Best Lesbian Erotica 2009 Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Foreword

  Introduction

  THE VIRGIN OF G

  THE DINER ON THE CORNER

  OPERATION BUTCH AMBUSH

  BAIT AND SWITCH

  GOLDEN GATE

  SPIKE

  PUNK LOVE

  LIPSTICK ON HER COLLAR

  DREAM DATE

  ON SNOW-WHITE WINGS

  TOUGH ENOUGH TO WEAR A DRESS

  A NIGHT AT THE OPERA

  PLEASE (ACT III)

  HARD TO GET

  WAITING

  THE PLACEMENT OF MODIFIERS

  VELVET

  STUCK AT WORK AND LATE FOR A DATE

  BANDANNA KISS

  FLIPPING THE SCRIPT

  THE BREAKING POINT

  THE CHRISTMAS GIFT

  BLADE, INK, STEEL

  To the Skin

  In the Skin

  Through the Skin

  BENEATH THE CARPET IS THE FLOOR

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  ABOUT THE EDITORS

  Copyright Page

  FOREWORD

  Tristan Taormino

  In 1995, I began work on my first edition of Best Lesbian Erotica, and here I am writing the foreword for Best Lesbian Erotica 2009, the last volume I will edit. Fittingly, it feels like the ending of a sex-filled affair. I’m sad, I’m satisfied, I’m nostalgic, and I’m ready for the next adventure.

  In fact, as I read the stories for this collection knowing it would be my last, they reminded me of a steamy affair I had some years ago. I was in San Francisco speaking at a gala evening honoring Joan Nestle in the fall of 1998. I stood on the stage of the Victoria Theater with literary luminaries like Dorothy Allison, Jewelle Gomez, Carol Queen, and Alison Bechdel, and I was the youngest woman asked to read the work of one of my heroines. I chose a passage from “My Woman Poppa,” one of Joan’s signature pieces of erotica that was first published in On Our Backs. It was about butch/femme power dynamics, strap-on sex, the politics of penetration, and passion.

  My woman poppa who knows how to take me in her arms and lie me down, knows how to spread my thighs and then my lips, who knows how to catch the wetness and use it, who knows how to enter me so waves of strength hit us both.*

  After the event came to a close, I was standing on stage talking with the other readers and audience members. I spotted a hot butch in the audience making her way toward us. Actually, it looked like she was making a beeline for me. She had on a sharp gray suit and tie and well-shined wingtips. Her hair was sculpted into a perfect pompadour. She had a retro cool about her as she swaggered up to me and introduced herself. Her icy blue eyes were warm underneath her macho gaze. I admit it, I was pretty taken with her. I told her I was only in town for a few days. I invited her to a book reading the next night at A Different Light in the Castro. She showed up at the store, hung back in the travel section while I read from my latest work. This time, she was dressed in dark blue jeans with thick turned-up cuffs, and a plain white T-shirt peeking out from a vintage bowling shirt. And she had that pompadour, perfect again.

  I don’t remember if we went out after the reading or not, I just remember ending up at her apartment in the Mission. It was filled with mod furniture and a fluffy gray cat the same color as her suit from the previous night. She was a gentleman, as if she’d gone to a school for gentlemanly skills or something, and we talked on her couch. It turned out that we both used to ride horses when we were younger, so we compared notes. We swapped stories about hours spent at the stable and waking up at four a.m. to go to horse shows.

  “Why did you stop riding?” she asked.

  I paused, looked her right in the eyes, and the words tumbled out of my mouth before I could stop them.

  “I lost my nerve,” I said quietly.

  “Yeah,” she nodded. “I know what you mean.”

  I had never told anyone that before. I had never even said those words out loud. Who was this stranger and how did she unearth such a revelation from me? My stomach fluttered. I felt cracked open. Part of me wanted to dart out the front door. She leaned in to kiss me before I had the chance to escape. And I surrendered…to her mouth on mine, to her hand on the back of my neck, to her thigh pressed between my legs. When she slipped her hand under my skirt and slid two fingers between my slick lips, it was obvious: I was smitten and soaked and hers. Seduction has never felt so easy. I have never felt so easy.

  She pushed her face through my tangle of curls and pressed her mouth to my ear.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said, and disappeared.

  I heard water running and realized she was in the bathroom. The water kept running and soon I wondered what she was doing in there. But I kept still on the couch, exactly where she had left me, and waited. She finally emerged in boxers and a silk smoking jacket with gold-colored lapels. I saw a bulge in the boxers. I smiled. She sat down on the couch, and I didn’t need any more of an invitation. I slipped my hand inside the opening of the blue fabric and found her cock. I tugged at it to guide it through the slit and that’s when it hit me: she had a really big dick. I mean, big like a porn star replica…big like, well, bigger than I was used to. I wrapped my lips around it anyway, decided to give it my best try. It hit the back of my throat and there were still several inches left to go. I put my hands around the base and pressed down on it with each bob of my mouth. She moaned like she was turned on and mad about it at the same time. It was music to my ears. As I leaned back over her to continue working her with my mouth, she fingered my pussy. She touched my chin and brought my mouth back to hers. We kissed and I think my nose started to run, probably from deep-throating her one too many times, and that gray cat. I was allergic to the cat.

  We made our way to the bed in the other room where she climbed on top of me. She sat up between my legs and reached for the bottle of lube on the bedside table. She poured some in her hand and started to stroke her cock with it. The robe fell open slightly, and I saw a flash of black leather against her chest. She moved my hand between her legs and put it over hers and continued to stroke. With my other hand I traced my way up her chest over the robe’s silky fabric. I looked at her, wanting to know if it was okay to go under. She tipped her head down slightly.

  I found my way to her chest and the leather harness that encased it. Her nipples were hard cylindrical points, thicker than mine and twice as stiff. I followed the black leather down the front of her chest and realized it was connected to the harness underneath her boxers. I was trying to picture how it all fit together in my head when I felt her hand move underneath mine. She spread my legs and the cock was hard against my inner thigh. I felt the tip at my opening. The lube had warmed up with her stroking, and it felt good. She pushed in slightly and my legs fell open farther. Then her entire body covered mine as she went all the way inside. I felt the smooth silk of her robe against my chest with the stiff leather just underneath it.

  She fucked me like that for many months, with steamy cross-country phone calls and emails in between. Then, I came to visit her and realized that she and her girlfriend—she’d had one all along—had gotten very serious. Her girlfriend was no longer happy and gracious when I came to town, although she wouldn’t say so. Sometimes, a femme just knows when another femme is grinning and baring it, and I knew. So, I sat down with my San Francisco sweetheart in my friend’s apartment and I told her good-bye. Her butch ego took a hit, and she wasn’t happy. But she didn’t stay mad for very long. The beautiful thing about the whole affair is that it never had the time (or perhaps the inclination) to get ugly or mean or bitter. It was perfect in that way. My time with her filled me with sexy memories, without the sting of a bad breakup. It had ru
n its course, and we had to go our separate ways. To this day, when a butch excuses herself to the bathroom and I hear the sound of running water, I think of her.

  And that’s what it’s like leaving Best Lesbian Erotica, a series I created and nurtured for sixteen volumes. No temper tantrums or messy phone calls, just a bittersweet ending to a wonderful affair.

  I will miss the saucy femme who wrote a brilliant personal ad, the woman who had a hysterectomy and feared she’d never ejaculate again, the mom who was in love with a knife sharpener, the Muslim sisters-in-law with depilatory wax, and the surfer girl who became a boy. I’ll never forget all the horny hitchhikers, cheating wives, unconventional vampires, pervy professors, and leather daddies. Or the yoga teachers, dyke superheroes, butch bakers, kinky sex machine inventors, queer strippers, and lesbian escorts. I’ll miss how writers managed to work Queen Elizabeth, Little Red Riding Hood, Rita Hay-worth, Salome, and Monica Lewinsky into their lesbian erotica. I’ll miss all the words writers use to describe swollen clits, wet pussies, stiff cocks, hard nipples, muff diving, blow jobs, hand jobs, finger-fucking, cunt-banging, and ass-reaming. I will miss sex in parks, office cubicles, bathrooms, taxicabs, subways (and subway tunnels), national monuments, Italian villas, and trailer-park brothels; at tranny boy pool parties and on carnival rides. I’ll miss revenge sex, make-up sex, anonymous sex, fantasy sex, love sex, hate sex, and public sex. I’ll miss genderfucks, mind fucks, power fucks, and first-time fucks. I will miss reading a new story by the most published author in the anthology series, Peggy Munson. I’ll miss reciting snippets of erotica to my partner before bedtime. I’ll miss the thrill of accepting a piece and receiving the author’s bio with the line, “This is her first publication.” I’ll miss meeting writers all over the country and reading in bookstores and bars and backyards. I’ll miss proofreading the galleys and jerking off.

  I’m happy that the series will continue in the capable hands of Kathleen Warnock, who has contributed stories to many volumes herself (writing under a pseudonym). I’m honored to have been the keeper of this collection for so long, and I can’t wait to see what the next fifteen years bring!

  Tristan Taormino

  New York City, 2008

  *Joan Nestle, “My Woman Poppa,” in A Fragile Union: New and Selected Writings (Cleis Press, 1998), 151.

  INTRODUCTION:

  IMMERSION COURSE

  Joan Larkin

  “Mm!” My friend has a sly, knowing look. “So, when I read this collection,” she teases, “I’ll know what you like to do in bed.”

  “Don’t assume anything,” I say sharply. “You won’t have a clue what I like to do. You’ll know what I like to read, what I like thinking about. You’ll get a good look at some of my wildest, dirtiest fantasies—and a few sweet, romantic ones, too. You may guess at some language I enjoy in the bedroom. You’ll know a whole range of scenarios, any one of which turns me on just thinking about it. You’ll know words and mental pictures that ignite my feelings and arouse my flesh. But what I do—? That,” I tell my friend, “stays private.” I insist on the boundary. You know what Robert Frost said about good fences making good neighbors.

  Here’s the thing. Having just read and reread this stack of shamelessly delicious, varied, unpredictable stories and felt the effect on my pulses of their thrilling details, I’ve never been more convinced than I am right now of this truth—I’m sure of it: the brain is the wildest sex organ of all. Just remembering an image from one of these stories—a pair of ripped panties, say—or a spiked heel, a nylon cord, a strap-on under an Edwardian dress, the sound of a zipper, or of lube quietly gliding over silicone—one image is all it takes to make my skin blush and my muscles tense. It’s thinking that shortens the breath, raises the temperature, and quickens the blood. Let’s hear it for the imagination!

  These stories are full of objects you may or may not have used: latex, rubber, silk, and silicone; clamps, collars, harnesses, plugs, floggers, camisoles, scented candles; and yes, one outrageous enema bag. You may be inspired to go shopping. I was. But in truth all you really need is this book and some light to read by. I read many of the stories in manuscript format, at bedtime, in a supine position, and I can enthusiastically recommend that you do, too. This is not an academic exercise.

  As for what the fabulous women in this collection like to do in bed—well, I’m here to report that very little of the dramatic action takes place in beds, and almost none of it is horizontal. Bars, clubs, kitchens, a tattoo parlor, a famous public park, a concert hall, a diner, a war zone, a librarians’ conference, an art gallery, a cruise ship, a beach, a balcony or two. And what happens there, at a depth, under these many surfaces? Themes of power, self-knowledge, self-revelation, love, and even spirituality run through scenes of domination and submission, the inhabiting of old and new roles, sudden turnabouts, the intensity of repression, and the wild exhilaration of freedom. From teasingly playful to darkly cruel to hilariously inventive, I was riveted—as I know you will be—by the sophistication and power of these writers—and by what they exposed of me to myself.

  I began reading these pieces convinced I was the same vanilla romantic I’d been since prehistoric times—the ’70s, when all feminists were expected to sport construction boots, femmes were suspect, bisexuals were out-and-out traitors, and trans persons had no voice. But reading these stories has been an illumination. Not only has this immersion course expanded the scope of my erotic imagination and shaken off old, limiting ideas of political correctness, it has made me hungry for more: more pleasure, more life, more connection to myself and to others. In awakening my lust, these stories free the life force in me.

  Yet another revelation: the better written the story, the more erotically powerful it is. Writing itself is an erotic art, ruled by rhythms of desire and release. These stories are written by women who know how to tease, gradually unfold, and prolong our interest, or how to pull us into their worlds with an immediate shock and hold us there, breathless, watching a sometimes dangerous drama unfold. Their rhythms are as compelling as their voices are different. The variety of scents and flavors made me swoon. I won’t forget the outrageous baby talk and undercurrent of incestuous fantasy in Thea Leticia’s “The Christmas Gift,” the hilarious/serious revelation of the eternal holy feminine in Jean Casse’s “The Virgin of G,” the unabashed fetishism of Jodi Payne’s “Spike,” the melding of dominance and class in Jean Roberta’s “The Placement of Modifiers,” nor the dark, anonymous coupling in Jessica Swafford’s “Golden Gate.” I’ll read Radclyffe’s “Dream Date” over and over, reveling in the drawn-out fantasy of the considerate escort who’s thought of—well, everything—and I’ll keep coming back to savor the danger of loving a merciless park ranger in Anna Watson’s “Beneath the Carpet Is the Floor.” And these are only some of my favorites. You’ll have favorites, too, worlds you’ll savor and want to return to. But I promise that nothing between these pages will disappoint you.

  So turn the page. Let’s get the party started.

  THE VIRGIN OF G

  Jean Casse

  “You sound like my grandmother!” She turned on the light and sat up.

  “No!” This was both a denial and a protest because I wasn’t some religious old lady muttering prayers in Spanish, or maybe Latin, in the corner.

  I still knelt between her legs, my head lifted, lips moist from her. “Just let me get a mirror so you can see, too. She shows up really clear in this light. Let me take a picture.”

  “No way.” She brushed me aside as she got out of bed. “You did not see anybody in my cunt. You are not going to talk crazy like my grandmother, seeing the Virgin in an apple core, San Francisco in a half-eaten Baby Ruth bar, I don’t know what-all. All the time. No!”

  “Listen, Lupe…”

  “No.”

  But I knew what I saw. We’d been lovers for a year, but it took all that time of looking to see it, and it took a candle she’d bought as a joke in a bodega the day before.

/>   “Look,” she’d laughed. “Just like my grandmother has all over her room. Let’s get one for our flat.”

  We’d just moved in together. We hadn’t even unpacked the boxes yet when she carried that candle upstairs and set it on her old steamer trunk in the bedroom.

  The picture glued to the glass was of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Lupe’s real name, though she never used it. “Merciful Virgin Mary of Guadalupe, show clemency, love, and compassion to those who love you and fly to your protection. May your intercession, like the sweet fragrance of roses, ascend to your divine son…” I read in English from the back of the candle, while Lupe read the same words in Spanish. We cracked up laughing because Lupe was the opposite of an innocent virgin: more scary than merciful, more apt to tie me to the bed and tongue me just to the edge of coming before she stopped than she was to show love and compassion. Lupe was exciting, not protective, the rose thorn rather than the scented bloom. She kept me alive on the blade of her own brand of love.

  I looked at the picture, at the sweetly simpering face of the Virgin surrounded by the pink and black folds of her robe, a crown on her head. There were rosebuds along the bottom edge, with a strange little boy peeking out from the lavender underskirt of the robe.