Best Sex Writing 2013: The State of Today's Sexual Culture

by Неизвестный

  I have had the life I should have had in San Francisco, more or less. I came to partake of and foster the sexual revolution, and surely I have done some things that count for that. You should have seen us, in the early ’90s, saying Fuck You to Death, making places for people to play safely, trying to sanitize these dangerous streets just enough to keep our people, the sex people, from dying. You should have felt how hot to the touch a naked cock could be when there was no sure way to keep someone alive if they got AIDS from the load that cock shot. What it meant to negotiate to be fluid-bonded when that bond had come to promise more than any ring: naked-cock sex was now coded to mean life or death, like the words the straight people said when they got married, but everyone knows they can get out of that if they want to.

  I did not worship cock till I got to San Francisco, because nobody anywhere else I ever found people to fuck was proud enough of their cock, worshipful enough of other men’s cocks, to override the fear and derision and tension that tempers desire with shame and dirt and mistrust. Most places, for most people, but in San Francisco? Here, fags sing hymns to cock, in Esperanto.

  Besides, I was a dyke—a dyke who wanted to fuck fags, yes, but also a woman whose cultural context was so shot through with the bias of the binary that it scarcely let the possibility exist of real love between people whose bodies were different. Only when I could find that queer-on-queer love did it feel safe, feel like home, and open me to desire unsullied by the war-between-the-sexes taint that heterosexuality so often had.

  And when I came home to that love, I found it tainted with something else.

  3

  I remember when I met Jack.

  It was at a reading at 848 Community Space, and there he was, so sexy and magical in his long silver hair. Nothing else about him was elven; it was butch—his faded 501s fit tight as I slid a card into his pocket and told him to call if he wanted to be invited to a sex party. He cut his silvery hair later and I wondered if everyone else who loved and desired him felt as bereft as I did. Now I know that was just a foreshadowing of loss, one part of him slipping away, the rest finally ready to follow. All the men he did homecare for: their brothers are still alive, but because he did not have AIDS, in 2011 he died an old-school AIDS death.

  I remember when I met Steven.

  He stood in front of us at the SFSI training, tall, charismatic and funny, and told us about being a sex surrogate. He thought people came to him mainly to heal the part of their lives scarred by the absence of touch: We stroke our cats and dogs, he said, not each other. Steven lived with HIV for twenty years. He said that when you have a hundred things that get you off, giving up one or two of them wasn’t such a loss as when those were the only things—naked cock in cunt or asshole, he meant—that could mean sex and pleasure.

  I remember when I met Robert.

  Tall, beautiful, the brightest eyes, describing himself as some older woman’s Twinkie: that’s how queers flag each other, with language and eye contact, and once we touched, I knew I’d do whatever it took to keep him in my life, and I have. “And we carried each other through it,” he said, crying a little, as I told him I was writing about AIDS. The only thing that was powerful enough to overcome the times in which we lived was lust, and we had so much of it that for some years, we seemed to float above all the pain. Funny, this is not the narration of our love that I’d have constructed, but it’s true: I wonder how many others, HIV-NEGATIVE, met then and tried to create all the fuck-love in one place we felt our brothers being denied?

  I remember when I met David.

  Powerfully built and so very powerful in his spirit. His parents were Holocaust survivors; his sexuality became intertwined, even though he was a devoted sadomasochist, with the notion of tikkun olam, the care of the world. Only authentic sexuality could, in fact, carry us through the plague years—though David did not survive them. He once said that “Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly,” a way to talk about harm reduction: every attempt, whether or not it was 100 percent successful, helped make things better, keep us safer, halt the virus more than it might have been halted if we just wilted in the face of it and did not try. David and I were like magnets, drawing each other close and then the polarities flipping, preventing our connection. For me it was the pure fear of loving someone with HIV—but I did love him, more than I was ever able to say or to show.

  I remember when I met James.

  A boyish, scruffy lawyer, the man who had made Oregon divest its investments from South Africa. On the heels of this success he joined the Willamette AIDS Council, where we worked together to try to create HIV awareness and advocacy from the ground up. He did not stay in Oregon long—he went to New York to work with the city’s newly established AIDS Office as his T-cells dwindled and I tried to love him as lightly as I could—though we had spent his last month in Oregon necking like teenagers, he was a gay man and I was a lesbian (well, more or less) and our love for each other was like the Scarecrow’s crossed arms: this way! That way!

  He was not the only man who talked to me of his impending death without letting it become the weighty thing it really was, the millstone that would forever change the way my heart was able to beat. He did not tell me when it was time to come and see him to say good-bye. We beautiful, vital, sexual youths; we human thoroughbreds; I think we are ashamed to die.

  4

  Okay, so I keep telling you: I was a dyke.

  That’s only true insofar as “dyke” is an identity that can incorporate both a fierce love of, and identification with, women—plus in my case, a fierce love of, and identification with, fags. There really is no actual word for the thing that I was. But that is so true of so many of us; it’s the reason we now just say “queer.”

  For a minute, after a youth full of bedpost-notching, the kind of frisky experimental fucking that teenagers do best, I tried to stay stable and lesbian. Well, that was never going to take, but I subsumed my desire for male bodies, my delight at sparring with men as a prelude to fucking them, into erotically charged friendships with gay men. One after the other, I created gay activist events and groups, my love for my coconspirators floating like oil on top of the water that was my connection with my women lovers. I might have gone on forever this way, my bisexuality living mostly in frantic masturbation sessions fueled by gay porn.

  Until James. Until the gay man who should have pretended not to notice my crush instead kissed me good night until the windows of his Volkswagen steamed. Until the safely unattainable man turned out to be polymorphous enough—or enough in love with me too—to allow acknowledged, not silenced, erotic feeling to float in the air between us.

  And how could a queer activist not take seriously the challenge and dilemma of forbidden love? We would never have wanted to be seen as any kind of straight, but the freedom to love is what our whole struggle was about. AIDS was the reason I went from lesbian to bisexual: that I might lose James made me see that the heart of my turn-on was pure love.

  James opened the door to everything: queer men, queer sex, a newly (re)embraced bisexual identity, San Francisco. . .the person I have become. James wrote me a letter of recommendation when I applied to be the first woman working at an AIDS service organization—I didn’t get the job, because it was still too soon for women to really be part of the change that would change everything, but James said this: “Carol is more comfortable with and for gay men than most gay men I know.”

  He did not live to read The Leather Daddy and the Femme, to watch Bend Over Boyfriend, to realize that I did walk through the door he opened. Many people offer us change, but only a few people change us as completely as James’s love changed me.

  And he set up, gracefully and inexorably, a pattern I have retained through all the men I’ve loved who are dead: a full stop regarding intimacy, sex, a relationship with a future. When that future spells death, neither I nor they ever try to keep me on the train.

  5

  Look at this city.

  Go up to t
he East Bay hills or drive the frontage road in Berkeley. Take the ferry to Alcatraz or Angel Island. Emerge through the Waldo Tunnel for that fast, stunning shot of San Francisco framed by the tower of the Golden Gate Bridge, or go down to Fort Baker, where there’s a Michelin-star restaurant now instead of an Army base. Drive through the Bay Bridge tunnel under Yerba Buena Island—do you always say, as Robert and I do, “Look, we live there”? Climb to the top of Potrero Hill or Bernal Heights. Take the ferry from Oakland or Marin. Look at the skyline, the hills, the bridges spanning away.

  Or go to the top of Twin Peaks; from one side you can see the Pacific, the blocks of houses stretching off to the west and south. But from the other side, you look right down into the Castro. If you knew where to focus, you could pick out the top of the apartment house where Steven Brown lived, or any one of your old lovers—it probably doesn’t happen anymore, but years ago, men who lived on the slopes of Twin Peaks could find a trick among all those apartments just by holding up a sign with their phone number written large enough to read from across the way, while they slowly worked their cocks on the balcony or at the kitchen window.

  Every part of San Francisco has been touched by AIDS, but that swath of downslope, the valley below it and the hills that start to rise up again as you head south on Castro Street, that part was decimated as surely as if a neutron bomb had burned away the men who had lived there when I first came to San Francisco to visit Will during Pride Week in 1978. The next time I came, with my girlfriend Ellen, we walked the block from Market to Eighteenth Street after the parade, and it was so thick with men, bare-chested, Izod-shirted, tight-Levi’d, chaps-assed, nipple-ringed, drunk on Gay Pride and brotherhood, that we had to cling to each other’s hands like swimmers fighting rapids to avoid being split apart and losing each other. It was the first time I had ever been surrounded by men with no feeling at all of fear. We were pressed in like a scrum of sardines, we were held securely between sweaty men, and I was so happy, I have no idea how I mustered the strength the next day to leave the city and go back to the mundane world. San Francisco was New Jerusalem; it was Oz.

  That street streams with ghosts, day and night.

  6

  I didn’t come here in the 1970s, because I was afraid. I was a small-town girl, and I remember when I believed San Francisco was such a big city. You have to be ready to do any new thing, unless the world forces you into it; otherwise, you grow into the time when what you could not do, you can. It’s what maturation really means—this growing.

  I did not think I could make a life for myself here. I swam in a small pond, the years ticked by, I waited to be ready to step into the world that I knew waited for me, and perhaps by doing so—though truly I cannot see it as anything but a failure of my character—I saved my own life.

  We were not ready to lose our men. We were not ready to lose our friends and our lovers, and if the savage losses of the epidemic had happened to any single individual one of us, nearly all their friends gone, dying and then dying and still more dying, that one might have lost their mind with grief. Instead, it happened to all of us. The world forced us into it, and, drafted, watching each other die, some of us stayed alive and helped each other and waited for the future.

  In the face of such a thing, fear means everything and it means nothing at all. Do you hide, move away, go straight? There must still be shell-shocked people everywhere who fled it. Do you sign up with Shanti or STOP AIDS or go walk somebody’s dog? Or, like Robert and I did, throw a sex party, trying to deploy the only tool we trusted—and the one we ourselves needed—to help preserve sex in the face of all this fear?

  All my dead men: I could not save them, can barely grieve them. Now that I finally found the courage to come here to find them, I am left with San Francisco: we are each widowed so many times.

  Happy Hookers

  Melissa Gira Grant

  The following books were not published in 1972: The Happy Secretary , The Happy Nurse, The Happy Napalm Manufacturer, The Happy President, The Happy Yippie, The Happy Feminist. The memoir of a Manhattan madam was. The Happy Hooker climbed best-seller lists that year, selling over sixteen million copies.

  When it reached their top five, the New York Times described the book as “liberally dosed with sex fantasies for the retarded.” The woman who wrote them and lived them, Xaviera Hollander, became a folk hero. She remains the accidental figurehead of a class of women who may or may not have existed before she lived and wrote. Of course, they must have existed, but if they hadn’t, say the critics of hooker happiness, we would have had to invent them.

  Is prostitution so wicked a profession that it requires such myths?

  We may remember the legend, but the particulars of the happy hooker story have faded. Hollander and the characters that grew up around her are correctly recalled as sexually omnivorous, but desire alone didn’t make her successful as a prostitute. She realized that the sex trade is no underworld, that it is intimately entangled in city life, in all the ways in which we are economically interdependent. Hollander was famous for being able to sweep through the lobby of the Palace Hotel, unnoticed and undisturbed, on her way to an assignation, not because she didn’t “look like” a working girl, but because she knew that too few people understood what a working girl really looked like.

  In The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington, a 1977 film adapted from Hollander’s memoir, a scene opens with Teletype bashing the screen with Woodward-and-Bernstein urgency. Flashlights sweep a darkened hall. Inside an unlocked office, a criminal scene is revealed: a senator embracing a prostitute. Hollander is called before Congress to testify. When the assembled panel interrogates her career, attacking her morals, she is first shameless, then spare but sharp in pointing out the unsurprising fact that these men are patrons of the very business they wish to blame for America’s downfall. What’s on trial in the film is ridiculous, but the questions are real. What value does a prostitute bring to society? Or is hooking really not so grandiose as all that? Could it be just another mostly tedious way to take ownership over something all too few of us are called before Congress to testify on—the conditions of our work?

  “Did you know that 89 percent of the women in prostitution want to escape?” a young man told me on the first day of summer this year, as he protested in front of the offices of the Village Voice. He wanted me to understand that they are complicit in what he calls “modern-day slavery.” The Village Voice has moved the bulk of the sex-related ads it publishes onto the website Backpage.com. This young man, the leader of an Evangelical Christian youth group, wanted to hasten the end of “sex slavery” by shutting Backpage.com down. What happens to the majority of people who advertise willingly on the site, who rely on it to draw an income? “The reality is,” the man said to me, not knowing I had ever been a prostitute, “almost all of these women don’t really want to be doing it.”

  Let’s ask the people around here, I wanted to say to him: the construction workers who dug up the road behind us, the cabbies weaving around the construction site, the cops over there who have to babysit us, the Mister Softee guy pulling a double shift in the heat, the security guard outside a nearby bar, the woman working inside, the receptionist upstairs. The freelancers at the Village Voice. The guys at the copy shop who printed your flyers. The workers at the factory that made the water bottles you’re handing out. Is it unfair to estimate that 89 percent of New Yorkers would rather not be doing what they have to do to make a living?

  “True, many of the prostitution ads on Backpage are placed by adult women acting on their own without coercion,” writes New York Times columnist and professional prostitute savior Nicholas Kristof. But, he continues, invoking the happy hooker trope, “they’re not my concern.” He would like us to join him in separating women into those who chose prostitution and those who were forced into it; those who view it as business and those who view it as exploitation; those who are workers and those who are victims; those who are irremediable and those who can be saved
. These categories are too narrow. They fail to explain the reality of one woman’s work, let alone a class of women’s labor. In this scheme, a happy hooker is apparently unwavering in her love of fucking and will fuck anyone for the right price. She has no grievances, no politics.

  But happy hookers, says Kristof, don’t despair, this isn’t about women like you—we don’t really mean to put you out of work. Never mind that shutting down the businesses people in the sex trade depend on for safety and survival only exposes all of them to danger and poverty, no matter how much choice they have. Kristof and the Evangelicals outside the Village Voice succeed only in taking choices away from people who are unlikely to turn up outside the New York Times, demanding that Kristof’s column be taken away from him.

  Even if they did, with the platform he’s built for himself as the true expert on sex workers’ lives, men like Kristof can’t be run out of town so easily. There’s always another TED conference, another women’s rights organization eager to hire his expertise. Kristof and those like him, who have made saving women from themselves their pet issue and vocation, are so fixated on the notion that almost no one would ever choose to sell sex that they miss the dull and daily choices that all working people face in the course of making a living. Kristof himself makes good money at this, but to consider sex workers’ equally important economic survival is inconvenient for him.