Sex Still Spoken Here: An Anthology

by Carol Queen

  We were in bed and he was on all fours. The sheets were the new 600-count cotton white ones I’d gotten on sale at Macy’s. I was fucking him again. At least my knees were comfortable, the sun was out and we had the day off. I was naked, too much bother for the outfits. I had my hands on his hips and I was sweating, eyes closed, grinding away at his ass. I felt him grab my hand and groan and I realized he wanted me to give him the reach around. I didn’t. I paused and backed out a little and then slammed the cock almost all the way inside of him and waited. He groaned again and I pulled the cock almost the way out again, just leaving the very tip inside.

  “Baby, please, don’t stop,” he whispered.

  “What are you going to do for me?” I countered, slamming the cock back in.

  “I’ll do it, I promise. I’ll fuck you in the ass, whatever you want, just don’t stop.” I had stopped and I was fully impaled, probably pressing on his prostate pretty hard.

  I pulled all the way out, unbuckled the harness and stepped out of it. I put it on the chair next to the bed. Nick had turned over on the white sheets and his dick was hard and sticking straight up and he was staring at me, naked in front of him. “I forgot how beautiful you are.”

  “You see me every day, fool.”

  “No really, we have been doing it so much in my ass, I haven’t had a chance to look at you, all curvy and shit. Come here.”

  I climbed on to the bed and he pulled me to him, kissing me on the lips hard. He turned around and eased on top of me. I reached out and caressed his arms, my hands tracing through his hair, relaxing even more into the soft bedding. I looked up at him while he put his swollen cock at the entrance to my pussy and he slid in, us both shuddering.

  “This is just a warm up, you know,” he said while thrusting into me. I moaned deeply. God, it had been so long since we did it this way.

  “I am going to give you what you want.” His arms grabbed my shoulders, his lips vibrated at my neck, while his pelvis pressed into mine.

  “You are?”

  “Yeah. I can tell you need a good ass-fucking.” He stared into my eyes with a half smile, knowing that we were still playing the game but the tables had shifted themselves back into a more balanced place.

  And with that my man climbed back in the saddle, squirted some lube into my ass and slowly inched his way in to our hearts’ content.

  [go to top]

  “It was fun to dream up, and fun to work on, too. Writing pornography is its own reward, delirious self-indulgence compounded by the orderly pleasures of making sentences and paragraphs. I still sometimes reread my own porn, because I don’t have to browse around it looking for the good parts. My stuff is all good parts—for me. When one of my characters tells my hapless heroine that he knows what she wants, that’s me—writer and dominant—talking to me, reader and eager submissive.”

  - Molly Weatherfield

  (author of Carrie’s Story)

  Simone Corday

  Bio

  Simone Corday is the author of 9½ Years Behind the Green Door: A Mitchell Brothers Stripper Remembers Her Lover Artie Mitchell, Hunter S. Thompson, and the Killing that Rocked San Francisco, a Memoir (2007). She has written for HSTbooks.org, a Hunter Thompson resource, and is working on a novel. Her website is www.greendoorbook.com.

  Mini-Interview

  How did you start writing about sex? I danced at the Mitchell Brothers’ O’Farrell Theater for nearly ten years, took part in three of the brothers’ films, and was a girlfriend of O’Farrell co-owner/pornographer Artie Mitchell. I experienced this insular world from several different points of view. I had an interest in writing and an MA in English before I became a dancer, and the drama and stories that unfolded in this setting fascinated me.

  How is the Erotic Reading Circle part of your writing process? I found the Erotic Reading Circle after I finished my book and was ready to read parts of it aloud and see how an audience would react. Jen and Carol are very supportive, kind, and helpful mentors, as well as being experienced writers. The group is friendly and positive, and makes constructive comments. It is interesting to hear the work of other writers, and some of the writing is outstanding.

  What’s the inside scoop on your story? What inspired it? This section, from Chapter 6 in my book, introduces a few main characters in January 1986, including Artie and Jim Mitchell, and the main setting of my memoir, the O’Farrell Theater. The entire book begins in the early 80’s just before AIDS, and we are behind the scenes at the entrancing Mitchell Brothers’ O’Farrell Theater, which gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson has declared to be “the Carnegie Hall of public sex in America.” The theater and its steamy live shows are a countercultural gathering place for celebrities in entertainment and sports, and for San Francisco politicians and journalists. They are drawn by the beautiful strippers and the backroom hospitality of their outrageous porn king hosts, Artie and Jim Mitchell—who directed the groundbreaking porn film, Behind the Green Door, starring Marilyn Chambers.

  The Spirit of the O’Farrell

  Simone Corday

  Excerpted from Chapter 6: Hunter’s Defiant Note, and Double Trouble: The Mayor vs. the Senate Page in 9½ Years Behind the Green Door

  January 18, 1986

  Three months after being laid off, I got a message on my machine from the O’Farrell. I called Vince in the morning. He said, “Jim asked me last week, ‘Whatever happened to Simone?’ So he’d like to have you back, and I don’t think Art would object too much. What you should do is come down here and catch the two of them together. Call me this afternoon and maybe they’ll be back by then.”

  I talked to my two best friends for strategy and dressed with care—as hot as I could but with a serious conservative edge befitting an accused—black suede Yves St. Laurent heels, marquisette pin, black jacket, short red dress to show off my legs. Spraying on a discreet amount of “Paris,” I tried to summon up a smile in the mirror. With long dark hair and green eyes, I still looked too serious and idealistic, for a stripper. Clearly reflected in the glass was an ex-schoolteacher with an addiction to the outrageous. Unmistakably, I was a woman who was old enough to know she was deeply in love.

  I felt a sea of mixed emotions. Being away from the place for awhile had given me a clearer perspective. Now I knew that walking into the O’Farrell was like crossing a border into a principality as foreign as Shangri- La, with its own unique customs, and a constantly changing party-line point of view that necessitated denial. Jim and Art Mitchell were kings there, and games were played for power. Women were encouraged to prove how hot and uninhibited they were, while the men measured their sexuality by their number of conquests. Once I stepped back through those doors, I had to deal with life on their terms, no matt how fanciful, harsh, or strange it might seem. Once I was within Mitchell territory, I’d be living on X-rated time.

  I was going back. There was no question about it. I drove shivering with fear, keeping a sudden sense of nausea in check. Dealing with a pair of countercultural entrepreneurs bent on a pornographic crusade wasn’t easy. Would I get to tell my side of what led to the argument? I wondered. What would they do to try to make me crawl? Everyone had to do some penance to come back to the O’Farrell—it’s a ritual, and part of the game. Thinking, they’re not going to break me, and thinking, what more could happen, what do I have to lose? And thinking, I haven’t been this broke in the last five years, I pushed open a mirrored glass door and felt the slightest chill.

  Inside the plush lobby, past the box office and the king-size fish tanks, was the staircase to the executive offices of Mitchell Brothers. Moving past the photo of a sleek Marilyn Chambers used to promote Behind the Green Door, I ventured in on the thick green carpet of the inner sanctum. Vince, tall with wavy brown hair, sat behind the roll- top desk from which he cleverly administered the entire operation. He was Machiavellian, yet at times benevolent; feared, yet cultivated by the dancers; implicitly loyal to the brothers and adept at defending them. “Simone, you came at
a good time,” Vince greeted me. “They’re in there.” “Simone, it’s good to see you,” said Dan O’Neill, notorious since the 60s as an underground cartoonist, and longtime O’Farrell groupie. A disreputable hat, irreverent overgrown mustache, and long hair heightened his whimsical expression. Just beyond him was Rocky, Art and Jim’s bearded cousin, a tough-looking quiet good old boy, who worked there as a janitor.

  Three dancers in lacy lingerie, rhinestones and heels, perched on the edge of the pool table. The pretty California girl-next-door types, whose clean-cut image and sexy magnetism have been so essential to the success of all Mitchell Brothers’ productions.

  Jim Mitchell was just inside the door. They were having a drunken spaghetti feed and had already half-eaten a dried-up, out-of-season game bird they shot early that morning, to destroy the evidence. A faint odor of marijuana hung in the air.

  “Simone, you’re back,” Jim turned toward me, steel-eyed. Ralph Lauren casual, he was bald with a trim mustache, slightly overweight but powerful, a man who clearly savored the accouterments of success, and his position of authority. Half-drunk at the moment, Jim was seductively forceful in his touch. Referring to my argument with Missy, Jim stated, “In these cat fights the rule of thumb is, both kitties have to go because it disrupts things for the other kitties. It doesn’t matt who started it.” Jim sounded typically sarcastic, but was relishing the King Solomon aspects of his role that day, having been able to banish, being able to pardon, “But you have friends in high places. And since Christianity, we believe in giving a guy a second chance, so we’d like to have you back. Art, Simone’s here.”

  “Party Artie,” devastating, bearded and slender, walked over with the assured style of an outlaw, and gave me a kiss. It’s polite. I didn’t want it polite—I wanted it passionate. Art kept love intense and compelling, he was a flawless player in control of an ever-changing, unfolding game. A game I had to win. I followed him longingly with my eyes down to the other end of the pool table. Art stretched out on the floor like an animal, on top of one of those padded cloths used to cover packing crates.

  “Help yourself …” Jim suggested. “Have some spaghetti.”

  Vince came in. “Yeah, you can have some of that,” he snickered, pointing to a paper plate of parsley.

  O’Neill helped me to a serving of this horrible white spaghetti, red sauce with bird gizzard cooked into it, which I felt I had to taste as some kind of sacramental gesture. The girls were looking through the new Playboy and pointed out a small photo. “Oh, there’s Missy. Miss Congeniality.” Missy—the kitty who had me fired.

  The office looked the same—it was dominated by the pool table, fishing relics, mementos, and a poker table reminiscent of Art and Jim’s Depression-era, Okie gambler father, J.R. Mitchell, who schooled them well in living outside the law.

  Art got up off the floor, came over to me, and said, “I want some of that pussy,” in his rich Oklahoma drawl, lawless, always melted me completely. I put my plate down and followed him down the hall, into a scene from one of his movies.

  He closed the door softly, then pulled me onto his lap, and I told him, “I really missed you.”

  “No,” Art said, as I looked into his sultry indecent brown eyes, “you mean you love me.”

  He pulled my red dress up and slipped into me, while pressing his head to my breast, “Keep your mouth shut and I’ll fuck you in secret,” he said. Fat chance. “Be the slave to love that you are, Simone,” he said, stealing a line from the dreamlike Bryan Ferry hit song.

  “I still love you, Art,” I said as he was coming. “I’ll always love you.” “Is whoever’s fucking you fucking you right?” he asked.

  “I’m not seeing anybody,” I hugged him. Art said, “Enjoy your spaghetti.”

  I went right out to the manager, Vince, who asked, “What happened?”

  “I think I can come back,” I replied.

  Vince told me to call Monday and O’Neill kept offering me his chair. But I didn’t want to sit down, I wanted to leave. Vince said, “By the way, did you ever see Hunter’s note?” Hanging down over the window were six sheets of yellow lined paper all taped together, penned in a large defiant scrawl by Hunter Thompson. I tried to lean over Vince to read it.

  The first part deplored the evils of the business and then over and over he was asking whatever happened to his friend Simone, the spirit of the O’Farrell, the most creative girl act, what evil bastard was responsible for this hatchet job on his good friend Simone. All this really heartwarming stuff.

  Vince said, “You know, there’re probably five or six versions of that story, one of them’s over there, I’m saving that for the archives.”

  “I never told anyone my story,” I said. “But I don’t care, if I can come back.”

  And as I turned and walked away I heard O’Neill say softly, “And now we have a gorilla.”

  [go to top]

  “If I hadn’t learned to write about sex, and particularly to write about my own sexual desires, I don’t think I would have survived. I think the guilt, the terror I grew up with was so extraordinarily powerful that if I had not written my way out of it, I’d be dead … And I think it’s vital [to write about], aside from whether it ever becomes good fiction, particularly for women with transgressive sexuality … [or] people who in any way feel their sexuality cannot be expressed. Writing can be a way to find a way to be real and sane in the world, even if it feels a little crazy while you’re doing it. If we are to answer that call, we have to be able to feel every part of our lives.”

  - Dorothy Allison

  seeley quest

  Bio

  seeley quest was born in 1976, won a first poetry award in 1989, has lived in California and the East Bay since 1998, and performed around the Bay Area since 2001. Sie has featured at the International Queerness and Disability Conference, National Queer Arts Festival, SF Anarchist Cafe, SF Sex Worker Film and Arts Festival, and more, as well as on tour to Vancouver, Toronto, and numerous other US cities and colleges. More of hir work’s at sinsinvalid.org.

  Mini-Interview

  How did you start writing about sex? i had written a few shorter love poems in the late ‘90’s which had hints of suggestive phrases, as i became interested in playing a bit with readers around what i was evoking. An affair in ‘98 with my second lover helped increase comfort with my sexuality at that time, which had been quite repressed while growing up, and pretty unsatisfied until my 20’s. In ‘99 i also began reading the East Bay Express, where Carol Queen then published a sex advice column weekly (far better than Dan Savage’s or anyone else’s i’ve seen), and in ‘00 i met her going to an educational workshop at Good Vibrations she was teaching … … this was part of my first exposure to actually sex-positive public communication, and a local culture of discourse valuing directly engaging with sexuality. i went back to school in 2000 to finish a BA in Performance Studies and Gender Studies, and wrote my first erotically- invested vignette in late 2000,which was about power play, shaving someone’s face. That fall i was in a class for Gender Studies at New College of California taught by Judy Grahn called “Literature of the Sexual Underground,” and texts i recall included some of her writing, and also Robert Gluck’s. His book Margery Kempe narrated merging his experience with a female saint’s, and he and Judy explicitly describe and reflect on their sexualities. The opportunity to talk with both of them about their writing approaches—as well as see performance art then such as at 848 Divisadero, Keith Hennessy improvising pissing while dancing—influenced my own experimenting and interest to write material specifically invoking erotic energy.

  he has short arms

  seeley quest

  you know, the kind you get if your parent was exposed to certain drugs

  or other factors that mutate development.

  He has short arms, but regularly wields his razor to keep a close shave,

  because it seems easier to introduce himself with a European kiss on the cheek

 
than handshake.

  I can tell he likes his jawline to stay as kempt and smooth as possible, ‘cause

  he’s got a lot of people to meet and kiss and charm.

  He’s also game to charm by feeding people chocolate, being fed chocolate, and by

  licking chocolate off of others, too.

  He shares this after a girl says I just fed her from my piece of chocolate torte.

  He adds yes, he wants some also, and then I get his mouth

  deliberately closed around my two fingers to caress the bite from them

  with his tongue, an approach I hardly get every day.

  He thanks me and moves off in the crowd, while I marvel at how supple his

  lips feel.

  He has short arms, and perhaps his legs wouldn’t seem so long otherwise,

  but with his height and peculiar grace there’s a beautiful long movement as he

  suddenly steps down next to me upon returning and saying yes, he’d like more

  but thinks he needs to be kneeling for it.

  I can tell he’s not all about chiseled bravado when this time he lets me play with

  him at my pace, lets me fingers brush against the surprising softness of the skin

  around the lower edges of his face, asking, “how badly do you want it?”

  before fingers pushing the smear past his teeth.

  He worships the texture of my fingertips as much as the torte, savors sucking them

  even more thoroughly now, and after he rises and disappears again,

  I wonder if he likes his fingers licked as much as I do;

  are his upper appendages sensitive different from his lower ones?

  They are placed perfectly to stroke his own chest or another’s; he barely has to