Big Sex Little Death_ A Memoir Part 16

In 1989, for example, I went to the University of Minnesota to speak on the history of lesbian eroticism in cinema. I was greeted at the podium by a phalanx of women carrying "blood"-stained banners who demanded to read a protest letter. Everyone is unfailingly polite in Minneapolis, so I moved to the side and crunched on my Baby Ruth while a young woman with a voice like Sarah Bernhardt read from her script: First, it was the Roman Empire. Then the Holocaust. Then the Holocaust. And now, the University of Minnesota has invited Susie Bright to speak on p.o.r.nography. And now, the University of Minnesota has invited Susie Bright to speak on p.o.r.nography.

She was serious.

I gave my lecture, which was well received. People laughed with good humor. I didn't seem like the monster whom "Sarah" had described. I was pregnant with Aretha, and when I went to the bathroom, I asked the event producer to escort me. As if on cue, I was rushed by a student hiding in the toilets, her eyes burning like she's been awake for nights.

"You are responsible for women's genocide!" she said. She was carrying something sharp in her hand. She stopped mid-speech and took in my big belly, like it hadn't been on her screen before. In my protestors' minds, I was killing women with my wicked fantasies, not creating new life.

I remembered that girl in Betty Brooks's cla.s.s. Was there a knife behind her helpless plea? I knew she wanted attention. But what kind?

Even in Betty's cla.s.s, I sensed that if I had comforted the girl - "There's nothing wrong with you. Call off the witch hunt; let's think about this" - it would not have been welcome. Everyone was talking in rhetoric.

I could have told The-Girl-in-the-Peasant-Blouse, "Someday your fantasies will change, but it will be because you have more s.e.xual experience, not less."

She might learn to be tender to herself. She might blink and see that not everything was so black and white.

How I Got Introduced to On Our Backs On Our Backs

A love poem brought me to love poem brought me to On Our Backs On Our Backs. A great swirling erotic gust that picked me up and dropped me down in rich dirt like Dorothy Gaynor.

I was twenty-two. I had one credit left to graduate from college, my "hard science" requirement. I'd transferred from Long Beach to UC Santa Cruz, where activism and adventure were an easy fit. But UCSC still expected me, a high school dropout, to learn my molecules and formulas.

I procrastinated. I thought I might get rich for a summer, in 1981, by joining my friends who were planning a season of work in Alaskan fisheries. Salmon, salmon, and more salmon. The scheme was, we'd eat doughnuts and fish and fly to Hawaii when the season came to a halt or our fingers went numb.

Young people like my Santa Cruz girlfriends and I poured into the fishing town of Cordova, Alaska, every year with such dreams. But the summer of 1981, there was a catch. The full-time fishery workers went on strike.

Ah, catnip. I got involved with the Longsh.o.r.emen's Union like flypaper and sap. Getting rich wasn't on the agenda; I was eating doughnuts exclusively. I lived with six other people in a three-person tent located on a pallet at the top of a mud cliff. Dumpster diving, pallet scavenging, beautiful midnight suns - Alaskan days and nights blurred together, and it was August before I knew it.

I began to hitchhike home, starting with a small plane back to the Yukon. I looked like a boy with a bowl haircut out of The Grapes of Wrath, and all my muddy possessions were in my embroidered ("Alaska or Bust") Kelty backpack. I had achieved both.

It was a beautiful road trip; for a time I was happily escorted by other adventurers, and no fewer than three Deadhead school-bus conversions. I felt close to home when I stuck my thumb out on Interstate 5 out of Eugene in southern Oregon, with a sign that said: South: Humboldt.

A solitary Datsun driver, bald, with three days' beard, picked me up and started speed-rapping. Guess what? Everybody was against him. Another Earl Van Nuys. I nodded sympathetically and wondered how long before the next gas station stop, where I could make an excuse to get out.

The driver - "Call me C.B." - kept one arm on the wheel at all times. But when we crossed the state line, he reached under the seat with his free hand, pulled out a handgun, and set it in his lap. "I gotta protect myself, s.h.i.t, the people I pick up, these f.u.c.king f.a.ggots, I have to protect myself!" he said. I didn't take my eyes off that gun.

Then I tuned in.

"You know, you could suck me off," C.B. was saying. "Suck me right here; I'm doing you a big favor, and I don't even know who you are. You could be anybody, and I couldn't trust you, but if you sucked me off, it would be like we could trust each other."

I answered as if he'd asked me whether I could spare a moment to make him tea and toast. Nice and slow and really quiet: the eggsh.e.l.l walk.

"Let me tell you, mister, it's like this," I said to him. "My sister Tracey is expecting a baby - a home birth - any hour now, and that I have to make it to Arcata, that's fifty more miles, on the double."

A man frightens you with a handgun, you counter with childbirth. Something equally terrifying.

C.B. let me off in Trinidad. "This is fine," I said, opening the door before he came to a full stop.

I walked the rest of the way to Spinster Hollow, my "sister Tracey's" lesbian commune. Eight women sharing all their income and expenses to live on the land. Tracey was in fine condition and not pregnant in the least - but some of her roommates wanted to be.

I walked into a Spinster Hollow biology lesson being held in the main cabin, where everyone shared common s.p.a.ce. One of the other collective members, Marilyn, wanted to get pregnant as soon as possible. She'd "borrowed" a microscope from Humboldt State University to take a closer look at whether her insemination tactics were working.

A nice gay man in town was jacking off for her. I volunteered to go pick up his sperm. I drove a 1967 VW bug into town, collected Mr. Good Sport's s.e.m.e.n in a Gerber baby food jar, and tucked it into my down jacket to keep it warm.

When I got back to Marilyn, the turkey baster was ready. Everyone wanted to squeeze the bulb. There was a burst of comic recognition at our desire each to be "the one" who e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, the thrust that would make it happen. "Let it be me!"

We took turns. Marilyn was supine. She did a shoulder stand. After a few minutes, she wanted to test the sperm's motility. We swabbed her, put the mucus specimen on a gla.s.s slide, and looked through the microscope. I had never used a microscope before. Wow. More science in one morning than I'd had in a lifetime.

The sperm were madly wriggling about. Exhilarating!

It was too soon to see whether Marilyn's fertility rite had been successful. I had only a few days to get back to Santa Cruz. I made a forlorn but final decision, with Tracey hugging me for luck: I would waste no more time pa.s.sing my science cla.s.s. My turn behind the microscope had given me hope that my attempt at completing college might not be a complete fiasco.

I enrolled in San Francisco City College and chose: astronomy. Who doesn't love a dark sky and beautiful stars? I had a glorious memory of the night in 1969 when Neil Armstrong stepped off the ladder onto the Big Green Cheese - my first time seeing color television.

Our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Lesley, made Jiffy Pop popcorn and crackers and onion dip. Even Mrs. Lesley's miserable teenage son crept into the room for the moon walk. All the miserable vapors from America's culture wars disappeared for one evening, as weightless as s.p.a.ce junk.

With that history, I was sure I could master the City College astronomy cla.s.s. When I arrived the first day of school, I was like a constellation, so white, so fair, so filled with literary references. The only way I could remember anything the professor handed out was to recall the Greek myths my mother taught me. It was as good a route as any into my professor's heart.

My last course in college became a treat instead of a burden. I would get a respectable B. My real problem became housing, money. I was crashing in my sleeping bag in a gay commune at 986 Valencia Street. All the bedrooms were full, but there was a generous sill below the window in the storefront. The sun poured down on my Therm-a-Rest. Upstairs, a Rajneesh commune performed their self-t.i.tled "chaotic mediations" and f.u.c.ked their brains out while we, the pinko queers downstairs, tried to have meetings. They called it their "spiritual practice." We called the police.

I did janitorial gigs, waitressed a few banquets out of Local 2, cleaned sinsemilla from the Spinsters in Humboldt and sold it for $40 an ounce. I just wanted a normal wage job. Tracey had moved to San Francisco, and she pointed out a notice in the newspaper: The Golden Gate Bridge District had been ordered by the courts to hire women, after years of discrimination. They needed lane changers, the people who move the traffic cones during rush hour. I could do that! I had the perfect interview gambit: "Yes, I know the bridge weather is cruel. It would scare any normal person, but you have to understand: I've been living on a mud pallet in Alaska and skinning my own squirrels. This is nothing."

Those bridge veterans probably met vigorous and physically able women all day long. I was the one who was impressed with my heretofore undiscovered physical prowess. I didn't know I had it in me.

My love life and my political interests filled every spare minute I wasn't job scrounging. I was part of a queer artists' collective called Mainstream Exiles that went a lot further than anything I'd experienced quoting Rita Mae Brown. Wasn't she dating tennis players now and raising racehorses? Her revolution had taken a detour to plusher pleasures.

I had a lot of crushes in our group - there were so many charismatic people: Rhiannon, Max Valerio, Marga Gomez, Tom Ammiano, Tede Matthews, Reno, Lea DeLaria - it was the birth of the San Francisco gay comedy and performance art scene.

I wanted to do a show, too, my own show. I knew what the t.i.tle would be: Girls Gone Bad Girls Gone Bad. I had a treasure trove of old pulp novels from the golden years of early paperbacks, the ones that presented t.i.tillating case histories of twilight women - insatiable, fiendish, and h.o.r.n.y. These kinds of books didn't get discussed in school, but you'd find them in drawers, tackle boxes, under car seats. I was fascinated with literature that everyone knew about but no one spoke of. I wanted to mash up some of that genre with the catechisms of Catholic virtue I'd been brought up with.

One of my old lovers from Alaska - Terry - came up to crash with me on a holiday weekend. It was Carnival, the holiday that turned the Latin Mission District into a tsunami of samba. Tede, my roommate, found a magenta-pink taffeta ball gown in the streets outside my window, and said, "It's you, Cinderella." It felt so good. If he could wear beautiful skirts and corsets, surely I could be just as quixotically femme.

When I made love to Terry that night, I put my whole hand inside of her. It just happened. My fist curled like a rose hip, inside a place that was so soft. She coiled around me, like she was lost, like a kitten who hadn't opened her eyes yet.

The day after our rendezvous, my ball gown came off, and I was back in Astronomy 101 in my cutoffs and Queers Support the Sandinistas T-shirt. I didn't pay much attention to anything our dear professor was saying, because I was busy writing a love poem:

1. Rocky outer crust

Icy mantle liquid nitrogen, a kernel Hissing at the core. 2. Compare planets with lovers: 2. Compare planets with lovers: As with cosmic evolution, There are many mysteries Does life exist on other planets? Does life exist on other planets?

Where did we come from? Your orbit Your orbit Was like a magnetic field baby That hurts I was so attracted too And now And now I cannot touch Your outer rim Without remembering a dream I f.u.c.ked you round a dance floor I f.u.c.ked you round a dance floor Like a wheelbarrow, your hair mopping the ground And legs about my waist The sweat ran down my neck The sweat ran down my neck And trickled on the underside Of your b.r.e.a.s.t.s They curved like a sulphur plume The next night, Tede invited me to read at Modern Times Bookstore Collective, just two doors down. A gay Marxist bookshop: yummy.

I read my poems. I felt like Elizabeth Taylor in Maggie the Cat's nylons. My words gave me a presence that my spectacles and hunched shoulders wouldn't otherwise suggest.

Someone during the show's break told me that Good Vibrations needed a "feminist vibrator clerk;" I thought maybe I'd apply for that along with the bridge job. Good Vibes had one employee who'd left town suddenly with broken heart. I wondered who that was.

Vibrators, huh? That could be more fun than changing traffic cones. My heart was the opposite of broken - it was bursting with leaps of faith.

Two days after the Modern Times poetry reading, I found in my mailbox a handwritten letter from a stranger.

The message was curlicued, in fountain pen, a beautiful hand, from a young woman named Myrna Elana. She said she was the cofounder of a new magazine in the works called On Our Backs On Our Backs ( (OOB). I burst out laughing before she even got to the t.i.tle's explanation: they were dedicated to tweaking the prudery of puritanical feminist publications like off our backs off our backs. The conservative feminists believed s.e.xual liberation was playing into the hands of the b.e.s.t.i.a.l impulses of male dominance. Ah, science!

The premise of OOB OOB was going to be that lesbians were not celibates-in-waiting-for-the-revolution, or coldly distant planets. We were alive to s.e.x and adventure and being every kind of queer we could be. I couldn't wait. was going to be that lesbians were not celibates-in-waiting-for-the-revolution, or coldly distant planets. We were alive to s.e.x and adventure and being every kind of queer we could be. I couldn't wait.

Myrna wrote that my writing was "beautiful," that she had been sitting on one of the metal folding chairs at Modern Times. She asked me if they could include my poems in the first issue - or anything else I might have in my desk drawer. She said she'd loved to meet me. It was my very first fan letter.

I don't think anyone had told me my writing was wonderful save my parents and a couple grade-school teachers. Those had been fairy tales I'd made up. There'd been a gap. My propaganda efforts for The Red Tide The Red Tide were always critiqued for their bourgeois individualism, inappropriate humor, and the lack of a socialist imperative summary. I'd become expert at aping other people's writing that could get the seal of approval. It was dreary. were always critiqued for their bourgeois individualism, inappropriate humor, and the lack of a socialist imperative summary. I'd become expert at aping other people's writing that could get the seal of approval. It was dreary.

Poetry was the one place where originality - my personal lair - was prized. I didn't feel self-conscious.

I wrote Myrna back with one of my green ink fountain pens.

"I would love to," I wrote. "I will do anything to help get the first issue out. I know how to do paste-up, sell ads, write copy - anything you need to get it together. You have given me the best laugh in a very long time. Call me."

I told her that I might be working at the women's vibrator store on Twenty-second Street, next to the Catholic school and the barbershop. She could probably find me there.

The Feminist Vibrator Store

My job at Good Vibrations was lonely in 1981. Sometimes, I'd have only one customer per day. Even if that customer stayed for an hour or two, I had lots of time to sit there and think about what she had said.

"My husband has died and I will never achieve climax again." "The therapist has told me I am s.e.xually dysfunctional and sent me here." "The therapist has told me I am s.e.xually dysfunctional and sent me here."

One little boy darted in and spat at me: "My dad's in prison, and he has a bigger d.i.c.k than anything you got in here."

I could rock our customers' world with just a little information. One little chat, and they wouldn't think they needed to rely on someone else for their o.r.g.a.s.m. Nor would they remain distraught that an MD had "sentenced " them to a vibrator store. The kid who taunted me about his dad in prison and ran out the door - I could say something kind to settle him down. s.e.x education was so powerful because even the smallest effort was enlightening.

I got bored when the store was slow. I read every book on our shelves. It seemed strange that the catalog of decent s.e.x information was so small that one could read it all in a couple of weeks. There was only one book for kids about s.e.x that wasn't focused on pregnancy and disease. One! There was a single photo book about men and masturbation that didn't treat it like a juvenile disorder or failure. And all of the contemporary "women-auth.o.r.ed" erotica had been penned by Anais Nin, circa the twenties. We had Nancy Friday's sociological surveys of women's fantasies, but I would advise customers just to read the fantasies, not the pathological critiques of why these women fantasized in the first place. It would have only discouraged them!

We had what my boss Joani Blank called "the try-out room." The "world famous try-out room!" I called it, although it was really the world's biggest secret.

It was only a bench adjacent to the bathroom, behind drapes. There were two basic electric vibrators plugged into the wall sitting on the bench's flowered seat cover. Customers widened their eyes when I suggested giving it a whirl.

"You'll understand after you turn on the vibrator," I'd say. "You'll understand in one second, literally."

You could be wearing fleece-lined snow pants and a parka, but if you brushed the Hitachi Magic Wand to the outside of those snow pants, you'd know whether you liked it or not. For many women, it was the first time they'd experienced what men would call an "instant b.o.n.e.r."

People always ask me if the try-out room was "abused." It never really got a chance to be during my tenure. Everyone jumped out of there quickly because they couldn't wait to get their own vibrator home.

The only reason to take an extended interest in the try-out room would've been to impress me, and that happened only twice. Each time the customers were friends of the owner.

A cabdriver, David Marshall, who was some kind of s.e.x guru on the side, came in with his girlfriend. "Isn't she gorgeous?" he said, walking in with his trophy girl. "Lana, show Susie your tattoo!"

Lana was wearing a long gown that split open on the side. She had turquoise eyes and Lady G.o.diva hair. She released her magic snap and the Greek-style dress fell open, revealing a serpent that crept up from her instep, around her hips and b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and up to her neck.

I was their captive audience. I had a gong under the cash register if they became too obnoxious. But they didn't. I was still interested. I'd never seen anyone with a body-length tattoo before. I didn't want them to stop.

David heralded the wonders of the try-out room to his mistress. I hoped Lana wouldn't be disappointed. I mean, it was barely more than a water closet. They disappeared behind the mauve curtains, and their moaning began a moment later. I suppressed my laughter since I figured they could hear me as well as I could hear them.

This is what everyone thought my job was like, eavesdropping on ardent lovers in the back room, everyone dripping in sweat. In fact, this was a once-in-my-career performance.

David and his Serpent Girl popped out of the try-out room and turned to me, flushed, their afterglow aflutter.

I could have crushed them with indifference, but that was just too mean. They had pushed me a bit to be the voyeur, but really, was I unwilling? No. I had a flash of how unusual it was to be in a s.e.xual s.p.a.ce where the rules are what you make them. In my previous life, when men had exposed themselves, they always they got the drop on me before I had a chance to respond. This time I was in the lead.

"You look happy!" I fanned at them with my copy of the Chronicle.

"Do you want Lana to show you more?" David asked. She stared down her aquiline nose. Ouch.

In my fantasies, I was beautiful, too, not the stepsister sleeping in the ashes.

"No, I'm good," I said.

Lana hooked up her toga, and they swept off into their chariot. It was the week of vibrating dangerously.

Another customer walked in, right in their wake, with a honey beehive and sensible pumps.

She spoke up loud and clear, "I have to got to get a Magic Wand; all the other girls at the switchboard have one!" She was an AT&T telephone operator. She didn't share one furtive glance, one troubled whisper.

I felt the click, the chamber turning. Here was someone who wasn't claiming to be sick, troubled, widowed, hopeless ... just a hip chick who wanted to get what all the other gals were talking about.

She pointed at the stickers on the plastic vibes that said, Do not use on unexplained calf pain.

"What's that for?"

"It's just as silly as you think. ... It's a response to a lawsuit from so long ago that even the manufacturers don't remember. No one uses battery vibes on blood clots, let alone on their calves."

"No s.h.i.t!" she said. "Is there such a thing as 'explainable' calf pain?"

"That's a great question!" I wish the novelty factory morons could meet women like her. They didn't even understand there was such a thing as a woman who bought s.e.x toys. They didn't get that we wanted toys to be attractive and witty and not like some kind of crutch.

The phone rang. It was Olive Oyl. At least, that's exactly what she sounded like, Olive Oyl after a pack of cigarettes. She said her name was Dori Seda, a cartoonist, and she wanted to come down with photographer Terry Zweigoff and cartoonist Robert Crumb and some other dame, and tie themselves up in vibrator bondage and shoot a "photo-funny" - like the kind you see in Mexican comic novella.

"Okay, I have to call my boss Joani, and then I'll call you right back. What's your number?"