Cover

Other Titles by Susie Bright

The Best American Erotica, 1993–2007 (editor)

Inspired by Andrea: Essays on Lust, Aggression, Porn, & The Female Gaze

Three Kinds of Asking for It (editor)

Three the Hard Way (editor)

Mommy’s Little Girl: Susie Bright on Sex, Motherhood, Porn, & Cherry Pie

How to Write a Dirty Story

Full Exposure

The Sexual State of the Union

Nothing But the Girl (with Jill Posener)

Herotica, 1, 2, and 3 (editor)

Sexwise

Susie Bright’s Sexual Reality: A Virtual Sex World Reader

Susie Sexpert’s Lesbian Sex World

Susie Bright’s Journal

Copyright

Touchstone A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2008 by Susie Bright

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Touchstone Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

TOUCHSTONE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Designed by Mary Austin Speaker

ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-6442-3
ISBN-10: 1-4165-6442-X

ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-6442-3

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Dedication

This edition of The Best American Erotica
is dedicated to the memory of my father and
editorial guru, Bill Bright

Contents

Introduction

Rowan ElizabethHalves

Alicia GiffordSurviving Darwin

Eloise ChagrinPlaying Doctor

Debra BoxerInnocence in Extremis

G. BonhommeThe Program

Eric AlbertThe Letters

Haddayr Copley-WoodsThe Desires of Houses

Greg BoydHorny

Jennifer D. MunroPinkie

Joe MaynardFleshlight

Greta ChristinaAre We Having Sex Now or What?

Marian PhillipsThree Obscene Telephone Calls

Patrice SuncircleTennessee

Thomas S. RocheUp for a Nickel

Martha GarveyThe Manicure

Susan St. AubinThis Isn’t About Love

Steven Saylor writing as Aaron TravisBlue Light

Tsaurah LitzkyEnd-of-the-World Sex

Steve AlmondA Jew Berserk on Christmas Eve

Serena MolochCasting Couch

Nelson GeorgeIt’s Never Too Late in New York

Susannah IndigoThe Year of Fucking Badly

Susie BrightStory of O Birthday Party

Top of the 15th: Best American Erotica’s Authors, 1993–2008

Readers’ Directory:
The Most Influential Erotic Editors, Journals, and Web Sites of the Past 15 Years

Contributors

Credits

About the Editor and Author

Introduction

This is the fifteenth anniversary of The Best American Erotica series, and my last turn as editor.

Whew.

In this volume, I’ve invited some of my favorite storytellers to make an encore appearance. I interviewed each author, and asked:

What inspired you to write your story in the first place? How do you see it, now, compared to when you first wrote it?

When Debra Boxer first penned “Innocence in Extremis,” she was deliberately and publicly a virgin. When Greta Christina wrote “Are We Having Sex Now or What?” she demanded to know what authentic sexual connection was made of in the first place.

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.

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.”

There’re a few stories in this collection that I never got to include in BAE before because they predated 1993. I hungered for them; I cursed my tether to our annual tradition. First among those yearned for was “Blue Light,” the novella by Steven Saylor, writing as Aaron Travis, which is perhaps the most fantastic supernatural erotic thriller ever written. Edgar Allan Poe would find a telltale cock pounding in this one. At first, I couldn’t go to sleep from reading it, and then I couldn’t rest until I published it! I’m so happy to finally have the story here.

The best erotic lit is always highest comedy and deepest tragedy—both in the cut, at times. I laughed at Eric Albert’s “The Letters” when I wasn’t moaning at his protagonist, “You’ve got to be stopped!”

Erotic prescience illuminates places and times that couldn’t be captured any other way—like New York on a high-wire down low in Nelson George’s “It’s Never Too Late in New York.”

And sometimes, you just need to laugh—a helpless, naked, wet belly laugh—at it all, like Joe Maynard’s “Fleshlight.”

The shaming prejudice about sex writing is that it’s supposed to be so porny, so stupid, so obvious that “anyone” could write it, craft unnecessary.

But how many people can perfect its satire and get you off at the same time, like Serena Moloch’s “Casting Couch”? How many chick-lit authors can turn a “Manicure” into a descent into the S/M looking glass, as Martha Garvey does? And who could articulate the dilemmas facing woman’s sexual choices like Susan St. Aubin in her “This Isn’t About Love”? Without their direct erotic approach, it wouldn’t have been said nearly as well.

I also have some memorable new stories in this collection, too. I’ll never say “Fuck me, Santa!” again without thinking of Steve Almond’s “A Jew Berserk on Christmas Eve.” Haddayr Copley-Woods’s haunted house made me creep to my bed the night after I read it and felt the floors whispering to my soft feet. Jennifer D. Munro had me howling with size-queen irony in “Pinkie,” and Eloise Chagrin reinvented a cuckold’s tale in “Playing Doctor.”

Erotic literature is made to break taboos—that’s its promise. Rowan Elizabeth’s “Halves” transformed a Hansel and Gretel–style fairy tale into a way of seeing unbreakable desire. Author G. Bonhomme reconstructed the male libido in his “Program,” and Susannah Indigo throws every Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous rule out the car window in her “Year of Fucking Badly.”

I, however, am ending my tenure as your editor a little sadly—although with great affection and respect. At the back of the book, you’ll see I’ve included a list of all 272 writers I’ve worked with in our series to date—it made my jaw drop as I reviewed the list from top to bottom. I’ve also provided a Readers’ Directory of the most influential editors, publishers, ’zines, and Web sites that’ve made erotic lit something to celebrate.

There’s one person in particular I’ll be missing as the series goes on—that’s my dad, who passed away as I was first composing this anniversary edition.

When I was asked to start Best American Erotica in 1993, the number-one most excited person in the world was my father, Bill Bright. He was an editor, a linguist, a poet—and the greatest reader I’ve ever known. That’s not daughterly affection; probably everyone he knew would say the same thing. His descriptions to me of the history of American erotica, and censorship battles, were something he’d taught me since I had my first questions about “banned books.”

When I was a little girl, he would sit me up at his desk while he was proofreading the galleys of his linguistics journal, Language. He’d give me a pencil and tell me to look for e’s and a’s that weren’t closed up, serifs that had broken off. It took me pages and pages to find one, but what a treasure to discover a real mistake!

He proofread every one of my BAE manuscripts, which offered plenty of new grass to mow. His expertise and enthusiasm in world languages and writing systems were invaluable to every character in this series who spoke a line of dialog. Between the two of us, we covered a couple centuries of popular culture, idioms, and historical references.

In August 2006, Bill was proofreading the latest of my galleys, up to page 125. The next day he went into the hospital for brain tumor surgery, and he did not recover. The day before, at his desk, was the last time he used his red pen.

The following winter, I was back to work at my office, and I said to my daughter, now eighteen, “It just won’t be BAE without him.”

Aretha looked at the pile of unread manuscripts that sat on my desk, and started writing little notes all over them. And so the apple falls to the ground. I’ll treasure her Post-its as I have every one of my dad’s red-ink remarks.

Thank you to everyone, for all your letters, counsel, sexual inspiration, and surprises over the past fifteen good ones. I can’t wait to see what’s going to happen next; and I’m sure you’ll find me in the thick of it, for many years to come.

Susie Bright

February 2008

Halves

Rowan Elizabeth

Tavis and I are twins; each one half of a whole.

Mother was a twin. Her brother, Ian, was her only true friend. He was killed in the Pacific in forty-two. She immediately married Ian’s best friend, my father, and they mourned together. They must have mourned primarily in the bedroom, for shortly after they found themselves expecting.

Our parents were blessed with both a boy and a girl in one messy arrival. Father cradled me and cooed my name, “Minna.” Mother laid Tavis out on the bed to examine his ten tiny fingers and toes and to be sure he arrived with all of the requisite equipment. They promised their infants a childhood of loving innocence.

Tavis and I were inseparable. Every one of our firsts came together. First steps, first words, first climb up a tree. Neither of us would leave the other behind. We refused to bathe unless we were together. Mother schooled us at home, and we spent each hour of the day together. We slept in the same bed until we were twelve. That’s when Grandmother moved in, bringing her money, her views, and her yappy little dog.

Grandmother had been left well-off when Grandfather passed away. How our mother grew up under her rule confounded us. Yet Mother was gracious and beautiful, glowing with the love of life she passed on to us.

“I will not allow Minna to be ruined like your brother ruined you,” we would hear Grandmother chastise Mother. Grandmother was appalled and swore we would grow up differently.

Everything changed when she came. I could no longer wash Tavis’s back as he took his bath; I had to wear my swimsuit top when we went to the lake. Grandmother didn’t permit us to hold hands or to eat off of the same dinner plate any longer.

Father was a quiet man with sad, loving eyes. He was proud and worked hard to provide for us. When Grandmother and her heavy purse took up residence, both barreled over Father and Mother.

The atmosphere of eternal spring left our house.

I was kept at home to be taught by Mother while Tavis was shipped off to St. Boniface Catholic Church for a proper Catholic education. Grandmother gave strict instructions, and a healthy donation, to the school for them to keep tight reins on Tavis.

We were put in bedrooms on opposite ends of the big house. Grandmother entrenched herself in a bedroom between ours. She slept with her door open, and her tiny devil-dog would bark when anyone passed in the hall.

I couldn’t sleep without Tavis next to me. Mother would lie with me until I fell asleep. After she left, I would wake and imagine I could hear Tavis down the hall. I knew he was awake and Mother was lying next to him to coax him to sleep.

Our separation was horrible, and it seemed that nature conspired with Grandmother to increase our suffering. Our bodies changed, and we could not revel in those changes with each other. I’m sure Tavis noticed my developing chest, just as I took in his peach fuzz across the breakfast table. I wanted to tell him about the monthly change, and about the heavy feeling between my legs when I tried to fall asleep.

A handful of years later, Grandmother paid the tuition for Tavis to attend a college hundreds of miles from home. I was not to receive further education. Grandmother had courted a family for their eldest son, who was tightly tied to the Church. She planned my marriage as though we lived a hundred years in the past.

As terrible as it may sound, we were relieved when the old crone died the summer before Tavis was to go away to school. Mother and Father used the money Grandmother left to send us both to the university. There I developed my love of art and the workings of the mind. Tavis studied engineering, a subject that his technical mind devoured.

Once again we were divided, not by the rules of Grandmother but by the rules of the university—co-ed dorms were unheard of at that time—and our temperaments. Like my father, I was quiet and took everything in. Tavis flourished in the public setting.

My roommate was a loud southern girl who lived in bright colors and heavy makeup. Many nights she snuck her new boyfriend through the dark halls and brought him to our room. I would feign sleep and silently watched her allow him to fondle and caress her. He would run one hand over her blouse while he tried to inch the other up her stocking-clad leg. She would giggle and smack his hand. It was the night when she didn’t giggle that shocked me.

I saw his fingers coax their way up her thigh, and bunch up her skirt and slip to reveal the tops of her stockings and the suspenders of her girdle. For the briefest of moments, his hand cupped the crotch of her white panties.

I touched the heaviness between my legs and felt something spark. There was wetness, and everything felt fuller than it did when I washed in the shower. The bump at the top of my female separation seemed to dance under my fingers. Quietly, I rubbed myself, the wetness growing and unnerving energy building up. Something was coming together between my legs, and it felt as though it would break through my skin. And that’s exactly what it did. The energy flew from my body into the room and took off for the sky.

“Minna, are you awake?” asked my roommate.

I lay quiet in the dark and pretended sleep.

Tavis told me, “He thinks I’m asleep. He pulls and tugs like I do and groans at the end.”

Tavis and I spent every moment outside of class huddled together on the upper levels of the student union or in the stacks of the library, trying to make up for the years Grandmother had kept us apart. Over time, those years apart began to seem like an unfortunate dream.

“Tavi! You do it, too? How?”

“When I first started, I would wrap my sheet around my parts and rub against my bed. I would do it every night after Mother left my room. I wanted to come to your room to show you. I would get long and firm and just running my hand along it made me light-headed. Then I used spit, but now I use baby oil.”

“What on earth for?”

“To make it slick; it’s easier for my hand to rub up and down.”

“I get wet all by myself. I put my fingers in my opening to get the wet part, and then massage it into my…uh.”

“It’s called a ‘clitoris.’ I’ve found books. The textbooks talk about penises and vaginas, but an author named Henry Miller calls our parts cocks and cunts.”

Heat flushed not only my face, but spread between my legs. “You have to show me these books.”

We read everything we could find. We would take our books to an unused room on the top floor of the library, and Tavis would help me put together the pieces.

“I rubbed myself in my room. I think all of the blood in my body rushed to my…my cunt. I could hear my heartbeat in my ears and I was breathing so hard.”

“I jerk off as much as I can.” Tavis enjoyed using our new language.

“Show me. Show me how you do it.”

He unfolded his legs and leaned against the wall. I bit my lip as he opened his trousers and pulled out his pink flesh. It was bigger than I remembered from years ago. Limp and wrinkled, it had a bulbous head with the same slit in the end. It didn’t seem as imposing as the pictures showed or the stories described.

Tavis spit into his hand and began running his hand over his penis. He pulled on it in such a way that I was sure he would hurt himself.

As I watched, the flesh in his hand grew. It lengthened and became fatter. Oh, how it changed!

Tavis closed his eyes and stroked up and down his length. He would pause and roughly handle the full head. Moisture formed at his opening. I wanted to reach out and touch that glimmering drop. Tavis began making low sounds. I watched in amazement of his obvious pleasure. I wondered if his thighs tingled like mine did when I touched myself, like they were at that moment.

I pressed my hand between my legs to calm the growing rush. Instead of peace, I found I needed to press harder.

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