BEST LESBIAN EROTICA 03

  Series Editor

  Tristan Taormino

  Selected and

  Introduced by

  Cheryl Clarke

  Copyright© 2003 by Tristan Taormino. Introduction © 2002 by Cheryl Clarke.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published in the United States by Cleis Press Inc.,

  P.O. Box 14684, San Francisco, California 94114.

  Printed in the United States.

  Cover design: Scott Idleman

  Cover photograph: Laurence Jaugey-Paget

  Text design: Frank Wiedemann

  Cleis logo art: Juana Alicia

  First Edition.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  eISBN: 978-1-57344-889-5

  “LIVE: By Request” © 2002 by Samiya A. Bashir, was originally published on www.kuma2.net. “Venus in Therapy” © 2002 by Betty Blue, was originally published in Tough Girls: Down and Dirty Dyke Erotica, edited by Lori Selke (Black Books, 2002). “Wide White Sky” © 2002 by Cheyenne Blue, was originally published on www.mindcaviar.com (Summer/Fall 2002). “Bull Rider” © 2002 by Sacchi Green, was originally published in Body Check: Erotic Lesbian Sports Stories, edited by Nicole Foster (Alyson, 2002). “Cop-Out” © 2002 by Rosalind Christine Lloyd, was originally published in Bedroom Eyes: Stories of Lesbians in the Boudoir, edited by Lesléa Newman (Alyson, 2002). “How It Started” © 2002 by Mary Anne Mohanraj, was originally published in Wet: More Aqua Erotica, edited by Mary Anne Mohanraj (Three Rivers Press, 2002).

  Foreword

  Tristan Taormino

  Thanks to the Internet, people, places, and things are easier than ever to find. You can locate your high school English teacher, the perfect apartment, or a personalized t-shirt with your pet’s picture on it. Type a few words into a search engine, and you’re almost there. It’s like having access to your own private detective who combs the virtual universe to find what you’re looking for.

  Each year, I search for unique, surprising, and really hot stories for Best Lesbian Erotica. Although erotic writing has become plentiful (thanks in part to the Web), it hasn’t necessarily made my job any easier. I’m hunting for new voices, intriguing scenarios, and works of fiction that make my panties wet. I don’t want the ordinary, I want the best. I find what the guest judge and I think is the best in handmade chapbooks, at open mike nights, or waiting for me in my post office box. These tales may come from familiar names or unpublished writers, but they are all waiting to be discovered. They want to be found. It’s not exactly a hunt for buried treasure, but there are similarities between the process of reading and selecting submissions for this anthology and tracking down a pot of gold. I sift through common, everyday gems, seeking the magic and the heat of an erotic bond captured in words. I feel so lucky when I’ve found them!

  The people who inhabit the tales in this year’s collection are engaged in their own compelling searches—for a new lover, a sexy trick, a Daddy, or a secret tryst. Often they seek treasures less tangible: understanding, affirmation, comfort, redemption, revenge. Their private (or sometimes public) erotic reconnaissance missions take them to unexpected places, where unrequited crushes turn into real-life romance and erotic triangles are explored from new angles. They may find a forbidden love, an unlikely connection, or raunchy, uninhibited affection.

  Not surprisingly, sex is central to the stories, but it’s also a metaphor for what people want, what they need, what they’ll risk to get it. Whether it’s authentic intimacy, an elusive orgasm, or the adrenaline rush of capturing prey, these characters will put their careers and reputations, their identities and relationships, and their safety and sanity on the line to get it. What fuels both the search and the discovery is longing, attraction, love, lust, and fantasy. Or it may be a darker muse: the smell of fear, a taste for danger, the satisfaction of payback. Not all of them find what they’re after. Some discover something entirely different along the way, and the genuine surprise is a turn-on. Others are still looking, left empty-handed and hungry in the end. Dogged pursuit, the glow of gratification, or a lingering, unfulfilled wish are what make these stories so titillating and satisfying. Reading them is like having really good sex. So turn the page, and have at it!

  Tristan Taormino New York City October 2002

  Introduction

  Cheryl Clarke

  August 14

  Amber Hollibaugh, last year’s Best Lesbian Erotica judge, is a hard dyke to follow. I will try, because I’m proud that Amber and I are still doing the work we were born to do—writing. And here I sit in this almost one year anniversary of 9/11 funk/spunk with a lap full of this year’s erotic prose from lesbians. “Erotic Prose”—sounds like a toy company. Yet, as a poet who’s often written about the erotic and the sexual, it gives me great pleasure and trepidation to be holding these hard copies, leafing through them, choosing exemplary passages, and laughing out loud at a writer’s construction of erotic moments and the way that can change forever the construction of erotic writing and its theorizing. Yes, lesbians always lead in that respect—no respecters of anyone’s traditions. Sex is there. Because sex (and gender) are why we are so greatly and perpetually embattled. (In our literature and on the streets.) We homosexuals, transsexuals, bisexuals, bulldaggers, butches, sissies, queers.

  August 17

  Sex/Gender—whether we practice them or not. Race too. Plenty of sex, gender, and race here, dear reader. Sacchi Green’s “Bull Rider” is exemplary for its interface with all three:

  I should have tried harder to figure Anneke out.A damned fine rider, in total control of herself and her mount, she was all blonde and pink and white with cool, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth self-possession. But a certain Preppy Princess with a long chestnut ponytail and a cute round ass—and delusions of being a world-class equestrienne—had been using up too much of my energy at the time.

  And class—the loud secret in all of our lives.

  August 20

  I make no other diversity claims about the writers featured on these pages, yet the array of writing styles offered readers of this year’s Best Lesbian Erotica is indicative of the vitality of both the genre, “lesbian erotica,” and those who write it (and want it).

  In choosing the stories for this book, I became ever more convinced that place—physical place, cultural place, emotional place—are crucial to lesbian erotica: whether a character is hauling “a collapsible tripod over a hillside in Gilgamesh” in Catherine Miller’s “Along a Rocky Hillside”; or serving in the “English court” of Elizabeth I in Julie Levin Russo’s “Elizabeth”; or “alternating between galleries of naked women and the lurid, gruesome or bizarre” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in Carol Rosenfeld’s “Art History 101.” Or, again, in the “Am-ster- god-fucking-damn,” of Green’s hilarious “Bull Rider.” Perhaps, we (lesbian writers and readers) want our stories to enunciate place—in the same way we once demanded writers’ identities be made transparent so that the experience of our lives is authenticated.

  September 10

  I am purposely not writing any post-9/11 anniversary poems this week like Billy Collins’ poem read before Congress on Wall Street today. A skinny, bald-headed and funny-looking little man. Why aren’t we listening to a Guatemalan survivor who got out just before the second tower collapsed? And not Billy Collins, though the poem sounds halfway sincere. But back to the best o’ lesbian erotica for 2003. I’m looking ahead and trying to look up—(somebody’s skirt).

  “‘Oh God,’ I gasped later, when she plunged three fingers into me. ‘Oh God.’” Only the second line of Sharon Wachsler’s “The Pitcher,” but it kept me reading as the two dyke characters—one a “New York Jew” and the other “an Alabama Baptist”—alternate between the diamond and the bedroom (or rather, the floor of an equipment storage room!) pitching and catching. “I was the catcher, she was the pitcher, the way God intended.”

  “…we get our drinks and the almost relieved kinda jealousy washes over the face of the b-girl bartender who was trying not to cruise you before i got here. i stand behind your stool, my polished hands hide inside your jacket, between your thighs is just you tonight. good…” Poet Samiya A. Bashir in her lyrical lowercase experimentalese, “LIVE: By Request”— 1,637 words of clit-orality and compression. I want to hear more about “the b-girl bartender” and “those other b-girls.” Write on, sister.

  In 1977 Adrienne Rich gave the speech, “The Meaning of Our Love for Women Is What We Have Constantly to Expand,” to a small group of women who had chosen toseparate from the Gay Pride demonstration against Anita Bryant in Central Park. Rich was speaking to the issue of coalitions and alliances, but these erotic narratives take that mandate seriously as well. The writers let us know that lesbianism is more fluid during this wave of feminism, as is the sexual imaginary of lesbian writers (and readers) more fluid—as fluid as the voyeur/actor in a ménage à trois.

  Peggy Munson in the “The Edge of Day and Night” evokes “Daddy” as certainly as Sylvia Plath does in her famous poem of the same name and far less stridently. “‘Now strip,’” says Daddy, pushing me away. “‘Your Daddy wants to come.’”

  Yeah, the dance—wheth
er it occurs in the bar, the house party, the club—is still a crucial part of the lesbian lore of the erotic. I was taken with how sexily one or the other figures into many of the stories and must still figure in our lives as lesbians. It’s not the alcohol. It’s the dance and the possibility of sex. The club—still a site of the erotic. That gives me hope. These writers keep the politics and the art of writing as lesbians vital and sexual. Hey, hey. In “How It Started,” set in Berkeley, Mary Anne Mohanraj bears this out:

  I let my body move to the music, let it carry me over to her. We were dancing alone, a foot or so apart, and then a little closer, a little closer still. That’s when her eyes opened—dark green… She smiled at me, slow and lazy, and I slid closer, just an inch or two away from those glorious breasts. Dancing hard, sweat flicking off me as I shook my ass, arms up in the air, arching my back and hoping my breasts looked bigger than they were.

  In Elspeth Potter’s “Free-Falling,” the triple action occurs in a utopian “Grrltown,” the most famous—well, the only— dyke resort in the solar system, where Trixie and Dixie fuck the brains out of the newly “come out” heroine.

  September 15

  Forty years ago today, the Sixteenth Street Church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama. Four young black girls attending Sunday school were killed in the blast and two teenage black boys were shot and killed in the ensuing mêlée. And R. Gay’s story, “Of Ghosts and Shadows,” haunts me today. Set in Haiti, where “the moon burns just as hot as the sun,” it is the story of Amèlie, the loved, and Marie Françoise, the lover/narrator, whose mothers “are best friends,” whose fathers were “taken away for supporting free elections,” and who live in defiance of the proscriptions against love between women. Defiance exacts a high price—in truth and in fiction.

  Passing women and trannys people the erotic terrain, like “Troi,” in Rosalind Christine Lloyd’s “Cop-Out.” An ex-Marine, former college hoop all-star, a New York City detective, and black, Troi likes to pass as a man and pick up straight women in hip-hop bars:

  Hip-hop clubs were perfect venues for her obsession because the social element was fiercely dark, wild, uninhibited and crowded enough for her to move around freely without inciting any suspicion… The only problem she ever encountered were the down-low, bisexual switch-hitter boys prowling around who correctly detected her on their ‘gay-dar’, but incorrectly assumed she was a gay man or something even more ambiguous…

  And let us never forget what a site of sex is the academy, where the lines are never straight and are sometimes very thin between the sexual and the intellectual. The narrator of “Keeping Up Appearances,” Norma, researching, of all things, “lesbian erotica,” falls under the tutelage of Professor

  Katherine Carlyle, who advises: “Try and develop a mouth fetish. It will make poetry much more fun to read.”

  Plenty of domination among the best of lesbian erotica, in Kate Dominic’s “Cinderella’s Shoes,” and Tamai Kobayashi’s “Egg,” for instance.’” In fact, in most of the pieces, the dimension of domination is explored in some way. Strong women love to be told what to do and be made to do it, and lesbians no less so.

  These stories are in the world, but also full of visions of how the world can be, might be, will be. They are historical, political, and cultural analogues awaiting the possibilities of future. The best erotic writing by lesbians awaits you. Tune in.

  Cheryl Clarke

  New York City

  September 30, 2002

  Cop-Out

  Rosalind Christine Lloyd

  Troi was into picking up girls at straight clubs. Tonight, her destination was Butter, a hip-hop club in Tribeca.

  An ex-Marine and former college hoop all-star, Troi was now a New York City police detective. Her preoccupation with combat and competition defined a quiet but powerfully aggressive demeanor. She kept her 5’10”, 160 pound body buffed to masculine perfection with rigorous daily workouts that involved pumping iron with the muscle queens at a gay gym in Chelsea where she matched their workout regimen to achieve similar macho results. Every inch of her was solid, sinuous, rippling muscle.

  Her skin was like dark fudge, as rich and even in tone as a sinfully delicious chocolate cake. When she laughed, a mouth full of perfectly spaced teeth framed by thin, silky lips accentuated a smile that ignited the light in her unusually light brown eyes. Her hands were massive: hands designed to palm basketballs, handle heavy artillery and apprehend suspects, among other useful things.

  Tonight she opted for a pair of soft brown leather pants and a suede camel-colored shirt. She had a knack for choosing loose-fitting clothes that enabled her to neutralize any semblance of femininity. Her breasts were almost always held hostage, bound tightly beneath her clothing. She selected one of her larger dildos, the one she’d named Shaft, along with her new leather travel harness. Shaft was handmade, designed precisely to her specifications to include, among other things, a skin tone that matched her complexion. The startling replica even came equipped with a fake foreskin that made it feel that much more authentic. It served its purpose. It set her back quite a lot of money but she quickly discovered it was worth every cent and more. She finished her outfit with her favorite designer square-toe boots (for men, of course), splashed on a men’s designer cologne and dared to accessorize with a fat ruby in her left ear and a matching pinky ring for that hint of gangsta.

  To throw people off her trail, she would often flash her police badge on her way into the clubs she cruised. Besides being allowed admission at no charge, she avoided being carded. This particular evening, it was obvious that Butter was seriously implementing its ID policy because of the excess crowd of underage kids hanging out behind the ropes, trying to get in.

  Hip-hop clubs were perfect venues for her obsession because the social element was fiercely dark, wild, uninhibited and crowded enough for her to move around freely without inciting any suspicion. The carnival feeling reminded Troi of her freaknik college days. Most of the men were typical in their badass attitudes, adhering to the typical negative stereotypes of male posturing, and taking the pessimistic connotations of the music way too seriously. Talk about game—all of this worked in Troi’s favor because she offered an alternative. Her meticulous, classy, cash-money look attracted the girls’ attention every time. The only problem she ever encountered were the down-low, bisexual switch-hitter boys prowling around who correctly detected her on their gaydar, but incorrectly assumed she was a gay man or something even more ambiguous. Troi found these occasions amusing but off-putting. For this reason, using the restrooms, any restroom, was strictly out of the question.

  Scanning the club, she easily found her mark; a tall, red bone with the face of an angel dipped in honey, with two long French braids that went down her back tickling a fat, juicy ass squeezed into a cheap, tight, lycra hoochie dress. The slinky fabric stretched and strained against the milk-fed curves of her breeder hips. Her calves, sprung from svelte, golden thighs, were incredibly sculpted in a pair of chic platform ankle boots that had a sci-fi affect: the entire boot, including the heel, was encased in stretched black leather. Troi liked the way they made her calves look. Long and wispy eyelashes like the fringe on a gypsy’s shawl draped huge, sensuous eyes. Wearing too much jewelry, she was definitely into “bling-bling”. Her nail tips were long, decorated in startling designs and colors; but her tits, piled into a push-up bra, were voluminously for real. Ms. Thing was ghetto fabulous in all its glory.

  Troi watched the girl closely, studied her standing at the bar as if waiting for a bus. At least three men asked Braids to dance, but she declined them all. Braids was waiting for Mr. Right. She was waiting for Troi.

  Troi sent her a glass of champagne with a shot of Hennessey poured on top (commonly known as thug’s gold) and waited for the young lady’s reaction. Initially, Braids hesitated with suspicion, refusing the cocktail. But when the bartender pointed at Troi, Braids stared for a moment with those eyes, assessing her admirer before smiling seductively and mouthing the words thank you with lusciously burgundy- coated lips. She then proceeded to sip slowly from her glass as if digesting something very precious. Troi would not allow her much time to think, knowing she would have to crank up the charm to get Braids where she wanted her.