From Wikipedia:

Demi-Monde is French for “half-world.” The term derives from a play called Le Demi-Monde, by Alexandre Dumas fils, published in 1855. The play dealt with the way that prostitution at that time threatened the institution of marriage. The demi-monde was the world occupied by elite men and the women who entertained them and whom they kept, the pleasure-loving and dangerous world Dumas immortalized in the 1848 novel La Dame aux Camelias and its many adaptations. “Demimondaine” became a synonym for a courtesan or a prostitute who moved in these circles—or for a woman of social standing with the power to thumb her nose at convention and throw herself into the hedonistic nightlife. A woman who made that choice would soon find her social status lost, as she became déclassé.
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The demi-monde used to be much bigger than it is now. Before the social upheavals of the 1960s, just about anyone who had a sex life that wasn’t confined to married heterosexual monogamy was in one or more of the overlapping circles of the demi-monde. Men who desired other men risked being arrested, as did people of any gender who got paid for sexual service. Women-loving women risked the same legal penalties (which varied by state) as gay men and sex workers in the U.S. — but not in Commonwealth countries, including Canada.

The Canadian Criminal Code doesn’t mention sex between women. It’s just not there. There is an anecdote about how Queen Victoria cleverly refused to sign a law against “sodomy” that included women, and most of Canadian criminal law can be traced back to British law. However, I’m skeptical of anecdotes. At the time when male politicians were busily drafting laws against “vice” in Victorian England, women didn’t really have the status of adult citizens. Why write women into every criminal law when most of them were under the authority of their fathers or husbands? Male heads of households could decide what they could tolerate from their female wards.

The “gay community” of Regina, Saskatchewan, where I “came out” as a lesbian in the early 1980s, was not considered respectable by anyone, least of all by the people in it. Dr. Valerie Korinek, who teaches at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, recently gave a talk on Zoom, based on her 2018 book, Prairie Fairies: A History of Queer Communities and People in Western Canada, 1930-1985. Dr. Korinek claimed that it was harder to find interview subjects in Regina than anywhere else, and she speculated on the reasons. Regina is the seat of government of the province of Saskatchewan, and it is also the national headquarters of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. A heavy government and police presence promotes conformity and fear of the law.

When I went to the “gay club” for the first time, it was so dark that I wasn’t sure I would recognize any other members of that demi-monde by daylight. The rule was that newcomers could visit the bar a few times, but then must pay the membership fee and sign the registry. Later, when I was elected to the board, I saw that most names on the registry looked too fanciful to be the same names on people’s birth certificates.

I knew that the federal Omnibus Bill of 1969 had suddenly brought Canada into the modern era by liberalizing divorce, abortion, and sex between men by making it more-or-less legal in “private” places, subject to interpretation. This was generally considered a sign of progress.

The legal status of women-loving women didn’t change in 1969. What was invisible stayed invisible.

On my first night at the bar, I met Jo, as I’ll call her, who became my first “woman” lover, loosely speaking. She called herself a “dyke,” and bought all her clothes in men’s clothing stores. I had a daughter from a previous marriage to a man, and I moved us in with Jo before I knew her very well. I was afraid of the gossip that would ensue if too many of my neighbours in a housing co-op for low-income single parents became aware that Jo was spending nights in my apartment.

The new apartment I shared with Jo was soon filled with her drinking buddies from the bar. Most of the “dykes” in that crowd were convinced that lesbianism was illegal, and I couldn’t persuade them otherwise. Several of them had spent time in the minimum-security women’s prison in Saskatchewan, and I came to recognize the DIY blue tattoos of an ex-con. They had all been convicted of something other than consensual sex with female companions, but the fact that they had been locked up seemed like proof to those who knew them that all “dykes” were subject to legal persecution.

When I told Jo’s friends that I was working on a Master’s thesis at the local university (originally a branch of the University of Saskatchewan), they seemed amused. As far as they could see, I had delusions of middle-class success.

I was alarmed to learn that Jo had been fired from her job as assistant manager of a pizza parlour because she had been caught with her hand in the till. She explained that: 1) she had been drinking, and therefore couldn’t be held responsible for what she did, and 2) the money was easy to grab, so she couldn’t be blamed for grabbing it.

I tried to reason with her. Jo had a daughter of her own, conceived when she passed out at a party in the presence of men. Jo’s daughter was being raised by her foster-parents, but Jo wanted us to raise our two children under one roof. As I pointed out, this would require stability of several kinds: financial, emotional, occupational, domestic.

Jo grew tired of my nagging, and she watched me when I withdrew money from the ATMs which had recently been installed in local banks. One day, she helped herself to the contents of my bank account, and fled to the western city of Calgary during the annual summer Stampede.

I asked my parents for help, and they were glad that I wanted to leave my stunningly unsuitable roommate. They hoped I was over my “lesbian phase,” and they helped me and my daughter move in with them. From there, I reported Jo’s theft of my money to the Regina police.

This was a bold move, and I knew it. I wondered whether anyone in the demi-monde I had joined would ever speak to me again after they learned that I had reported my own lover. On the other hand, I didn’t want to become known as a sitting duck, someone who could easily be fleeced.

As soon as Jo returned to town, I told her what I had done. She appeared at my parents’ house and threatened to show them some compromising photos of her and me. (The only photos I knew of showed both of us with all our clothes on. I wasn’t sure what she thought that proved.)

For about two weeks, Jo and I yelled at each other over the phone. I told her that if she paid me back in full, there would be no case, I would refuse to testify against her, and the police would leave her alone. She promised to pay me back—eventually. I told her this had to happen soon if she wanted me to call off the attack dogs.

Then the phone calls started. Almost every one of Jo’s friends called me at my parents’ house, demanding to know whether I had reported them to the police. What had I said?

I asked them if they been involved in Jo’s bank heist, and they seemed confused. The standard response was, “I don’t know nothin about your money.”

At length, the dust settled. Jo’s friends seemed greatly relieved to learn that the cops weren’t after them for anything to do with me, even though they had heard from Jo that I had come to the bar for the purpose of getting all the “queers” locked up.

Jo never paid me back, and she acquired a record for “grand larceny,” theft over $500, although she wasn’t jailed for that. Instead, I was given custody of her car in lieu of repayment, even though I couldn’t drive. I ended up selling it for much less than she owed me.

For years, I seemed to be known in certain circles as a police plant, a “straight” academic type who never really fit in with the “dykes” and “fags” of the club. However, I met more compatible people in the queer community, and joined several groups that advocated for greater social acceptance and legal protection.

Emerging from a shadowy demi-monde into the light of visibility feels surrealistic. I doubt whether the transgender, non-binary and pansexual, polyamorous millennials among my students believe for a moment that the police are just waiting to arrest them for being “perverts.”

Wherever you live, there is probably still a demi-monde near you: a community of sex workers which overlaps with a community of the poor, the racially oppressed and of non-violent drug users. There is still work to be done, not only in “rehabilitating”  the “fallen,” but in lifting the concrete blocks off their necks. Those of us who believe in sexual freedom have a responsibility not to romanticize the culture of the closet.

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I hope everyone reading this is enjoying the winter holidays as much as possible.

I can’t help thinking of WW2, when my parents were engaged for Christmas in 1943, and married in January 1944, when the U.S. Navy promoted my father to the rank of Lieutenant and deployed him to Staten Island, NYC, where my mother awaited him. One of the perks of promotion was the right to marry.

I’m well aware that Americans weren’t experiencing the same war as the British, or even other citizens of former British colonies, including Canada. For everyone in the former British Empire, the war started in 1939, when King George declared war on Germany. After France fell to the Nazi regime in 1940 (along with several of the Channel Islands), everyone in the British Isles waited anxiously to find out their own fate. Children were sent to the countryside or to other countries while planes with swastikas on them dropped bombs on London.

I’ve been told that my London-born great-grandmother Bessie, a proud Cockney living in New York City, felt personally offended that her city was being bombed by a monster called the “Luftwaffe.”

At this time, the fate of the Jewish diaspora within Nazi-controlled countries was literally unspeakable. No one outside those countries knew anything with certainty. It was only in 1945 and later that my mother’s New York Jewish friends found out what happened to their extended families in Europe — or, in some cases, they had to make reasonable guesses, based on the known facts.

Americans, like Swedes, were safely neutral all this time. Only after the Japanese Air Force bombed the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in December 1942, did the U.S. government declare war on the Axis countries: Japan, Germany, Italy. So The War for my parents (the most serious one, the war that defined their young adulthood) really only began in January 1943 and lasted until spring 1945.

After the U.S. joined the war, the tide turned, and the chances of a worldwide Nazi/Fascist conquest which would last for a thousand years grew increasingly unlikely.

Why does the dumpster fire of 2020 remind me of the war? The most obvious answer is: Nazis! Fascists! The other obvious answer is the worldwide pandemic, which affects everyone on earth, but not all to the same degree.

Governments have responded with various degrees of caution—with lockdowns, partial-lockdowns, reopenings and reclosings. In the absence of a cure or any form of prevention apart from quarantining, governments have had to try to balance the health of human bodies with the health of the economy. As a result, some countries are still in free-fall, while others are almost completely Covid-free.

Just as patriotic citizens in London and New York were told to stay indoors after dark and cover their windows with blackout curtains (or better yet, avoid turning on lights), people in countries with lockdowns are being encouraged to stay in our “bubbles” of a few close companions, and keep a lid on festivities. (Drinking alone now sounds more wholesome than it has in the past.)

The wartime carols, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” (for sure), and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” sound more poignant to me this year than they have for a long time.

The news of a vaccine sounds like news of an armistice. So there is change on the horizon. The big question is: will everything go back to normal after the vaccine is widely distributed? Will some people be left behind, because they are overlooked by the local health-care system, or because they refuse the vaccine because they distrust the system (often for good reasons)?
Time will tell.

Meanwhile, I hope that being home alone with a Significant Other or a few is a sexy experience for at least some of you.

I’ve been teaching university classes from home, and it has turned out to be more fun than I foresaw when the local university shut down in March 2020 (in the middle of a semester!) Not having to catch a bus from home to school in the cold and the dark of winter (when classes are scheduled before 9:00 a.m. or last beyond 4:00 p.m.) has been a great convenience. Although I haven’t been able to see my students, they have shown up in surprisingly large numbers for Zoom classes, possibly because they also like the convenience of attending class from home. I know I still don’t understand all the technological bells and whistles available to me, but I’ve been able to communicate with students in various ways, and several have told me they enjoyed the classes.

Meanwhile, my female spouse Mirtha has had numerous Zoom meetings of her own because of her position on various boards and her job as the co-ordinator of a group of local LGBTQ elders (age 55+).

When we wake up in the mornings, I ask her what meetings she has, at what time, and which device she plans to use (phone, laptop, or the Mac in our spare bedroom, called the “library”).

We could have spontaneous sex any time we’re not otherwise occupied, and we could do it anywhere in the house. Yet we don’t.

I’m well aware that we’re incredibly lucky compared to many other people: we live in Canada, where basic health care is available to all, and where dental and eye care (which are not part of the government health-care system) are covered for us by work-related insurance. We haven’t needed emergency government funding because our incomes have never been interrupted. We follow the local safety protocols, and we’ve stayed healthy.

Yet fear of the virus seems to be universal, even for those of us who live far from major coastal cities. There have been anti-mask demonstrations here in Saskatchewan, on the Canadian prairies, and the arrival of winter weather brought a predictable Second Wave. Just because many people in the world couldn’t find Saskatchewan on a map (it’s a large rectangle in the middle of the continent) doesn’t mean we’re safely isolated.

I’ve been told that the possibility of imminent death gives some people the urge to live as fully as possible while they can. Some of that joie de vivre seemed to spring up during WW2, although the possibility of imminent death really varied by location and occupation. (Obviously, anyone in the armed forces was at greatest risk. They were the front-line workers of the time.)

This situation might have affected me—and possibly my spouse Mirtha—differently when we were younger. Maybe we have a different relationship with death now than we did in the past. Then it seemed like a villain that could attack without warning. Now we know we’re guaranteed to meet it sooner or later (within the next thirty years), and it won’t be a surprise.

Whatever your methods of keeping fear, anxiety and depression at bay, I wish you well. (But if you’re an anti-masker, please consider the evidence that there really is a war on.) If you’ve been inspired to have lots of actual sex, or write a lot of erotica, good for you.

Personally, I’m still waiting for the publication of my erotic novel, Prairie Gothic, because apparently the publisher is still waiting for a review from Publishers Weekly, which had good things to say about a story I had in a major erotic anthology in 2014. As with many other things, their response to my novel remains to be seen.

I haven’t written much this year, but I do have plans for three single-author collections, and will take a stab at writing something between now and New Year’s Day 2021, before I start teaching two new on-line classes.

Life, lust, energy, inspiration, and determination all seem to be related. I wish more of all that to all my fellow ERWAns in the new year.
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Lately, I posted something on Facebook about an episode of the Dr. Phil Show in which a male massage therapist had to answer questions about accusations from 18 women (some clients and some dates) that he had sexually abused them.

As a woman of a certain age, I remember a time when all the focus would have been on the “accusers.” They would have been questioned about why they were reckless enough to have any contact with a male massage therapist, and why they didn’t foresee that a “massage” would include something else. Their private lives would have been scrutinized, and they would have been prompted to admit that they were exaggerating, if not lying outright.

In this case, the focus was on the man who had been accused, and on his evasive responses to Dr. Phil’s questions. Although there is probably no way to determine the absolute truth about what happened between two people in a place where there were no cameras or recording devices, Dr. Phil’s approach seemed to be as objective as possible.

I said I hoped that this is a sign of progress in the way the cultural mainstream deals with sexual harassment and abuse.

A man I know sent me a private message, since he was squeamish about saying it in public. He said that ever since the “Me too” movement of women posting on social media about their experiences of sexual abuse, the men he knows have been nervous about how to interact with women. How on earth can guys avoid doing the wrong thing?

I’ve heard this before, but this time, I was honestly taken aback. The man who sent me this message belongs to two sexually-defined communities, and one that appeals to creative types. He is gay, and belongs to the Society for Creative Anachronism (people who choose medieval identities, from AD 600-1600, and stage banquets, jousts, and other cool cosplay events), as well as the BDSM community in a larger city than the one where he lives. I had always assumed this person was sexually “woke,” not a farm-bred teenager who thinks all sex outside of marriage is kinky and probably illegal. And I wouldn’t expect my friend to hang out with the clueless.

Just as in Freud’s time, men are apparently still saying, “Dear God! What do women want?”

If men are confused, so am I. What parts of consent and context do they not understand?

When I was in my twenties, spending my summers typing, filing, and answering phones in government offices, many a male co-worker would casually squeeze, stroke, or pat various parts of my body in passing. When I tried to squirm out of the way or asked them to stop, they would usually explain that they were just being “friendly,” and that they treated everyone else the same way. They seemed to think I was unreasonably touchy or completely humourless, or both.

Yet as far as I could see, none of the handsy guys tried to grope each other, or their male supervisors. I could imagine the consequences if they did. (“What the hell, man?”) When the highest-ranking person in the office (Deputy Minister of a government department) was a woman, every man Jack managed to avoid touching her, or commenting openly about whether she had sex appeal. (I assume her husband thought so.) Strange how that worked.

If the Deputy Minister had a sex life, and even if it was more colourful than vanilla monogamy, everyone around her seemed to understand that her private life was not relevant to the business of government. All the guys in suits who had contact with her seemed able to do their jobs without being unbearably distracted.

Aha, I thought. If I can’t become a Deputy Minister, I need some other title that says “Hands Off.” In due course, I became an English instructor, and that role has protected me from unwanted groping for many years now. Strange how that works.

Among the many women who have described harrowing experiences in the “Me too” conversation, none have suggested that all women are fragile flowers, or that consensual sex destroys us. If there is a real-world version of the “Anti-Sex League” in the dystopian novel 1984, it doesn’t seem to be led by women—as it isn’t in the novel.

Most employed men show an understanding that work is different from play. If your girlfriend greets you at her door wearing saran wrap, stilettos and a wicked grin, you can assume you can safely treat her differently than you would treat an employee in your favourite coffee shop, or the receptionist in your place of work. Context is important.

What if you would like a more intimate relationship with the barista in the coffee shop, or the receptionist in the office? Invite her to a different location. If she turns down your invitation, or explains that she is already in a relationship, back off gracefully. If she says yes, you can proceed from there.

Can a man strike up a conversation with a strange woman in a public place? That depends. Asking “wanna fuck?” is less likely to get a positive response than “Excuse me, does the Number 10 bus stop here?”

Saying anything to a lone woman you don’t know who is outdoors after dark—and who didn’t approach you first—might make her wonder about your intentions. You can save your compliments for daylight hours.

If you really want to fuck something immediately, there are more appropriate places to seek that experience than outdoor space. Masturbating in your own bedroom, with the door and the curtains closed, isn’t likely to offend anyone who can’t see you.

Seriously, I don’t know why herds of men are supposedly wandering in circles, wracking their brains to figure out how to communicate with women now that “the rules have changed.” As far as I know, the basic rules that my parents used to call “common courtesy” have always worked for those who apply them. I never “accepted” being groped at work and catcalled on the street. I just didn’t know how to stop guys in general from treating me this way. If I can believe what I’ve been told, many other women of my generation also knew we would be labelled and ridiculed no matter how we responded.

By now, there are at least two generations of adult women who are younger than I am. Based on the “Me too” posts, their experiences in the 1980s, 90s, early 2000s and post-2010 haven’t been much different from mine in the 1970s.

If any of my friend’s male friends are really worried about offending women they don’t know well, their training in courtly manners should help. Throwing a cloak into a mud-puddle for a lady to step on probably wouldn’t be taken amiss, as long as the gentleman doesn’t follow that up by complaining loudly about being trapped in the “friend zone.”
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As the late comedian Joan Rivers used to say: Can we talk?

When the scandal of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church first became public, the term “pedophile priests” seemed accurate. Most of these guys seemed to have operated under the public radar for years because of how unthinkable their actions seemed to anyone not directly involved. For one thing, priests are not supposed to have sex at all. For another, the abuse of innocent children is probably the worst thing they could have done, short of murder.

As far as I know, pedophilia is a fairly specific type of “filia,” or fetish. Pedophiles are sexually attracted to children, i.e. young humans who have not gone through puberty yet. Children of all genders lack breasts and facial hair, they do not have menstrual periods, and their voices are relatively high.

After reading about numerous investigations of particular priests, I could see why they might have done it. The men who choose to become priests are a small percentage of the general population. Especially in past generations, the priesthood must have looked like a safe closet for Catholic men who wanted to maintain respectable status without having to be married to one woman for life, or be financially responsible for numerous children. These men must have included a high percentage who were not heterosexual and possibly not comfortable with the prospect of adult courtship. They became part of a hothouse culture, involving in-group solidarity and a certain degree of isolation from the outside world. Pedophilia could flourish in that atmosphere.

Now that the notorious sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein is dead, and his former accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell is behind bars, they have both been widely accused of running a “pedophile ring.” In this case, I don’t buy it.

Virginia Roberts Giuffre has been shown numerous times in the media, explaining how she was forced to have sex with Prince Andrew when she was 17. I tend to believe her, and her story is disturbing, even though she doesn’t sound like a “child” at the time. Consider the fact that she clearly knew what sex was, and she knew she didn’t want it. Children are rarely that knowledgeable. If Virginia had been 18, 19, or 20 at the time, her age wouldn’t have changed the facts of the case. If forcing a teenage girl to have sex with an older man is awful, I don’t see how doing this to a grown woman could be okay.

Let me explain this clearly: rape, or sexual assault, is a traumatizing negation of personhood even if the victim is not a virgin. Gang-rape during war is usually inflicted on whole populations of girls and women, including wives and mothers. So I don’t care how sexually experienced/inexperienced Virginia or any of the other victims were before Epstein, Maxwell and company got hold of them. It doesn’t matter.

Enough women have come forward to explain how they were lured by Epstein or Maxwell that a pattern has emerged: the traffickers claimed to offer glamorous jobs to teenage girls who dreamed of being models, and who were independent enough to go to “interviews” by themselves. This just wouldn’t happen to children under the age of 12 or 13, who would have had to be tricked some other way.

Let’s consider the motivations of the traffickers. It seems that they targeted attractive girls who were physically mature enough to have breasts and hips, who could be dressed up to appear older, but who were naive enough to believe what they were told until it was too late to back out, and powerless enough to be intimidated. The traffickers not only wanted to enjoy sex with these girls, but to share them with their rich and powerful friends, who presumably had similar tastes.

There is a lot of speculation about how many upper-class men, besides Prince Andrew, are worried about what Maxwell might reveal. Does it seem likely that every “friend” of the traffickers really craved sex with ten-year-olds, eight-year-olds, or even toddlers?

Imagine that every adult male were secretly given a truth serum that would prevent them from lying. Then imagine that they were asked about their sexual tastes. How many do you think would ignore the image of a porn star (adult female or male) and describe their ideal date as a hot grade-school student?

At the risk of sounding naive, I don’t believe that Western society is overrun with actual pedophiles. Obviously this doesn’t mean that children can’t possibly be abused, but the evidence shows that children are much more likely to be abused by the adults they know well, and not all child abuse includes sex by any definition.

Growing up is a process, not a sudden transformation. Most people go through puberty at the beginning of adolescence, but legal “adulthood” is set at different ages in different eras and jurisdictions. When I was young, the age of majority was 21, and no one could legally do adult things (vote, sign contracts, drink alcohol) before then. Now the age of majority throughout North America is eighteen. Does this mean that the millennial generation is maturing faster than their grandparents did? That’s debatable.

What might be more to the point is that no one wears their age on their forehead. Not everyone can see the age difference between a 14-year-old girl with breasts and hips, especially if she is wearing makeup and a clingy dress, and a similarly-dressed 16-year-old girl or an 18-year-old girl, although only one of them is legally an adult. There are good reasons for age-of-consent laws, and employers have an obligation to make sure their employees have the legal right to work, especially in sexually-related jobs. It doesn’t follow that everyone who is sexually attracted to a young female who looks like a woman is a pedophile.

Please hear me out. I’m not defending those who exploit, assault, or abuse other people. Teenagers are definitely vulnerable to adults who have economic and physical power over them. Exploitation, coercion, deception, physical assault, and extortion are all real crimes, and they should be called out and prosecuted.

The flood of references to “pedophiles” and “pedophile rings” is the expression of a moral panic, a mass fear that gathers random things into it, like a black hole in space. During the “Burning Times” (approximately 1500-1700), everything that scared anyone was assumed to be the result of “witchcraft.” In Nazi Germany, everything bad was associated with a worldwide conspiracy of Jews, including “decadent art” (??). In the U.S. in the “McCarthy Era” of the 1950s, the media screamed about the threat of “Communism,” which was somehow connected with “smut” and “homosexuality,” even though officially Communist countries disapproved of those things too.

The claim that almost any victim of sexual abuse is “really a child” is often accompanied by the claim that “children” need more “protection”—as distinct from the rights of adulthood. This makes me shudder, especially when the person who makes such claims seems to think that childhood can continue indefinitely.

Consider the legal status of Britney Spears, a 38-year-old pop star with children of her own, who has been under her father’s guardianship for the past twelve years. It’s possible that she could not be responsible for herself at the time this arrangement began, but how likely is it that she has needed this amount of supervision and control all this time? Since her legal guardian controls her income and financial decisions, he has no motive to set her free.

When I was 22, living in England with my parents, I met a Nigerian student and became involved with him. My parents didn’t really approve of the relationship, but after I returned to Canada with them, I sponsored him into the country as my fiance, and we were married in 1975, when I was 24. When I was 26, I gave birth to my daughter. Three months later, my raging, alcoholic husband threatened to take the baby to Nigeria with him to get her away from my harmful influence. I escaped to a shelter with her, then my parents invited us to move in with them and go back to university to increase my income-earning potential. This seemed like the best option for myself and my baby, so I accepted.

While I lived with my parents, my mother announced several times that she thought no one should be allowed to get married until they are old enough to make mature decisions. She was clearly hinting that I married too young, and that was the cause of my problems. Never mind that my husband was affected by the moral panic in which many men think they have lost face in the eyes of other men because their wives aren’t sufficiently faithful and devoted. And never mind that since then, Nigeria has become known as a home for international fraud, including romance scams.

Do you think I was a victim of child sexual abuse when I chose to move in with my Nigerian boyfriend in London? If so, how far should the age of consent be raised: to 25? 28? 30? If no one could ever marry or (gasp) cohabit without their parents’ consent, would unmarried “minors” simply not have sexual feelings?

Problems can’t be solved until they are defined accurately. Sexual harassment, abuse, coercion and deception are serious problems, and there are laws against them. It doesn’t follow that every victim of sexual abuse is “really a child,” or that all sex traffickers are “pedophiles.” Please don’t surrender to the hype.

And don’t get me started on the assumption that every adult who has willingly provided sexual service for money or material goods has been “trafficked.” That’s an insult to the victims of thugs like Epstein, Maxwell, and company.

Those of us who love to write don’t like to admit this, but there is some overlap between artists in general (including writers) and con artists.

Years ago, when I was a grad student in the Canadian prairie university where I now teach, a woman prof I admired wrote a biography of the writer Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980). The prof’s research turned up evidence that the writer didn’t really grow up in a white-pillared antebellum mansion in the southern U.S. She came from the social class that used to be called “white trash,” and simply decided to reinvent herself. While doing that, she neglected to mention a short, messy teenage marriage. I couldn’t blame the writer for editing her life-story, but I sympathized with the biographer when she had to decide how much truth to tell on the page. Porter still had living relatives.

Stories like this are not that unusual, and they often come out after an artist has died. I was vaguely aware of how easy it would be to fictionalize an actual life while I was still an only child who made up stories about my dolls. My mother often told her friends that children can’t tell the difference between real life and “make-believe.” Looking back, I suspect this belief was probably widespread among parents of the post-war Baby Boom. I decided back then that I was not a baby, and I would always make a serious effort to keep the two dimensions separate.

Writing, whether one gets published or not, is a marvellous outlet for imagination. I like to think I can stay in touch with reality because I can escape to an imaginary world whenever I want to.

This brings me to a breakup that has been on my mind since early March 2020, when no one was hibernating at home. I had a gay-male friend, a polished drag queen. He was/is also a gifted raconteur, on and off a stage. In fact, I learned years ago that my friend (I’ll call him Puck) liked to dominate conversations, and that trying to change the subject was usually futile. At least his stories were always funny or dramatic.

Then he came very close to telling me that he had the missing original final piece of the Bayeux Tapestry (or Embroidery), which tells the story of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066.
According to Puck, he was visiting England when someone offered to sell him an old piece of embroidered cloth as a souvenir, and he bought it. He didn’t seem to remember the name of it, but when I prompted him, he said that was probably it.

This story troubled me more than any previous anecdote from Puck’s repertoire. I told my spouse that if something that valuable were really in the private possession of a tourist, a British historian would probably like to see it. But then, I hadn’t seen it myself, I know there are reproductions, and it was none of my business.

Then Puck told me that he and his husband would probably be adopting a little girl because her father (a friend of his) had died, and the girl’s mother was a nymphomaniac drug addict who neglected her. According to the story, the mother was inviting men to line up outside her house to take turns in her assembly-line bed, in full view of her child. Apparently she wasn’t charging admission, but she also didn’t hold a paid job, or spend any time cooking or cleaning.

I had already heard versions of this story, as circulated by some men about their ex-wives or girlfriends, or about women who have turned them down. This was my ex-husband’s description of me in the 1970s.

The slut of legend usually sounds like an X-rated cartoon, or a character in a porn flick which was made for laughs. She has no human limitations, and is imagined as a voracious cunt. (I vaguely remember a horror story by Clive Barker about a woman like this, a victim of her own plumbing.) The people who spread this story have never seen the slut in action, but they assure their audience that the story comes from a reliable source.

I expressed doubt about this tragic scenario when I heard it. I suspected it was invented by the child’s father, while alive.

Meanwhile, Puck’s impending adoption of a child seemed to be the talk of the LGBT community. The next time I saw him, I asked how this process was going. He told me that actually, the mother had custody and seemed to be doing an adequate job of raising her child. According to Puck, he had been lied to about this.

I stewed about this situation, then expressed my feelings in an email to Puck. I explained that I had been a victim of a similar smear campaign, run by my ex-husband, now also deceased. I explained that the death of the person who launches the Story of the Slut doesn’t kill the story as long as it is being passed on. The resemblance of a malicious rumour to a deadly virus seems too obvious to need pointing out.

Puck apologized, said he considered me a friend, and said he never intended to hurt ME. I’m sure he didn’t, but I wasn’t his primary victim. I haven’t responded to the apology.

So here we are. Much as I enjoy interesting stories, I wish all creative types would avoid passing off their own and others’ fantasies as truth. A good story has value on its own, and the best stories, even speculative fiction, are 1) plausible, and 2) about characters with personalities.

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