It’s not so much that erotica has made a narrow genre successful—although that’s true too—it’s that writers now don’t hold back “the sex part” anymore when they write about…anything. The omission was always unnatural and deceptive, and now the lie is laid bare. Sexless stories about human relationships are dishonest. How did anyone write about love, life, or death and manage to avoid it so neatly? It was a hoax, and thankfully behind us.

Success and innovation in contemporary erotica bred fantastic originals—and also exploitation and mediocrity. Not exclusively, but certainly exponentially! That’s the sign of how big American erotica became—it’s admired, envied, and the butt of any number of literary jokes. But the proof of the erotic literary revolution is all around us, in cinema, on the Web, in our music.

Since I started BAE we’ve seen so much happen in American sexuality. There’s been the dominance of the Christian fundamentalism in public policy, the fear—and then ghettoization—of the AIDS epidemic, the revolution of the Web, porn chic, kink liberation, the rise of multicultural literature—and gay literature, the end of the thriving independent American bookstore era, two wars, an impeachment vote, 9/11, and a national abstinence policy direct from the White House that is designed to keep us chaste until marriage, no matter how old we might get. The trench has been dug. There’s a war on the ground, and a war for minds and hearts that reaches into the deepest American roots of Puritanism, individualism, and rebellion.

I don’t know if we could have survived it all if it wasn’t for some great erotic writing. No one wrote with more poignancy about New York and 9/11 than Tsaurah Litzky’s “End-of-the-World Sex.” No one captured the religiosity of sexual guilt better than Greg Boyd at his “Horny” best.

And the message of redemption—when you’ve done everything to screw the pooch—can be seen in the agonies of stories like Alicia Gifford’s “Surviving Darwin.”

What makes a piece of erotic fiction remarkable, even legendary? Probably the biggest factor is its unpredictability, the miracle when it transcends formula.

I couldn’t resist Marian Phillips’s “Three Obscene Telephone Calls” because it so neatly dug the “nice girls” grave. Thomas Roche innovated the trans-noir thriller with stories like his “Up for a Nickel.” Nostalgia for the innocence that preceded labels, before consciousness of the world’s judgments, is spun like honey in stories such as Patrice Suncircle’s “Tennessee.”