Part 1 (1/2)

s.e.x Still Spoken Here.

An Anthology from the Erotic Reading Circle.

Carol Queen, Jen Cross.

Table of Contents.

Introduction * Carol Queen, PhD.

Conversation with the Editors * Carol Queen, Jen Cross, and Amy Butcher Girl in the Red Dress * Sinclair s.e.xsmith.

Heart-Shaped Box * Charles Lyons Ricky Dumb a.s.s * 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 * Anain Bjorkquist The Train Trip * Avery Ca.s.sell.

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 s.e.x Love Story * Lilycat.

Poems: Life Is Good When You're Getting f.u.c.ked, I Have Seen The Future And It Is Full Of Big d.i.c.ks * h.o.r.ehound Stillpoint pink and devastating * Jen Cross G.o.d'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.

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 compa.s.sion, generosity, and kindness. Thank you for holding s.p.a.ce for your own and others' creative erotic expression.

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 meand 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, a.n.a.lyzing and describing everything around me, everything that was troubling or inspiring or new. If you are not keeping a journal, my friend, please doit 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 cla.s.s, 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 youpick up a pen.

Since it was my journal, there was a lot of s.e.x in it, and that's what started me on the path of becoming a s.e.x writer. (Even when there wasn't any actual s.e.x 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 windowso struck by the damage was I that I left the train without it, and was so bereft that my raw doc.u.ment of new love and heady f.u.c.king 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 Franciscojust 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 stewards.h.i.+p 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 namebut 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 s.e.x storyand 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 ma.n.u.script 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 allyou cannot judge a book by its cover, nor the person who has written it), can't a.s.sume 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 ident.i.ties of the humans around us, but also of their unbounded erotic imaginations. We spend much time in the s.e.x-positive world decrying the role of shame and lack of informationbut 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 gatheringshundreds, 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 s.e.xual 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.

”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 s.p.a.ce?

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 publis.h.i.+ng boom of erotica in the 1990s was years in advance and [Good Vibes] hadn't even started publis.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.sume 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 fellows.h.i.+p 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 s.e.x 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: s.e.x Spoken Here, a t.i.tle that actually was cooked up by Lawrence Schimel who I did Pomos.e.xuals 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 t.i.tle 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 s.e.x 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 s.e.xology 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 practic.u.m for my master's degree and I was leading an erotic writing workshop for queer women survivors of s.e.xual 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 s.e.x 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.e.x which is [often, in other workshop s.p.a.ces,] 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 s.e.x 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 G.o.d, 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 people. 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.e.xual experience.

CQ: Even to a lover, yeah.