Big Sex Little Death_ A Memoir Part 17

Joani was a reliable iconoclast. "Oh, it's for Last Gasp," she said, "the underground comix publishers. Ron Turner's an old friend of mine." He was going to be publishing Crumb and Dori's mad comic, Weirdo.

"Of course," she said. "Give them my love - and no smoking!"

I told the Weirdo crew to come over when the store closed, so they didn't scare anyone away. I said, "You know, there're no curtains in the windows, so you have to put up with whoever's walking by. We're a block from a Catholic church."

No problem. Dori led her troupe in. She was the only one babbling. I loved her, with her big dark eyes and painted Twiggy eyelashes, as tall and k.n.o.bby as a popsicle stick. Robert kept his comments to things like, "How exactly is this used?" as he picked up the most unusual object he could find on the shelf and waved it at me. He was already drawing it in his mind. Terry chain-smoked. But I didn't want to kill the mood.

"Could I be your vibrator bondage ch.o.r.eographer, or something?" I asked. "Because this will take forever if you don't know the toys."

"Oh yes!" They were in unison.

Their narrative structure was based on The Perils of Pauline The Perils of Pauline: Two innocent girls are trapped by dirty old men in a vibrator store and must fight to escape!

I did draping and artful slipknots with electrical cords. I picked up the rabbit-fur mitt and stroked the Dori's cheek with it. "Oh my G.o.d, that feels so good." She sighed against my hand.

"Everything in here feels good, but you have to endure a photo shoot instead."

Dori told me she woke up at noon and went to bed at dawn, that she lived right around the corner. She invited me to come over and try on rumba panties and draw and drink with her, draw the new feminist revolution comic book together.

"I can't draw, and I can't really drink, but I sure would like to visit you."

I had other customers I fell in love with for other reasons.

One day two nuns walked in. I know that sounds like a bar story. They were women who'd left their order five years previously. They had both been novitiates at the same time, as teenagers, and had fallen in love. They left the convent to be together openly. The two of them dressed as modestly and primly in my vibrator store as any nunnery would've required.

They wanted a vibrator and "something for v.a.g.i.n.al penetration." They conferred with each other patiently. They'd been saving up for this purchase the way someone else would be socking it away for a car. I wanted to give them everything for free.

"How long have you been together?" I asked.

The younger one with blue b.u.t.ton eyes c.o.c.ked her head. "Oh, twenty years, right?"

Her lover concurred. They were delighted at the number. "It's our vibrator anniversary!"

I was single. I had never been with any one person seriously more than, I don't know, six months. I was friends with many of my exes, and loved them as family. But day in and day out, for twenty years? How did they do it?

"What's your secret? Why aren't you grumpy and bored and itchy?" I pulled my hair up into a bun, like Marion the Librarian.

They laughed. The older one - with crow's-feet around her eyes - said, "I think it's just because ... we love each other, so much." She slowed her words down, each one followed by a little pause.

I shook my head, not sure if they were teasing me. I guess I had to humor them. Call "Dear Abby," call the Vatican - we have the answer here: "love." But I was disappointed. I wished they would really figure it all out and tell me.

The Baby Showers

Debi Sundahl, the co-founder of On Our Backs On Our Backs, threw the first baby shower I ever attended, in 1983. She also invited me to the last one I'd attend, when I got pregnant myself in 1990. I can't believe our lesbian guerrilla operation was bracketed by babies, but maybe many women's adventures are like that.

I hadn't attended feminine rituals like baby showers before. I was twenty-five, and I'd never been to a wedding. My mom didn't go for that sort of thing - I observed only the sitcom versions. I had no idea what to expect.

Debi's showers had silly games, pastel wrapping paper, and little plastic baby shoes as party favors. Plus a houseful of strippers, most of them just coming off their shift. They all worked at a peep show called the l.u.s.ty Lady, in North Beach.

The timing in '83 couldn't have been better. I'd been re-reading that fan letter about my poetry for weeks, the one that Debi's work wife Myrna had sent me. They did girl/girl s.e.x shows together, a seven-hour shift, and they'd been planning their magazine for months. Myrna said On Our Backs On Our Backs was going to publish its first issue "any minute." was going to publish its first issue "any minute."

So many minutes and months had pa.s.sed by. What was the holdup?

I didn't have a phone number for either of them, just Myrna's letter, with an address in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. I walked there from the 33 MUNI bus with a handwritten letter that I planned to slip under the door. The address was on Beulah Street, Beulah and Waller. A pink two-story with a bas.e.m.e.nt window that saw a lot of action, people walking up, filling a short transaction, and walking away - like a pie shop, only with baggies and cash.

I ignored the bas.e.m.e.nt queue and walked up the front stairs to the second-floor flat, stuck my letter in the mail slot. I wanted to knock; I stood there rubbing my cold nose, but I couldn't do it. Sometimes I'm ready for anything, but this time I wasn't.

I wrote to Myrna in my letter that I could do most anything involving putting a magazine out. It's odd to think that at that time, 1983, I really could, because publishing technology hadn't changed much since Gutenberg. I could ink a press, set the type, write the headlines - whatever you wanted.

My phone rang that night. Debi, Myrna's partner. Of course I couldn't see her over the phone, but I can imagine her now, sitting at the kitchen butcher block, chain-smoking, her long nails tapping on the wood, blond afro bobbing and weaving as she punctuated every question with her Marlboro. She was so friendly, but businesslike, like a charismatic Avon Lady setting up a full encampment in your living room.

"Have you ever sold advertising?"

That was the last thing I expected to hear. Advertising? I'd sold communism to Teamsters and high school students ... wasn't that practically the same thing?

I wanted to say yes so badly to anything she asked. "Sure, is that where you're at right now?"

"That's it; we have a certain number of preorders, but we need advertisers to meet the printer deposit before Gay Day," she explained.

The idea was to distribute OOB OOB's first issue when a million people descended into the San Francisco Civic Center for the June Gay Day bash. We'd make so much money in one afternoon, Debi said, that we could pay the printer the balance in cash and leave a tip. Six hours to make $10K. Doable!

"Lesbians are lined up to purchase your goods and services!" That made me laugh. When did lesbians ever do anything but line up for the bus? But Debi would've said treating lesbians like they had money was the whole f.u.c.king idea.

"Lesbians have never been treated with respect as consumers; no one's ever come to our community with anything s.e.xual we want," Debi said. I heard her take a big breath and exhale through her nose.

When I went out with my d.y.k.e friends, we'd walk through the Castro and see all the gay men's business, a vertical column of f.a.g capitalism. I temped at a Castro Street bookshop - and more than half of the books we sold were t.i.tles that have seldom, if ever, been seen in a straight bookstore. Every real estate transaction, every ice cream cup, every T-shirt was in queer vernacular, man to man. Five miles away in the Mission, you'd walk down a littered, dirty street to a feminist bookstore - a sweet academic haven - but as impoverished as a church mouse.

"This is my business plan; we can talk more about it later," Debi said, tappity-tap-tap. "We're going to have a baby shower for Goldie this afternoon. Why don't you come over?"

"Who's Goldie?"

"She works with me at the l.u.s.ty. She's eight months pregnant - such a sweetheart."

Goldie was a doll; she was like a Creole Kewpie - brown skin, bra.s.s-colored sausage curls, tummy out to here. She sat on a velvet couch of glory. The house was beautiful in the back, off the street. Debi shared the whole place with her lover, Nan - and Myrna. A sunlit Victorian with ferns hanging in the eaves, the smell of pies and chili in the kitchen - no sign of a drug man downstairs.

Debi, the tallest, was surrounded by other dancers. It was like being in the locker room of a girls' varsity team. Their bodies were incredible - all different shapes but so strong, so ... conceited. Tight clothes, high heels, muscles. Any of these women could pin me with one hand and do a French manicure with the other.

The question on my lips was, How can you be pregnant and strip? Just as obvious to me was that I couldn't ask anything so stupid without blowing my chances. Goldie was lamenting the day of her maternity leave, her disappointment at leaving the l.u.s.ty's daily schedule: "The money's soo good, you know, too good!"

I realized that I, too, might pay good money to see Goldie's naked body with her b.u.mp. Had I ever seen a pregnant woman naked, talking to me? I didn't think so. Most of the customers at l.u.s.ty Lady had probably not had that opportunity, either.

One of the other dancers - who'd come in with a waist-length red wig but had taken it off to get comfortable in her crew cut - had a whole rap worked out on the value of alternative s.e.x education at the l.u.s.ty. She was a college girl from the Art Inst.i.tute. "They oughta send the whole UCSF medical faculty down here to talk to Goldie," Vanessa said, pointing up the hill from Debi's house to the university campus. "She has schooled these men - they are better papas for it, better men for it. Poorer, but better!" She winked at me, her lashes covered in glitter.

Goldie blushed.

Debi motioned to me to start serving cake. She seemed so experienced at everything. "My son's having his tenth birthday this week, too," she said, licking frosting off her fingertip.

Ten? She had a ten-year-old? Where?

"He's with his father now; it's his turn!" she said. "I did the single-mom thing from the time Kenny was born, but when I met Nan, I had to turn it around. Everything we were reading, all signs said: 'California.' We had to come out here; we're lesbians. I'm going to bring Kenny out here for the summer, and he's going to love it."

She sounded so normal. I imagined Kenny's father was like some Minnesotan version of Alan Alda ... doing his share while Debi got her turn to follow a dream. But my thoughts wavered. I knew it was backward, but I thought women gave up their children only because they went mad, flew out the window, lay sick at death's door.

One of the girls turned up the stereo, Vanity 6's "Nasty Girls." Vanessa drew her arm across her body like Gypsy Rose Lee and stepped in front of Goldie's throne. She began to dance for our momma-to-be, her belly trembling, executing a perfect back bend. The other dancers screamed and ululated. A dance-off for Goldie! How was she ever going to choose who was the best?

I cheered - but cleared plates. I've never moved like that in my life.

"Frannie, I love you!" Goldie shouted over the music, blowing kisses in Debi's direction.

"Who's Frannie?" I asked.

"That's my stage name," Debi told me. "Frannie Fatale. This is so great you're here."

f.a.n.n.y's business plan was one-part subscription presales, one-part advertising, and a Hefty bag of dollars that she and Myrna were making on their backs and in their high heels, strutting stages with gold chains around their waists.

The dancers' physical prowess was one thing - but the shocking thing about any stripper gathering, I discovered, was that you have never heard women talk so fast and so explicitly about money in all your life. They make the guys on the trading floor on Wall Street look like a bunch of pansies.

Debi was older than most of the others: twenty-seven. She was all about The Plan. "You can only buy so many pants," she explained to me. "You'll make more money dancing than you could ever spend on shoes and earrings. Your body is only good in this business for a few years. You have to think like you're in the NFL. You gotta buy a house, buy investment property, buy stocks - or be like her" - she pointed at a platinum blond" - go to med school. Get straight A's."

"But if you f.u.c.k up and give it all to your lover" - her eyes shifted back and forth, like there were a few culprits in the room - "you might as well not have bothered!"

"What about her?" I asked, pointing toward a gorgeous girl, visibly tipsy, standing at the lasagna table. She'd had something more than pasta.

"That's bulls.h.i.t!" Debi's afro, like Medusa's, grew in size every time she tossed her head. "I'll tell you one thing: That girl might p.i.s.s it all away on c.o.ke, but everything she spent tonight getting loaded - she spent ten times that much on some loser who's sucking her dry."

"You mean a guy, her pimp?" I was such a tourist.

"No, her "boooyfriend," Debi said, drawing out the word like a sick lollypop. "Or her butchie. Her f.u.c.king parasite. Same difference."

Every woman in the room seemed to have a lover. Were they the ones she was talking about? The straight dancers were, come to find, members of that same Rajneesh commune I lived below on Valencia Street - they must be the ones paying the rent, not their orange-sashed boyfriends.

Some of the strippers were butches who worked in drag. They brought their femmes, other working girls. Who made more? I hadn't figured that out yet.

I remembered Debi's financial "seminar" many times as the years went by at On Our Backs On Our Backs. She was right; very few strippers took the fortune they made and protected their interests. The manager of the l.u.s.ty, Tamara - she sent her fiance to law school. He insisted she stop stripping - and she was so proud he cared. Then she caught him racking up charges to wh.o.r.es on her credit card. He cracked her hard across the face when she confronted him. She swallowed a bottle of pills that night, and we sat around her deathbed at the UCSF emergency room until her parents flew in from Idaho to turn the machines off.

I thought they were going to kill us with a look. But we were her family, too. The lawyer "fiance" was nowhere. Her mother and father thought s.e.x work killed her, we wh.o.r.es. But betrayal killed her, and I don't know when that started - it wasn't on a bra.s.s pole.

"That's the story," Debi said. "The girls who wanna work one man - they put all their eggs in that basket. Or they want the perfect butch prince to save them. They give them all their money, they buy them a house, then the jealous p.r.i.c.k insists they stop working. When our girl isn't dancing anymore, the prince loses interest. He busts her flat, and she's left with nothing."

I floated around Goldie's shower that day with such cheer. I remember everyone's names, stage and real.

Debi was right about the short time many of them had left. Mary Gottschalk would die of breast cancer when she was thirty. Ramona Mast ate a Fentanyl patch, and her "lover" tried to make money off her suicide. Laurie Parker, the most talented lover in all of San Francisco, hanged herself when her girlfriend left her. Nicole Symanksi had her kids taken away, lost her teeth, froze to death on the street. Cindy Ricci disappeared back to Yosemite with nothing but a duffel bag on her back. She was a friend of mine. And another, and another. To paraphrase Dylan, "she was friend of mine." Those girls each made a million dollars in five years of work, and it did not save them.

"I don't do that s.h.i.t," Debi said. "Don't want a work wife who's into that. I walk on the stage and I say, 'We're going to make a thousand dollars in the next forty minutes.' And you turn over laps like pennies, until you hit the mark. I want a million wallets in one night; I don't want one trick's charity."

Debi's partner, Nan, was true blue. She had a "real" job, although it wasn't glamorous in the least. She worked for the gas company, one of the few women at the time. Nan climbed up a fifty-foot telephone pole with only spurs & a b.u.t.t strap to get that job.

She had taught physical education at the University of Minnesota, and when I told her about the Long Beach Women's Studies Department, she had the best belly laugh. It was familiar. The other dancers looked at her - able-bodied, articulate, loyal - and sighed. Debi had someone for the long haul.

"We used to bomb adult book shops in Minneapolis, can you believe that?" Debi raised her cigarette like an imitation of a Molotov c.o.c.ktail. "'Violence against f.u.c.king women.' The university's whole Women's Studies Department was in on it." She smoothed out the ap.r.o.n around her waist. "That's how Nan and I fell in love, back in the old separatist days. I was organizing a Take Back the Night rally in Minneapolis -"

"No, that was before." Nan interrupted her with a wave of her champagne flute. "You were volunteering at the Harriet Tubman Shelter for Battered Women, and I was teaching street-fighting self-defense courses."

Debi winked and took a sip. "It was love at first sight."

"I can't believe I didn't already meet you at Spinster Hollow," I said, telling them about my insemination adventures.

"We all know where we're coming from," Debi said. "Now we're going to make something erotic for women, the kind of s.e.x we want," she said. Her green eyes twinkled at you like a wish coming true. "Our little magazine is going to blow them away."

Models Crying

Susie Bright: Do you think lesbians have a different relationship to what their genitals look like than heteros.e.xual women? Do you think lesbians have a different relationship to what their genitals look like than heteros.e.xual women? Photographer Tee Corinne: Photographer Tee Corinne: I think they have a different impetus to learn. I think they have a different impetus to learn.

Last summer, in 2010, I was at my friend Eddie's Open Art Studio in Santa Cruz, eavesdropping on a patron who complimented his photographs' sensitive approach.

"You don't abuse the models, dear, do you?" she asked him. Ed somehow kept a straight face.

I couldn't resist. "Oh, my ex had a different philosophy," I said, turning to her without introduction. "She was the staff photographer for On Our Backs On Our Backs. Honey Lee always claimed to be quoting Helmet Newton, but she'd say, 'The shoot's not over until the model cries.'"

Eddie shook his head at me - and put his arm around his fan. Yes, Ed, protect the audience - they don't wanna know what we go through for this.

I'm glad I can make a joke about it now - I was often that very model, crying. I gave Honey Lee Cottrell, Tee Corinne, and every other photographer at our magazine, what they needed, no matter what the cost. They taught me everything I know about pictures.

The On Our Backs On Our Backs pictorials were the most visible, controversial part of our magazine. But the scandals arising from their debut were never on the mark. The critics who despised us said our photo shoots were sadom.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic, which seemed to be code for other, unspoken faults. pictorials were the most visible, controversial part of our magazine. But the scandals arising from their debut were never on the mark. The critics who despised us said our photo shoots were sadom.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic, which seemed to be code for other, unspoken faults.

Our photo shoots were m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic, but not in the way they meant. I froze my a.s.s off getting a shot many, many times.

The doubters asked whether one could look at a model and be aroused without knowing her resume; "What if she was a racist?" What if she was a poor example of a human being?

These critics had never a.n.a.lyzed a single piece of art or advertising with this method before, but The Crucible atmosphere in the women's movement of the eighties was contagious. It was like an uppercla.s.sman marching into your dorm room, drawing herself up to full height, and saying, "You should be ashamed of yourselves."

Why did they make such a fuss? For real? My best answer today is that they were guilty, fearful, compet.i.tive, fascinated with power - but utterly thwarted in their own attempts to live large.

Our On Our Backs On Our Backs efforts had remarkable success. We distributed our zine all over the world. I still don't know how we persevered. We were pushed down so many times, most forcefully by men with money, but most cruelly by other women, our peers. efforts had remarkable success. We distributed our zine all over the world. I still don't know how we persevered. We were pushed down so many times, most forcefully by men with money, but most cruelly by other women, our peers.

Here was the real scandal of On Our Backs On Our Backs photography: We were women shooting other women - our names, faces, and bodies on the line - and we all brought our s.e.xual agenda to the lens. Each pictorial was a memoir. That is quite the opposite of a fashion shoot at Vogue or photography: We were women shooting other women - our names, faces, and bodies on the line - and we all brought our s.e.xual agenda to the lens. Each pictorial was a memoir. That is quite the opposite of a fashion shoot at Vogue or Playboy Playboy, where the talent is a prop.