I didn’t always know what I wanted. When I was coming out in the late 1990s, though there was a serious lack of queer porn in the video stores, there were plenty of people paving the landscape for what would become the blossoming queer porn of the 2000s. Diana Cage, On Our Backs magazine, Good Vibrations, (Toys in) Babeland, Annie Sprinkle, Susie Bright—and, of course, Tristan Taormino. It was Tristan’s 1998 Best Lesbian Erotica anthology that clicked something into place for me, something I could no longer pretend wasn’t there. I would hide the book in the back of the shelves at the bookstore where I worked, and I’d sandwich it between two others and sneak into the stock room to read when it was slow. I wore creases into the spine with Toni Amato’s story, “Ridin’ Bitch,” and Karlyn Lotney’s story, “Clash of the Titans.” I was genuinely confused as to why I liked these stories so much. What was this effect they had on me? Why did I love them so much? What did it all mean?
I began to find other books, short stories and essays that helped move my budding baby dykery along: Nothing But the Girl—oh, swoon. That essay by Anastasia Higgenbotham in Listen Up: Voices From the Next Feminist Generation. Cunt by Inga Muscio. Breathless by Kitty Tsui. And the Herotica series, which was erotica for women before Rachel Kramer Bussel’s prolific erotica editing career.
I bought one of the Herotica books at an indie bookstore—now gone—on Capitol Hill in Seattle when I visited one summer, before I moved there. But it proved to be too threatening to my boyfriend who, enraged one night after yet another argument about my sexuality, stabbed that book and two other lesbian erotica books with the wide-handled screwdriver that I’d used to masturbate with since I was a teenager.
These books are filled with three powerful things: Women who are empowered about their sexuality (which, by the way, does not involve men). Even the books themselves are threatening.
These books of lesbian erotica are not fluff. They are not nothing. They are not frivolous or useless.
For queers coming out and into our own, they are a path.
Fast-forward a few years and I’d managed to snag myself a lesbian bed death relationship, going out of my mind with desire and disconnection. I stopped writing, because the only thing I was writing was how miserable I felt, how much I wanted out of that relationship—a reality I wasn’t ready to face. I decided that to work off my sexual energy, I would either go to the gym or I would write erotica. Well, I ended up writing a lot of erotica, rediscovering this tool of self-awareness and self-creation that had led me to smut in the first place, and I began writing myself back into my own life, back into the things that I hold most important: connection, touch, release, holding, witness, play.
My first published smut story was in Best Lesbian Erotica 2006. Between the time I wrote it and the time the book came out, I was beginning to end the bed death relationship, in no small part because I’d reminded myself of the value of the erotic, of my own inner erotic world, of erotic words. Between the time I wrote it and the time it came out, I started Sugarbutch Chronicles, (sugarbutch.net) which has carried me through these last five-plus years, often being my sanctuary, support circle, best friend and confidant.
Writing these stories, for me, has not been frivolous. They have not been nothing. They are not fluff or useless.
For me, they were a path back to myself when I got lost.
When I was lost, I had no idea what I wanted, aside from the basic daily survivals: work. Eat. Pay bills. Sleep. Shower. But when I wrote, when I connected with my own desire, I felt a little piece of me bloom and become in a bigger way. I felt more like myself.
I turned again to the great books of smut to help me find myself, to help me find a way back to a partner, a lover, a one-night stand—hell, even an hour with a Hitachi was sometimes enough. The Leather Daddy and the Femme. Mr. Benson. Switch Hitters: Gay Men Write Lesbian Erotica and Lesbians Write Gay Male Erotica. Back to Basics: Butch/Femme Erotica. Doing It For Daddy. And Best Lesbian Erotica, always Best Lesbian Erotica. I still eagerly buy it every year to see what the guest editor’s tastes are, to see what the new trends are, to read the emerging new writers, to get my rocks off.
I rediscovered what I wanted through reading smut and writing it, through carving myself a path in connection with a lineage of sex-positive dykes and sex radicals and queer kink-sters and feminist perverts.
After six years of writing and publishing erotica, I am thrilled to be a guest editor for the series which sparked me into queerness in 1998, thrilled to be choosing stories for the same series that published my first piece, “The Plow Pose,” in 2006, and which helped spark me back to myself. It is so exciting to be contributing to this queer smut hotbed that Cleis Press has helped nurture all these years, and I’m so glad to continue to be part of it in new ways.
I know what I want now. And lesbian erotica, or as I prefer to call it, queer smut, has helped me not only visualize what is possible, but create a path toward getting what I want.
The stories in this book reflect my taste, my favorites, my personal hot spots, certainly, but they are also the best-written stories from a large pile of well-written stories by some of my favorite authors, like Kiki DeLovely and Xan West. There are some less-well-known writers in here whose work you may not be familiar with, yet, but who will leave an impression on you, writers like Anne Grip and Amy Butcher. I found dozens of moments of signposts, signals directing me toward myself, words illuminating my own meridians of ache. With each story, with each act of lust, with each dirty command or submissive plea, I rediscovered my own want.
I hope you find some of what you want within these pages, too.
TOUCHED
Amy Butcher
“I know it sounds wicked strange,” Sharon whispered, “but I think I’ve been touched.” Her thick Boston accent pressed a staccato emphasis into the final word. She rocked slightly as she said this, her heart moving toward me then away. Something ached inside me with each pull.
Sharon had been agitated, so we’d skipped fourth period French, escaping to the top of the bleachers overlooking the football field. We sat cross-legged, knee to knee, the September sun purring against our skin. We were hunched forward like old women, the weight of our emerging adolescence hanging around our necks, bending us forward.
Years of Catholic schooling had indoctrinated me into the war of Good versus Evil but never had the battlefield felt so tantalizingly close. I swallowed hard, daring to lift my eyes toward hers. “By the Devil?” I asked, a mixture of terror and thrill sliding out alongside the words.
“No. By God!” she said, fingering first the hem of her own plaid school jumper then moving across to mine. “By God…” she repeated quietly, taking a whole handful of the material and clenching it in her fist. I could feel her hand trembling through the fabric.
I sat back, relieved but confused. “Well, that’s great, right? First off, God is definitely better than the Devil, right?” I struggled to understand her distress. “And second, this means you’ve been chosen. That’s a good thing. I mean, Sister Abigail is always saying that only a few of us will be… chosen, that is.”