Sex Still Spoken Here: An Anthology

by Carol Queen

  We did what we did

  there is no other story

  We’ll do it again if I have any say in the matter

  But I’m not jumping to conclusions

  I’ve been dropping opinions/beliefs, left and right

  and not picking them back up either

  I don’t know who I am and none of this seems the least bit probable

  I doubt any of this would be happening if I didn’t meditate so much

  Meditation is a whole other world of fun

  if you stick to it long enough

  it can make blessings and tortures drop out of nowhere

  to dazzle your senses

  till you don’t know which is which and who is who

  Walking a spiritual path is a bumpy ride and a total blast

  Having Jon Bernie as my guru on Monday nights is a regular riot

  he tames egos and turns on the untroubled light within

  Hearing wisdom talks on Tuesday nights at the Saraha Buddhist Center

  those teachers make a good case for the way to happiness

  being the exact opposite of what people usually think

  Years ago and for years thereafter, I wanted to kill my father

  Then I wanted to strangle my bosses

  Slap my co-workers into oblivion

  Throw my lover down the stairs

  Get those goddamn guys over there to give me what I crave

  All the while, wanting to hang my head

  in shame on top of shame

  Well, sha la la, man

  Balls out no matter where we are in the story

  Being who I am, brother

  It’s a lot easier to see the reasons to be grateful

  when someone is taking care of my ass

  So I gotta count my blessings now and then

  ‘Cause when the shit of Hellfire rains down

  I sure do count every scratch and scrape

  My litany of woes can make the butchest of men roll their eyes

  and throw their hands in the air

  Oh, I can clearly be a monster

  yet I come from Heaven

  and to Heaven I belong

  I am a slutty, joyful, greedy, piggy, butt-boy bottom

  And I will not stop

  till I have drunk every drop

  I Have Seen The Future And It Is Full Of Big Dicks

  Horehound Stillpoint

  Tennessee Williams never choked to death on a stray bottle cap

  No matter how insistently the media reported this at the time

  According to my new buddy, Bill

  Who was friend and neighbor to the author of Streetcar Named Desire

  Glass Menagerie and Suddenly, Last Summer

  Tennessee choked on a big dick and died

  When I gently protest, having had my share of monster cock

  and not being able to imagine one of them so stuck in my throat

  I could die

  Bill proclaims it happens and he knows it happens

  because another friend of his also died choking on a big dick

  I only met Bill a few hours ago but already I am learning so much

  He met me on the stairs to his apartment and asked:

  “Are you the new volunteer from New Life?”

  It’s New Leaf but I don’t have the heart to correct such a clever mistake

  “I’m 97 years old,” he throws out there. “No, 91.”

  When he settles on 94, I don’t know if it’s the truth

  or just a nice compromise

  “Are you gay?” is his third or forth question, and thank God I am

  His conversational skills center—squarely—on the topic of big dicks

  Though he also announces that Marlon Brando had a micro-dick

  It’s only in passing, a throwaway line, before getting back to business

  Humphrey Bogart couldn’t get a star-making role on Broadway

  even though he did have a big dick

  Bogart was short and not classically handsome

  So he went out to Hollywood where “they know what to do with big dicks”

  says Bill, adding, by the by, “He was gay, too”

  Come on, Bill, I objected, what about him and Lauren Bacall

  “Lauren Bacall,” he harumphed, “married gay men with great regularity

  “She was straight, though, unlike Katherine Hepburn

  “Of course, Kate made a big show of being with that other guy with a big dick

  who was also gay”

  You mean Spencer Tracy?

  You should see Bill smile when I come up with the name of the star

  he’s trying to talk about

  We’re getting on like gangbusters

  I mean, this is the best conversation I’ve had in ten years

  At some point I do interrupt to ask him

  can we get back to Marlon Brando for a second

  I mean, how do you know

  he had a small dick

  “I told you, I was great friends with Tennessee and he knew everything

  about everyone

  “Besides that, my best friend was Maynard Morrison who was a casting

  director on Broadway and he sucked everyone off

  “AND besides that, Marlon Brando was totally gay, not bisexual, GAY

  and he used to cruise the bushes in Central Park like we all did

  and no one would play with him, because [raises little finger & wags]

  “Oh, you know who else had a little dick?

  That German guy who starred in Marlene Dietrich’s last movie

  the one in which she wore that big hat all the time”

  We don’t come up with his name, and Bill is almost in tears

  He can’t talk anymore, he says

  He can’t write

  He used to write, under a pseudonym, oh lord, he can’t remember

  the title of either of the two books he wrote

  All his friends are dead

  All his family members, not just parents, brothers and sisters

  but cousins, and nieces and nephews, all dead

  After an hour, he says that besides Richard, the other volunteer from New Leaf

  I’m the only friend he’s got

  I’ve already seen evidence to the contrary, because his neighbors love him

  Richard, he complains, “only comes to look through my book of big dicks”

  while he lets Bill watch some old opera on his DVD player

  Okay, so Bill plays fast and loose with the truth, I think

  We laugh all afternoon

  He doesn’t want to have sex anymore

  He can’t read, his mind is fading, and his body is falling apart

  He does like to watch opera but his real joy is talking about big dicks

  We’ll get along just fine, I tell him

  We have so much in common

  Two old broken down writers who never made a dime

  living in tiny cluttered dusty apartments

  We both sucked off Scott O’Hara

  and I can attest to his having a big dick

  It’s another laugh, another misty twinkle in his eye

  We’re bonding like mad, but really, he’s showing me my future

  He’s teaching me to love many things because you never know

  The one thing with which you will be left

  [go to top]

  Jen Cross

  Bio

  Jen Cross, co-editor of Sex Still Spoken Here, is a writer, workshop facilitator, and performer whose work has appeared in a plethora of anthologies, including The Healing Art of Writing 2010, Best Sex Writing 2008, and Nobody Passes. The founder of Writing Ourselves Whole, Jen’s facilitated sexuality and survivors writing workshops in the SF Bay area and at across the country. She’s more honored to get to co-facilitate the Erotic Reading Circle with Dr. Carol Queen than she can say. www.writingourselveswhole.org.

  Mini-Interview

  How did you sta
rt writing about sex? How does it differ from non-erotic writing? I can’t remember exactly how it started: whether I wrote about sex and my stepfather found out and attempted to occupy that part of my sexuality the way he attempted to occupy every other part of my life, or whether he was the one who originally demanded that I write about sex for him. In any case, trauma was intricately interwoven through this part of my erotic life, as it has been through every other part of my life. As I’m writing this, I think about Scheherazade, who spun stories for her Master so as to keep herself alive. My situation wasn’t as dire as that—though I did use the stories as a way to displace his abusive attentions (at least momentarily) from my body onto the words. Then he went to jail, and I kept the words. Later, after I got away from him, I continued writing sex as a way to discover and uncover my queer surviving self, and as a way to try on a free and radical sexuality that I lacked access to in an embodied way for many years. Sex writing has become intertwined with all writing for me: in my experience and practice, erotic writing may or may not be sexual in content, but is writing that is deeply embodied, rising out of the empowered erotic self and therefore often slippery, messy, genre-defying, disturbing, and free.

  pink and devastating

  Jen Cross

  I know what you’ve heard: gossip thronged around the edges of the community, snatches here and there. You heard that Zora took me down, that I let her shove her hand up in my aching, pearly pink. But, baby, before we go any further tonight, I gotta set the record straight. If we’re gonna do this, you’re gonna need to know the whole story.

  We met at the corner of pink and devastating, each of us trying to high highest femme the whole room, me in flouncey, spangled, peppermint-stripe tutu, stacked platform lace-up ballet shoes, a ruffled top split wide down the front (tied at the midriff), and hair sprayed within an inch of its life with Aqua Net and Pink Neon Manic Panic. Oh, and no panties. And her, with that fat fluffy rose boa, first of all, which was so long that it trailed on the ground behind her even as she made her way through the tight throng of the dressed (both over- and under-) at this year’s Drag King contest, plus 5-inch spike heel Lucite pink puma peep toes, a matching long skirt that flung itself from her waist down to just above her ankles and cleaved along one thigh to reveal her too goddamn perfect plump (and glitter-sheened!) calves, the rose-paisley bustier, the thick dark hair in a cloisonné upsweep held together by cherry blossom chopsticks, a couple of combs, and, yes, spit and prayers—oh, and no panties—well. There was no keeping from setting it off. I dropped my butch escort’s arm as soon as Miz Pristine made her entrance, needing all of my energy to lance through the fauxhawks and thrift store finery, plumage and socks stuffed in varying nether regions, in order to—um—make her acquaintance. I meant to demand some sort of tithe from her, this new-come-to-town trying to defame my own throne of highest femme in the land.

  Now, she stood so you’d think she’d just come to attention (but I saw, didn’t you, that she came to be attended to), pursed her MAC bright lips and lowered her impossibly long, impossibly fake, impossibly PERFECT Too Wong Foo Priscilla drag queen lashes just to half mast, shifted so that slit in her skirt shut the door on my wandering eye, focusing my attention, you could say, reminding me that, yes, I had been an adoring young butch once, too. And she put that long tongue out just a little—a shade, you might say—purplish rose lacquered lips split by school-perfect pink eraser muscle, and she lit a new shine to her lips and all of mine then and there, thank you, and she said, “Ooh, girl, look at those shoes.”

  She grinned wide then, shadowing in and pinpointing her meaning. She said: “So stable.”

  Then she cocked one hip, ‘cause it was meant to be cocked that way, popping out into and claiming more of the space that the crowed had cleared for this collision of femme dominion.

  Now, some say that plain platforms, a solid chunky fat heel, is cheating when it comes to the way girls do with each other. Some say if it’s not spiked it’s practically flats. Maybe she was in this category. I can’t say as I could tell you. Maybe she was dishing some evil shade. But let me tell you, honey, that place where my panties ought to have covered had my parents raised even a halfway proper lady was running thick with all the—possibilities—and I stood firm, legs spread just enough, and pelvis cocked forward, sure, and could not be jostled by the crowd. I said, “I bet you want to find out, don’t you?”

  Her cheeks went a red that clashed with her outfit and I checked myself a point in the femme register in the sky, ‘cause even though I know about the inherent wrong of girl-on-girl competition, sometimes you just gotta win one for the home team, don’t you? But really, I just wanted to keep the redness coming into those taupe cheeks.

  Lord, what was coming over me? I wanted her in that split skirt and split thighs, all right, yes, over my big brawny girl shoulders, all of our tits at attention while I rocked in and out of her purple pink lower lips, the very hot red rose tootsie roll cock that I carried in my bag all ready ready, I came to realize, to be strapped not around some one of these king-y wanna-bes but instead around my meaty thighs.

  Now, boys, take a picture of this, ‘cause it’s never happened before and it’s not likely to come again. It is well know that I am not just a pillow queen—I am an empress. After a few years of topping bioboys after I started having sex as a teenager, I met an old school older butch during my first excursion to my small home town’s dyke bar. The first time I laid my eyes on her, I laid down. I mean, when she laid her hands on me, I fell so hard on my back that the sky started crying. The only time I’m not on my back is when I’m on my knees. It’s not just do-me, it’s do away with any ideas you might have had about getting done. My pussy’s so pillowy hard and fine, there are still butches lost down there, exploring and seeking and navigating all that good terrain.

  Now Miss Pristine – or Zora is how she was called by other people but I liked to call her Pristine ‘cause she was always put together like a shiny piece of plastic and she hated any kind of mess. I was shocked as hell to see her out at the Drag King contest, which was held at a warehouse space in the not-yet-completely-gentrified part of way downtown and had a concrete floor already coated with beer drippings, sweat, and mud. It was clustery hot and barely ventilated, so most of the girls start melting immediately after setting one manicured foot into the door (boys, too, if they hadn’t put their spirit gum on just right; there were drooping moustaches and sliding soul patches all through the room). The only time Miss P uttered the words “Do me” was after she’d fucked some tender butch bottom til ze was wrung all the way out, and she was finally ready to come herself. The way the story went, she’d set herself up into this tall throne, part her legs (high-heeled shoes pushing her calves into a more pornographic roundness than anyone might imagine possible), pointed one short-nailed, perfectly-polished index finger at her pussy, and the butch was to get her off with no more than thirty strokes on her clit (and this count was well confirmed.) The ones who tried to insert anything whatsoever into Zora’s soaking slit were summarily dismissed—they’d hear the buzzing and the “oh! Oh! Oh!”s before they hit the front door. Miss P might get a little mussed while she was fucking someone (though no one knew her not to use gloves)—a soft sheen of sweat might break across her brow, a cleft of hair might fall lose from her coif—but no one could ever say they’d seen her disheveled.

  So it was not an idle thing I said there, insinuating that she might have been complimenting the stability of my footwear because she imagined me in a position compromising in more ways than one.

  Zora just wrinkled her long nose at me, barely a sniff, let her eyes fall on the door to the back stage side entrance and then didn’t she just turn and part the crowd without a word.

  The things I did, now, I did because of her. Everyone knows that, right? I mean, I saw her look at that side stage door before turning away and forcing me to watch her ass switch switch switch into the congealed crowd, all the faces of our own personal audience
turning back to snatch their eyes to me, to see what I was going to do now, now that she had just left me and my question hanging here. I mean, still I throbbed like a woofer at a bad ‘90s dyke club, still I was beginning to smell my own goddamn cunt over and above the accumulated aromas of second-hand smoke and cheap-ass cologne. I worked my jaw like I was popping gum, even though my mouth was suddenly too empty and dry, and said, “Figures,” then pursed my lips and turned my own self around, pushing between two thrift-store-suit-jacketed tranny boys behind me, wiggling out of any ideas they were forming about putting me in the middle of their T-dance sandwich. I made a beeline for the bathrooms, shoved my way through the clouds of glitter and hairspray into an empty stall, locked the door and sat my shaking self down.

  I didn’t stop to think—not on your life. I popped open the clasp of my bag and took out the nylon harness that I carry out with me to these sorts of events, so as to foreswear that sad butch song, “Oh/I didn’t plan on getting it on tonight/I’m not packing/la la la.” You know how it goes—I don’t even have to hum any bars. I settled the harness around my thighs and ass, then fitted in my Ms. Big Red, tucked her in place under the tutu ruffles and waistband, and felt something else in me thicken and harden—maybe it was my resolve. I didn’t dare touch myself, just pissed, patted dry, straightened up and shoved back out into the crowd.

  I made a meandering round-about way to the stage door she’d indicated as our rendezvous with her eyes like a parting shot, like the way girls used to say, Back playground after school—you’re gonna get it. But the goddamn thing was locked when I tried to barge my way in, and it was only the long round toe of my platforms that kept me from knocking my too-urgent forehead on the cheap presswood door.

  “Eager much?” came a low curdled-and-spiced voice in my ear, and I did not turn around because my knees were weak and anyway her breath was singeing my bare neck, ice and burn all at the same time. “You got the equipment to back up what you said out there?” Did I mention my case of cotton mouth? All I could do was lift up my handbag and nod. She snatched the bag away from me, and her breath came hotter on my neck.

  Zora reached around me, grabbed at the doorknob, pulled it hard toward her, jamming it in to the frame, pulling herself tight into me for a moment and I felt the feathers of that boa tickling the back of my legs. Then she twisted hard and shoved, pushing the door open and shoving me through. I stumbled into the dimly lit room, trying not to fall over what would have been a strategically placed gymnast’s horse had my latest daddy been behind me, ready to bend me over and lift my skirts. What was it doing here? Well, this was a boy’s club when the dykes weren’t taking it over once a year. I turned to reach for Zora, see if she meant what she’d insinuated, see if she was ready for this, but she stood stone-faced against the door, arms folded, eyes wide and furious and smoky, still that hip cocked out, creating just the line of lust that every trucker silhouettes with their hands around the air and I got to draw my eyes around the flesh.