Best Lesbian Erotica 2013

FOREWORD

Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I would like to add that those who do remember it will come up with a great guest judge for Best Lesbian Erotica.

Among her many smart decisions, Tristan Taormino, the founder of this series, asked Jewelle Gomez to edit the 1997 volume. It was the second year of Best Lesbian Erotica, and getting Jewelle to select the stories was a major step in the growth and visibility of the book and the genre. This year, when we were discussing possible guest judges, I asked the folks at Cleis: “Could we do repeats?”

I’d had a chance to meet and work with Jewelle earlier in the year, when TOSOS (the LGBT theater company in New York, of which I am a proud member) produced a staged reading of her new play, Waiting for Giovanni. It’s a beautiful and challenging piece about James Baldwin, one of our great American writers, by an artist whose own voice is more powerful than ever. So we asked Jewelle to select this year’s stories and were thrilled when she said yes.

In the fifteen years since Jewelle last worked with Best Lesbian Erotica, the genre has become a mighty one, evolving into a full-voiced maturity, with a loyal audience, and writers whose work stands with the best in any genre. I was proud to pass the finalists on, and wondered which she’d choose: which writers would have their first story published, which of the emerging ones would keep blossoming, which grown artists would thrill us with a masterful tale.

One of the most important things we do as artists, one of our obligations, is to make it possible for others to tell their stories. So each spring when I begin to sort through hundreds of stories, I look and listen hard for the ones that are most necessary. What we do: naming and owning our desires, our loves, our fears, our deepest secrets, is essential. Saying, “No, I am HERE, this is who I am,” is crucial to living when scared, angry people try to erase us, deny us, legislate us out of existence, make us second-class citizens, third-class… nothing.

In Jewelle’s beautiful play about James Baldwin, the artist is pressured not to publish Giovanni’s Room: a book about two men, white men, who love each other. His editor begs him to consider another topic; many of his fellow African American writers think he should be writing about their struggle to achieve equality. And finally, Baldwin picks up his papers from the floor and says:

…Still, I can do no more than bind my own wounds and remind them that not accepting love is where the end begins. Each book is my way of wringing life from death. And this story is one I… need… to tell and he is the one I wish to tell it. Unknown. Loving with the certainty of the tides.

And my life, my needs, my questions are my own to be examined by me… read by many. But judgment? In the beginning was the word… words made from the breath of life. It is the same breath whether we are singing a praise song or taking in the scent of our beloved who lies naked beside us. No matter how fierce my need may be; no matter how loud the sound of those who turn away—I am always me… inside here, looking out. Bearing witness. Preaching the word.