Xan West's Blog, page 4

Interview with Malin James, author of Roadhouse Blues!

I am excited to share this interview with Malin James, author of  Roadhouse Blues, a collection of linked erotica stories set in the same town. This collection (and Malin’s erotica in general) is full of complex characterization, strong voice, and gorgeous writing. This book grabbed me by the throat. Roadhouse Blues is the kind of erotica that’s intent on making you feel a wide range of emotions, and illuminating the ways sex can be complicated and scary and vulnerable and messy and hot, sometimes all at the same time.

As a heads up, this interview discusses queer hatred, writing trauma survivor characters, the author’s trauma history and recovery, and writing consent into erotica. 

[image error]

We first met at your first public reading, where we were both reading our erotic short stories. Now you are publishing a collection! Tell me about how you developed this collection of linked stories. What was challenging? What’s been fun?

First of all, thank you for having me. I really appreciate being here. And yes! I remember that reading! I was so young in the genre, really just feeling my way around, and the story you read opened so many doors for me. Suddenly, I saw how powerful erotica could be. I think it’s fair to say that your work, as well as the work of one or two others, changed the way I approached the genre moving forward. I’ve been meaning to thank you for that for a long time now, so thank you.

As for how I developed this collection, I’d love to say that I planned the whole thing from start to finish, but that would be a lie. All I knew when I started was that the stories were going to be linked. I didn’t know how, and I wasn’t even sure why. I just knew that they had to be. From there, I just started following threads. In the first story, “Flash, Pop”, Debi is still getting over a messy divorce, so I followed that thread and it led me to Krystal and “Krystal’s Revenge Fuck”, the woman Debi’s ex left her for. Then Krystal led me to Vanessa in “The Waitress” and Vanessa led me to Luke in “Truck Stop”, who led me Sarah in “Love in the Time of War”, and that story led me all the way back into the past to “Natural Mother”, “Down and Dirty” and “The Things You Do” and so on. It was a really organic process, and one of the most challenging things, as well as one of the most fun, was trusting that process.

How would you describe yourself to a new reader just discovering your work?

Oh…I have no idea. I’m all over the place, really. I don’t tend to slot into a neat, describable category, so it would probably be most accurate to say that I’m a character writer. It took a while to get comfortable with it, but I’m what a good friend called a “marmite” writer – either you like me or you don’t. There isn’t much middle ground. Getting okay with that freed me up to write from a very honest place. In the end, my intention is just to put the stories out there, and hope they will find the right reader to resonate with.

Tell me about the queer characters in the book. Do you have a personal favorite?

One of the things I wanted to do was explore how fluid sexuality can be. Cassie, in “Love in the Time of War”, openly identifies as straight but, much to her own surprise, finds herself having profoundly moving and sex with her dead lover’s widow. Sarah, the widow in question, has no attachment to the gender of her partners. It’s about the person’s humanity and how they relate. As a bisexual woman who was lucky enough to grow up in San Francisco in the 90’s, Sarah, more than any other character in the book, reflects my relationship to sexual identity.

That said, sexuality, gender and identity run on a spectrum and it was important to honor that spectrum, especially in a socially conservative setting. In fact, one of the reasons I set the collection where I did is because I wanted to explore how queer people across various spectrums might navigate their sexual identities in a potentially hostile environment. That’s where Luke in “Truck Stop” came from. He’s gay but passes as straight because it’s safer that way. For him, sex is an indulgence, all the more so because it holds an edge of danger. The fear of being caught in the act of being gay is a real threat in large chunks of the country, and I didn’t want to ignore that.

Conversely, I didn’t want to lean on trauma and fear to define the queer characters in the book. That’s where Sam in “Good Love” came in. She’s a trans woman, and she is, hands down, one of my favorite characters in the book. Lana and Jake at Go Deeper were instrumental in helping me portray her in a way that was true to her experiences as a trans woman, but that didn’t flatten her into a stereotype. She is, quite possibly, the most psychologically healthy person in the book, and one of only two characters who get and stay out of Styx. She was a bright light in my mind as a I wrote, not because she’s trans or queer, but because she’s an amazing, strong, compassionate human being.

I know you decided to put content warnings on this collection, something that’s fairly unusual in erotica. What led to that decision?

First of all, I want to thank you – the content warning you wrote for your (freaking powerful) collection, Show Yourself To Me was the template I used for the one in Roadhouse Blues. I always assumed I’d include one in the collection, but yours really helped it take shape.

The question of whether or not to put content warnings on sex writing is a hard one. In the end, I think it’s an issue of context and responsibility. Triggers take so many different forms. Half of my own triggers are impossible to anticipate, so a content warning would do them no good. That said, some topics are more likely to trigger than others, and it’s part of my responsibility as the author to consider how potentially difficult subject matter might effect on the reader.

For example, I probably wouldn’t put a trigger warning on story about happy car sex because the probability of it triggering someone is relatively low (not impossible, but low). On the other hand, stories that contain rough sex, trauma recovery and certain kinds of BDSM or D/s play have a much higher probability of causing a reader unexpected and unwanted pain. Some of the stories in Roadhouse Blues fall squarely into the second category, and I felt that it would be irresponsible of me not to put a content warning on them, just in case.

It’s clear that one of the core things you wanted to do in this book was to center the sexual experiences of survivors of violence and abuse. Can you tell me about why that’s important to you?

Absolutely. More than anything, I think I needed to play out the survivor’s fantasy of life beyond the thing you survived.

I was able to process the psychological damage done by an abusive relationship in my twenties, but it took me much longer to start grappling with the trauma I experienced as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. The effects of violence are deeply individual. It’s undeniable that trauma causes damage, but the nature of the damage is the product of how a lot of different factors come together. Because I experienced trauma at such a young age, a great deal of my development was shaped by it, like a vine climbing a crooked trellis. As a result, recovering from that trauma has meant digging deep into my own development. The recovery process, while necessary and positive, can also be intense, isolating and overwhelming. The feelings that emerged as I began to heal became central to the collection.

As a result, it became very important that I portray survivors as being strong and complicated, not as perennial victims forever defined by their trauma. While there are, very often, literal and figurative scars, people who suffer from PTSD, depression and anxiety as a result of sexual or physical violence are more than the sum of those scars. While I needed to show the effects of violence, I wanted to do it as honestly as I could, without the generalizations that so often accompany portrayals of abuse. It would be a lie to say that recovery is easy, but it is possible. More to the point, you are still a full, complicated human being, not a personified reaction to violence.

My favorite story is the very last one, which centers an adult survivor of child sexual abuse and a trans woman who was her best friend when she was a child. It feels like it’s very much about honoring consent in complicated ways. Can you tell me more about consent in your writing, and how you navigate the complexities of it?

I’m so happy you enjoyed “Good Love”. It was the hardest to write, and the one I am most proud of. Portraying consent in all its complexity has always been important to me. I’ve been in situations where my consent was neither sought nor given, and it is no exaggeration to say that those experiences underpin my relationship to power, control and trust in all aspects of my life and work. It’s something I take very seriously and want to explore in different settings and situations.

For Leigh and Sam, the repeated act of asking for and giving consent is a critically important. For a person with a sexual history free from abuse, the care Sam shows wouldn’t be necessary, but because Leigh is an adult survivor of childhood sexual trauma, and because she is still deeply caught in the struggle surrounding that abuse, Sam’s repeated requests for her consent form a safety net around her. Leigh has no experience voicing her needs and desires. The fact that Sam not only wants to hear them, but makes her feel safe enough to voice them is a turning point in Leigh’s life, and it’s what the story hinges on. Consent is a powerful thing. It can literally make the difference in whether or not a person is able to risk moving on.

Of all the stories, the one I most wanted to imagine continuing was Good Love; is there a possibility that story or another in the collection might be the spark for a novel?

Absolutely, yes. In fact, I have three stories about Sam tucked away in a file. There’s something about her that pulls at me, and I have a very strong sense that I’ll work with her again, possibly in another collection, but more likely in a novel. Of all the characters in Roadhouse Blues, her story is the one that stretched far beyond the scope of the collection. I’d like to come back to her and see where she takes me.

You have multiple sex worker characters in this collection, and the stories center their erotic experience, which is rare. What led to these stories in particular?

There’s an awful cliché about sex workers having a flat, performative, transactional relationship to sex, as if the way they make their living cancels out the possibility of their having a sexual private life. I’ve never liked seeing sex workers in fiction portrayed as being defined or destroyed by their professions, so Maybelline (from “Marlboro Man”) and Krystal (from “Krystal’s Revenge Fuck”) gave me an opportunity to dig past that stereotype into the emotional reality of two women who just happen to be strippers, but who are not defined by what they do.

For me, the fact that they’re sex workers carries as much weight as another character being a waitress, or an actress, or a PhD candidate. Yes, it’s an identifying factor, but it isn’t everything – not even close. As I was writing, Maybelline and Krystal defined themselves through their emotional and sexual landscapes. What they do for a living was just a practical fact.

That said, it would be disingenuous of me to imply that I didn’t make a conscious effort to undermine and subvert sex worker stereotypes once I realized how reflexively they might be defined solely by their professions, but my intention was always to focus on the immediacy of their interior lives, rather than on how they pay their rent.

What’s next on the horizon for you?

A small break, I think. A lot went into this collection and I need to recharge my emotional battery. After that, I’m not sure. There are a couple of projects clamoring for attention, but I have a feeling something is going to come to me in that quiet time, and whatever that something is, is going to be next. I think my biggest priority at this point is to make sure I’m ready for it.

[image error]Blurb for Roadhouse Blues:

Welcome to Styx—a blue-collar, American town where people can do whatever they like, so long as they don’t advertise. From a 1950s diner to the back of a rocking Camaro, the stories in Roadhouse Blues reveal sex that is by turns romantic, raw, triumphant, and desperate. Meet two women grieving the same man, a bartender looking for anything but love, and a hot, brash newlywed who knows she married a cheat. The local garage is run by a kick-ass woman who gives as fierce as she gets, and the strip club is a place full of whiskey and smoke, where memories are exposed as easily as skin.

“In the end,” writes author Malin James, “sex is about people, and people have motivations, and sometimes those motivations surprise them.”

This is Roadhouse Blues. Surprise is just the beginning.

Available now from Go Deeper Press (with launch discount) and on Kindle. Full launch (including print) is Tuesday July 11.

Author:

Bio: Malin James is an essayist, blogger, and short story writer. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Bust, MUTHA, Queen Mob’s Tea House and Medium, as well as in podcasts and anthologies for Cleis Press, Sweetmeats Press and Stupid Fish Productions. Her first collection, Roadhouse Blues, releases this summer (July 11th!) with Go Deeper Press.

Find a longer biography at malinjames.com.

Tagged: erotica, PTSD, queer, queer characters, sex worker characters, trans characters, trauma, trigger warnings, writing characters who are trauma survivors, writing erotica

Meet Cutes: Chapter 1

I’ve been working on a lighthearted butch F/femme F/genderqueer butch polyamorous kinky romance novella, tentatively titled Meet Cutes. It centers disabled fat Jewish queers in NYC. I am sharing the first chapter with you.

In this chapter, you get to meet two of the three main characters:

Naomi, a chubby stone butch queer autistic Jewish cis woman with endometriosis who is a dominant
Rachel, a fat femme queer Jewish cis woman with a mobility disability who is a switch

You also get to briefly meet a secondary character, Zora, Rachels best friend and housemate, with whom she’s in a queerplatonic partnership (though they don’t use that language at this point in the story)

One of the core things I wanted to do in this book was to show that all of the three main characters have significant relationships before they meet each other, because although we are moving towards a polyamorous triad, it will be an open triad, and each of the main characters will continue to have other partners of various sorts, including queerplatonic partners. I am writing it this way because this is how I do polyamory myself. (This story is ownvoices in many ways, and that includes the kind of polyamory depicted in the novella.)

I also really wanted to show disability culture and communities, kink culture and communities, and fat activist culture and communities, Jewish culture and communities, queer culture and communities. These are folks who have webs of relationships they care about, and that includes community spaces that are important to them. The book begins at a disability community event that Rachel co-organized because I wanted to place these characters in a community context from  the beginning.

Without further ado, here is the beginning of Meet Cutes. As a heads up, there are brief references to trauma, misogyny, transmisogyny, and ableism.

Chapter 1

Naomi

Naomi had never seen the redhead before. She’d snuck in to the reading, grabbed a seat by the door, late again because of the damn subway, and caught most of the femme’s piece. But honestly, she barely took in the content because she was mesmerized by the redhead’s face as she read, by the way her lips moved and the wicked sparkle in her eyes, and by the sound of her voice. The femme’s voice was all steel and smoke and flattened Naomi like a freight train. She was holding her breath as she listened, glad she had a fidget in her hands because there was this thrumming inside her that just kept building and the energy had to go somewhere. And then the piece was over, and she watched the redhead walk to her seat. The lady had curves with a capital C, and was showing them off in classic fat femme style, from the sweetheart neckline to the wide blue belt, which of course matched the blue flowers on her cane perfectly. Her magen david sparkled at her throat, the blue accents picking up the light.

Naomi was lucky enough to have a good vantage point, where she could see the side of the redhead’s face as she whispered to the femme sitting next to her, winked, and glanced over her shoulder. Right at Naomi, who was definitely staring and had totally been caught at it. And this was the point where Naomi was supposed to do that classic butch thing of holding the femme’s gaze till she looked away and waiting till her gaze returned. She knew that. This was how butches and femmes flirted from across the room, it was traditional. Except of course Naomi basically never did eye contact, and the key to that move was the locked gaze, which just wasn’t going to happen. She could feel the femme’s gaze on her face, and she looked down at her hands, still moving on the fidget.

The room seemed so crowded, now, all these queers, all this pressure, and it made it hard to breathe, hard to be still. This was why Naomi hadn’t really gone to disability spaces much, because of the crowds, and the noise, and the pressure. And really, Naomi was always conscious about how you could look at her and have no clue she was disabled, and she wasn’t sure of her welcome, even if she mustered up the spoons to go, and was actually up for talking to people. The fidget wasn’t enough of a stim anymore and she started to rock, trying to focus on the next reader, a Latinx femme trans guy with sparkly nails and fuschia lipstick who was reading something about PTSD. His piece was a bit too raw for Naomi to listen to right then, so she slipped out of the bookstore for some air.

It was better out here. The fall air felt cool and crisp in her lungs, and she leaned on the building next to the bookstore, her cheek pressed against the cool smooth marble, her eyes on the ground by the door so she wouldn’t be surprised by people walking out. The marble felt good against her face, offering up its impenetrable smooth stoneness so Naomi could take it into herself, draw strength and calm from it. Stone had always helped, long before she had language to call herself by its name. It was exactly what she needed, and she closed her eyes so she could draw it close, ready herself to go back inside.

That’s how the femme surprised her, after all. Because her eyes were closed, and she had stopped watching the door. Suddenly that voice was there, the same one that had mesmerized her.

“Taking a break? It was a bit much for me, too.”

Naomi startled, losing a good portion of the calm she’d drawn from the stone, and opened her eyes to find the redheaded femme right in front of her. Her heart was pounding—she didn’t handle surprises particularly well—and she blurted out, “Whoa. You surprised me.” Smooth, Naomi. Real smooth.

“Sorry about that,” the femme said softly, her hands twisting around each other.

Naomi tried to get her breathing to slow down.

“No, no, it’s ok.”

The femme smiled at her, shyly. Wow, her smile was spectacular, made her glow.

Rachel

Rachel thought maybe it wasn’t actually ok. The butch didn’t seem like she was doing that well, really. Maybe she didn’t like surprises. Maybe she was triggered from the piece Rickie was reading. Maybe Rachel had misread the whole thing inside and the butch wasn’t actually interested in her. Damnit. Best to play it safe.

Small talk, she could manage small talk if she tried. She just needed to ground a bit first. Rachel took a slow breath, let it out even slower, and counted backwards from ten. Say something neutral, casual. Yeah. She could do that.

“It’s nice and cool out here,” she managed.

“Yes, there’s really nothing like New York in the fall. I know people love spring, but this weather just makes my skin happy.”

Made her skin happy. Oh. Rachel melted a little at that, then managed to get out a response.

“It’s such a relief after how hot the summer was. And I like that I get to wear tights and leggings with my dresses again.”

The butch cleared her throat, eyes on Rachel’s legs.

“Yes, those are spectacular,” she said, gesturing towards her Dali melting clock leggings.

Rachel grinned. Maybe the butch had been flirting after all.

“Thank you. I did want to wear something artistic for this event. These seemed appropriate.”

“Oh yes,” the butch said, her voice a bit throatier. “These definitely work.”

Applause broke out inside, and Rachel realized she had to go back. She was emceeing after all. Damnit.

“So I’ve gotta get back in there. An emcee’s job is never done. Did you get a copy of the zine?”

“No, not yet.”

“Here. You can have mine.” She pushed it in the butches hands, and walked back into the store to introduce the next reader, who had already made her way up to the front. She sure had fumbled that one. And the butch was so handsome, too. Those horn rimmed glasses! She looked a little like a shorter chubby Mandy Patinkin. Not from Princess Bride, but from Yentl. Without the beard.

Damn. She didn’t even know the butches name.

Rachel rested her head on Zora’s shoulder and listened to Mercedes read a piece about nobody getting that she was femme because all they saw was the wheelchair. Rachel was glad Zora was there. Not just to lean on, though that was good right now. But because she needed at least one of her closest people in the audience for this. It was a big deal, launching this zine, making this space for disabled femmes. She glanced behind her to see if the butch had come back in, but couldn’t see her. Nope.

There weren’t that many butches at the event. Because of course, femme events didn’t draw butches the way butch events drew femmes. No surprise there. Just your regular everyday queer community misogyny. Instead, the room was packed with her readers, able bodied femmes, and a bunch of the disabled folks Rachel saw at every feminist and queer disability event in NYC. Oh, she was on again. She flirted with the audience, made jokes, and told a story about her and Beth flirting with the same femme top at a play party, before Beth performed her poem about transmisogyny in queer kink spaces and how it’s all about femme hatred.

She sat down to listen, her knee protesting all this getting up and sitting down, thank you. Zora offered a hand, and she took it, counting breaths in the hopes that the pain would fade a bit. Luckily it was the break soon, and then Blaze was emceeing the second half. She had wanted to try to stay for the whole thing, but this wave of exhaustion was hitting, and Rachel realized that she’d spent down her spoons too much. She was going to have to leave at the break.

There was the applause. She stood to announce the break, and caught Blaze’s eye. Ze came over right away, and she didn’t even have to say anything. Ze cupped her cheek and said, “Out of spoons? Is it time for you to go home?”

When she nodded, Blaze told her not to worry, ze had it all under control, to just take care and get home safe. And then she was heading out the door on Zora’s arm. She looked around for the butch, but didn’t see her anywhere. Damn.

Before she could say anything, Zora had hailed a cab, and they were on their way home.

“So, who was that butch you had your eye on, hmmm?” Zora teased.

“I don’t even know her name or anything. We barely spoke. I’m not even sure she was actually flirting with me.”

“Mixed signals, eh?”

“I can’t tell. Maybe.” Rachel shrugged, and leaned against Zora in the taxi. “I’ll probably never see her again.” She couldn’t wait to get home and curl up with Zora on the couch. And an ice pack. And maybe a nice cup of tea.

She leaned into Zora, and said, “Thanks for getting the cab without me needing to ask. I really appreciate you being here and supporting me tonight.”

Zora said, “Of course, it’s what we do. We take care with each other, and show up for each other. I wouldn’t miss your big night unless I had no other choice. You know that, right?”

Rachel nodded. She did know that. “I love our us.”

“Me too, babe, even if we don’t have a name for it, and it confuses other people,” she teased.

“We do have a name. It’s our us.”

“True enough. You got me there. Our us is one of the best things ever.”

Tagged: autistic characters, butch, butch characters, butch femme dynamic, cane user, disability, disability culture, disabled characters, femme, Jewish characters, kink, Meet Cutes, polyamory, queer, queerplatonic partnership

Anonymous review of Noteworthy

A non-binary and queer reader asked if I would be willing to post their anonymous review of Noteworthy, by Riley Redgate, as they did not feel comfortable posting it openly. I care deeply about creating space for trans and/or non-binary readers to share their thoughts about trans and/or non-binary literature.  I am including the anonymous review below. (Please note that this is not my own review of Noteworthy; I have not yet read this book.)

*****

 Noteworthy is, unfortunately, a mixed bag for me. I enjoyed Riley’s debut novel Seven Ways We Lie, despite finding some issues with the asexual and aromantic representation within. It was one of the first books that allowed me to see a character feel exactly how I felt in high school, with dating and kissing and these pressures around both finding love. So I was extremely excited for Noteworthy (even though I have a strong aversion to a cappella performances, don’t really know why…)

But I’m sad to say that while it did extremely well in some regard, it failed in other areas.

Let’s start with the positives. The depictions of sexuality and how it’s fluid were done very well I think. Now I can’t speak specifically to the bisexuality aspect of Jordan’s journey, because that isn’t really my lane, but the way Redgate discussed Jordan discovering and coming to terms with her own sexuality, talking about past experiences and eventually coming to the conclusion that she is in fact bisexual? I thought that was done extremely well, and it’s really something that YA needs more of. You never know who needs stories like these. Also: Thank you Riley for actually using the term ‘bisexual!’

I enjoyed the cast very much as well. Jordan/Julian is very well developed, and an interesting POV to follow (I haven’t read many books from the theater kids POV). And each of the boys from The Sharpshooters is definitely their own character that brings something different to the cast, though I do feel like a few of them fell to the wayside in order to give others more time. Which is just par for the course really, because characters like Isaac and Travis definitely have more going on than John or the Freshman.

We also see Jordan struggling with family finances and money, having to always consider their options, how/when they can get somewhere, if they’ll even be able to. Redgate doesn’t really shy away from the details here, and again, it’s something we need to see more in YA novels.

Unfortunately, Noteworthy also gets a lot wrong with its representation, at least for me. And according to the other reviews, threads, and opinions I’ve seen from enby, trans, genderfluid, and genderqueer readers, I’m not the only one.

Jordan disguises herself as a boy named Julian in order to join, and compete with the boys a capella team. On the surface, this may not seem problematic, but as the book explores this more and more, I just kept seeing issues.

The problems didn’t really strike me as overt until Jordan is looking at safe ways to bind her chest, and discovers that she is, in fact, on a blog dedicated to finding safe ways to pass as a trans male. Here Jordan goes into a few paragraphs, describing how guilty she feels, and talking about two students on campus. One of whom is genderqueer, and the other who is a trans woman.

But, that’s about it.

There are a few sentences here and there. Times where Jordan finds the line between her being a boy and being a girl have blurred a little. But other than that, we really don’t get much to explore here. The genderqueer and trans characters are given one mention, and then never brought up again, as if they’re the new ‘gay best friend who appears in the first chapter and then vanishes from the story’ trope. Redgate focused on the cis-gaze of being trans and ‘passing,’ for large portions of the book, but also very heavily during this scene, and that really hurt.

Things are also discussed in a clearly gendered way. There are a few instances of equating a period as something only women deal with, and that it’s a symbol of womanhood. You also have a pseudo-potential love interest for Jordan in one of the boy’s sisters, but the second she finds out Jordan isn’t a boy, all interest is gone. Which is a very heteronormative and borderline transphobic way of presenting this ‘twist.’ I know this gets complicated, and the character in question can’t help who she’s attracted to, but I personally don’t believe this was Redgate’s place to unpack this kind of narrative.

At least Redgate does avoid this character having some big transphobic rant about how Jordan ‘betrayed’ or ‘deceived’ her or something.

The cover and chapter headers also include the typical ‘male’ and ‘female’ gender symbols. You know, the Mars and Venus ones? Not Redgate’s fault, but really book designers? I rolled my eyes so many times.

There is also blatant homophobia, but one big moment that stuck out to me happens about halfway through the book, Jordan (as Julian) is intoxicated, and Issac is taking her to her dorm, but then Jordan asks to stay in Isaac’s room instead. And there’s a split second where Isaac thinks Jordan (as Julian) is going to kiss him I guess? Cue the next day where Isaac (again, thinking Julian is a cis boy) outs Julian to their whole group. Without consent. He just assumes this thing about Julian, and proceeds to spill the beans to their whole a capella group.

That scene then leads directly into a moment where one of the boys (I’ll reiterate because this can get a touch confusing,) thinking Jordan is also a gay boy, proceeds to come out to Jordan. Honestly, I could sit here and unpack some of this mess for hours. But I’m just sitting here, racking my brain, wondering how Redgate thought any of this was appropriate. At least the other boy is rightfully pissed off when it comes out that Julian is really a cis, bisexual girl, but still, there’s no reaction to Jordan being ‘outed’ and that mess really pisses me off, in any form of media.

Then we have the typical ‘boy is closeted and a total bully’ trope that I’m honestly so tired off. Thankfully he’s minor, and Redgate does do her best to flesh him out in the handful of scenes he appears in, but really, it wasn’t needed. Or at least could’ve been done with more tact.

Honestly, I don’t know if this book could’ve been improved upon had Redgate explored gender as much as she explored sexuality. I’m very apprehensive when it comes to books about trans/enby/genderqueer and fluid characters written from the cis gaze. Ironically, that’s sort of what Noteworthy ended up being. I’m not sure if it could’ve been fixed with sensitivity readers, maybe they could’ve reigned in on some of the micro-aggressions and more problematic aspects, but I really think the premise is one of the roots of the issue. Stories like this weren’t thought much of in the early 2000’s (i.e. She’s the Man) but nowadays, we’ve grown, and we can see the larger issues in things and discuss them. And really, I don’t think cross-dressing stories have a place in 2017.

It’s been told to me (not naming names, but the person who told me this has spoken to Redgate) that Redgate isn’t overly fond of the book jacket alluding to the idea that Jordan ‘identifies’ as or may be non-binary (though I never once thought this was an enby POV book, but maybe that’s my fault for not paying attention to the description?) Which is fair, because authors typically won’t write their official book jacket descriptions, and that can lead to issues (see Ramona Blue’s original description coming off as biphobic and homophobic.)

I’ve also been told that Redgate didn’t want to write just one or two trans/enby characters just to have them be there in the background for the explanation and reactions to Jordan cross-dressing, which in all honesty seems just as hurtful as Jordan has that scene (when she finds the blog about passing and binding) where she talks about the genderqueer and trans students at her school, and then never brings them up again. I don’t really know if having a trans or enby member in the a capella group would’ve solved anything because, like I mentioned before, I’m wary when it comes to cis authors unpacking these topics, and that’s not something you could’ve avoided writing trans and enby secondary characters into a narrative like this.

At the end of the day, I didn’t hate this book. There were things to love about it, but most of the time, it made me extremely uncomfortable, to the point where I didn’t want to finish it. But since so many people are recommending this pretty hard, and I’ve seen only a handful of people speak against the problematic aspects, I figured I needed to review it. Especially when a few of my trans and enby friends told me they’d been looking forward to it, but were now going to avoid it.

With it being such a mixed bag of good vs. bad representation, I have to say that I’d be careful with who I suggest this book too. If you’re trans/non-binary/genderqueer or fluid, I’d highly suggest passing on it. If you’re gay, or are uncomfortable with subjects like being outed without consent, I’d also suggest skipping. Or, if you are going to try and read it, be wary.

Note: for more trans and/or non-binary reviews of trans and/or non-binary literature, please see my (continually updated) list of links to them. Here are a couple other reviews of Noteworthy written by trans and/or non-binary reviewers:

Review by Shenwei, a non-binary/genderqueer/genderfluid reviewer
Review by C. T. Callahan, a non-binary author

Tagged: anonymous reviews, non-binary literature, non-binary reviewers, Noteworthy, queer, trans, young adult literature

An Interview With Nicole Field about Bad Beginnings

I adored Bad Beginnings, the new M/M romance release by Nicole Field. I was lucky enough to get a chance to ask a few questions of the author!

Q: One of the core elements of this story is a longtime crush. What’s fun about writing that kind of romance? Where are the challenges?

A: One of the pieces of feedback I got through one of my rounds of edits was that I needed to offer more depth to the friendship. These are people who have known each other over half their lives, including at ages where the age gap of four years was actually a big deal. I guess it was a challenge to get that kind of history on the page, to invent it, but honestly once I got going with it, it was loads of fun to create the in jokes and camaraderie between characters.

Q:  I fell really hard for Kit, especially, with his determination to get things right, and his anxiety and how caring he is, not to mention his strawberry blonde hair and adorable pajamas. Tell me about Kit and his arc in the book. What do you think he sees in Dante?

A: It’s really important to me to show how characters like Kit live their lives with anxiety. That’s part of Kit’s arc. His anxiety doesn’t define him. He’s able to do his job and have his relationships with anxiety, even though he doubts that at various points in this book. I think when he starts to fall for Dante, he focuses too much on getting things wrong and losing him, without realizing that Dante has known him since they were both teenagers. Dante already knows and accepts him for who he is, warts and all. After that, it’s just a matter of getting Kit to accept himself, and trust in Dante. Once he stops seeing him as the kid brother of his best friend, he sees someone who is caring but also strong and passionate and willing to fight for what he wants, and for others.

Q: Dante begins a new project in this story, one that is very dear to him. What made you decide to write this into the story? What does it tell us about Dante that he cares so much about doing this?

A: Dante’s brother Con is trans, but obviously Bad Beginnings isn’t a ‘trans story’. Still, I didn’t want to have Dante be completely unaffected by seeing his brother come out as trans. It wouldn’t seem like a real or honest portrayal. But, of course, being four years younger than Con, Dante was powerless to have much part in helping his brother when their parents didn’t accept him. This is what we see playing out again when Dante comes across the character of Tony: a young, trans teen who steals from his shop. Suddenly, Dante is an adult. He is fully able to step in and help where he feels like he failed before.

Q: Actually, one of my favorite things about this book is Con, and how he feels fully developed and whole, which is unusual for secondary trans characters, in my reading experience.

A: Con is a character who has been in my head since 2008, before Kit and before even Dante came fully formed. For me, it seems impossible not to write him fully formed on the page. The difficulty was keeping him from being a show stealer. In all honesty, I would hope that all of my secondary characters would feel developed and whole, trans or not. In that way, Con is no different to any of my other characters.

Q: There are characters in Bad Beginnings that appear in an earlier book of yours. What made you decide to link the books and write about two queer brothers?

A: I knew that I had a couple of stories I wanted to tell, one for Con and one for Kit. Kit was always gay, and never felt like he fit in. He’s not as confident or suave as his business partner and best friend Con. For that reason, he’s always felt like he exists in Con’s shadow. The idea of Kit’s love interest being Con’s brother Dante came to me later on, once I asked myself how other people in Con’s life reacted to Con’s first coming out as trans in a book yet to be released. (I write non sequentially, it’s a terrible habit.) When I realised how Dante reacted, it just sort of came to me that he’s always had a crush on Kit, even before understanding that he himself was bisexual. I’ve little interest at the moment in writing a character who is conflicted about their sexuality, so it suited me well to have those understandings for both characters be in their backstories.

Q: One of the things I love most about this book is the portrayal of chosen family. Tell me about family in Bad Beginnings, all different kinds, including chosen family.

A: In real life, I have an incredibly strong network of chosen family. I think that’s something that comes across in many of my books. That small group of people who bond together. It’s not always because the biological family isn’t accepting or loving, but in this case that’s a lot of what started it. In Dante and Con’s case, of course, they are biologically related. But the point is that they have chosen to stay together. It’s their actions that have caused them to be brothers, rather than blood. One of my favourite scenes in Bad Beginnings is when Con articulates to Kit just how much a part of his chosen family Kit is. It isn’t reliant upon whether or not Kit dates Dante at all. I knew that, and I’m sure the reader will know that, but it was important for me to have Kit have that aha! moment within the story too.

Q: What is next for you, and for the Bad Beginnings crew?

Well, I mentioned before that I don’t write sequentially. Ironically, the book in which Con comes to realize his gender identity was both the first story with these characters to come to me in 2008, and also the hardest for me to write. However, Con’s story has been written in an upcoming novel called Growing Pains. It’s set around 10 years earlier than Bad Beginnings, but all our favourite characters, Dante, Kit and Con will be there. Hopefully it will be out in print and ebook towards the end of this year, or early next.

More about Bad Beginnings:

[image error]After the recent ending of a relationship, Kit feels lost and uncertain about where he stands without being in a relationship. Dante, on the other hand, has been waiting for this moment for years, and now that Kit is finally single he has no intention of wasting this chance.

But even the most sincere feelings and best intentions aren’t enough to guarantee happiness, and it’s a long road from a bad start to a happy end.

I was able to convince Nicole to read a snippet from Bad Beginnings for you, and am delighted that it’s one that includes Kit in his pajamas. So. if you want a taste of this wonderful queer romance, here’s your chance to hear it, in the author’s own voice!

[image error]

Bio: Nicole Field writes across the spectrum of sexuality and gender identity. She lives in Melbourne with one of her partners, two cats, a whole lot of books and a bottomless cup of tea.

Co-creator of Queer Writers Chat and reviewer for Just Love: Queer Book Reviews. Also likes tea, crochet and Gilmore Girls.

Tagged: anxiety, audio, Bad Beginnings, characters with psych disabilities, chosen family, disabled characters, excerpt, interview, Nicole Field, queer, queer characters, trans characters

On Jonah’s Book, and Centering My Disabled Perspective

This post was written for Blogging Against Disablism Day 2017. [image error]

In 2013 I began working on what I think of as Jonah’s Book. (It doesn’t have a proper title yet.) I had read Alison Tyler’s Dark Secret Love, and its sequel The Delicious Torment, and begun to contemplate a project playing with a similar mix of memoir and fiction, also centering a kinky character based on myself. She says in the introduction of The Delicious Torment:

“There’s truth here. And fiction. Reality and fantasy. The lines blur at the edges. The seams fray. The satin strands begin to unravel. But not the bindings. Those leather bindings remain hard and fast, until they are met with the right key. This is a novel with me at the center. That is, my heroine is based on me. I’ve sketched her with broad strokes, but at our core we are the same.”

There was something deeply compelling about unabashedly intertwining memoir and fiction. So I envisioned Jonah, a genderqueer character who is based on me, who is also autistic, who also has endometriosis and diabetes, is also a trauma survivor, also Jewish, fat, kinky and queer, and who just moved from NYC to the Bay Area (something I had recently done). It’s about that move, and the very hard time he has afterward. And it’s about trauma, desire, music, gender, disability and ghosts.

Jonah’s Book is non-linear. This choice is about attempting to make the novel match how my autistic brain works, how it threads things together. It’s about matching the way my trauma works, the way time slips and slides and trauma intrudes. It’s about putting the hard parts of the story into a structure that helps hold it. In Jonah’s case, as he loves musicals a lot—they are a special interest and one of the main ways he copes, as they are for me—the novel is organized using them. Each chapter is threaded together by a theme that’s represented and amplified by a lyric from a show tune. There is one show tune for each letter of the alphabet, and the novel is organized in alphabetical order. This structure makes my autistic self flap my hands with joy just thinking about it.

I worked on this novel for a good portion of 2014, and then put it down for a while, as I was struggling more with my PTSD and needed a break. I started working on a romance novel instead. Then I got hit by a car. Everything changed. I stopped writing.

When I went to a disabled queer writing workshop in spring 2015, I got there on paratransit, using my crutches. I was just barely able to get there at all, and access was really hard to navigate. But it felt so vitally necessary to try. I needed to figure out how to write again and I didn’t think I could do that outside of disability space. I hadn’t been able to write anything new since the hit and run, and I didn’t know how to be myself without writing.

I was able to make it to two sessions of that workshop before the access issues became too much and I needed to stop. And I will never forget that workshop experience. It was intimate, and full of intent. The other disabled queer writers were also doing things that melded memoir and fiction. The space held my work like my work had never been held before: all of it, all of me. The first day, the prompt was to write about the last time you/your character moved your body in a way that felt joyous. And I wrote something new for Jonah’s book, something deeply personal and healing.

I want to share the piece of Jonah’s book that I wrote that day, the day I decided that since I’d been hit by a car, Jonah had too; he could hold some of that experience for me. The day I picked up a pen again, after months of not writing, and words flowed.

(As a heads up, this excerpt describes the impact of trauma, a character grappling with acquiring new disability and bodily disconnection. It describes sadism and rough body play. It describes a specific moment in recovery from knee surgery in substantial detail, and references medical trauma and misgendering in a hospital setting. It briefly references the Holocaust.)

I can’t remember feeling joy in my body. I am taken over by the trauma of getting hit by a car, and the surgery, and the recovery, and the daily pain of that, the ache and the strain the not-mineness of my body and especially my left leg. There is a fault line now, and the earth still is split there. I can’t really see across it. I don’t know what joy in my body was like, can’t touch it in a visceral way. I don’t have body memories like that right now. I barely have a body at all.

I know I used to feel joy, can hold that in my mind, even though my body doesn’t know it anymore, at least right now.

Trauma splits memory off into chunks you can handle, buries what can’t be handled. So much can’t be handled, really. Sometimes I think I know better than trauma, think “oh I can handle this.” Get angry that it’s buried. Get angry that it’s broken and partial. I want it all, so much sometimes. I want to be someone who knows their past. I want to be someone who remembers.

I was raised to think that remembering is important. Because I’m a Jew. Because I was raised by activists and writers and historians.

I was raised to forget and disconnect, too. Not from history, so much, but from myself, from my own memories. Those kind of memories were dangerous. Not just to me. Not even mostly to me.

Isn’t that why I was taught to remember, because holding onto history is dangerous in exactly the ways we need?

To reach across the chasm and try to touch the joy in my body feels impossible to do from inside my body now. Feels impossible to do without trying to reinvoke my old body, my body before.

Is remembering a betrayal? Is forgetting a betrayal?

The person who felt that was me, was Jonah. But the person who was in his joy and his body at the same time feels like an alternate universe Jonah. A Jonah who could walk the way he’d always walked since the last big injury, the last fault line. Sometimes slower, sometimes hurting. But the same gait, basically. If I’d taken a different turn that day, walked a different way, I’d still be that Jonah. Now he doesn’t feel like someone I really know. An acquaintance at best. That Jonah is walking that same thumping heavy-booted stroll, his hands moving, his body flowing, more connected than he knew he was.

But however distant he is across that chasm, not even really looking at me, unaware I’m even thinking of reaching for him, he is still me…supposedly. I used to be him, after all.

I used to be the one who moved around a lot. I used to be the one who fetched things for other people that had a hard time moving around. The one that made it a bit easier for my boyfriend. The one that walked to Walgreens. The one for whom the corner store wasn’t really so far at all. The one who could stand and wait for the bus for twenty minutes. It makes me angry how much that Jonah took mobility for granted. His joy, his arrogance, in moving so easily makes me so fucking enraged. I want him to stay across the chasm far away from me.

I can see him now, in his joy, deep in his sadism, kicking and punching and body slamming and just feeling so much himself, so grounded and happy doing it. I can see it so fucking clearly and it’s like there’s a glass wall ten feet thick separating us, not just a chasm but another barrier too. A wall with no doors.

He used to grin so intensely when he was beating someone up. He’d be shining gladness everyfuckingwhere. It was like coming home, being in love with his own body and what it could do, how it could move. The delicious ways it could cause the kind of pain that rooted him, that connected deep. That dance of thud that was so necessary, so juicy in its hotness, so whole.

The closest thing to joy in my body that feels like it happened to me, and not to him, is this:

Two days after surgery, I’m getting ready to go home. I can finally get out of this fucking awful hospital gown. It feels like a travesty to just put on clothes. I want to clean this all off. All of the helplessness and the people touching me that can’t get my pronoun right. All of the dehumanizing minute by minute shit of the hospital, the lack of access to food, the bed pans, the condescension. I don’t want to get dressed and go home covered in the grime of all that.

The nurse is back, that same one from right before surgery. First time I’d seen him, and he works to get my pronoun right. The only nurse who has done that my entire stay in the hospital. He’s had this surgery, told me about it before mine, about the last jump he ever did from a plane. And it feels possible to ask him for the help I need.

He sets the commode in front of the sink, and leaves me alone to wash, with half a dozen clean towels and four washcloths. Alone alone alone. I am so focused on doing this that it takes me a while to feel myself getting clean. To feel attached to my skin. But I do. For the first time, I am claiming my body for mine again, and the sweetness of the water on my skin has no match. I finally look in the mirror, and try to recognize myself. Who is that guy?

Putting on my own clothes is one of the most amazing things I’ve done in so long. Like maybe I could have a little armor again. Like maybe I was mine again, just a bit. My skin alive underneath, zinging against the cloth, happy.

 

Tagged: access, BADD, disability, disabled characters, embodiment, genderqueer characters, hit and run, Jewish characters, Jonahs Book, kink, memory, rough body play, trauma, writing

Support me by buying Show Yourself To Me

So, as you likely know, I am facing homelessness, and have launched a crowdfunding campaign.

You can also help me another way. My amazing publisher, Go Deeper Press, has generously promised to give me 100% of royalties of ebook sales for my queer kink erotica collection Show Yourself To Me!

Buy the ebook here, and I get 100% royalties! This goes from now until May 19 or until my YouCaring campaign goal has been reached, so if you have been considering buying the book, now is a wonderful time to do it.

I am so incredibly moved by the good folks at Go Deeper Press for deciding to do this. The erotica community is amazing, and Jacob and Lana are two of my favorite people in it.

I have included some advance praise for the collection below. Check out what reviewers had to say here.

 

“Xan West’s work is fierce and absolutely fearless.” –Simon Sheppard

“Xan West’s Show Yourself To Me proves that the most important sex organ is the brain. Smart, hot, intense stories that are some of the finest erotic fiction around. Xan West’s erotic short stories are so visceral and reach into you so deep they imprint like a new lover. They’ll give you flashbacks to kinks you didn’t know you had.” –Cecilia Tan, writer and editor

“At last! An entire collection of radically queer, deeply transformative erotica by Xan West! No one chronicles queer kinkiness with more passion, skill, courage and talent.”  –Barbara Carrellas, author of Urban Tantra and Ecstasy is Necessary

“In Show Yourself To Me, you will read erotica about characters that are queer, trans, POC, fat, some with chronic pain and/or various dis/abilities (and more). Where has that happened before? Reading erotica that reflects so much of who I am and who my partner(s) are is pretty mind blowing and not something I’ve ever seen published.”  –Wyatt Riot, sex educator

“I love this collection. It’s wonderfully intense in the best possible way. I adored the content warnings in the front. What a great idea!” –Alisha Rai, author of Serving Pleasure, Bedroom Games and A Gentleman in the Street

“Xan West’s work sends shock waves through the imagination that will send any reader over the edge into total sexual oblivion. A writer to watch, love and to be enticed by.” –Shane Allison, editor of Backdraft: Fireman Erotica, In Plain View: Gay Public Sex, and Black Fire: Gay African American Erotica

“Stunning stories of power, transformation, and real queers from one of the most talented erotica writers, period.”  –Sinclair Sexsmith, Sugarbutch.net

“Xan West’s gorgeous stories breathe new life into the literary milieu of classic bdsm erotica. They are at turns frightening and earnest, but always true to form and completely hot. Show Yourself to Me is a veritable sexy switch of a collection, and is sure to become well-loved and worn-out by queer leather lovers of every size, gender, and genre.” – Lyric Seal

For more about Show Yourself To Me:

An interview I did with Lana about the collection.
A lovely piece that Jacob wrote about it.

Tagged: community, erotica, erotica community, Go Deeper Press, kink, Show Yourself To Me

asking for help

Beloved Community,

I have been very ill over the last two years, and I am currently facing a high risk of homelessness. I need your support right now.

A couple of close friends helped me put together a crowdfunding campaign to raise funds to help me survive, until I begin receiving SSDI. Please consider supporting me by giving what you can, and/or sharing the campaign (there is a widget on the site that makes it easy!). Every little bit means so much.

Here is the link: https://www.youcaring.com/coreyalexander-803881

Thanks for any help you can offer.

Corey Alexander

Tagged: asking for help, community, crowdfunding, disability, DisabilityCrowdfund, hit and run, mental illness, support, survival, TransCrowdFund

On Internalizing the Cis Gaze When Thinking About Sex and Relationships

As a heads up, this essay tells several detailed stories about transmasculine people internalizing the cis gaze and passing those messages on to other transmasculine people, particularly with regards to sex, dating, romance, and relationships, and the representation of trans and/or non-binary people in romance and erotica. It includes descriptions of cissexism and internalized trans oppression. It references amatonormativity and sexnormativity. It references, but does not describe, sex, dating, desire, love, romance, and kink.

Note: If you want to learn what I mean by the cis gaze, I list resources at the end of this post.

A familiar narrative

Several weeks ago, I picked up a collection of personal essays about faggotry and community in a bookstore, and sat down to read one of the essays written by a trans guy. It was a rather long detailed description of crushing on a queer cis guy, flirting with him several times, coming out to him as trans, and being rejected for being trans. As the cis man put it: “I’m gay, and penis is important for that.” The essay felt full of despair, and a sort of inevitability. This sense that this is the way things are. This sense that trans guys are lucky to find a (presumably cis) partner at all.

This is a very familiar narrative, this assumption that most people wouldn’t want to be with us, one that has been passed on to me for years. Yes, I learned it from dominant culture, of course. And from queer culture as well. But what got inside the most are the ways I learned it from other transmasculine people, in the spaces I have been connected to as a transmasculine genderqueer person and trans stone butch, spaces dominated by trans men and transmasculine folks. The ways we taught each other this way of thinking about ourselves, seeing ourselves through the cis gaze.

In the late 90s, I met this couple at a queer bar in San Francisco, a high femme cis woman and a trans guy. He had recently moved to the city from a Midwestern town, to be with her. They’d met online. When he was telling the story about how he ended up moving to California, he said that he knew he couldn’t meet anyone where he was, after all, he was a “special commodity” because he was trans, and he knew most people wouldn’t want to be with him. He said it like it was a universal undeniable truth: that being trans meant that there were very few options for partners.

The saddest thing about that moment was that it seemed to be something they both believed to be fact. That she was rare and a miracle because she wanted him, and that he was a different kind of rare because few would want him. I remember thinking, is this what my future holds, as a trans person?

About a decade later, I was at a trans conference, and attended a workshop for trans men who were interested in cis men. It was supposed to be a panel of cis men talking about their experiences dating trans men, where the trans men in the audience could ask them questions. Except, it turned out that no one who was supposed to be a panelist had shown up. The room was packed; there were easily 40+ queer trans guys in rather tiny space, sitting on the floors and the cabinets, with every chair possible crammed into the room.

The facilitator, a queer trans guy, announced that he wanted to keep the conversation focused on how trans guys could date and have sex with cis men, and not have it include any conversation about dating or having sex with each other. I remember being deeply struck by the strangeness of this decision, as clearly many of the trans folks in the room were there to cruise, but we were directly told not to talk about any interest we might have in each other. The reason soon became clear: the facilitator and several of the most vocal trans men in the room were extremely focused on how to make themselves attractive to cis men, how to disclose to cis men, how to cruise and have casual sex with cis men. They dominated the conversation, which culminated in the facilitator exclaiming fervently that his biggest hope was that trans men would leave the workshop knowing that they could be desirable to cis men.

Desirable. This was the best that he could imagine for all of us. That we would believe we could be desirable to cis men. It was like a blow to my gut, hearing those words. I just kept thinking, can’t we dream bigger than this? Where is our own desire in this? Do we even get to have desire? Is the best we can imagine that we are desired by cis people, that cis people see us as viable sexual objects? What about being sexual subjects? Does the desire of trans people even matter in this room? Do we even think it counts?

I have written before about my experiences of being framed as a failed sexual object because of my fatness, and how important and radical it can be to instead center the sexual subjectivity of fat people both in how we see ourselves and in how we write fat characters in erotica. This is a similar kind of shift in thinking about ourselves as trans people, and I believe it is deeply needed.

Last year, I was excited to learn about a recently published young adult romance written by a trans man, a book about a queer teenage trans boy character dating a teenage cis boy. Then I read the blurb. The blurb begins by stating that this character thought no one would ever want to date him, declaring, “Everyone knows nobody wants a transgender boyfriend.” My stomach dropped, because there it was, yet again. This supposedly universal truth about our undesirability. Everyone knows that nobody wants us. Everyone. A stated fact, the premise that we are all starting from.

We are stuck in this framework, have been stuck in it for a very long time.

The framework of the cis gaze

This is the story about being transmasculine that I’ve been told for the last twenty years of being trans, over and over and over, a story that centers my potential desirability, and leaves out my desire. A story that values what cis people think about me over anything else. A story about how being trans means I am “doomed” to being alone. This story is usually steeped in amatonormativity and sexnormativity. It’s generally told in a way that conceives of sex and/or romantic relationships as necessary to humanity, and frames this supposed “truth” about me as a way to mark that I’m not really human.

Transmasculine people have been telling me this as unquestioned gospel since I first started seeking out trans spaces and thinking of myself as trans. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a transmasculine person will forever be in want of a partner. (So you should take what you can get and not complain about it.)

This story is not just told to and about transmasculine folks; it’s commonly told about trans and/or non-binary folks across the board. There are transmisogynist messages everywhere, targeting trans women with similar stories of rejection and erasure, often ones that have deep deep violence woven through them. Non-binary folks are often deeply desexualized, erased and othered, in ways that assume our lives are quite lonely (if our existence is acknowledged at all). I’m focusing on transmasculine folks because those are the communities I’ve known the best, those are the trans folks that personally warned me about this “reality” and described it as universal truth that applied to me.

We hold cis gaze for each other, pass it between ourselves. How cis people see us, whether we measure up, whether they want us, becomes the framework, becomes our story. A story we reinforce for each other.

I do it too. Some of my early trans erotica dreamed a fantasy acceptance of (my) transness by cis partners, after disclosure of trans identity. (Something that was problematic on a number of levels, that I recently got to rewrite so that it did not include this kind of disclosure and acceptance moment.) These stories were not only steeped in the cis gaze in how they were structured, they were also written from the point of view of the accepting cis partner. (My own erotica rewrite of the acceptance narrative that’s so common in trans YA.) I was trying to resist the story of my undesirability, but I was doing it while stuck in the framework of a cis gaze.

Telling different stories

What if we could tell different stories? Stories that center transmasculine folks seeking what we want from relationships, in whatever form that might take? Stories that don’t assume trans disclosure is inextricably intertwined with the likelihood of rejection? Stories that don’t even require trans disclosure conversations with new potential partners because they choose not to evoke the possibility of that supposedly inevitable rejection?

We can tell those stories. I know, because I’ve read them, and written them. It is possible to frame transmasculine characters in ways that don’t work from this assumption of undesireability that is so intensely steeped in the cis gaze. I want to tell you about a couple of them.

Peter Darling

Peter Darling by Austin Chant is a trans Peter Pan retelling, where Peter is trans and has a romance with Hook, who is cis. One of the things I loved about the story was the way Peter was unabashedly in his desires, all of them, recklessly at times, insistently pretty much always, driving so much of the story. His will, his choices, what he needs and wants, are deeply centered in this story. Chant discusses this in an interview, centering both the character’s agency and his mistakes, saying:

“I wanted him to lash out and fuck up as Pan would, rather than being a martyr. We all deserve happy endings, and we ought to be allowed to struggle and make mistakes, especially when we’re dealing with intense pain and distress.”

Peter is a deeply flawed, and completely loveable and infuriating tyrant for a good chunk of the beginning of the story. Then the book turns, and begins to unpack the ways he has internalized toxic masculinity, shows him growing to allow himself to be more complex, to have desires that seemed unfathomable before. There is so much to adore about this story but one of my most favorite things is that it’s a book in which the trans main character takes action for himself, over and over, goes after what he wants, thinks about what he wants, doesn’t move from a place of scarcity around what he wants. Oh, Peter is arrogant, and kind of a jerk sometimes, but he gets to have will, and subjectivity, and desire, and fully embody them, live into them.

The author wrote a blog post about his decision to not include a conversation where Peter discloses that he is trans to Hook. He made that choice precisely because that kind of scene is built on the assumption that such conversations almost inevitably lead to rejection. He talks about how he tried to write them, and ultimately decided to cut all of the drafts, saying “maybe the coming out scenes I kept writing were uncomfortable because cramming them in only served to entertain the idea of Hook rejecting Peter.”

And why should a romance novel entertain the idea of a cis character rejecting a trans character because he is trans? Why do we even need to invoke that possibility at all? As Chant says:

“why should we not assume, in the context of a romance novel, that a trans person’s love interest is going to accept and adore them for who they are? Do we always need to see acceptance on the page to know it’s there? Why not have it be the expectation, the default?”

This approach rejects the cis gaze, and rejects cisnormativity. It sets up a universe where we are not going in with the assumption of rejection as likely. Sure, the reader may go in with their own assumptions, but they are not answered by the text, not engaged. This is one of the core ways that Peter Darling presents a possibility of a romance with a trans main character that doesn’t center the cis gaze in its framework, doesn’t center cis readers and their desires in how it is written.

We also have no sense of Peter’s body, his transition, which I absolutely love. We do know his deadname (a common cis question about trans characters), but this is one of the few stories where that really worked for me, narratively. It didn’t feel like that was written for cis readers, but to honor the trans reality of Peters life, which includes the pain of being deadnamed and misgendered by his family. It was hard to read those passages, I’m not going to lie, but they didn’t feel like they were for the titillation of cis readers, and that made them work in the story, I think. A good portion about why they worked was due to when they happen in the story. Stories that start with the trans character being deadnamed and misgendered feel very much like they are for cis readers. Placing these passages later on gave them a different context and meaning. They worked differently.

The Topside Test

Topside Press (a trans-led publisher of trans literature) teaches writing workshops for trans writers where they offer exercises based on the Topside test (akin to the Bechdel test): “Does a film or piece of writing have two trans characters talking about something other than transition?” Writing from a framework that puts trans characters in conversation with each other about things other than transition radically alters the framework of the story, because it removes the cis gaze. Cat Fitzpatrick says that the radical potential of it is that “it’s an easy way to give you a trans speaker speaking to a trans audience.” It helps trans authors write for trans readers.

Removing cis people from the center of the story is one of the core strategies I’ve used in writing stories that reject the cis gaze. Especially when I focus on ways trans and/or non-binary people want each other, and what we sometimes bring to relationships, sex, and kink with each other:

The particular ease of being with folks who also have gender dysphoria so they get yours on a deeper level.
What it’s like to be desired, in all your transness, by another trans person, in a way that doesn’t hold cis objectification and fetishizing at the center of that desire.
The way trans and/or non-binary partners accept and know daily life things about being trans and/or non-binary, so they can sit with misgendering being part of daily trudgery and also hold those times when it feels huge and insurmountable.
The possibilities that open up when you are doing gender play with folks who really get how it can be both playful and turn serious and intense on a dime, can hold the sacredness of the work along with the play.
The kinds of intimate connections that are sometimes possible between trans and/or non-binary folks with vastly different genders and histories, where folks make room for those differences and can also draw connections to those things that are deeply shared experiences.
The intense and scary joyousness of being with someone who has been working on rooting out their internalized cisnormative beauty standards, who you really believe thinks you are gloriously attractive just as you are.
How tremendous it can be to be seen as the gender you are by someone who doesn’t imply for a second that it might be hard work to see you, or that your gender is false, or that you are anything but who you are.
The particular joy of being with a non-binary partner that flows with your gender fluidity as you are on a date or having sex or doing play, where you dance together in that because you both deeply know that gender can move in beautiful ways.

There is all of that, but there is also the thing that Fitzpatrick mentions, the way that centering trans and/or non-binary characters in my story means there is no need for trans 101 info dumps or explanations of things that would clearly be shared knowledge. That the story can begin from where the characters are with each other. The story doesn’t need to imagine a cis readership who might be confused by insider language or community specific references. It doesn’t need to frame a character’s transness as problem, object, fetish, or curiousity.

There is one more piece to this. Centering trans and/or non-binary characters in an erotic or romance story doesn’t frame cis partners as of course the ones we want, the ones who need to accept and desire us. Not only can it center our own desires as trans and/or non-binary people, but it can frame us as folks who may not just want this particular partner, but also can include trans and/or non-binary folks who prefer to be with other trans and/or non-binary people. And not as a last resort because we couldn’t find a cis partner who wants us—which is what the cis gaze would frame that as. I know plenty of trans and/or non-binary people who prefer to be with other trans and/or non-binary people—I’m one of them. For me, writing romance and erotica that centers trans and non-binary people in relationships with, having sex with, and doing kink with each other is creating stories that reflect my own life and my communities.

A Boy Called Cin

I fell so hard for A Boy Called Cin by Cecil Wilde because it felt like it held my experience more closely than any other trans romance I’d read, that it was written for me as a non-binary trans reader. Part of that was because there wasn’t a cis love interest. It shaped the book, on a really deep level. That said, I’ve loved other romances where both main characters are trans and/or non-binary. (Three I would recommend are Defying Convention, also by Cecil Wilde, Long Macchiatos and Monsters by Alison Evans, and Documenting Light by EE Ottoman, which I’m in the middle of reading.)

This book felt different. It cracked something open for me as a writer, taught me something about what trans and non-binary-centered romance could be. I had a similar experience reading Nevada by Imogen Binnie, in the way that it felt so deeply trans-centered and written for a trans audience. It taught me something so important about writing trans stories. But it wasn’t in a genre that I am actually writing, and genre is meaningful. A Boy Called Cin taught me something really important about writing trans romance.

It took these classic romance tropes like May/December romance and billionaire romance, and showed what they might be like if they were trans and non-binary centered. Showed what a romance arc might look like if the cis gaze wasn’t part of it, except in the ways that trans and/or non-binary people internalize it and need to unlearn it. It showed the critical importance of deeply consensual negotiated sex for trans and/or non-binary people, how central that needed to be in order for both characters to feel seen and respected in their genders. It didn’t just center two trans and/or non-binary characters; I loved the way even the secondary characters were pretty much almost all trans.

I fell so damn hard for Cin right along with Tom, his grumpiness, his certainty about the importance of boundaries and consent, the way he really saw Tom. I know that this book will be read by many as fantasy wish fulfillment for Cin (the whole billionaire thing). It definitely is that. But for me, as a genderqueer reader, Cin is a fantasy of a dream lover who sees your gender and holds space for you to be who you are. It happens during sex, as well, which feels like such a gift to me personally. I just swooned for the ways sex is working in this book.

For me, one of the most amazing things that can happen in sex and in kink is to have my partner see my gender and hold space for me to be who I am. And it’s incredibly tender for me to do that for my trans and/or non-binary partners. I’ve written story after story about this experience from all ends of it, and even titled my erotica collection Show Yourself To Me because this experience of being seen and held in who you are during sex and kink is one of the things closest to my heart. I wrote erotica stories about trans and/or non-binary characters having this experience partly so that I could read them, so I could hold that kind of possibility out for myself. It was the only way I knew to access that kind of hopeful framework that centered people like me, in our own desire and our own need to be seen and honored as who we are. That kind of recognition is rare enough in life; it’s even more rare in fiction.

There was something so intense and beautiful about getting to read an entire love story that included those experiences of recognition in a larger romance arc. It made me cry, to watch Tom get to have that for the first time after years of not having it in his sex life. To watch Cin get to offer that, and be held and honored in return by Tom. It felt like it had cracked scars open, and they were getting the light and air they needed to begin to heal. It made me feel less alone.

TLDR

This is what I want from the stories we tell each other, as trans and/or non-binary people: that they center us. That we work to root out the ways we have internalized the cis gaze, in our stories and in our communities. That we tell stories that center what trans and non-binary people want and need in our relationships, instead of focusing on how cis people see us, and whether they want us. It is not easy, I know. I will keep working on it myself. Join me?

Note: If you are trying to understand what I mean by the cis gaze, here are a few things you can read:

A twitter thread where I discuss being the object of a story vs being the subject.
Writing Better Trans Characters by Cheryl Morgan.
My essay that differentiates between cis POV characters and the cis gaze.

Tagged: amatonormativity, cis gaze, ciscentrism, cissexism, compulsory sexuality, dating politics, non-binary, non-binary authors, non-binary characters, queer, queer romance, relationships, romance, sexnormativity, sexual subjectivity, trans, trans authors, trans characters, trans erotica, Trans non-binary, trans oppression, trans readers, trans representation, trans romance, trans sexuality, transmasculine

Hold Me Down by Sara Taylor Woods

So I had the pleasure of reading an advance copy of Hold Me Down. This book is incredibly important to me personally, and I think also in a much wider way. I’m going to write an essay about it. I will tell you about how this book shows a submissive masochistic woman grappling with internal and external anti-kink judgment in complex ways. I will write about how radical and important it is for a BDSM romance to deeply centers a submissive woman seeking to claim her kinky desires, ones she had long before meeting the dominant hero. How rare it is to see a romance character who is both kinky and embracing her desire and has a deep and abiding relationship to Judaism. How much I needed this book when I was a kinky teenager.

But that is not this post.

This post is about giving you a sneak peak
of the hotness in this story. 

It’s called Hold Me Down. Take it at its word.

If you want your BDSM fiction to resemble the kink folks do in the world…
If you want to ride inside the head of a submissive masochist who knows exactly what she wants and asks for every bit of it…
If you have been aching to see a BDSM romance centering a Daddy/girl relationship…
If you are into stories that center kind of bondage that’s about fighting to get free and the sort of discipline a brat yearns for…
Hold Me Down is the book for you.

[image error]

Talia Benson has always been independent, unafraid to go after what she wants, regardless of setback, injury, or failure. But between her father’s conditional tuition payments and her mother’s nagging concern over her emotional state, Talia’s suffocating.

So when Talia meets doctoral student Sean Poole, she can’t figure out why she wants him to control her. Why she wants him to boss her around. Why she wants him to hurt her.

Talia learns the hard way that not all control is created equal, and sometimes submitting is the most empowering thing in the world.

Hold Me Down comes out Tuesday, March 28, 2017.

Pre-order here:    AMZ         BN           iBooks          Goodreads

Excerpt from Hold Me Down

As a heads up, this excerpt includes descriptions of D/s, Daddy play, consensual non-consent, punishment play, face slapping, light pain play, orgasm control, brat play, fucking, and restraint. 

He licked my ear. “Talia,” he murmured. “Let me inside, baby.”

“Fuck,” I breathed. “Yes. Yes. Please.”

He growled, a low predatory sound that made my stomach drop like a roller coaster. He pushed me onto the bed, and I stayed, didn’t move. I watched him shamelessly, a black silhouette in the darkness, the bulge and swoop of his body exaggerated as he dug through a dresser drawer.

He returned to the bed and pushed me onto my back. His eyes found mine and he dragged the corner of the condom package down my torso, scratching a thin line splitting my sternum, the valley of my breasts, my twitching abdomen.

“Put this on,” he said. “I’m going to fuck you, and you’re going to come on my cock.”

“I don’t know if I can.” I wanted to. Desperately. But I never had before, and I knew, statistically, the number of women with the ability to come from penetrative sex alone was pretty low, and I couldn’t figure out why the hell I was thinking about statistics instead of holy shit, the words that came out of his mouth, I mean, Jesus.

He lifted shadowed brows. “I wasn’t asking.”

I couldn’t hold his gaze when he talked like that. Goddamn it, why didn’t this infuriate me? Why was I squeezing my legs together to assuage the ache instead? What the fuck was wrong with me?

He must have sensed my unease, because he leaned down and put his lips to my ear. “Don’t worry, baby,” he murmured. “I take care of what’s mine, don’t I? Let Daddy take care of you. Okay?”

I nodded, trembling. My ass was actually throbbing. I couldn’t wait to see what pretty picture he’d painted on me.

He pulled back and lifted my chin with one finger, forcing me to meet his eyes in the dark. “Do you trust me, Talia?”

“Yes,” I whispered. “I trust you.”

He smiled at me, really smiled, his teeth so white in the dark, and kissed me. One hand slid up my neck to my jaw—the faintest pressure—and he said, “Let me inside.”

I couldn’t have kept my mouth closed if I’d wanted to. And when his tongue flicked against mine, something sparked between us, something desperate and combustible and I was suddenly aching to feel him move inside me, pressure and pulse between my legs. The bed depressed as he went to one knee, then swung the other up as he crouched over me. I sat up to meet him, my hands scrabbling at him, trying to bring us closer together.

He must have tired of it, because he grabbed my hands and pushed them behind my back, holding both wrists together in one hand. And he slapped me.

In the face. Not hard…but still. He slapped me in the face.

I had already drawn breath to tell him to go fuck himself, to ask him who the hell he thought he was, when I realized I wasn’t upset. I should be upset, I knew. But I wasn’t. I was flushed, and that ache in my cunt was grinding-hard. My hips were moving without my permission. My lips parted. Fuck. Fuck.

He hit me. He slapped me. Something dark and primal inside my brain bared its teeth, wanting to fight, wanting to fuck, even as I told myself to go, to run. To scream that ridiculous word Crookshanks and leave and never look back.

But we stared at each other, that word I wouldn’t mean on the tip of my tongue. I surged toward him, but he held on to my wrists and kept me steady.

“Do it again,” I hissed. I didn’t know if it was a challenge or a plea.

Sean knew. He slapped me again, then grabbed my chin, forcing me to look at him. I couldn’t catch my breath; my eyes wouldn’t focus. He waited until I met his gaze, then pulled me forward and kissed me.

His fingertips pressing into my skull. Into my wrists. Not enough. It wasn’t enough. I bit his lip. He cursed, letting go of me, and pushed me back onto the mattress. I tried to sit up. I wanted to fight. He pinned me down, one palm flat against my solar plexus, and slapped my cunt. The pain was sharp, unexpected, and I yelped, my body instinctively curling up, away from another blow. He held me against the bed, pushing my thighs apart, shoving his knee between them when I tried to twist away from him.

“Don’t pull away from me,” he snapped. “I’ll tell you when we’re done.”

I was molten. I could hear myself whimpering. Why wasn’t I furious? Why wasn’t I terrified?

“Are you always this uncooperative?” he asked, one hand on my chest, one fumbling in the covers for the dropped condom. He found it, stuck the corner in his mouth, and slapped my breast. I groaned, arched under his hand. My skin, my nerves, everything on fire.

“I asked you a question.” He tore open the condom package. “Are you always this uncooperative?”

I reached for him. “Let me help.”

He smacked my hands away, grabbing my wrists and wrestling them under my back. “No.” He rolled the condom on, his forearms pointing an exaggerated V down to his hips. His tattoos shifting like moon-shadows. I chewed on my lower lip. “You lost that privilege,” he said. “And your orgasm. You’re going to have to earn it back.”

I guess this is what orgasm control looked like.

“Sorry,” I whispered. “I’m sorry. I’ll behave. I’m sorry.”

He snorted. “No, you won’t. Do you know why you won’t?”

“Because I’m crazy?”

“No.” He pinched my inner thigh when he said it, reinforcing the point. “Because you like the consequences of misbehaving too much.”

I rolled my eyes.

He pushed my face to the side, pinning it to the pillow, and his breath rushed hot over my ear, my throat. His fingertip kept one of my eyes from opening. He said, “I don’t know why you think you’ll be able to get away with shit like that.” His voice was all hard edges and sharp points, and it sent a chill down my spine. “Don’t pretend that little spanking was all I’m capable of, and don’t think I’m finished with you yet, little miss.”

 

[image error]

 

About Sara Taylor Woods

Sara writes sophisticated erotic romance and dark contemporary fantasy. Her stories have been included in romance, erotica, and horror anthologies. When she’s not writing, she’s wrangling her two bouncing dogs, mainlining coffee, or working out. She lives in South Carolina with her husband.

Tagged: BDSM, BDSM romance, brat play, consensual non-consent, D/s, Daddy play, face slapping, Hold Me Down, masochism, orgasm control, pain, punishment play, Sara Taylor Woods, sex, submission

Elust 92

Welcome to Elust 92–

The only place where the smartest and hottest sex bloggers are featured under one roof every month. Whether you’re looking for sex journalism, erotic writing, relationship advice or kinky discussions it’ll be here at Elust. Want to be included in Elust #93 Start with the rules, come back April 1st to submit something and subscribe to the RSS feed for updates!

 

~ This Month’s Top Three Posts ~

Feeling Forced

NEEDY – a black obsession

Monogamish

 

~ Featured Post (Molly’s Picks) ~

“One Man Is Not Enough For You.”

blink

 

~Readers Choice from Sexbytes ~

Safewords in Kink Life and in Kink Fiction

*You really should consider adding your popular posts here too*

All blogs that have a submission in this edition must re-post this digest from tip-to-toe on their blogs within 7 days. Re-posting the photo is optional and the use of the “read more…” tag is allowable after this point. Thank you, and enjoy!

 

Erotic Fiction

The Anatomy Lesson

Town whore

Erotic Non-Fiction

The good girl pledge

Good Boy

From Headache to Clit Ache

Daytime: A married Valentines fantasy

Unlocking the Man…with Pieces of Me.

Thoughts & Advice on Kink & Fetish

Three’s Company

I hate the “One Size Fits All” approach

Safewords in Kink Life and in Kink Fiction

How great would it be if…

Poetry

Roadside Stand: A Lusty Limerick

Sex News, Opinion, Interviews, Politics & Humor

Dirty Money

Events

Looking back at our Eroticon Weekend

Thoughts & Advice on Sex & Relationships

Waiting and waiting and waiting

 

Tagged: elust