Erotica Made Me The Writer I Am Today
Before we get started… this newsletter is free, but I have a novel coming out in August and I would be absurdly grateful if you pre-ordered it. Pre-orders are increasingly important: they let the bookstores know what books you’re interested in, and they result in a lot of early sales. Plus it’s a present you give to yourself ahead of time.
Lessons in Magic and Disaster is a novel for adults about a trans witch whose mother has been hiding from the world ever since a tragic event seven years ago. So the witch, Jamie, decides to teach her mother how to do magic. This novel has been generously praised by Amber Tamblyn, Andrea Lawlor, Meredith Talusan, Torrey Peters and others. You can pre-order here, or if you want a signed/personalized/doodled copy, Green Apple has you covered.
Also, a quick content warning: the below article contains very vague descriptions of erotica stories as well as non-explicit discussions of sexuality.
I learned so much about writing from erotica
I never came up with a pseudonym to use for my erotica writing. It honestly never occurred to me — this was fiction that I was publishing, and I was just as proud of it as any of the other fiction I published at the time.
I started writing erotica around 1999, not too long after I had started writing science fiction short stories and sending those out. I had discovered a copy of Cecilia Tan’s groundbreaking book Telepaths Don't Need Safewords a few years earlier and had been blown away — honestly, that book changed my life. So it makes sense that the first place I ever tried to submit a story was Cecilia's publishing company, Circlet Press.
As I previously wrote about here, the story I sent to Circlet was not very good, even by the low standard of the short fiction I was writing at the time. (Today’s newsletter is partly expanding on some stuff I said at the end of that previous article about conflict and stakes, in fact.)
The story’s flaws weren’t just due to my limitations as a writer: in fact, I had completely misunderstood Circlet’s writing guidelines. The guidelines basically said that stories should not include any sex-negativity and should foreground explicit consent, but I somehow took that to mean that the characters in the story should not have any emotional problems, or experience any difficulties whatsoever. The result was a fairly lifeless story that I'd be scared to re-read.
It took me a while to learn how to write an erotica story featuring flawed characters who were dealing with emotional issues and having real conflict, while still being sexy, fun and positive. This required a lot of work on myself and my writing, and kind of pushed me to change how I think about conflict and stakes, as I wrote about earlier.
But writing erotica didn't just teach me about handling conflict with more nuance and less growling. It also taught me so much about establishing characters, writing believable relationships, getting to the heart of emotional issues — and oh yeah, writing good sex scenes. And yes, I got better at writing about consent, because that’s important and because it’s a major part of how people talk about sex inside a story.
It's not so much that writing erotica made me a better writer — it's more like, I don't know where I'd be today if I hadn't written erotica.
Sometime after I sent that story to Circlet Press, I moved to the Bay area and started getting involved in local queer organizations and non-profits. (I wrote more about that here.) One of the organizations I got involved with was a small publishing company called Black Books, which published books about sexuality, as well as a magazine called Black Sheets. When I wasn't organizing shelves and hauling boxes around, I was digging through the slush pile of erotica stories submitted to Black Sheets. I also was the first reader for a an anthology called Best Bisexual Erotica, which was co-edited by Bill Brent and Carol Queen but published by Circlet.
Reading piles of erotica submissions was a fascinating and sometimes overwhelming experience. The worst stories in that slush pile were worse than you can possibly imagine, and some of them were deeply offensive in ways that I shall not describe here. Black Books had three or four years of submissions crammed into a number of vinyl postal crates, because nobody had bothered to go through them in a long time. I even found a story that I had submitted a year or so earlier, which I now realized was completely wrong for Black Sheets magazine — I had the dubious pleasure of writing myself a rejection letter.
Despite the unthinkable horrors I encountered in that slush pile, I learned so much from reading and evaluating hundreds of erotica stories. One of the things Bill told me was that he didn't want to publish any stories that weren't intrinsically about sex. (The way Bill actually put it was, “If they're not fucking by page four, we're not publishing it.") In a murder mystery, someone has to be murdered, or there's no story. In a romance, someone has to fall in love. In an erotica story, there needs to be sex — or at least a sexually-charged situation.
That said, there's a nearly infinite number of stories you can tell about sex, because sex is intrinsically human and human beings are complex as heck. When people are being sexual, they are often accessing a really deep part of themselves and maybe working through some personal stuff that they couldn't work through any other way. Two or more people having sex are in a conversation, in which there are power dynamics (both acknowledged and unacknowledged.) But they’re also bringing their history, their own self-image, and all of the messy stuff that comes with having a body in this ridiculous world.
The more a story is about sex, the more it is about everything else. I learned to look for the stories that felt erotically charged, but also made me feel — and think.
I also learned so much from being around a set of utterly brilliant writers who were set on taking the erotica genre in as many directions as they possibly could. People like Bill, Cecilia, Carol, Blake C. Aarens, Marlo Gayle, Greta Christina, Ian Philips, Mollena Williams-Haas, Greg Wharton, Simon Sheppard, Tobi Hill-Meyer and so many others. They taught me so much about writing, because their stories were not just fearless and hot — but also weird, experimental, deeply felt.
The late Simon Sheppard was one of the first people I met in the Bay Area erotica scene, and we hung out a lot back in the day. I remember him telling me that he had written a story for an anthology of stories about foreskins. His story was about foreskins, but it was really about authenticity and the fear of being inauthentic.
(Perhaps inspired by Simon, I later wrote an erotica piece about queers having semi-public sex, which unfolded into a meditation on originality and the question of who owns a story.)
A lot of Simon’s stories were like that: they would start out seeming to be straightforwardly horny, and they would slowly unfold some slice of neurosis, interpersonal weirdness, or existential crisis. Recently, I was reading at an erotica event and I wanted to pay tribute to Simon, whose funeral had happened over Zoom instead of in person. I chose to read one of Simon's stories from his book In Deep, a blistering monologue spoken by a sadistic top to their quivering submissive.1 I can't express how intense yet tender that story is, and how powerful it felt to read Simon's words aloud.
But also, some of Bill's stories have stayed with me this whole time, because of their quirky weird cynicism and absurd concepts. Carol Queen wrote the sweet, tender, wry stories about queers exploring themselves and each other, and sometimes suffering unbearable heartbreak. Cecilia Tan pioneered a whole sub-genre of science fiction and fantasy erotica (though of course that subgenre has deep roots going back to at least Philip José Farmer.) Cecilia published dozens of anthologies, and her novel The Velderet (about people exploring BDSM in a dystopian alien world) remains a timeless classic. More recently, Cecilia has reinvented the magic-school genre, and written some incredible erotic romance, plus an urban fantasy series that I really hope y’all get to read soon.
There was a robust publishing ecosystem for erotica in the '90s and much of the 2000s, with small and midsized companies putting out a ton of books that were sold everywhere. Bookstores had erotica sections! Thomas Roche put out a whole series of anthologies of erotica with pulp noir themes, called Noirotica. Carol put out experimental erotica anthologies with titles like Pomosexuals. Greg and Ian ran a publisher called Suspect Thoughts, which put out books like The Best of the Best Meat Erotica — yep, a whole book of gay erotica about meat. Recently I found a used copy of an anthology from back in the day called Rode Hard, Put Away Wet — it was all lesbian cowboy erotica, and I saw so many of my friends in that table of contents. I snapped it up.
I don't mean to suggest that the only erotica I loved was somehow experimental or groundbreaking. Nothing could be further from the truth. There were so many stories I read, or heard at the long-running (and still going!) Perverts Put Out erotica reading series, which simply moved me with vividly drawn characters and grounded storylines.
But during the peak of erotica as a publishing genre, you really could get pretty weird.
I kind of carved out a niche as someone who wrote kooky, off-kilter erotica. For an anthology called Love Under Foot — a collection of gay foot fetish stories — I wrote a truly bonkers tale about a religious movement that turned foot worship into a holy sacrament and eventually took over the world, if I remember correctly. One of my earliest stories, for Best Bisexual Erotica, was about bisexual invisibility — the characters invent a device to find other bisexuals, called bidar (a play on gaydar). It was a tiny gadget that made booping noises, I think.
Incidentally, I don’t think my story made it into Best Bisexual Erotica because I’d been the slush reader — both Bill and Carol, the editors, spoke fondly of that story, even years later. When the final book was published, all the contributors were listed on the back cover — except that they had put a barcode where my name was supposed to be. (Because Anders was first alphabetically.) I felt grumpy about it, because it was possibly my first ever anthology sale, but I decided to put my hurt feelings aside — and then the story got a ton of positive attention, which was what really mattered to me.
Sometime around 2002, I joined Carol Queen and some other writers on a road trip to Portland, where we spoke at Powell's Books (and also at a local adult bookstore. An interesting contrast.)
I remember a lot of the conversations at Powell's being about whether erotica was a genre worthy of respect. Was it just much easier to get published as an erotica writer than in other genres? (All of those hundreds of people I sent rejection letters to from Bill's office might have had something to say about that.) I found that one or two of my fellow authors did feel as though it was easier to get noticed in erotica, because it was such a niche genre that a lot of other writers were afraid to touch. That said, even those folks were passionate about telling stories about the human condition. And weirdly, at that time, my experience was that I was having a decent amount of success getting into both erotica anthologies and prestigious literary journals, but not science fiction magazines. This shit is complicated, and it’s not all about prestige at all.
All of us were writing stories to make people feel something — the same way a horror story tries to scare you. Some erotica writers didn't want to get super pretentious about it, which made perfect sense to me.
That said, I've seldom felt as much creative freedom and fulfillment as I did when I was writing a ton of erotica short stories. Maybe because there was almost no mainstream prestige involved in what we were doing, we were free to create something transcendent and strange without worrying about what the New Yorker would think.
Sometime in the mid-2000s, it started to feel as though the party was over. Some smaller erotica publishers went out of business or had distribution challenges, like so many small presses at that time. Some of the biggest anthology publishers seemed to be pivoting toward publishing more straight/ mainstream stuff. A lot of my friends were complaining that they suddenly couldn't get published anywhere.
Some erotica writers pivoted to writing dirty short novels and self-publishing them on Amazon — only to get randomly censored at times. Eventually, Amazon launched its Kindle Unlimited program, and those people largely stopped being able to make a living. (I get the sense that Kindle Unlimited was especially bad for erotica, because someone might only read a few pages of a particular book, and Amazon would give the author pennies for that.)
Recently, I had dinner with a friend from the old days, and I asked where all the erotica had gone. Two places, she answered: there's a ton of erotic romance being published right now, a lot of which is extremely hot and gorgeous. And also, there's a lot of really wonderful smut on sites like Archive of One's Own, some of which is not fan-fiction but people’s own original characters.
By the time the party was ending, I had started writing some of my most bizarre stuff, trying to see how far I could go. I wrote this one story about a person who is seeking more and more extreme experiences, until eventually she ends up in an erotic torture-dome on the Moon. (I was told that story was too weird to publish. Go figure.)
My last ever erotica story, though, appeared in an anthology of trans erotica called Take Me There, edited by the wonderful Tristan Taormino. For this story, I did actually use a pseudonym, for a variety reasons that are too complicated to get into here. (But I’ll write about them soon, I promise.) All the same, I'm still very proud of that story, which is about someone celebrating completing their electrolysis treatments in the dirtiest possible fashion.
The other day, I was helping to lead the Bookstore and Chocolate Crawl, and I found a used copy of Take Me There in the sexuality section at Adobe Books. (It's probably still there — someone should pick it up!) I was flooded with emotions, seeing this gorgeous book with so many names I recognized and so many intense stories of trans desire and discovery.
It made me remember all over again how lucky I was to cut my teeth writing smut.
Music I Love Right Now
Greazy Meal were a Minneapolis funk band in the mid to late 90s — their members included Tommy Barbarella, formerly with Prince and the New Power Generation, plus a bunch of other key Minneapolis players. The other day, I was thinking of them because of their song “Forgiveness” — I’ve been thinking about forgiveness a lot lately, and it’s a major theme in Lessons in Magic and Disaster.
Sadly, you can’t buy Greazy Meal’s music legally anymore, apart from a few used CDs going for a lot of money. (Why no Bandcamp page?) But their very 1990s-looking website is still online and has a trove of mp3s. (Plus some Real Audio files, from back when audio was still Real.)
There are a ton of live recordings, including a wondrously slick cover version of “Kid Charlemagne” by Steely Dan. And a ton of other great live covers of Sly and the Family Stone, Queen, Jaco Pastorius and others. I’ve been obsessively listening to this stuff, and it all whips ass. I have enjoyed the studio recordings I’ve heard by Greazy Meal — but damn, their live recordings are incredible and addictive. They were the house band at a bar in Minneapolis for two years, playing one show a week, and they were tight as fuck. I don’t know the name of their drummer, but he was a beast, playing tons of energetic fills while holding the pocket steady. (Feels like Tower of Power’s David Garibaldi after a couple Red Bulls.)
Anyway, if you enjoy Greazy Meal’s music, you can still show some support. The band’s former lead singer Julius “Juice” Collins has been having some health problems and there’s a GoFundMe that’s still not fully funded.
Meanwhile, here’s their incredibly sleazy, slowed-down cover version of “Funkytown” by Lipps Inc.:
The story is called “Saint Valentine Was a Martyr, You Know,” and it’s VERY dark. No, darker than that. It’s a lot. But it’s beautiful. ↩