Macho Sluts (2 page)

The manuscript for
Macho Sluts
was assembled during the last few years of my stay (or should I say exile?) in New York City. I had moved there from San Francisco after my community and a long-term relationship fell apart. All of the gay men I'd befriended were getting sick and many had already died in what was to become the AIDS epidemic. Yes, there was a very sexy woman/boy involved who drew me to the East Coast. But once that insanely passionate affair was over, I never put down roots there. The fast-moving city was fascinating, challenging, and amazing, but I came to realize that the Bay Area was always going to be my sexual and spiritual home.

I had already been through quite a bit of the Feminist Sex Wars. I'd founded a lesbian-feminist S/M support group called Samois, named after the estate of the lesbian dominatrix in the
Story of O
. You had to be persistent and widely-read to find any reference to BDSM between women in the late 1970s. The
Story of O
was one of the few classics that everybody knew about. Samois was a high-maintenance group. My lover and I built close ties to the gay men's leather community and other friends who were bisexual women or straight players. We also had transsexual women friends. This was important to us because we wanted to know about the whole community, not just one corner of it. We saw ourselves as sex radicals who analyzed and opposed all of the ways that the larger society tried to repress Eros. That meant that we wanted more freedom for sex workers, gay men and lesbians, bisexual people, transsexuals, young people, swingers (as they were then called), etc. This broad agenda was not shared by very many feminists then, and I'm not sure it is today.

Many of the women who came to Samois were separatists. The only places we could find to meet were in our own homes. The local Women's Center refused to rent a room to us. The photographs in our hallway that depicted a polymorphously perverse range of S/M techniques and practitioners were very controversial. I was always suspect in the group because I was a sort of spokesperson for lesbian S/M, the face most identified with our cause, and frankly, because I was a leader and did so much work on its behalf. This notoriety sprang mostly from the publication of
Sapphistry: The Book of Lesbian
Sexuality
, a sex manual I'd written and published that caused a shit storm of angry reaction because it had chapters on transsexuality, butch/femme sexuality, and S/M. The bulk of pages that dealt with vanilla sex were largely ignored. By the way, that subtitle was the publisher's idea, not mine. I never thought one book could tell the whole story of lesbian sexuality.

While lesbian magazines and newspapers like
Off Our Backs
tore the book apart, as if it could single-handedly destroy feminism, it sold and sold and sold. Gay women were coming out of the closet in record numbers, and they wanted to know more about how to please themselves and their lovers. That didn't make it any less traumatic for me to read the caustic reviews. I had poured so much of my own heart and soul into that book, largely because coming out had been a miserable business for me, and there had been no resources at all to help me with problems like difficulty having an orgasm or the daunting question of what to do with a woman who expected me to pleasure her. I wanted to break the silence about cunnilingus, sex toys, tribadism, masturbation, penetration, kinky sex, sexual health and prevention of STDs, group sex—anything I could think of that some woman somewhere might want to do, I wrote about. I was sick of the homophobic shame that colored our lives and made it difficult to take any joy in love or erotic abandon. Above all, I was sick of the “truism” that one woman would somehow automatically know how to get another woman off. Why should we have to fumble around in the dark when a little education could provide the lubrication to get past any unpleasant friction?

Samois would never have come together without the community-wide publicity and controversy generated by
Sapphistry
. Before that, many people believed and stated in print that S/M was a “perversion” that only gay men practiced, not lesbians. I'm not sure where all of the straight kinky people went while such bold statements were being made. The East Village, perhaps? Orange County? But I digress. On my lonesome, I braved the antagonism of bar owners and the Women's Center to put up flyers announcing an initial meeting. But I got very little thanks for sticking my neck out. In the 1970s, the only politically correct form for an organization to take was the collective, and all decisions were supposed to be made by consensus. Individuality was seen as patriarchal, and anybody who took initiative got hammered down. I hated this. I wanted officers for the group—officers who actually did their jobs—and I wanted to be able to have business meetings that ended before two a.m. That couldn't happen unless we took a vote and settled things by a simple majority vote. Otherwise, one person who objected to what we wanted to do could filibuster and prevent us from creating a handout for orientation, selecting a logo, or making T-shirts. You did
not
want to be in the room if I dared suggest that we let bisexual or transsexual women join Samois. Ugly things were said that would have made any right-wing bigot proud. I never ceased to be amazed by the ways that feminism could be twisted to justify a morality that duplicated every prejudice held by fundamentalist Christians—except for the part about lesbians.

Samois eventually exploded in a vicious bout of infighting that left all of us feeling deeply injured and shaken. But before the various rifts and factions tore the group apart, it managed to do some very good things to make it possible for S/M dykes to find one another and get information about how to act out their fantasies in a safe way that still allowed for intensity. First, we published
What Color Is Your
Handkerchief
, a pamphlet I typed, laid out with rubber cement, and photocopied, then collated and stapled in my living room. It contained just about every article we could find on the topic of S/M, plus some graphics. Every small printing of the pamphlet sold out very quickly, despite the fact that local women's bookstores either wouldn't carry it at all or sold it from under the counter. That meant you had to ask for it, which was a daunting prospect if you knew the clerk was a hostile, anti-S/M, and anti-pornography devotee. That was the equivalent of coming out as a woman-hating pervert and could cost you your slot on the women's clinic collective or your application for admission to a women's studies department. Women got discriminated against for having leather jackets then. It was a heartbreaking struggle to see our world divided because some of us needed a different kind of sex in order to be satisfied. I never did get a clear description of what “good” feminist sex would look like, by the way, and am still waiting for that information.

The success of this pamphlet led us to believe that there was a market for a book. So we formed an editorial committee, which I was specifically told I could not be on, and members loaned the group small amounts of money, which eventually amounted to enough for a first printing. By that time, I was exhausted from trying to finish my bachelor's degree while being an activist whose own community objected to virtually everything I did. So I was happy to have somebody else put the book together, but I did contribute one of my own short stories, and was quite surprised when it was accepted, but not at all surprised when large sections of it focusing on a bisexual female character were censored.

Unfortunately, Samois fell apart a few months after
Coming to
Power
hit the streets and rapidly sold out. Our book was a success, but we couldn't seem to work with one another amicably enough to do a second printing. Being new to the business of publishing, we hadn't even budgeted money for distribution, so there was no surplus cash to do a second printing once we paid back the loans. My eulogy for Samois was to make sure the book got a second life with Alyson Publications. I thought it was fittingly ironic that its champion was a gay man, Sasha Alyson, who was incensed about
Coming to Power
being censored by women's and even gay bookstores. He took the project on for that reason alone, not expecting to make a dime, and was pleasantly surprised when the book became one of his bestsellers. Despite the anti-porn movement's censorious rhetoric, women wanted erotica that accurately depicted their sexuality, challenged their imaginations, and made them think. They wanted sexy, sweaty, dirty lesbian fiction written by other lesbians.

I would have been insane to stick around if horizontal hostility and backstabbing were the only things that went on in Samois. Anybody who was in a women's group during that time has a similar story about that group's dynamic. This may be hard to understand now, but it was very difficult for women to learn how to work with other women. We had been kept apart for so long, conditioned to compete with one another, to never trust one another, to put men ahead of the women in our lives. No matter how irksome collective process was, I give us credit for believing in equality and searching for just ways to relate to one another. The women's movement made a big dent in those ingrained habits, but I think women are still learning how to bond with, mentor, and really help one another.

The dykes in Samois had other challenges as well. We were literally changing the definition of what it meant to be women. We were experimenting with new social forms—triads, nonmonogamy, sex parties, fetishes, role-playing. There was nobody else to give us advice, tell us how to do that, or patch us up when we got hurt. As pioneers out on the black-leather-and-silver-studs edge, we did some wild things, and I don't regret a single episode of excess or misguided experimentation. For some reason, it's easier to remember the frustrating business meetings than it is to remember all the great sex, but the latter definitely occupied more of my time than the former. You can't expect things to go smoothly when you gather a group of self-professed deviants and outlaws together, can you, now? Our tumultuous process wasn't solely due to the shortcomings of 1970s lesbian morés and culture. I was no great shakes at group participation. I was a self-centered kid, sure that my way was always the grandest and most glorious, and I got stoned way too often to be a reliable witness at a traffic accident. It's just sad to think that we'll never have a reunion where we swap reminiscences or congratulate each other for surviving. When you have only a handful of people who understand your way of life, their support becomes so important that no forgiveness for betrayal is ever possible. Or so it would seem thus far.

It took five years after the publication of
Sapphistry
[in 1980] for me to have the time and the guts to try again with another book. I hoped—prayed—that it would get a slightly less overblown reception. By now, there were groups organizing in several cities to oppose the anti-porn movement's lunatic idea to pass laws that defined pornography as a violation of women's civil rights. Sex-positive feminism was a reality, thanks to the efforts of many courageous women who thought censorship was not the answer to the subjugation of women. I had been writing short stories steadily over the years, sometimes to court a woman I had a crush on, or to examine a conundrum that amused me, or to be shocking. I wanted to be able to write about kinky sex for fun, without constantly stopping the action to talk about whether you could really
do
that. Goddess knows I've made a fetish out of being a sex educator, but enough, already! After the success of
Coming to Power
, Alyson Publications was willing to do another book in that newly-coined genre, so I typed it all up on my KayPro computer and sent it in on about a dozen eight-inch floppy discs.

The book was enormously popular, and even though there were still some of the same stereotypically hysterical reviews, there were also some good ones. See, I told you. Activism works. Some people were always going to think that S/M was pathological, violent, fascist, racist, anti-feminist, done only by women who'd been brainwashed by the patriarchy, and, oh yes, the Spawn of Satan. But there were other voices now, reviewers who could tell the difference between a sexual fantasy and an assault. The book got at least some of the credit that it deserved for being thought-provoking, well-written (says the person who revised every story till my eyes bled), unique, and arousing. It was especially wonderful to see reviews that recognized the worth of erotic literature as a form of writing that could challenge the status quo and take readers to a place of liberation as well as help them get horny for a little solo sex or an adventure with a partner (or two or three).

But Canada Customs had no sense of humor, no respect for queer sexuality, and above all else, no feminist consciousness.
Macho
Sluts
got confiscated at the border, and became one of the key books defended in a major censorship case. I have no idea how the folks at Little Sister's Bookstore in Vancouver fought their federal government for so many years. The Supreme Court of Canada eventually agreed that customs officials had indeed overstepped their bounds and were systematically censoring gay literature. They had confiscated issues of
The Advocate
, gay sex manuals like
The Joy of Gay Sex
, fiction by Edmund White, John Preston, John Rechy, the books of anti-porn stalwart Andrea Dworkin, and a long list of other gay and lesbian authors. Little Sister's is still defending queer literature from the bonfire-happy homophobes at the border. Next time you are having trouble buying gifts, consider giving them a donation on behalf of the Lipstick Lesbian or the Club Kid Who Has Everything.

So there you are. You're holding a bit of queer history in your hands. But does it still strike a raw nerve today and make it vibrate until you think you can't stand it any more, and you just have to come? Why, yes, I think it does. Only you can be the final judge of that, of course, but it's my hope that the twisted plots and carefully drawn characters in these stories can still take readers on a good, hard ride. It has always been important to me to give my readers stories that flow smoothly, so that they aren't jolted by inconsistencies or bad grammar. I want to create a state of suspended disbelief that allows you to occupy bodies and desires that may be quite foreign to your own. And along the way, I want to sow some interesting seeds of new thoughts about our bodies, why we want the things that we do, what the line is between the permissible and the forbidden, and why the hell we don't all have better sex lives. If
Macho Sluts
motivates you to buy a new toy, look for a new trick, or find more pleasure in the equipment and people you already know how to handle, I am satisfied … at least for today.