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Before 50 Shades, before internet erotica, before plastic-wrapped volumes in the corner of the bookstore, before pretty much anything we know today, there was Anais Nin.
A lot of times people try to validate erotica by grabbing onto as many canonical authors as they can. This is why you see "Top 25 Erotic Novels Ever!" lists that look more like a collage syllabus. Maybe there are some people who can masturbate to Tropic of Cancer, but I'm not one of them, and I would be worried if I was. But Anais Nin is the real deal -- a genuine meeting between modernist poetics and dirty, filthy smut.
Some of her stories may be frustrating to those looking for exhaustive detail, but there's more than enough in suggestion and style to get your motor going. Aside from that, Nin examines sexuality in interesting ways, making it simultaneously mythic and intensely real. Her landmark story collection, Delta of Venus, moves between a set of connected characters in 1920s France and captures all of the hedonistic possibility of that era as well as the uncertainty. Nin's characters are always striving for some eternal pleasure, and always just coming up short (sound familiar?).
Get a copy of Delta of Venus if you haven't already. You don't need to stuff it under your shirt: it's pretty much the most respectable porn you can buy. You can read it with or without your pants on and enjoy it in different ways. How many books can you say that about?
This was the Simon chapter or, as I previously described it, the chapter where things get really gay. Like the BDSM in chapter 3 (and in Sunday & Monday), this is me trying to write something that isn't in my sexual wheelhouse but perhaps could be. As such I'm not sure if the sex is really convincing, but hopefully I at least got the mechanics right.
The other issue I tried to address in this chapter was how having sex with Simon affected Mike's identity. This is something that doesn't get a lot of play in gay and lesbian stories, and I think it should. Maybe in a perfect world deciding to suck another dude's dick wouldn't change anything meaningful about the way you identify yourself, but in our world homosexual acts or the lack thereof seem to be central to the identities of many men. (Of course, queer identities and lifestyles can be incredibly useful for challenging heteronormativity, so I'm not advocating a naive "Why can't we all be people, man" approach either. But if being just people works for you, go ahead.) This kind of ties into Mike's broader search for purpose and identity, which has been running through the whole story.
Anyway, hopefully I didn't turn off all my audience with this chapter. I know that SOL and Literotica are populated primarily by straight guys, but I think the Saying Stay's commitment to a kind of pansexuality demanded that our erstwhile protagonist not rule out half the population. And I also wanted to disrupt the erotica status quo where all men are straight and all women are bi. Why demand things from our female characters that we aren't willing to see in our male ones?
Next in the docket is a fantasy/erotic horror idea I've had for a while. Progress has been slow, and grad school is gonna cut into my time once again, but it will be out as soon as I can manage.
Hey all. The newest chapter of Saying Stay is almost ready. I'll warn you ahead of time, it's pretty fricking gay. But that's not what I'm here to talk about today. Instead it's time for me to mumble something about creativity and capitalism and then drop the mic.
In our weird bubble of free online erotica we're fortunate in some ways. There's no money to be had and not much respect. We're doing this purely out of love. I guess some people might start writing incest fiction for the hits or whatever, but I doubt they would last long. In some ways it's an almost idyllicly non-commercial. Of course, it turns out that most people's passion project is crude misogynistic power fantasies, but it still provides a great forum for erotic expression.
This is not true for everyone. Forms of art which require equipment and funding -- filmmaking, for one -- are much more subject to the pressures of the marketplace. And for those who don't have the free time, even written erotica can be difficult to produce. I know I've sometimes felt the desire to "sell out" and start churning out monster-sex stories for Amazon. The existing adult industry, oriented as it is to a particularly vicious form of male heterosexual desire and objectification, leaves little room for passion projects, at least not of any merit. There's not much art in Gaping Teens 19.
The first website I want to share with you is called Porn For Everyone, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's a just-launched website that provides legal free queer porn. Not that there's anything wrong with piracy, but unfortunately the very small amount of good video porn is generally hard to find via criminal channels. I'd certainly love to see some of the videos on this site -- earnest, sex-positive, and hugely erotic -- make it onto the tube sites instead of yet another clip of some woman gagging while being insulted. Porn For Everyone is just in its beginning stages, but hopefully it will be a success. Here's the link: http://www.pornforeveryone.net/pfe/home/
The other is a site called Offbeatr, which is basically attempting to be the Kickstarter of porn. While the crowd-funding model is less than ideal, it's a welcome alternative to the sex industry. There's a lot of good stuff on here -- there's a new Erika Lust movie, for gods' sake -- as well as some kind of grody stuff. I trust you, my faithful reader, to be able to tell the difference. Right now it looks like pretty much only furry stuff has been successful -- but then, the furries have always been better at using the Internet. But once again, with a little support it could be a success. It doesn't cost anything to vote for a project, so you have no excuse. Here's the link - http://offbeatr.com.
This is all about gaining control of our own sexuality again, and being able to produce smut independently and outside of the strictures of mainstream sexuality. As writers, we have this power, although few choose to use it. It's up to us to make sure other forms of media do as well. (And even if you're just into written stuff, there's a bit of it on both these sites). Of course, under a capitalist system art is never truly free and is always a bit of a compromise, but sites like the one above suggest a way in which our porn can be compromised a little less. So go out there and seize the means of reproduction.
Before sex-positive came to mean "anything to do with sex is good", I thought it referred to things like Colleen Coover's brilliant comic Small Favors The comic is absolutely abundant with joy and optimism, as well as humour and hot lesbian sex. There are forces of oppression, but they're so cartoonish and easily seducible as to enhance and not stifle the comic's unrepentant libertinism. The art is bright and open, with the minimal lines creating a sense of exaggeration and abandon, more akin to manga than the dirty hyper-realism embraced by
Small Favors is genuinely funny, without sacrificing eroticism. Both the humour and the sexiness come from the joyful sense of play that infuses the comic. Nibbil can grow to full size and sport a strap-on because hey, why not, and everyone involved will be just thrilled about it. Coover's representation of female sexuality is amazing, at least in part because it makes you wonder why this kind of enthusiastic consent is so hard to find in smut. For once sex isn't something to be inflicted on a female body or to be coaxed from some uptight (but inwardly sexy) woman, but something that's joyful and free-flowing. The overall message of Small Favors, a message everyone needs to hear, is that sex is okay and you're okay too.
Some pages that show Coover's sense of playfulness as well as the art style:
http://xxx.freeimage.us/share.php?id=590F_517B289C
http://xxx.freeimage.us/share.php?id=D2B5_517B289C
The above paragraphs are pretty repetitive, and that's because there's little to overthink in Small Favors even for a guy as prone to overthinking as I am. (I mean, I used "joyful" so many times in there, and I hate joy!) I've mentioned that in my recent writings I've been trying to trace the contours of a utopian sexuality, and I think that Coover presents that sexuality in its purest form. The setting of the comics is a weird lesbian suburbia that is a total fantasy and all the better for it. It's a hard bar to step over.
Unfortunately, Small Favors was Coover's only adult work, as she's since crossed over into mainstream comics doing youth-oriented work that I'm sure is very good but doesn't really scratch my queer-porn itch. The thing about American erotic comics seems to be that none of the greats stay -- Phil Foglio took a similar path, and is now drawing a garish steampunk webcomic in between polishing his Hugo awards, while I think Larry Welz is selling pot outside a high school somewhere. The complete run of Small Favors is out of print, but I think the first half is still available, and there may be illegal versions floating around in the Interwebs (wink wink, nudge nudge). Even if you usually prefer your smut strictly text-based, I would encourage you to check it out.
My new short story-cum-novella (insert "cum" joke here) is up, or it should be soon. Like I wrote earlier, this one kind of got away from me, but I'm kind of glad it did because I ended up developing both the characters and the sex more than I would have if I had been concerned about word count (or releasing it within a reasonable timeframe). At the very least I hope it suited all of you underserved lesbian BDSM fans out there.
BDSM is kind of an odd thing to write, especially for me -- I'm not overly turned on by it, but I'm interested in the dynamics, and a lot of my favourite smut authors write a lot of BDSM stories. It definitely seems to be a part of the cultural zeitgeist right now. Generally there seem to be two divergent approaches -- tell the fantasy that a BDSM scene would be trying to replicate, or tell a story about people participating in BDSM play as they would in real life. The second route has some weird meta-narrative implications, so of course it's the one I chose. Sunday & Monday isn't "pomo porno" like, say, Tokyo Symphony, but there are definitely moments where the line between fantasy and reality gets called into question. I'd like to think that represents a kind of fantasy in itself rather than just a sterilized, politically correct version of what people really want to read.
Up next: Not Alone chapter 5! Hopefully I can remember the characters' names...
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