I think my answer to Greta’s question was, “If you have to ask, you’re probably in the thick of it.” Editing this series, for example, is one of the best sexual experiences I’ve ever had, and I’m not being coy.

So how have I changed, as BAE’s editor, in the past fifteen years?

When I was thirty-five, I had a new baby on my hip. I got a phone call from an editor in New York who said, “I hear you know more about erotic literature than anyone else in the country.”

I shifted baby Aretha to the other side. “Well, if that’s true, that’s pathetic…but you’re probably right. Most people have no idea what they’re missing.”

What were they missing? Honesty, for one. Good sex stories were in hiding. For a lot of readers at the time, “American erotica” was an oxymoron. It appeared as either some well-worn Fanny Hill–style paperback, or a plain-brown-wrapper novelty that revolved around a nymphomaniac and a pizza delivery boy. Not a bad start, but hardly the whole works!

Women erotic authors at the time were virtually unheard-of. Queer writers were underground. Henry Miller and D. H. Lawrence had been consigned to the stuffy scholars’ corner of academia. Not a bright or accessible picture!

But I’d discovered something new since I started publishing small-press women’s erotica in the 1980s with Herotica and On Our Backs. There were new writers willing to speak as frankly about sex as any other part of life—to hell with the smarmy stereotypes. They were inspired by Beat masters, S.C.U.M. manifestos, and Penthouse Letters, but had fashioned their own new breed of storytelling.

Some people wished that the “best erotica” would hold court as a romantic walk on the beach with a soft-focus ending. But the best authors I’ve worked with were outlaws, nonconformists, walking short planks on fantastic piers. Those are the waters where the “best” was swimming. Nobody’d ever heard their names before.

There were a couple of famous exceptions. When I started BAE, I wrote personal letters (e-mail was not something most people used!) to Nicholson Baker and Anne Rice, thanking them for using their real names to write unabashed and eloquent erotic novels. They came from such different worlds, but they both put their reputations on the line. The early 1990s were still a time when most “respectable” writers avoided distinct or frank sexuality.

Nowadays, I don’t think there’re mainstream novelists who haven’t been asked what role sexuality plays in their fiction—or why they’re pussyfooting around, if they continue to avoid it. It’s the stuff of Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winners.