Sex Still Spoken Here: An Anthology Read online

  Sex Still Spoken Here

  An Anthology from the Erotic Reading Circle

  at the Center for Sex & Culture

  Edited by Carol Queen, PhD, Jen Cross, and Amy Butcher

  Published by Center for Sex & Culture Press at Kindle Direct

  Copyright 2014 Center for Sex & Culture Press

  All stories copyright 2014 by their individual authors

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, online, or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Cover illustration Copyright 2014 Dorian Katz

  Cover and book design by Amy Butcher/Wiggleybutt Design

  First Edition.

  Photo credits:

  Jen Cross photo by Sarah Deragon

  Holly Zwalf photo by Mark Narciso

  Trade paper ISBN: 978-0-9907685-0-0

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-9907685-1-7

  “Bambino” by Gina de Vries first appeared in Coming and Crying, Glass Houses, 2012. “he has short arms” by seeley quest first appeared in Disability Culture and Community Performance: Find a Strange and Twisted Shape, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. A different excerpt from “Swirl” (as “Pro-/Noun/ Per (Voice// en/ Trapeze)”) by Scott Bentley first appeared in The Body Electric, Ars Omnia, 2011. “pink and devastating” by Jen Cross first appeared in 2011 Seattle Erotic Art Festival Literary Art Anthology, Seattle Erotic Art Festival, 2011. “The Spirit of the O’Farrell” by Simone Corday first appeared in 9 ½ Years Behind the Green Door, A Memoir, Mill City Press, 2007.

  Dedication

  To all the readers who’ve graced the Erotic Reading Circle with their words and erotic brilliance over these years

  and To Good Vibrations for getting it all started

  and To all the new Circles about to gather—may you celebrate the beautiful and complicated erotic experience with compassion, generosity, and kindness. Thank you for holding space for your own and others’ creative erotic expression.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction • Carol Queen, PhD

  Conversation with the Editors • Carol Queen, Jen Cross, and Amy Butcher

  Girl in the Red Dress • Sinclair Sexsmith

  Heart-Shaped Box • Charles Lyons

  Ricky Dumb Ass • Jeff Jacobson

  Letter to My Girlfriend • Marlene Hoeber

  Poems: Gift, Ordinary Time • Christine Solano

  Red Paint • Tori Adams

  The Long Odds • Vince Clarthough

  My Desire for Women • Anaín Bjorkquist

  The Train Trip • Avery Cassell

  Swirl • Scott Bentley

  Back in the Saddle • Erin M.

  The Spirit of the O’Farrell • Simone Corday

  Poems: he has short arms, serpent stirred • seeley quest

  Stock Check • Elizabeth Rae

  San Francisco Earthquake 1906: Love Among the Ruins • Jack Fritscher

  Stilettos • Amy Butcher

  The Gambler • Dorothy Freed

  Tone • Ember Eli

  Just Another Dirty Bathroom Sex Love Story • Lilycat

  Poems: Life Is Good When You’re Getting Fucked,

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

  pink and devastating • Jen Cross

  God’s Country (Excerpt) • Norman Armstrong

  It Just Takes Practice • Eugenia Mills

  Poems: Reading, Fern • Joy West

  Bambino • Gina de Vries

  A Short Story • Holly Zwalf

  Mirror in the Machine • Carol Queen

  How To Start Your Own Erotic Reading Circle • Jen Cross

  Acknowledgements

  About the Center for Sex & Culture

  An Army of Erotic Writers Cannot Fail: My Life with the Erotic Reading Circle

  Carol Queen, PhD

  I began to write in middle school. I journaled every single night when I was a pup, only stopping that daily practice when I went to college. But even there I wrote and wrote, now when the spirit moved me––and it moved me often, because a youth can always talk to herself, even when she doesn’t have others to talk to. I filled book upon book with hand-written musings, analyzing and describing everything around me, everything that was troubling or inspiring or new. If you are not keeping a journal, my friend, please do––it is such an extraordinary gift to yourself, to take your own life so seriously that you make a book out of it, even if it’s only for your own eyes … even if you never re-read it after you fill the pages. Years later I realized I had been writing the story of myself for myself, giving my older self a set of notes to help me make sense of my younger self, scattering breadcrumbs through a forest that, some days, was very dark and trackless.

  Now I know I was also teaching myself to write. I never had a formal writing class, aside from those compulsory ones in high school. I didn’t get an MFA, didn’t apprentice to some amazing mentor, didn’t go to Iowa or anywhere else. I just wrote, and read, and wrote, and the scritching of my pen all alone in rooms, or surrounded by the comforting buzz of cafes, comprises a great deal of how I built my future.

  I’m telling you––pick up a pen.

  Since it was my journal, there was a lot of sex in it, and that’s what started me on the path of becoming a sex writer. (Even when there wasn’t any actual sex being had, there was yearning for and thinking about it, the next best thing.) Once, on a BART train the week after the Loma Prieta earthquake had knocked down part of the Bay Area’s freeway system, I sat my journal, in which I had been writing about (what else?) another night with Robert, down on the seat where I’d been writing, and gaped out the window––so struck by the damage was I that I left the train without it, and was so bereft that my raw document of new love and heady fucking was gone forever that I vowed I would go get hypnotized so that I could retrieve it, word for word.

  (The guy who picked it up went to pretty extreme lengths to find me and return it. He left his card; he was a filmmaker, and to this day I keep an eye out in case the story of my life surprises me on Netflix.)

  What I’m trying to say, I think, is that I mostly talked to myself for the first twenty years of my writing life. Until I found the Erotic Reading Circle. I visited it at least once in the 1980s, when I was new to San Francisco––just a few women crowded into the tiny Good Vibrations store on 22nd and Dolores. I think we sat on the floor. Some of them read their own writing; others got up, when it was their turn, to pull a book off the shelves, sharing someone else’s words.

  By the time I began working at Good Vibrations myself, I was just beginning to write for publications, in anthologies and ‘zines. I soon took over the stewardship of the Erotic Reading Circle, joined by Jack Davis, the first man who came to work at GV. Wonderful readers flocked to the circle, too many to name––but just as exciting as hearing the opening pages of the piece that would later become Molly Weatherfield’s BDSM novel Carrie’s Story (take a back seat, 50 Shades of Grey!) was the pleasure of hearing people who’d ventured in with their very first-ever piece of erotic writing. From then until now, a span of twenty years, it is still such a thrill to hear the initial words of someone’s first-ever sex story––and a huge honor to be able to nurture them with feedback and appreciation.

  We never know when a new person comes in the door what they’ll read when they pull out their folded manuscript or their laptop. We cannot predict by looking at a person’s apparent gender, age, station in life (and all of these are only
appearances, after all––you cannot judge a book by its cover, nor the person who has written it), can’t assume what fantasy or experience has flowered from their pen or their blinking cursor. It is the most beautiful opportunity to be reminded of the diverse experiences and identities of the humans around us, but also of their unbounded erotic imaginations. We spend much time in the sex-positive world decrying the role of shame and lack of information––but people find workarounds, and when they sit down to write, no matter where they came from, they may dive into surprisingly deep waters.

  I don’t know how many stories I’ve heard at Erotic Reading Circle gatherings––hundreds, maybe thousands. I have been touched by every one, moved by other Circle members’ feedback, taught more about the craft of writing just from my co-facilitator Jen Cross’s wise and loving observations than I’ve learned from any other single place. (Except, I suppose, my journal.) At the Circle, we have created the kind of sexual world every single one of us deserves: one in which each of us has a voice, a unique array of experiences that make us distinct and valuable to others for our knowledge and perspective, and where we can come together in our wonderful difference and feel, at the end of two hours, that we built a new world together. You’re holding a book in your hands that contains way more than just each individual author’s erotic dream. You are holding synergy, and community. I hope it makes you feel that the possibilities, on and off the page, are endless. The Erotic Reading Circle has certainly done that for me.

  —San Francisco, August 2014

  [go to top]

  “My community for writing is the Circle”: A conversation about the Erotic Reading Circle

  Carol Queen, Jen Cross, and Amy Butcher

  JC: I think it would be great to go back to the beginning. Carol, I love hearing the stories about the beginnings of the Erotic Reading Circle. Who had the idea, what was the initial impetus around holding such a space?

  CQ: The original Erotic Reading Circle was born out of the early years of Good Vibrations, actually, within five, six, seven at the most, years of Good Vibes having begun in 1977, little postage-stamp- sized store in between the Mission district and Noe Valley in San Francisco. As part of the after-hours programming, the Erotic Reading Circle started really to bring newcomers into the store. There were barely any books on the shelves yet. The publishing boom of erotica in the 1990s was years in advance and [Good Vibes] hadn’t even started publishing the erotica anthologies that Susie Bright and Joani Blank helped to put together and put out in the world. But it was, I think, the period that Susie Bright had already joined their staff. And so I can assume that she had something to do with it back in the day. I know that Stafford Kathy Winks was at the helm when I joined [the Reading Circle] one night in the mid-’80s, and, then as now, it was a small group of people reading aloud, talking a little bit amongst themselves about each piece. I think we do more of that than we did then. And we’re more likely now to have it be our own work that we read. In those days, it wasn’t always the writer herself or himself who came to share their work. It was some people who wanted to read erotica and be in fellowship around their love of erotica.

  AB: Oh, interesting.

  CQ: I joined Good Vibes in 1990. And it wasn’t very long before I put my hand up in the air and said I wanted to take over this circle. And for a while Jack Davis was my co-circle-convener, and by that time the anthology boom had happened, the zine boom had happened. No websites yet but we had a lot of writers—the writers that San Francisco is known for now, in the early mid-90s [they] would come to the Erotic Reading Circle and try out their stuff on each other. And so while it still wasn’t necessarily a writer’s own work that was shared, it got more and more likely that that was the case. [The Circle] went dormant for a little while, the very end of the ‘90s or the beginning of the ‘00s, and then you came to town, Jen Cross. When we expressed interest in doing it at the Center for Sex and Culture, Good Vibes said “take it, run, fly with it.” And the rest is history that you’re part of.

  JC: And you and Jack co-edited the first Erotic Reading Circle anthology.

  CQ: Sex Spoken Here, a title that actually was cooked up by Lawrence Schimel who I did Pomosexuals and Switch Hitters with Cleis back in the ‘90s. From far away in New York or Spain or wherever he was he thought of this title and we went with it. At that point we had been doing the Circle for quite a few years and I actually can remember the moment that I knew that we had to do that anthology. There was one specific writer who came along and he read a story—and this is pre-Clinton and Lewinsky, I just want to say this as a preamble—he read a story he had written about a man and a woman who used cigars as a sex toy. Is it possible that Clinton could have read that story? I don’t know! But I heard it and it was so freakin’ creative. Mind you I already had my degree (or almost) in sexology and I thought I’d been around the block a couple of times and I was all … “Wow! We have to put that in a book.” So we did.

  AB: And, Jen, how did you get involved in the Circle?

  JC: I had come to San Francisco in 2002 to lead erotic writing workshops, was doing my practicum for my master’s degree and I was leading an erotic writing workshop for queer women survivors of sexual trauma. Of course, I knew about Carol Queen and I was a huge fan; we were introduced a few years later when I was hoping to come and use the Center to run a series of workshops there. I had found a copy of Sex Spoken Here, I think when I was at Community Thrift buying anthologies as research for my thesis, and [the Erotic Reading Circle] felt like something that should be happening in San Francisco and wasn’t. This sort of space should be available! That feels very bold, that I would have just said to Carol, “Is this something that you want to start doing again?” And she said, “Yes!” [After it got going again,] I liked to encourage writers who were in my workshops, who wanted to start moving their work out into the world, to come to the Erotic Reading Circle.

  CQ: It’s a fantastic step in between …

  JC: [To read aloud] any piece of new writing is really risky to do, [and it’s even more challenging to] read a piece that has to do with sex which is [often, in other workshop spaces,] treated like it’s less than, easy, ridiculous, and not offered the same merit as other forms of writing.

  CQ: And presumed to be experientially-based when it isn’t always, although sometimes it clearly is, and that’s even more intimate and extraordinary, when someone brings something that we know is their own true experience, what an amount of courage it can take.

  JC: And even for folks I think who are comfortable, who have maybe written a lot about sex and read often in the Circle and in other places, when they bring a new piece of writing, it’s still really scary, it’s still really risky, it’s still sort of stepping into that same “oh my god, is somebody gonna laugh at me? Is someone going to think this is ridiculous? Is someone going to take this apart?”

  AB: I remember coming to a Circle once where, um, you know usually there’s somewhere between 5 and 15 people in the circle. And I came to one Circle and it was just the two of you and me. And this is early on in my coming to the Circle. And I read a piece that was one of the more vulnerable ones—it was a harsher piece than I usually write, there was no humor in it, there was nothing to protect me in that piece. And I read it to the two of you. And I was shaking afterwards, after hearing it, having those words come out of my body. But that was such an important experience for me and one of the things it taught me is that that shaking is when I know I’ve written something true. And so I actually look for that now. And I wouldn’t have discovered that had I not had a chance to read aloud to the two of you and to larger groups afterwards.

  JC: Feels like there’s a somatic process happening right there. I would love to find the language for that. This is something we were talking about before, that there’re these different pieces around engaging with a new piece of writing: there’s the actual finding language for something, writing it down, putting it on the page, which is an extraordinary step for many peo
ple. And then there’s that next piece of bringing it up off the page, like we have to embody the words in writing them down in the first place, whether we’re writing by hand or whether we’re typing it in, it’s still moving through our bodies, moving through our physical experience. Whether we’ve done it before or not, I’m thinking how would that feel, and I’m calling on my own physical experience. And so it’s this embodying process, or can be, to generate the work and then to sit in this space and move it up through the page, up through our bodies so we can hold it in our throat, to hold the words in our mouths, and to move them through us in that way—and then we’re also getting to say these things out loud that we’re never supposed to say, that we’re rarely encouraged to speak, even … it can still be so uncomfortable, even in private, even in sort of an intimate sexual experience.

  CQ: Even to a lover, yeah.

  JC: Yes. Right. And so you were talking about that a little bit before, about the power of that reading aloud.

  CQ: Well, one of the things that I think is extraordinary about the Erotic Reading Circle, especially for people who read their own work, although what you just described of the embodiment and voicing of the forbidden, that would be true of anybody who walked through the door and took any book off the shelf here at the Center for Sex and Culture and started to read the sex words out of it. So that would be true, regardless. But the person who has written their own fantasy, experience, piece of work that they hope is art, whatever—to speak it, to read it aloud is a big deal.

  JC: I wanted to rewind a little bit and hear how you, [Amy,] came to be involve in the Erotic Reading Circle.

  AB: Actually, about two weeks before I moved to San Francisco, I was living in Boston and I took a writing workshop with Michelle Tea in Boston and then—I was not stalking her—but then followed her back to San Francisco and I think that was the first writing workshop I’d ever done and so I was like “Oh, this!” I got some good feedback and could feel my legs underneath me a little bit. [I thought,] “I need to replicate that, I want more of that” and so—like so many other things in San Francisco—I came here and [asked myself,] “OK, where’s that workshop that will let me write smut and talk about it and learn about it?” And so I think I stumbled across it through the Center for Sex & Culture. I don’t even remember what the first story was that I read, I’m sure it was quite tenuous with probably some fun things in it … I had these incredible somatic experiences of reading stuff, and crafted all sorts of weird, strange stories and felt like my weird, strange stories were accepted and so trusted my own voice a little bit more …