Best Lesbian Erotica 2013

INTRODUCTION: ON OUR BACKS Jewelle Gomez

Back in 1984, when I was asked to submit an erotic story to the magazine On Our Backs, I’d never written one before. Of course, I had fantasies like most people (I was, after all, raised Catholic!); but as for writing them down—it never occurred to me. As a lesbian feminist of color I wasn’t against erotic literature; I just wasn’t sure how one constructed a juicy story that wasn’t based on exploitation. But I was already formulating the ideas for my vampire novel, a story told through a feminist lens, so I had begun thinking about how to tackle a traditionally exploitative genre without traveling down the easy road of tradition. So I figured I might as well give erotica a go, too. The challenge of finding the “sweet spot” while creating engaging, multidimensional women who are not taking advantage of each other (unless that was mutual) was a challenge I enjoyed.

The other part of wanting to write the story was a response to a call to action by the Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce (FACT) which, in the 1980s, was providing a sex-positive political alternative to the very loud voices of conservative, antiporn activists. Women’s relationship to sexuality was and remains a complex territory. No matter how hip and powerful we feel, women have been and continue to be seen as the sexual receptacles for men. Male-produced images in popular culture still define us so narrowly it would be impossible for an extraterrestrial being landing on earth to actually recognize a female unless the being had landed in the offices of a fashion magazine where the women are dress-size 0, wear six-inch heels, and all look white, even when they have brown skin. Female images in popular media are crafted to pique the desire of middle-aged white men. And any women that seem to deviate from that are quickly slapped down—see “journalists’” comments about Kate Winslet or Kelly Clarkson being “fat.” Notice how few African American women with dark skin or Asian American women appear on magazine covers or on television series. This affects how we treat ourselves and our desire.

Mainstream pornography simply follows mainstream commercial images to their logical conclusion: women are not people… we’re soylent green. That is—like the eponymous movie—we are a packaged edible, human commodity to be used, abused and discarded at the whim of male consumers. The famous picture that antiporn activists used most often was that of a porn magazine cover in which women were being fed into a meat grinder, legs and high heels the only remaining indication that we were humans. There is no question that these images cause damage. But I’d venture to say that numerically speaking, many more people have their ideas about women shaped by going to auto shows; watching the Kardashians, the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders and children’s beauty pageants; all of the above being alarming cases where women contribute to their own objectification or that of their children, usually without a thought about the pornographic quality of their acts. All of it supports the idea that women are disposable and interchangeable items as easily killed off as changing the tires on your truck.

That said, it is just as dangerous for women to tamp down our sexuality in response to exploitation, and that is what conservative lesbian feminists of the ’80s were insisting on. Should we don the not-so-gay apparel of the cloister? Never enjoy our fantasies? Never experience orgasm because it frightens the horses? When President Ronald Reagan sent Attorney General Edwin Meese on a fact-finding mission, Meese traveled the country, holding meetings, trying to convince local municipalities to shut down “porn” operations. The commission engaged “experts” who emphatically declared that if we didn’t fight this scourge we were Nazis.

A group of us—mostly lesbian—activists went to a courthouse hearing of the commission in New York City, smuggling in signs that said CENSORED and we whipped them out at one point, and sat quietly so it would look really bad if they tried to drag us away. The resulting Commission report didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know, and told us a lot that was totally untrue. The result of the Commission, its report and the so called “porn wars” was not a lessening in the profits of porn magazines or increase in the recognition of responsible human beings, but rather the clamping down on and sometimes ban of gay and lesbian literature (erotic and not) crossing borders.

I know what it’s like to have female sexuality abused. African women were used by slave masters as if they were one of the mules on the plantation; Native women were raped and eviscerated for sport; and every day in the news we see the reports of only a fraction of the rapes and domestic beatings that occur. But women do have a right to sexual expression that we control and we have to be suspicious of any male authority attempting to maintain control over our bodies, whether it’s about what we wear in public, what we do in bed or what we do or do not carry in our wombs: these things are connected.

It’s no accident that lesbians have been at the forefront of that activism trying to hold on to our right to be sexually active and exploratory. We have been declared outlaws for our sexual desire; or worse, told that we (as women) didn’t have any real desire. One of the last things I did before I left New York City was participate in a collective that created a one-day conference (in 1992) called Lesbians Undoing Sexual Taboos—LUST. It featured panels, readings, demonstrations (a lot of women found Annie Sprinkle’s G-spot that day), and it culminated in a dance at the Clit Club complete with a back room for experimentation. I am forever in debt to the women who engaged me in FACT and LUST for expanding my understanding of the significance of desire in our political lives.

I tell this history not to be downbeat, but to indicate how important these stories in this anthology are and celebrate them! I tell the history so that we don’t forget how easily and self-righteously some would take away our right to speak these stories out loud; and so that the younger writers included in this anthology know they are part of a heroic tradition. Women and lesbians are not having an easy passage into liberation and there are those who still believe our bodies are their own personal colonies; to paraphrase Maya Angelou… “and still we rise.”

The variety of stories here will testify to the breadth and variety of lesbian desire and the triumph of freedom of expression. Each one is my favorite, of course, because they all elicit the sense of anticipation or surprise or fun and the desire that makes life worth living. No one really knows what raises our blood pressure, engorges our sexual organs and gets our hearts pumping; it’s a complexity of biology, history and imagination. But each of these authors has created a singular landscape in which she has expert control over the facets of desire for her characters and succeeds in getting the juices flowing, figuratively and literally. Whether you’re listening carefully for the soft, tantalizing rustle of voluminous gowns in the sensual treasure “Underskirts,” by Kirsty Logan, or you’re moving with the hard-driving need of “Anonymous,” by BD Swain, you’ll find the core elements of erotica that are key to our lives as lesbians. These are elements we don’t give up easily even in the face of repression or censorship. On our backs we are not helpless like the crab or turtle; we are open and moist, ready for fulfillment. At the same time we’re ready to spring up to show the power of our desire. As Audre Lorde said, “Our visions begin with our desires.”