what connects us to our bodies and to each other.
Tristan Taormino
New York City
September 2004
Introduction
Felice Newman
I live to make your clit hard. I want to make you need to beat off. I’ll be happy when you feel your cunt pulse with blood, your asshole pucker.
I want you to call your girl in the middle of the afternoon and tell her things that make her squirm in her pantyhose. I want you to crouch low behind your computer screen and post a personal ad on LesbiaNation, Lesbotronic, ClassicDykes, LeatherDyke, Technodyke, Strap-on.org, one finger ready on a function key to clear the screen, another gently stroking the seam in the crotch of your jeans.
I want you to think about sex when you get up in the morning and when you go home at night. I want you to be startled by the smell of your own heat rising from your crotch. I want the taste of butch cock on your tongue. I want girlsex flashing in your brain like neon in the elevator, subway, traffic jam, sidewalk crowded with people hurrying away from their jobs.
I want you suddenly to remember that you have a body, to swim in the juice of your erotic need until your workaday skin sloughs off and all that’s left of you is your pulpy hot blood-engorged self.
I don’t want you to forget for a minute that sex is why you call yourself lesbian queer bisexual.
I want you to know that you are alive.
Ten years ago, when Tristan Taormino proposed the idea of an annual “best” lesbian erotica series, she invited writers to expand the definition of what could be considered “sex writing” or “erotica,” or, for that matter, “lesbian.” “Send me the stuff everyone else won’t touch,” she said, smut too hard-core to print in a book and literary fiction that doesn’t read like your typical erotica story.
I had been reading some hot, fierce, sexy fiction and poetry in small publications and homemade zines; I was impressed with the erotically-charged work of new writers I had heard at literary events and open mics in New York City. Because of the carnal content of their work, these writers weren’t being published in mainstream books and magazines. There was an entire body of work waiting to be tapped into that was not only arousing but also made you think.
She chose judges who themselves were literary and cultural icons: Heather Lewis, Jewelle Gomez, Jennifer Levin, Chrystos, Joan Nestle, Patrick Califia, Amber Hollibaugh, Cheryl Clarke, and Michelle Tea. She invited a generation of writers to open up the genre of girl-meets-girl erotica to stories of “lust, memory, obsession, attraction, anticipation, longing, love, hate, transgression.”
The permission that gave writers and readers cannot be overstated.
Lesbian sex, which had been lurking on the fringes of lesbian literature, no longer had to be sanitized to fit the formula of lesbian fiction. Love indeed had conquered all, including our sex writing, which often masqueraded as romance, with the “good parts” floating above the grit and sweat of our lives. Even books explicitly intended as erotica, books filled with clit-thrumming sex stories, were packaged softly. To sell lesbian sex as sex was just too blatant.
Best Lesbian Erotica gave us permission to get real. It was not always pretty, the protagonist did not always get the girl (who may or may not actually have been a girl), and the plot did not always neatly conclude with a hyperbolic spray of girl cum. These stories did not give their allegiance to the three-act-play predictability of the genre.
Tristan gathered the best lesbian sex writing and the widest range of sexual experience, and if you don’t think that has given you the means to expand your own sexual horizons, think again. In the introduction to Best Lesbian Erotica 1996, she identified a few conventions of lesbian erotic stories that had already become standards:The is-she-or-isn’t-she-a-dyke narrative of wonder and seduction. The one-night-stand-who-became-the-girlfriend tale. The “butchflip” story of unexpected role reversals. The very existence of such conventions suggests that there is a recognizable (dare I say) canon of lesbian erotic writing with identifiable authors, publishers, and even themes.
Five years later, in introducing Best of the Best Lesbian Erotica, she previewed the forty-four stories she had chosen as the cream-of-the-cream of the more than 140 stories published by then: …war stories, ghost stories, initiation stories, and one night stand stories. Stories full of knife-wielding tops, cocksucking femmes, basketball-bouncing butches, greedy bottoms, budding porn stars, naughty nuns, Jewish newlyweds, hungry boydykes, and courageous FtMs. They are players in dark fairy tales, femme-on-femme fantasies, transgressive tales, and personal ad encounters. This all takes place in movie theaters, bubble baths, gym locker rooms, S/M play parties, gay male sex clubs, hotel rooms, and martial arts dojos. As they rub up against one another, these erotic pieces boldly contemplate, demonstrate, and celebrate the complexity, uniqueness—the muff diving mélange of lesbian sexuality.
Today our sexual options, both in print and in the sheets, continue to grow wider and wider.
Long before I got to live the kind of sex life I wanted for myself, I wrote a story about it. I know a lot of writers who can say that—even Patrick Califia wrote “Jesse,” the classic lesbian S/M story, years before ever wielding (or yielding to) a whip. Before that, I read every piece of lesbian erotica I could get my hands on and a prodigious quantity of both gay and straight porn in which I crossed gender to get off.
What we have now in lesbian erotica makes us rich.
The credit for Best Lesbian Erotica goes to Tristan, who reads and reads and reads, writes about sex in print and online, shoots sex TV shows and porn films, crisscrosses the country teaching workshops and giving lectures, brews storms in academe, and sets women’s eyes afire with lust and possibility. Tristan is dedicated to good-fucks-for-all and has the energy to back it up.
At Cleis Press we are so proud of Tristan Taormino and Best Lesbian Erotica, each year the most intelligent and provocative lesbian erotica anthology available—and now winner of the Lambda Literary Award two years running. From the beginning, we took a stand: Les
bian erotica, we believed, should combine high-quality writing and hot sex; it should be subtle and searing; it should be complicated in ways that provoke us to look at ourselves. With Tristan, we have held to that standard, publishing more than a hundred writers in a partnership we hope will continue for decades more.
As publisher of the Best Lesbian Erotica series, I am the editorial voyeur to hundreds of imaginary and thinly veiled (or unveiled) acts of sex. What I want is the knowledge of your pleasure. I want you to read stories that describe the sex you are having now and the sex you have always wished for. I want the stories you read to sharpen your need for more sex, different sex, the sex you’ve never admitted you think of alone in the dark when your hand snakes down your belly. I want your desire to become irresistible, like a force of nature pushing you beyond reason. I’ll settle for no less than torment. Why? Because I want your need to become inescapable. When a detail or image or scenario from one of these stories lodges in your brain, I want it to feel like a hot poker forcing you to action. Go ahead. Unburden yourself from if only and what if…. Go get it.
And I want to imagine you doing it. Why? Because that’s my thing.
You don’t think I do this out of altruism, do you? You’re my kink. Now do it for me.
Oh, yeah. Just like that.
Felice Newman
San Francisco
September 2004
How I Do It
Jack Perilous
Here’s how I do it: on the corner of the desk. On the corners of the sink, table, kitchen counter. It started with my rocking horse, when I was three. When I sat back, leaned forward, butterflied my proto-ballerina legs, I felt something I didn’t know women had to work for. For a while I did it everywhere, then after I was shamed (for that, for sucking my thumb till the age of eight, for glasses, for being Jewish, for whatever), just on the bathroom sink, door locked. At nine, I learned from a child development book what it was I was doing. Masturbating. Having orgasms. It was normal, like fleeting feelings of homosexual attraction. At twelve, I imagined my best friend watching me do it. I imagined watching her do it, too. I imagined her kissing my back and neck as I fucked myself. Now it’s the desk in my Brooklyn bedroom, the one my girlfriend got in parts for free. Leaning forward, legs butterflying, hands clutching—sometimes I let myself balance on my clit. I imagine my girlfriend sucking my cock with her pink-lipped mouth. To be honest, it takes me less than two minutes to come.
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