Sex Still Spoken Here: An Anthology (2 page)

“
My community for writing is the Circle”: A conversation about the Erotic Reading Circle

Carol Queen, Jen Cross, and Amy Butcher

JC:
I think it would be great to go back to the beginning. Carol, I love hearing the stories about the beginnings of the Erotic Reading Circle. Who had the idea, what was the initial impetus around holding such a space?

CQ
: The original Erotic Reading Circle was born out of the early years of Good Vibrations, actually, within five, six, seven at the most, years of Good Vibes having begun in 1977, little postage-stamp- sized store in between the Mission district and Noe Valley in San Francisco. As part of the after-hours programming, the Erotic Reading Circle started really to bring newcomers into the store. There were barely any books on the shelves yet. The publishing boom of erotica in the 1990s was years in advance and [Good Vibes] hadn’t even started publishing the erotica anthologies that Susie Bright and Joani Blank helped to put together and put out in the world. But it was, I think, the period that Susie Bright had already joined their staff. And so I can assume that she had something to do with it back in the day. I know that Stafford Kathy Winks was at the helm when I joined [the Reading Circle] one night in the mid-’80s, and, then as now, it was a small group of people reading aloud, talking a little bit amongst themselves about each piece. I think we do more of that than we did then. And we’re more likely now to have it be our own work that we read. In those days, it wasn’t always the writer herself or himself who came to share their work. It was some people who wanted to read erotica and be in fellowship around their love of erotica.

AB
: Oh, interesting.

CQ
: I joined Good Vibes in 1990. And it wasn’t very long before I put my hand up in the air and said I wanted to take over this circle. And for a while Jack Davis was my co-circle-convener, and by that time the anthology boom had happened, the zine boom had happened. No websites yet but we had a lot of writers—the writers that San Francisco is known for now, in the early mid-90s [they] would come to the Erotic Reading Circle and try out their stuff on each other. And so while it still wasn’t necessarily a writer’s own work that was shared, it got more and more likely that that was the case. [The Circle] went dormant for a little while, the very end of the ‘90s or the beginning of the ‘00s, and then you came to town, Jen Cross. When we expressed interest in doing it at the Center for Sex and Culture, Good Vibes said “take it, run, fly with it.” And the rest is history that you’re part of.

JC
: And you and Jack co-edited the first Erotic Reading Circle anthology.

CQ
:
Sex
Spoken
Here
, a title that actually was cooked up by Lawrence Schimel who I did
Pomosexuals
and
Switch
Hitters
with Cleis back in the ‘90s. From far away in New York or Spain or wherever he was he thought of this title and we went with it. At that point we had been doing the Circle for quite a few years and I actually can remember the moment that I knew that we had to do that anthology. There was one specific writer who came along and he read a story—and this is pre-Clinton and Lewinsky, I just want to say this as a preamble—he read a story he had written about a man and a woman who used cigars as a sex toy. Is it possible that Clinton could have read that story? I don’t know! But I heard it and it was so freakin’ creative. Mind you I already had my degree (or almost) in sexology and I thought I’d been around the block a couple of times and I was all … “Wow! We have to put that in a book.” So we did.

AB
: And, Jen, how did you get involved in the Circle?

JC
: I had come to San Francisco in 2002 to lead erotic writing workshops, was doing my practicum for my master’s degree and I was leading an erotic writing workshop for queer women survivors of sexual trauma. Of course, I knew about Carol Queen and I was a huge fan; we were introduced a few years later when I was hoping to come and use the Center to run a series of workshops there. I had found a copy of
Sex
Spoken
Here
, I think when I was at Community Thrift buying anthologies as research for my thesis, and [the Erotic Reading Circle] felt like something that should be happening in San Francisco and wasn’t. This sort of space should be available! That feels very bold, that I would have just said to Carol, “Is this something that you want to start doing again?” And she said, “Yes!” [After it got going again,] I liked to encourage writers who were in my workshops, who wanted to start moving their work out into the world, to come to the Erotic Reading Circle.

CQ
: It’s a fantastic step in between …

JC
: [To read aloud] any piece of new writing is really risky to do, [and it’s even more challenging to] read a piece that has to do with sex which is [often, in other workshop spaces,] treated like it’s
less
than
, easy, ridiculous, and not offered the same merit as other forms of writing.

CQ
:
And
presumed to be experientially-based when it isn’t always, although sometimes it clearly is, and that’s even more intimate and extraordinary, when someone brings something that we know is their own true experience, what an amount of courage it can take.

JC
: And even for folks I think who are comfortable, who have maybe written a lot about sex and read often in the Circle and in other places, when they bring a new piece of writing, it’s still really scary, it’s still really risky, it’s still sort of stepping into that same “oh my god, is somebody gonna laugh at me? Is someone going to think this is ridiculous? Is someone going to take this apart?”

AB
: I remember coming to a Circle once where, um, you know usually there’s somewhere between 5 and 15 people in the circle. And I came to one Circle and it was just the two of you and me. And this is early on in my coming to the Circle. And I read a piece that was one of the more vulnerable ones—it was a harsher piece than I usually write, there was no humor in it, there was nothing to protect me in that piece. And I read it to the two of you. And I was shaking afterwards, after hearing it, having those words come out of my body. But that was such an important experience for me and one of the things it taught me is that that shaking is when I know I’ve written something true. And so I actually look for that now. And I wouldn’t have discovered that had I not had a chance to read aloud to the two of you and to larger groups afterwards.

JC
: Feels like there’s a somatic process happening right there. I would love to find the language for that. This is something we were talking about before, that there’re these different pieces around engaging with a new piece of writing: there’s the actual finding language for something, writing it down, putting it on the page, which is an extraordinary step for many people. And then there’s that next piece of bringing it up off the page, like we have to embody the words in writing them down in the first place, whether we’re writing by hand or whether we’re typing it in, it’s still moving through our bodies, moving through our physical experience. Whether we’ve done it before or not, I’m thinking how would that feel, and I’m calling on my own physical experience. And so it’s this embodying process, or can be, to generate the work and then to sit in this space and move it up through the page, up through our bodies so we can hold it in our throat, to hold the words in our mouths, and to move them through us in that way—and then we’re also getting to say these things out loud that we’re never supposed to say, that we’re rarely encouraged to speak, even … it can still be so uncomfortable, even in private, even in sort of an intimate sexual experience.

CQ
: Even to a lover, yeah.

JC
: Yes. Right. And so you were talking about that a little bit before, about the power of that reading aloud.

CQ
: Well, one of the things that I think is extraordinary about the Erotic Reading Circle, especially for people who read their own work, although what you just described of the embodiment and voicing of the forbidden, that would be true of anybody who walked through the door and took any book off the shelf here at the Center for Sex and Culture and started to read the sex words out of it. So that would be true, regardless. But the person who has written their own fantasy, experience, piece of work that they hope is art, whatever—to speak it, to read it aloud is a big deal.

JC
: I wanted to rewind a little bit and hear how you, [Amy,] came to be involve in the Erotic Reading Circle.

AB
: Actually, about two weeks before I moved to San Francisco, I was living in Boston and I took a writing workshop with Michelle Tea in Boston and then—I was not stalking her—but then followed her back to San Francisco and I think that was the first writing workshop I’d ever done and so I was like “Oh, this!” I got some good feedback and could feel my legs underneath me a little bit. [I thought,] “I need to replicate that, I want more of that” and so—like so many other things in San Francisco—I came here and [asked myself,] “OK, where’s that workshop that will let me write smut and talk about it and learn about it?” And so I think I stumbled across it through the Center for Sex & Culture. I don’t even remember what the first story was that I read, I’m sure it was quite tenuous with probably some fun things in it … I had these incredible somatic experiences of reading stuff, and crafted all sorts of weird, strange stories and felt like my weird, strange stories were accepted and so trusted my own voice a little bit more …

JC
: Those dish gloves!

AB
: Oh yes, “Dish Gloves to Die For.” Yeah, I thought erotic writing had to be this very narrow sex-specific thing and that wasn’t what I was writing about, so getting a chance to read it in the Circle and discover that that was OK liberated me to the point where now we have a murder mystery [
Paws
for
Consideration
] that has dungeon scenes in it, right? So all of that can be traced back to both the craft and the confidence building that’s come out of being a part of the Circle. And hearing the other voices, too. So, that’s what I remember.

What
happens at the Erotic Reading Circle?

JC
: One of the pieces that we get at the Circle is that you put your words out, and you get an immediate response from folks while you’re reading, as well, so you get to hear where somebody thought something was funny, or people thought something was hot, or something was alarming … and then after we’re done reading folks are telling us, “this was really hot for me” or “here’s something that was really strong for me about this piece” … To have your work met with respect and received as a [worthwhile] piece of writing, to know that folks are taking it seriously, that they’re saying “Here’s what I really loved about it” and “Yeah, I really liked this character” and “It was hard for me to believe they would necessarily do this” and “I wonder about …” is such a validating thing for us as writers.

CQ
: [At the Erotic Reading Circle,] we get this great mix of people who do write very seriously for publication, thinking about their audience, having been trained sometimes or just sort of being natural good or pretty good writers and then we get the people who just heard about the Circle and have this one thing and they think they’ll come and read it. And to treat everybody just the same in that Circle to me is one of the miraculous things that we can do. I’m sure I can think of, well right now I can think of one person who is actively looking for publishing options for everything she writes that I’m pretty sure she walked in the door not being in that space at all, writing for herself, and now she’s getting published and she’s going to hit the “Best of—” collections soon if she hasn’t already.

JC
: That’s right.

CQ
: And that’s so awesome to see and experience—but somebody who walks in the door having just scrawled something for their partner and their partner responded so well that they decided to come share it with somebody else—it’s so beautiful. The intimacy of that [sharing] helps those of us who really want to be craftspeople with erotic writing. It’s a kind of a different craft—it’s the same but it’s also different than the craft of writing in general, right? You know you can do everything right in an erotic story and it may or may not have the investment of erotic charge that we hope it will have. And that’s a sort of a special sauce; I don’t even know if I can say how to put it in there but I feel like at the Circle we totally know it when we see it.

AB
: And that it comes in such different packages, I mean it’s not like you show up and everybody is reading a cigar story—the diversity of erotic expression just blows my mind, and that’s part of why I show up as much as I can, almost every month, because like I never know what it’s going to be. Is it going to be a sci-fi futuristic dystopian weird chapter 11 fascinating book happening? Is it going to be a movie script someone is working on? is it going to be something about an erotic dance as somebody’s dying? There’s such a diversity of erotic expression, it frees me to think all things are possible.

The
uses of erotic writing

AB
: [Carol,] you referenced that people are often writing either memoir or from their own experience or something—you know, I think one of the fun things for me is using erotic writing as a halfway step: “I don’t know if I really want to do that thing, so I’m going to write about doing that thing that I’ve never done.” To find the words I have to find it through my body so I will get to sort of test drive it in a really safe way, and then bring it to the Circle and read it and test drive it again in that way. And then I can decide if I actually want to go out and do it, or if the writing of it suffices on that occasion.