Best Lesbian Erotica 2011

FOREWORD

Walking down Commercial Street in Provincetown during 2009 Women’s Week, (question: can this sentence get any gayer?) I ran into Lea DeLaria (answer: yes).

We’d seen her perform the night before as a washed-up’80s rock star in Meryl Cohn’s musical Insatiable Hunger and stopped to tell her how much we enjoyed the show. We continued on to our respective brunches, and an idea was born.

I’d been thinking about who I should ask to judge Best Lesbian Erotica 2011, and after last year’s trio of musical judges, BETTY, did such a great job, I liked what musicians added to the mix.

I think many musicians understand what makes short fiction work instinctively, because in their own genre, they have to get in/get out and do it beautifully and uniquely each time, and it has to be a complete thing, not a phrase, or a riff or an idea. Lea’s known for her stand-up comedy and acting, but she’s also made a name for herself as an accomplished jazz vocalist, and I thought it would be fun to see where her instincts took her. (No “scat” jokes, please!)

When I asked her to come onboard, she accepted with alacrity, and I got to work reading the submissions. I have edited, screened, assembled and adjudicated plenty of writing over the years, and I’ve noticed that when you sit down with a great big stack of prose, poetry or plays, certain themes emerge, ideas that seem to be percolating up out of a collective unconscious. You can sense widely felt emotions, fears and also euphoria in better times. In the submissions for 2010’s book, I saw more comedy, more playful stuff and even some political pieces written in the wake of the ’08 elections (with plenty of hot sex, of course).

The submissions for 2011 seemed a little more doubtful. There were fewer outright comic pieces, more pieces about negotiating long-term relationships and marriage (in places where gay marriage is allowed), and the political pieces were less hopeful (but with plenty of hot sex, of course).

And this year the trend was also toward butch: stories told from the butch point of view, of femmes seduced by and seducing butches, and butches being mistaken (and sometimes passing for) men. Lea’s selections included several particularly strong pieces featuring butch characters, and I was glad to see it.

You may have noticed we live in an extremely uncivil age. The term cyberbullying didn’t exist ten years ago, though the action is alive and vicious now. And while it may begin with middle schoolers, it extends through all ages these days, in so many of our social interactions, both in person and online. The vicious quip, the snarling insult, the intent to hurt someone and deny their identity is not only accepted, but standard operating procedure for more and more people. They’re proud that they wound, glad that they’ve called a spade a spade, or a fag, or a pervert, or just “it.”

Even in the LGBT community, there’s always a center and outliers: I know people who think there shouldn’t be a T in the mix and that B doesn’t really exist. On a sunny weekend in June, I went to see a reading of Doric Wilson’s play, Street Theater, set on Christopher Street on the night the Stonewall riots began. In the play, the cops entrapped and extorted from the gays, and taunted and were frustrated by the ones who didn’t fit into their image of what “fairies” were supposed to look and act like. Boom Boom and Ceil were drag queens, Jack was a leatherman and C.B. a butch dyke. The other gays called them “pathetic,” (even as they were attracted to them). In the play (and on Christopher Street), it was the “others,” the outsiders in their own community, who started it all that night.

There are still plenty of others, plenty of outsiders: woman-identified butches, gender queers, trans people and the ones who stubbornly refuse to be one of four or five letters of the alphabet (and plenty of contention and controversy about that identity within the community itself). Because they can’t/won’t “pass,” people who blur the boundaries in such a way are still the ones attacked first, sneered at, scoffed at, discriminated against even by fellow queers who say, “Why do they have to be like that?”

Which is why I’m glad to see such excellent pieces celebrating butch sexiness, identity, and the serious, soulful, lusty interplay between butch/femme. It’s about the need, the desire, the essential connection between two people. It’s not always joyful or pretty, but it’s passionate. It’s not about what body part is doing what to who: it’s about everyone being allowed to get her or his fill and achieve satisfaction.

That’s an essential pleasure, an innate right that can’t be legislated (though you can certainly go to jail for it, still, in many places).

I’d like to thank you for choosing this book and peering into the many worlds and windows of this year’s Best Lesbian Erotica. Thanks to Cleis for championing the series, and to our fabulous contributors, who hail from six different countries this year, and range from first-time authors to masters (or mistresses) of the form.

I hope you enjoy it.

Kathleen Warnock

New York City