Best Sex Writing 2006

In the afterword to my erotic short story collection Too Beautiful and Other Stories, I told readers that if they lived far from a large city and wanted to live out their sexual fantasies, they had two choices: start their own scene or move someplace like San Francisco, where, I wrote, there really are people like the polyamorous, polysexual characters I depicted in my stories. There really are sex parties here; there really are S/M lesbians, orgiastic gay male sex bashes, experimentally minded bisexuals, couples who live in Daddy/boy arrangements, and so on.

I gained my real initiation into this sexual demimonde as so many have: I became a San Francisco Sex Information phone volunteer. At the same time, 1990, I started my magazine Frighten the Horses, and I joined Queer Nation. Suddenly I was part of a network of creative sexual revolutionaries. I met strippers who did performance art, sex writers who worked in galleries, prostitutes with zines or rock bands, polyamorist activist Ph.D. students, and painters who bought art supplies with the money they earned lap dancing on weekends.

Among these cheerfully transgressive youths was a woman in her mid-twenties, Stephanie. I met her in Queer Nation’s bisexual affinity group, and when I learned she was a comix artist I asked her to do some illustrations for Frighten the Horses. So it was through this connection that, after knowing each other for a few years, we became lovers.

While Stephanie and I were going through the same getting-to-know-you flirtations that all lovers do, I found out that, in addition to her comix artwork, she was a dancer at the Lusty Lady strip club. I didn’t want to come off like a typical slobbering male, so without actually saying so I tried to make the conversation sound more like I was conducting research. I asked respectful, sympathetic questions about hours and working conditions, the relationship between workers and management, the ins and outs of working in the “booth” where dancers had one-on-one encounters (albeit still separated by Plexiglas) with customers.

Of course, behind my polite facade, I wanted to know what any man wants to know about a stripper’s job: Is it a turn-on, or is it just like any job where you feign interest for the customer’s sake? Is it interesting or even arousing when men masturbate in response to a dancer, or is it merely objectionable and gross? And most important of all, is there any reality to the pornographic stereotype that the girls turn each other on and have hot girl-on-girl action in the locker room?

I wanted to know all those things, but I didn’t have the nerve to ask them at first. It took quite a while before I finally satisfied my curiosity about the ins and outs of working at the Lusty. By then, we had been lovers for months. If I arrived early at the theater to pick up Stephanie at the end of her shift, I walked around mingling with the customers but reveling in the secret knowledge that I was not one of them. I wasn’t just a customer; I was getting what they only fantasized about. Listening to Stephanie talk about work, I came to share her perspective, and her coworkers’, that the customers were more or less to be looked down on, or at least pitied. In our intimate conversations, and once at an offsite spoken-word performance organized by the dancers, I laughed with them at the customers’ foibles, at the gulf between the customers’ stereotypical fantasies and their schlubby reality.

The most flattering confirmation of the difference between them and me came one day when I was, as usual, early to pick up Stephanie. I wandered into the one-on-one booth and put a twenty into the slot. I didn’t say anything about being a dancer’s boyfriend; I just began talking to the performer as if I were making small talk at a party instead of talking to a naked chick under glass. After making sure that I really wasn’t there to jack off, she relaxed and just started chatting with me. After a few minutes she said, “You don’t seem like a regular customer,” and then I admitted that I was, in fact, in the boyfriend category.

Only after several years can I see the irony of this situation. Secure in the knowledge that I was somehow different from—even better than—the men who were the run-of-the-mill customers, I presented myself as different. The performer, in response, treated me exactly as she would have any other customer: She confirmed and reflected what she assumed was my fantasy. And I had, in fact, paid her to do this. So by attempting to set myself apart from and above the louche customers, I had done nothing more than become one.

Though I learned that it was not true, of course, that the dancers had pornographic interactions in the locker room, they did have relationships of various types outside the club. The spoken-word evening that I mentioned above was only one example. They’d go to dance clubs or the Folsom Street Fair or twelve-step meetings together; they went to each other’s art openings, performances, and readings. Stephanie told me of one occasion when, to celebrate a dancer’s birthday, several of them went to a local sex club; there they jokingly bossed around the birthday girl, who was known to be submissive, making her perform erotic chores. Most of the dancers were lesbian or bisexual; a few were lovers. Stephanie had an on-and-off affair with a woman who worked at a massage parlor; I’d introduced them, and on two memorable occasions the three of us went to bed together.

Stephanie was a perfect lover. She was generous with her affections to the point of self-denial; she was experimental and willing to do anything I proposed. When I told her, early in our affair, that getting a blow job had never been my favorite way to come, she took that as a challenge. We did S/M; we did role-playing; we went to sex parties together; we had sex on drugs; we had threesomes. She never said no, and she came up with plenty of ideas of her own.

This, one of the momentous affairs of my life, took place almost ten years ago. It’s taken me that long to figure out how to write about it. Part of the problem is that it’s hard to say something original about having a hot affair with a bisexual stripper, which every man fantasizes about. So when I say, for example, that we had a threesome with one of her coworkers, I want to tell you about the parts of the experience that set it apart from fantasy—the odd bits, the parts that didn’t work, the moments of awkwardness.

“There’s a girl at work,” Stephanie told me one day. “She’s a dyke, but she said once in a while she feels like getting fucked by a real prick. I told her I was with someone who was cool and would respect her boundaries. Do you want to do it?”

Did I want to do a threesome with two bisexual San Francisco strippers? Well, sure I did. But while my first reaction was to grab Stephanie by her shoulders and shout, “When?! Where?! Can we do it right now?!” I sensed that if I acted too eager I might not be considered cool enough to participate at all. It’s the old rule: If you want someone, act as if you don’t.

Typically for modern San Francisco, it took us a few weeks to iron out everybody’s schedule. During this time Stephanie would check in with me about a certain date, and I would answer back in the laconic voice I’d chosen for this particular interaction. I was so successful in maintaining my cool that she even asked me if I really wanted to do it, so I had to assure her I did, still maintaining my cool all the while. Eventually it was arranged, and we finally got together one evening, picking the girl up after an evening class at San Francisco State and driving back across town to Stephanie’s apartment in the Tenderloin. Before going upstairs to the apartment, we stopped in a bar to negotiate our encounter, since the girl’s lover had put certain limits on what she could do. She could fuck me—that was the whole point—but not kiss me. She’d go down on me, but I wasn’t allowed to go down on her.

Finally we went upstairs and fucked, and the best moment was when I penetrated her and she exclaimed, “It’s so warm!” because she was accustomed to silicone and plastic. Though I had to keep myself in line, Stephanie had had no limits imposed on her. She fisted the girl while I watched.

Did my affair with Stephanie make me happy? Of course—we did everything I’d ever wanted to. There were many times I reminded myself to cherish our time together, because I sensed it wouldn’t last forever. But it did last a long time. Each of us plumbed the depths of our desire, coming up with new positions, new partners, new places to fuck, new fantasies to enact.

But after a few years, we’d done everything we could think of, and then what do you do? What do you do when all your sexual fantasies have been fulfilled, when there are no more barriers to push through, no more taboos to transgress? The answer is, you do the things that you don’t particularly want to do, but because everyone else talks about them, you do them. It may surprise you to find that, in our case, this was nothing more exotic than buttfucking.

Anal sex is a practice about which I’m sort of neutral and something Stephanie had never learned to appreciate, so we had never gone there. But in the last months of our affair—when, as in any long-term relationship, the little annoying things, the unresolved arguments and hurt feelings, were mounting up, making it harder to be together—she seized on the idea that things weren’t going well because she hadn’t broken through this particular barrier. So she insisted that we try. As usual when neither person really wants to do something, the result was a failure: Anxious minutes of grappling with lube, towels, and each other, with her trying to ease herself backwards onto my cock and me asking, “Look, are you sure you want to do this?” until she would give up and collapse onto the bed in tears. We repeated this scene at least three times in as many weeks until dropping the whole subject. And the worst part was that, after all the crazy outré stuff we’d done together, this failed attempt at assfucking—the act that neither of us really wanted to do—was the first time we were actually embarrassed.

The other thing about getting to a far point with a lover is that you tend to take for granted all the great stuff you did on the way there. At least I took her affections for granted—I think she never presumed mine. When we broke up after four years, she told me, with great bitterness, “You don’t know what you’re giving up.”

In the end, she was right. Only since our breakup have I come to know what I’m missing. Because while this is San Francisco, and there are still plenty of artistic, polyamorous bisexual people around, I’m now in my late forties, and all those youngsters are with each other.

I still visit the Lusty Lady from time to time, partly to keep in touch with that memorable affair, but also because it’s one of the few places where I can go and talk to someone like Stephanie—someone sexually open, willing to participate in any fantasy. But now I am, like everyone else, just a customer.