Sex Still Spoken Here: An Anthology

by Carol Queen

  “Okay, I think … I’m a housewife. You’re my son’s friend …” “I’ve had a crush on you for a long time, yeah.”

  “And you’ve come over … And my husband happens to be on a business trip. And my son’s out with those hoods he runs with.” I felt my voice start to change, subtly. It got lower. More serious. “Why are you over here, kid? Shouldn’t you be out with those boys, too? Not that I approve …”

  His eyes got big. He had never looked more earnest to me. “No, I’m good, Ma’am. I don’t hang out with those boys. I don’t like that your son hangs out with them.” Then he cracked a smile. Started laughing. “Wait, wait—I’m sorry, I just thought of something. Can I be fucking your son, too?!”

  That got me laughing. “Pervert!”

  “No, no, hear me out. So you want me, but you’re angry with me, because I’m taking your son away from you. You want me, but you think I’m a bad influence.”

  “You’re a glutton for punishment, little faggot.” I grabbed a curl and pulled again.

  He shrieked, but he looked like the cat with the canary in his mouth. “Guilty as charged.”

  ***

  I listened to Diamond Dogs over and over again the summer we got together. If I’d had the record player, I would have worn out the vinyl, I’m sure. Music takes on a different meaning when you’re falling for someone, and I was falling, hard—for him, but for my new self, too. The whole relationship was a coming out moment, coming out into something different and new, and like most people who are newly out and overzealous, I ran into it full-tilt, no holds barred, not a single stop or hesitation. No checking to see if there were any obstacles. No worries that maybe I’d trip over that rock and skin my knee. I didn’t think. I just ran. Everything was intense; everything felt like a whirlwind of emotions and sex. I still use words like pivotal and formative to describe our months together, and god, I fear I’m being grandiose, melodramatic, talking that way. But that’s what it was. It’s how we were with each other.

  So that month, falling for him, listening to Diamond Dogs because it happened to be what I’d picked up from the library on a whim—suddenly, I took the album very personally. It was the soundtrack to the crush, and it was the soundtrack to my newfound Mama persona. It felt like every line of every song was written especially for me. “Sweet Thing” was an anthem, Bowie’s creepy-sexy snarl in my ear, the perfect music for dating this boy who was glam rock and choir boy, French new wave and faggotry, lisp and snarl, James Dean and Lou Reed, cocksure and shy violet. Dating this boy who wanted nothing more than to suck my cock, who wanted nothing more than to fuck me so good, just right. When you rock’n’roll with me, there’s nowhere else I’d rather be. We’re taking it hard all the time. I love you in your fuck-me pumps, and your nimble dress that trails. Boys, boys, it’s a sweet thing. Mmm, if you want it, boys? Get it here.

  ***

  His hands on my tits were sweet, that night. Tentative. “Oh, honey. You’re not so tough, are you? You’re just a little pussycat under all that bravado, huh?” He made a little whimpering noise—the pink rose to his cheeks and his eyelashes fluttered. But he didn’t take his hands away. Something about how soft and unsure he was made me want to up the ante.

  “Nobody’s touched me like this for a long, long time. Not my husband. Not my son.” I heard him catch his breath at that. Good. “Nobody.” I leaned in to kiss him. He was so pliant in my arms, a rag doll of a boy, a marionette, but god, the noises he made. Little moans and sighs, and he licked the crook of my neck and whispered. “Oh, your skin tastes so sweet, Ma’am. I like it.”

  I pushed him back on the bed. He kept looking up at me in wide- eyed wonder. Or was it fear? Uncertainty? His breathing was heavy, and he was moaning, though. He’d tell me if he was real-life scared, right? I pulled his leather jacket off. Leaned down between his legs and started to unbuckle his belt. “Have you done this before, baby?”

  “In a way,” he said. Smirking. “In a way?”

  “I can’t talk about it.” And suddenly, the smirk melted from his face, and he looked so little. “Ma’am … There’s a woman I do this with in my dreams.”

  “In dreams?” I hated that I was repeating everything he said. But I wasn’t expecting that from a greaser boy. In dreams? What do I say to that? “Do you touch yourself in these dreams?”

  He shuddered. “Sometimes, Ma’am.”

  So I put my hand on his zipper and stroked. “Show me how you like to do it.”

  He reached down and started to unzip. But then he froze. Turned over on his side, and curled up into a fetal position. “I need to stop—I’m sorry.” I’d never seen him cry before. I was dumbfounded. What had I done? Was this about gender? Sexual assault? Shame? Maybe even just not being horny any more? Swallow your ego, I said to myself. He needs you right now.

  “Baby. It’s okay. No apologies.”

  “I—” He blinked. He looked so surprised. “The character’s too repressed and fucked up. I’m getting too into it. I feel real-life ashamed.” “No worries, Bambino.” I pulled him into my arms. “You’re so sweet. Honey, you’re so good.” But what I most wanted, in that moment, was to be told those things myself.

  ***

  I started calling him Bambino after I saw Murmur of the Heart for the first time. It’s the Louis Malle film about the adventures of a precocious—sexually, intellectually, otherwise—fourteen-year-old boy named Laurent. It’s most famous for its frank but somehow uncreepy depiction of incest. The boy has sex with his mother at the end, consensually. He said the boy in the movie was a big influence on him, made an impression when he was first coming into s/m and wanted to cultivate a boy persona. So I felt like I was learning as much about him as I was about the movie when I watched it over salad and pizza one night after class.

  “I’m making this movie out to be supererotic,” he’d said, “But it’s probably not that sexy. I think I just get off on the cocky rich French boy thing.” From the first moment, the opening wail of Charlie Parker, where towheaded Laurent and his friend are out on the cobblestoned French streets scamming tourists out of their pocket change by pretending to collect for the Red Cross, I was just riveted. I could not take my eyes off the screen. The boy is called Laurent by his French family, but Venzino by his Italian mother, a gorgeous, doe-eyed woman from a meager background. I read her as a sex worker, even though I’m not sure if that’s what Malle intends. She’s not whoring in the film, but you get the distinct sense that she married the boy’s father for money. That they met under less than proper circumstances. It’s a story full of sex and jazz and the intense push/pull between love and resentment. Venzino has a lot of homoerotic encounters with his brothers—not quite sex, and not quite sexy, so they are somehow less shocking than when he and his mother touch each other, but it is still surprising. The sex scene with his mother at the end is so bizarrely normal that you almost forget that it’s an incest scene. Except that that’s also what gives it a charge, a spark—that they are fundamentally not supposed to desire each other this way, mother and son, teenage boy and middle-aged woman, but they do.

  In the movie, Laurent’s mother calls him “Venzino” as a pet name, a kind of sweet Italian diminutive of his French name. And it occurred to me that my boy should have a pet name, and for some reason, it was “Bambino.” It just was. It’s Italian for “baby boy,” which seemed perfect. Growing up, it was the nickname I heard my Calabrese grandmother and great-aunts bestow upon all my boy cousins. It also refers to manifestations of the Baby Jesus, which was less perfect. But I liked it, and I started calling him that, casually. “Bambino, how are you?” “Bambino, fetch that for me.”

  It took him a while to ask me what it meant. I’d been calling him Bambino for a couple weeks, and he finally said “Whoa! I just looked up this thing you’re calling me. Are you calling me the little baby Jesus?!!!” This was over an instant message conversation. He put three exclamation points at the end of the sentence, he was that taken aback. “No,
no. Sweetie, it’s Italian for ‘little boy.’ I’m calling you a little boy.” And he sent me back a smileyface.

  ***

  He started to change, curled up in my arms. I could feel the desire returning to him—whatever demon he’d wrestled with was floating away. “I want to keep going,” he said. “Maybe we could do something lighter? Just jerk off together? But be the same characters?”

  “Of course, honey.”

  “No, or maybe. I mean.” He was talking fast, now, I could see the wheels in his head spinning. “I mean, do you want me to fuck you?”

  “I … I mean, if you want to, I’d love that.”

  “Okay. Maybe we can do that, as long as you’re running it, showing me how.” He smiled big. “I really want to, Mama.”

  “Mmm.” I kissed his eyelids. “You want to touch me?” He kissed my neck. “Yes.”

  “You want to show me how you touch yourself?” And the minute I said it, I regretted it. Fuck. That’s what hurt him before. How could I be so dumb?

  But he was reaching for his fly again, saying, “Yes.” He got his jeans down over his hips and ass. Then he crumpled.

  “Fuck. I’m sorry. I need to stop.”

  “I’m sorry. God, I’m so sorry. I fucked up. Shit.”

  So we held each other for the rest of the night. Read each other stories. Ate ice cream. Went to sleep curled up in each other’s arms.

  ***

  We woke up that morning curled around each other like kittens. I

  started stroking his hair, absentminded, half-asleep; he stroked my face, and suddenly, everything felt electric again. My hands were all over him in a flash. He rolled over onto his belly, grinding his hips into my sheets and sighing as I raked my nails over his back. “I—you really wanna do this?” I was still gun-shy from the night before. I couldn’t believe I was back-pedaling out of sex with someone I was so hot for, but I wanted to make sure. “Honestly, I didn’t intend to be Evil Molesting Mommy and fuck you awake …”

  “No, it’s my favorite way to wake up. Please don’t stop.”

  I didn’t need to be told twice. “Do you want me in the back or the front hole?”

  “The front, please.”

  “Do you want my hands or my cock?”

  “Your cock, please.” That edge in his voice, so full of desire it was hoarse, guttural.

  I slipped into my strap-on so fast I fumbled with it. I fumbled when I fucked him, too—I’m short, and he was tall, and balancing on my knees behind him on the bed was hard. After I slipped out the third time, I couldn’t help it, I started giggling.

  “What’s funny?” He moaned.

  “My dick keeps slipping out of you from this angle. Can you turn over, pretty? Or can we bend you over the bed?”

  “No, I wanna be on my belly.” “Then I need to use my hands.”

  “Anything, just don’t stop, please, Mama.”

  He came fast around my fingers, snarling and pounding the mattress while I told him how good he was, how hot he was, how much I loved fucking him. I pulled out, pulled the glove off, pulled him close to me. I was so wet; I wanted him to touch me so bad. I leaned in to kiss him, and he stilled. He looked close to crying again.

  “I’m sorry. I’m not doing well. I’m sorry. It’s just hard sometimes, getting fucked fucks with my sense of myself, and I feel like less of a boy, and I’m sorry, I want to touch you, but …”

  So I held him while he broke again. Fought to urge to say I love you. “Baby. It’s okay.”

  ***

  Sometimes I felt guilty, needy for wanting that affection. He says we’re just casual. Do I get to want that? He’s a big kid, I can ask and he can say no, but what if even asking is too much? Is that pressure? Pushing? I’d daydream, and then I’d feel greedy for being daydreamy. I’d want little presents from him, the kind of gifts you buy for someone because you see or hear something and it makes you think of them—a notebook with a pretty cover, a small stuffed snail with pink antennae, a mix CD. Sometimes I wanted big presents, too—a new knife, tickets to see Patti Smith when she came into town that October. Sometimes I wanted the Lloyd Dobler moment—him standing outside my window in the rain, boombox above his head, grinning about me.

  And sometimes, I just wanted him near me. I wanted him to come over with popcorn and a movie at 9 o’clock on a Sunday night when I’d had a terrible week. But I didn’t ask. I didn’t ask, because he’d said he needed to cool down and he could only see me once a month and we had to be more casual, because he was overwhelmed, but he’d still text and email me all the time, we’d have phone dates, he’d say, over and over, how honored, privileged, amazed he was to be in my life. Where was I in his life, though? He called himself my friend as well as my lover, but he wasn’t the kind of friend I could rely on when I was having a bad day. He wasn’t the kind of friend I could call and ask to come over the awful day I ran into my rapist at a poetry reading, I came home to a letter that said I didn’t get the big grant I applied for, and then my septic system exploded when I tried to take a hot shower. My close friends could do that for me—my best friend, with a girlfriend and friends and a busy life, she made time to come over that night with ice cream and hugs and an offer to take a bubble bath in her tub. Why couldn’t someone I was ostensibly dating do that, too?

  ***

  We both took showers. Studied at a café together, split a piece of ginger-pear bread while I tried to write a response paper for my evening class, and he worked on his zine. We took a walk to the Mission Library after. I was so pent up, with sadness and lust and this feeling of missing him even though he was right in front of me. “I …” I finally said, “I … still feel really sexual.” Why did it feel so naked, saying what I wanted? I got to want things, right? “I have go home to Oakland,” he said. He looked embarrassed. For himself or for me?

  At the library, I borrowed a random DVD of Arrested Development, and he borrowed another Louis Malle movie. We hugged awkwardly at the BART train. My apartment is only a five-minute walk from BART; I was crying before I got through my front door. I collapsed into my bed, sobbing, and eventually reaching for my vibrator. I cried and jerked off and cried while I jerked off, thinking about all the things I wanted to do with him, all the places I wanted him to touch me that he hadn’t.

  Thinking about every question that was left hanging on my tongue. What did I do? Why did he go away? Am I too much? I just want a place in his life. I just want to matter.

  I went to my evening class, exhausted, rings around my eyes, questions still ringing in my head. I could barely focus in class, didn’t hear a word anyone said. I couldn’t wait to get home. I thought about calling him the minute I got in the door. I decided to send a text and watch Arrested Development instead. “bambino, i’m feeling a spot of top drop. can you reassure me i’m only evil in good ways?” Of course every minute he didn’t respond made me feel worse than before. Maybe the text wasn’t a good idea.

  I put on my pink lights and my softest pajamas, put the DVD on my laptop, and sett back into a cocoon of blankets. I just wanted something silly to take my mind off my day, something to watch while I collapsed. The first episode on the DVD was called “Motherboy XXX”—about a mother/ son bonding dance. I laughed, hard, for the first time all day, but it was the kind of laughter that verged on tears. I didn’t wanna start crying again. I pulled my blankets even tighter around myself as the credits rolled. My cat took pity on me. She let me press my face into her fur like she was a pillow, curled up around my head. She purred even louder and licked my face. Everything I could do to feel held that night, I did.

  [go to top]

  “I love erotica. I love writing erotic scenes. It really exposes the individual. And when I’m writing, I’m not writing just purely for the sake of erotica. There’s something you learn something about the characters through that interaction.”

  -Jerome Dickey

  (in conversation with Farai Chideya)

  Holly Zwalf

  Bi
o

  Holly Zwalf is from Sydney, Australia, but recently spent eight months living in San Francisco writing a PhD about queer leather Mommies. She sorely misses sunbathing at the gay beach in Dolores Park with a burnt sugar Bi-Rite ice cream melting in her hand.

  Mini-Interview

  How did you start writing about sex? How does it differ from non-erotic writing? I find it impossible to leave sex out of my writing, just like I find it impossible to leave sex out of life. Without either, I would be miserable.

  Do you write in multiple genres and, if so, why? I am a smutty spoken word artist, I have a PhD in queer kink, and I have also just written a novel about a maternal masochist who is a nanny by day and a sex worker by night. I figure if you’re going to dedicate your life to something, it may as well be something you love.

  How is the Erotic Reading Circle part of your writing process? I am from Sydney, Australia, but I attended the Erotic Reading Circle while I was living in San Fran and conducting my “research” on the queer kink community. (In other words while I was gadding about the place going to sex parties and dungeons and having a grand old time, at the University’s expense). The Circle gave me the opportunity to share my writing in a space where it wouldn’t be received as shocking, where my writing would be valued for its quality and craft, not judged for its confronting or outrageous content.

  What’s the inside scoop on your story? That dirty weekend away was an emotional journey that covered great distances, and that also somehow took me closer to home. My journey had begun in the red dirt of the central Australian desert, engulfed in grief and lust, and so it was only fitting that it ended hard up against a rusty redwood (being the perverted tourist that I am).A few hours later we stopped at the giant drive-thru tree, and I went to the toilet and discovered the perfect souvenir—bits of redwood crumbled all through my knickers.