Fucking Daphne (38 page)

“Usually I'm a lesbian,” Daphne's persona says in Stephen Elliott's story.

“Yeah, aren't we all,” I want to say, as I think back to my male lover's body stretching languidly in bed this morning, my hand on his sculpted chest; how he stands like a girl; how much I like that.

When Daphne visited me last October, I pelted her with questions about sexual identity, sucked the San Francisco fluidity from her lips. She dates women who look like boys, and sometimes the female-born who have transitioned into men, and sometimes bio men. “So,” I ask her, longing for sage clarity that I will need in my own life much sooner than I realize, “How do you identify?”

“Queer.”

“Of course.” I feel relieved, widened, like I need her in my mind, carving more openings in the small-town pathways of my sexual brain.

Who I am, who you are, what we do in bed, what we don't do. We clasp these hard jewels to our chests, write them in big block letters on the blackboard and point to them. As Sarah Katherine Lewis perceptively
writes in this anthology: “The real Daphne is—well, who knows? And that's where the hotness lives. Because you can put whatever you want into your idea of Daphne Gottlieb, and everyone else is shoving
their
ideas in there, too, and it ends up that the real Daphne Gottlieb doesn't even matter anymore because she's just a glory hole that we're all fucking—the
idea
of her; our wishes for what we desire.”

Everyone
else
is a hot wet space we're fucking, shoving our ideas of them into them, our sense of what they wish we were. How much we want to be what they desire.

Our sexual identities, too, are glory holes, categories we can stuff all our hang-ups and insecurities into.

“Usually I'm a lesbian.” I reach my ungloved hand into the cavern of this word, its shape elusive and elastic.

Like all words are.

I was standing elbow to elbow with an older man at a cocktail party on Friday night.

“I read that essay you wrote. You really castrated the guy at the end.”

Big smile, sparkling wide round eyes, super-high voice, like I am a stripper and he is a trick. “Surely you don't really think so?”

I stand frozen, giggle into my wine glass, let the conversation move on to another topic.

Oh, how I want to “fix” his view of me, pull it in line with my own, show him how I see what I said, how I meant it, how to look at it so that I still come across as pleasant reasonable likable perfect
perfect
perfect,
just what I ought to be what everyone wants of me exactly what you want and you and you and
you.

But I can't.

I flip back through the words that have been ascribed uncomfortably to me over the last couple of years: “selfish”; “flamboyant”; “indiscreet.” I used to imagine writing a poem about each word, revealing the fine line between the ways each one is true and not true. Would I really consider devoting a lifetime of creativity to correcting other people's views of me?

How much energy goes into image control. How it leaves us sleepless, our heads aching as we start the next day.

I admit it: The first thing that went through my mind when Daphne invited me to write this afterword was,
What are people going to think of me?

“That Lisa Johnson,” I imagined them saying, thinking they know something about me.

“People are free to believe what they want to believe, regardless of how I would prefer to be seen,” Daphne tells me when she sends copies of the stories as they come in. I tuck her words away, know she is really talking about me, even if she doesn't mean to be.

I am bringing Daphne Gottlieb to campus again this year.

A new year, a new campus, but I am telling the same stories: six feet tall, dreads, slam poet, San Francisco. Wait till you see her! A subtle listener could decode the messages in this line about who I am, what I desire, what I fear, how I think others see me. The rest will still think I am just describing Daphne.

T
his book owes its existence to the goodwill and hard work of many. Thanks must go to Seal Press for their dedication to and enthusiasm for the book, and particularly to Brooke Warner for her strong editorial judgment and guidance, as well as her willingness to engage in serious conversations about the literary merits of various sexual practices. Deepest gratitude is due to all the contributors for their wild imaginations, faithful scribing, and patience. Thanks to all of you for your uncanny ability to find a kernel of truth under seven oft-fictitious mattresses. Special thanks to Nick Mamatas for his extra set of eyes, and to Sarah Katherine Lewis for her impeccable literary matchmaking. A kiss in the wind to the people I was in relationships with during the gestation of the book—I'm sure it was, as you told me, a strange time to be my girlfriend/boyfriend. Rob Arbo deserves so many thanks for helping find real-world solutions to impossible time crunches, and for doing so with absolute sweetness, gallantry, clean sheets, and buckets of fishy. Thanks to Claudius Reich and Kirsten Saxton for always having my back. Thanks to Connor Cook who makes everything I write here sound like a double-entendre. It might be. Finally, thanks to my sister and brother. I know you won't read this, and I know you love me very much, as I do you.

CHARLIE ANDERS
is the level boss you have to fight before you can get to the next level of literature. She wrote
Choir Boy,
a novel, and coedited the anthology
She's Such a Geek.
Her writing has appeared in
Salon, ZYZZYVA,
and
Mother Jones,
on
McSweeneys.net
, the
San Francisco Chronicle, Pindeldyboz, FreshYarn,
and
Strange Horizons.
She's the publisher of
other
magazine and the hostess of Writers with Drinks, a reading series in San Francisco.

 

JAMIE BERGER
lives in Turners Falls, Massachusetts. He is a student in the MFA writing program at UMass Amherst, where he also teaches eager frosh to write. He was raised in Albany, New York, and overeducated in and by New York City, after which he lived in San Francisco for a long time. His first book,
Bo's Arts
(Evil Twin, 2006), is all about a soft dog. His essay “Peep Show” was published in the
SUN
and anthologized in
Flesh for Fantasy
(Thunder's Mouth, 2005). He and Daniel Oppenheimer maintain a blog called “Masculinity and Its Discontents” (“M.A.I.D.”) that can be found at
www.man-ifesto.com
. He has written for the
San Francisco Chronicle,
McSweeneys.net
,
Watchword, Planet,
and
elsewhere, and is currently hard at work on a memoirish kind of thing called
A Natural History of Lust
:
Girls, Women, Lusty Ladies, Friends, Lovers, Feminism, Porn, Strippers, Mom and Me
. Please see also
www.jamiebergerwords.com
.

 

HANNE BLANK
is a writer and historian who retired from writing erotica following the release of her short-story collection
Unruly Appetites
(Seal, 2003). Her sixth book,
Virgin: The Untouched History,
was published by Bloomsbury USA in early 2007, and an anthology on menstruation entitled
Breakthrough Bleeding
(coedited with Moira Russell) will be out from She Devil Press in fall 2008. Find her online at
www.hanneblank.com
.

 

DIANA CAGE
is the author of
Girl Meets Girl, Box Lunch
,
Threeways,
and
The On Our Backs Guide to Lesbian Sex.
She lives in New York, where she hosts the Diana Cage show on Sirius OutQ.

 

JUSTIN CHIN
is the author of three collections of poetry,
Gutted, Bite Hard,
and
Harmless Medicine
(Manic D, 2001), which was a finalist in the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Awards. He is also the author of three collections of essays,
Burden of Ashes
(Alyson, 2001),
Mongrel: Essays, Diatribes and Pranks
(St. Martin's, 1999), and
Attack of the Man-Eating Lotus Blossoms
(Suspect Thoughts, 2005).
Gutted
was awarded the Publishing Triangle's 2007 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, and was a finalist in the Lambda Literary Awards.

 

TRISTAN CRANE
is a writer and photographer currently living in San Francisco. Tristan's first graphic novel,
How Loathsome,
was
nominated for a GLAAD media award in 2004, and his second graphic novel is forthcoming.

 

STEPHEN ELLIOTT
is the author of six books, including the novel
Happy Baby
and the short-story collection
My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up.
He is also the founder of the Progressive Reading Series, which raises money for progressive candidates through literary events nationwide. Stephen has written for
Esquire,
the
New York Times, GQ,
and other publications. He's been anthologized in
Best American Erotica, Best Sex Writing,
and twice in
Best American Non-Required Reading.

 

COLIN FRANGOS
plays guitar in the band Ovipositor and runs the existential void known as
Nadir-novelties.net
. He successfully dropped out of numerous colleges throughout the '90s and has achieved little of note since. He lives in Oakland, California, with his wife and five cats. He regularly donates blood, and, if your blood type is A+, you live in the Bay Area, and you find yourself in a hospital, you may end up the recipient of a pint of his best.

 

R. GAY
is fascinated by strange and curious things, including first aid kits, miniature things, and poets. Her writing can be found in
Best American Erotica 2004,
several editions of
Best Lesbian Erotica, Shameless: An Intimate Erotica, Glamour Girls, Slave to Love,
and many others. Visit R. online at
www.pettyfictions.com
.