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Jean Roberta

Telenovela, or Inspiration

by | November 28, 2015 | | 4 Comments

by Jean Roberta

Alas, I missed my day to post. And I’ve almost missed my day of grace (the day after my day to post and before the next regular blogger is due to post).

Here is the situation: through my spouse (who originally came to Canada as a political refugee from Chile), I know some other people in the local Spanish-speaking community, most of whom were also political refugees from various hot spots (Central America has been exporting people for decades). Spouse and I know a family in crisis: the parents came here in the 1970s, and raised two children who now have children of their own. The husband/father passed away over 10 years ago, and the widow has been declining in several ways ever since. Several months ago, a group of us realized that she needed urgent help, but we weren’t sure what to do. Despite her insistence that she didn’t need or want help/charity/interference, we got the son on board. Luckily, he has a key to his mother’s uninhabitable house, and with another member of the group, he got her to a hospital earlier this week. When she arrived, it wasn’t clear if she would live through the night.

The whole group, including me, has spent as much time as possible with the widow in the hospital, when we’re not at work. The events of this week have seemed like a telenovela, a Latin American soap opera. (Watching these dramas is the best way to learn Spanish, IMO.)

Is there a message in this real-life epic? I don’t know yet. Whether this play is a tragedy or a comedy will probably depend on the outcome. In any case, some of the details will probably find their way into something I write in the future.

For the meanwhile, please accept my apologies for not commenting on the writing process or the publishing biz. Sometimes life interferes.

The Censor's Dilemma

by | October 27, 2015 | | 4 Comments

by Jean Roberta

Selena Kitt’s clear expose of the “Pornocalypse” of hard-to-find erotic titles on the Amazon site reminds me of my uncomfortably educational stint on the local Film Classification Board in the early 1990s. Yes, folks, I belonged to a government-run board with the power to ban films.

I was a single mother, and desperate for any job that paid, a situation which could make almost anyone vulnerable to demonic temptation. A sister-feminist of my acquaintance told me about the position on the classification board that she had just vacated; she claimed that all the porn films she had been forced to watch had given her nightmares. I sympathized, and tried to ask as discreetly as possible what, exactly, had kept her awake at night: serial killers in masks chasing terrified women with chainsaws? The torture of political prisoners? My acquaintance was both vague and indignant: it was porn, and therefore an expression of contempt for women. Wouldn’t that be enough to give any woman nightmares?

I recklessly applied for the position on the board, and was accepted. I was told that I would need to watch films in a basement screening room with a few other board members for only a few days per month, and I would be paid a “per diem” to cover my “expenses.” This was not to be referred to as a salary, so I agreed not to call it that.

I watched numerous short porn films that had been seized from places with names like “Joe’s Gas and Confectionary.” The worst aspect of the films, IMO, was the relative lack of originality or esthetic value in them. There was usually a soundtrack of elevator music, and a well-worn plot about a horny housewife and a pizza delivery boy, or a naughty co-ed and her manly professor. The actors usually recited their lines as though reading them off cue cards. There was no torture, and no overt use of force.

Several of the films I watched were (somewhat) witty parodies of mainstream films (e.g. Edward Penishands). They combined sex with humour, not the degradation of the innocent.

I soon learned that while all mainstream Hollywood movies had to be viewed and rated by us, the classification board, before they could be shown in movie theatres in the Canadian province I live in, the rating of porn videos was complaint-driven. This meant that if no one complained, Joe’s Gas could stock unrated porn films for sale or rental, and life went on. If someone complained to the police (in small towns here, this consists of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police), they would hand over the entire stock of porn films from Joe’s Gas to us, the film police, to rate or to declare illegal.

The Film Classification Board was not equipped to rate every single porn film that entered a fairly large (geographically speaking) Canadian province from elsewhere. (As far as I knew, none of it was locally-produced.) There was just too much of it for six board members to view, discuss, and classify. This meant that any irate mother who caught her teenage son watching a film he had secretly rented from Joe’s Gas had enormous power to force Joe to hand over his entire stock, without compensation, to the Authorities (the police or us) and with no guarantee that it would all be given back to him. At the time I joined the board, it was in the process of reviewing a stash of over 900 films that had been seized from one retail outlet.

In a nutshell, anyone who claimed that the Film Classification Board was standing guard over the morals of the entire province was delusional. No one who actually sat on the board could believe that we could classify every piece of film available. Our role was to give an appearance of protecting “community values,” whatever those were, and to actually protect the politicians above us in the government from having to answer sticky questions from the public about what they were doing to stem the tide of “porn,” or why they were trying to limit what local consumers could read or watch.

Discussions with fellow board-members were informative. None of them was an anti-sex fanatic, as far as I could see, but all of them seemed to think we could make decisions that no sensible person could disagree with. The problem is that most people consider themselves to be sensible, neither prudish nor pathological, yet even in a relatively small population, there is large diversity of opinions about the depiction of sex.

Amazon, as a huge purveyor of books and related products, is highly visible to zillions of netsurfers. Although Amazon is a private company, not a branch of government like a film classification board, its administration probably feels the pressure to please a large, middle-of-the-road buying public that really does not exist. Given the quantity of items sold by Amazon, I suspect they have no coherent policy on what should be kept on a back shelf behind a curtain and what should be advertised from the rooftops.

In 1755, after an author and thinker named Samuel Johnson had produced the first “modern” English dictionary, a lady reader complained to him about the “improper” words in it. To his credit, Sam did not offer to pull them out of the next edition, but then, he wasn’t trying to earn a living from the sale of that book alone. Had he been more dependent on public opinion in general, Sam probably would have waffled, apologized, tried to blame an irresponsible typesetter, or promised that the offending words would be removed forthwith.

The problem with censors is not that they all have a fascist agenda to control the whole world, but that they try to please everyone in order to avoid negative publicity. If a certain book is available, someone will be offended. If it is suddenly made unavailable, someone else will be offended.

In effect, most censors are politicians who try to appeal to the largest number of voters by speaking in soothing generalities. Like politicians, censoring organizations need to be watched.
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The Passing of a Visionary

by | September 26, 2015 | | 1 Comment

by Jean Roberta

Since it’s my turn to post here today, I would just like to note the sad passing of an amazing photographer, Honey Lee Cottrell, on September 21, at the too-young age of 69.

Honey Lee, Tee Corinne (who is already gone) and JEB (Joan Biren), were a kind of Holy Trinity of photographers and visual artists who created the look of lesbian visual representation from the late 1970s through the 1990s. Anyone who has seen a lesbian sex manual or erotic magazine (particularly On Our Backs) from that era has seen their work.

Words can’t convey how these three pioneers managed to bring the previously-unspeakable eroticism of women with women into visual form. Those of us who lived far away from any queer mecca (San Francisco, parts of New York) were given hope by these women’s artwork to believe that nirvana might actually exist somewhere, or that it was coming into being.

In the 1980s, here in a government town on the Canadian prairie, I worked for minimum wage in a collectively-run “alternative” bookstore. (It was founded by a husband and wife who loved science fiction.) I was proud of the small lesbian section that featured books that managed to sneak across the border from Bookpeople (a major distributor in California), despite the efforts of Canada Customs to stop all “obscene” material from entering Canada from elsewhere. Every time I saw the latest issue of On Our Backs, carefully packed at the bottom of a box by someone who knew the score, I was thrilled. Honey Lee Cottrell’s unusual erotic subjects smiled back at me as if to say that eventually, we would all have our place in the sun.

I hope she is now in a place as beautiful as she ever imagined.

Sorting Out

by | September 26, 2015 | | 2 Comments

by Jean Roberta

This weekend, I have several big jobs to do, and I’m fairly sure I won’t finish them all. Unfortunately, none of them involves writing fiction.

1) I need to make a dent in my To Be Read list of books for review. The book that is most accessible to me physically is a hardcover anthology of fabulous (in every sense) lesbian sci-fi, just out from Lethe Press. In due course, I’ll post my review somewhere on-line, with a link on Facebook.

2) I really need to finish writing a first draft of my proposal for a book project for the university where I teach, so I can get time off to work on it. This book, which already has a publisher, will be about censorship, broadly speaking, not only the official kind imposed by governments but the mob-rule kind imposed by organizations which supposedly rebel against governments. The publisher wants me to focus on eyewitness events, for which I was present or involved. Egad. I have a mass of material that needs to be summarized in a logical way.

3) I need to start reading the pile of student essays that were handed in to me on Friday. The essays are on the short stories I’m teaching in a first-semester English class. The student efforts I’ve seen so far are not completely garbled, or incoherent, but they need work. It’s my job to explain how they could be improved, not because I want students to say exactly what I want them to say, but because I want them to express themselves as clearly as possible.

4) Later today, an expert in decluttering (who runs a business doing this) will arrive to help me tackle the basement of my house, which reminds me of a jungle or a war zone full of landmines. Ms. Declutter is a friend of my stepson, and she has been polite about the mess so far. I’m afraid we’ll probably have to take everything out of the basement to make sure we can find and destroy all the black mould. (I killed a large patch of it with bleach last week, and was lectured by my whole family for doing this without a mask or gloves.)

Looking at this intimidating to-do list, I see what all these tasks require: discrimination or judgment. Writing anything, fiction or non-fiction, requires the same skills that enable a person to create order in a house. What’s important needs to be identified and put in an appropriate place. What’s less important needs to be used to support or enhance the important stuff. What is not needed has to be discarded without mercy. No “maybe I can fix it and use it later.” If it’s taking up too much space, it has to go.

Reading an amazing collection of sci-fi stories, most by veteran writers, and then reading the writing of undergraduates in a mandatory English class, is a study in contrasts. Good writers demonstrate by example what works and what doesn’t work.

To show what I mean, here is the opening scene of “Eldritch Brown Houses” by Claire Humphrey in Daughters of Frankenstein (Lethe Press):

“This is Salem at its oldest and spookiest: cold fog off the ocean, daylight dimming early, gables and gombrels looming at odd angles. I’m gazing out from the upstairs window of the Corwin place, from beside a case of age-yellowed cloth dolls. The streets are empty except for the tail-lights of a single car, receding.”

Don’t you want to read the rest of this story? All the details in this paragraph, from the physical atmosphere to the vintage architecture to the aged dolls to the one modern car that is going away, combine to create a unified effect.

By contrast, a typical student essay reads somewhat like this:

“I am going to write about a story called “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman which is in a big book for my English class. This story was written in the 18th century.
[Note: students often confuse the 1800s, or nineteenth century, with the one before. It’s all in the past, and who cares about the difference?]
This story has a first-person viewpoint. It is about a woman who is depressed because she just had a baby. Her husband is a doctor named John. They go to stay in a house in the country for the summer. Some people think the house is haunted, but I don’t think so.”

Do you want to read the rest of this essay? Please, for me? I didn’t think so. Note the scatter-gun effect. What does the viewpoint, the character’s depression or the husband have to do with ghosts, or the illusion of ghosts?

In my comments on the student assignment, I will have to be more articulate than the student. I will have to explain that all the information in the opening paragraph can be used in some way, but it all needs to support the student writer’s thesis, that this story is NOT about ghosts. The widespread perception of contemporary readers (from the time of first publication) that the story IS about ghosts – or even demonic possession — needs to be debunked.

When dealing with a mass of material, in the form of notes, ideas, or physical objects, I need to apply my own advice to myself. What effect am I aiming for? What could be added, and what needs to be pulled out? If I have good material, how should it be arranged for best results?

It’s easier said than done, but just naming the challenge ahead is a good first step.

Other writing instructors before me have pointed out that half the job of writing is editing. Many writers before me have found this part to be the “work” of writing (as distinct from the “play”), but it can’t be avoided, and it can be as much a journey of discovery as the typing of a first sentence.

To those involved in a parallel process of shaping a work of creative writing, I say: Don’t give up! Be equally ruthless with irrelevant details and with the black mould of writer’s block. You are not alone.

Here Be Dragons

by | August 26, 2015 | | 8 Comments

b Jean Roberta

Much has been written about writer’s block, the internal censor, and various other personal demons that interfere with the flow of inspiration. J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter novels, conceived of story-killing depression as a group of evil characters called Dementors and included them in the plot so that she could write around them, so to speak.

The last few posts here have dealt with some of the external factors, or impersonal demons, that discourage writers. Changes in the publishing industry that have resulted in dwindling rates of pay and a dwindling market for innovative work, plus the free-for-all of self-publishing, can make it look almost impossible to have a writing career.

Aside from (or in addition to) all that, broad and clichéd writers’ guidelines are unhelpful. I’ve read too many messages on publishers’ sites that say something like this: “We set up shop because we thought it was time for someone to publish interesting work that engages the reader. We like believable characters, strong plots, and fresh language. We are completely different from all other publishers.” Sometimes a shortened version of this (“Enter the unique world of XYZ Press!”) appears below an editor’s name on a rejection message. More honest guidelines advise writers to read what XYZ has already published to get a sense of what they accept.

Harassment is another thing that seems guaranteed to harm any sensitive person – as writers tend to be, since we need to be attuned to our own consciousness and our own emotional climate. Some sites, both on-line and in the real world of writers’ events, need to be marked like medieval maps with images of dragons in the wild places.

During my annual two months off from teaching, when I hope to achieve phenomenal word-counts per day, and make at least a good start on a book or two, I’ve disappointed myself. Self-doubt has set in, as usual. When I’m surrounded by students and colleagues, I dream of having the time and solitude to write. Alone in a room with a computer, some notes, and a list of calls-for-submissions, I wonder if I am too out of touch with the general zeitgeist to write anything that would be meaningful for anyone else.

If I’m below the radar, however, I’m less likely to be a target for attack than writers who engage more regularly with on-line commentators. During the past few months, while taking part in an awards contest as a judge and co-editing a “best-of” anthology, I’ve become aware of feuds, sock-puppet identities, and the trashing of writers by other writers. I know it’s possible to grow a thick-enough skin to appear impervious to insults, but I’m not sure it’s possible to prevent unexpected hostility from wrecking one’s concentration. Recovery probably requires disconnecting from the on-line world, at least temporarily.

I sometimes wonder how to develop tough-minded resistance to rejection, snark, bad reviews and threats of violence while staying open to new ideas and editing advice. I wonder if any writer has really achieved that kind of balance.

The book I’m supposed to be writing is a work of creative non-fiction (to use a broad term) on “censorship” in various forms, focusing on my personal experience. A local publisher is waiting to read my approach to political conflicts in the writing/publishing world. Reading about vicious trashing which has not affected me directly reminds me of less-drastic ideological conflicts in my “real” life during the past twenty years.

I’ve written here before about a persistent belief on the political Left that grammar is inherently racist and elitist, that the best writing is “free” (an unedited stream of consciousness), and that language should float somewhere above the specific cultures that produce it. This set of beliefs drives me crazy. I can’t agree that the most incoherent student essays are beautiful in their own way. Saying this in public, however, seems likely to get me banished by the cool kids.

Then there is the more traditional objection to anything written by or about those who are not white, male, heterosexual, and “normal.” This bias shows up in the form of some editors,’ publishers,’ and reviewers’ preferences for work written by and about white men, and in complaints within the Ivory Tower that academic standards have slipped because of the introduction of “women’s studies” and “queer” and “ethnic” or international programs.

Traditional bias can seem to come from different directions, but it is always based on the same theme. As a teenage writer, I was warned by my boyfriend at the time that I should write about boys, not girls, so that my writing would appeal to more readers. As a graduate student in the local English Department, I argued with my academic father AND my faculty advisor about “women’s lit.” My father’s themesong was, “What’s wrong with Shakespeare?” as though I wanted to remove every Shakespeare play and poem from the curriculum to make room for the work of unknown women, and possibly for gangsta rap.

Defenses of a traditional literary “canon” as the only literature worth reading seem as long-lived as the racism of 1910. This stuff is the blood-sucking vampire or the rotting zombie that will not go away quietly, and which can’t be killed with logic.

For better or worse, I will soon enter the circus of Fall Semester in the university where I teach. For academics as well as Jews, September is really the beginning of the year. I’m hoping the new and the fresh (new students, some new colleagues, newish subject-matter, cooler temperatures) will be inspiring.

Somehow, in spite of everything, I’m never completely silenced. Many other writers continue writing as well, and I know from reading their work that the Muses aren’t stingy with their blessings. To keep going, it seems as if we all have to cherish a level of optimism that looks naïve on the surface. I like the statement that things always turn out well in the end because if they aren’t going well, it isn’t the end.

In Search of That Golden Feeling

by | July 25, 2015 | | 8 Comments

by Jean Roberta

I learned a new word recently, and that’s always a good thing for a writer.

While reading a list of available books for review that was sent to me by Dr. RS, long-term editor of The Gay & Lesbian Review (Massachusetts, formerly produced at Harvard University), I noticed this title:
Love’s Refraction: Jealousy and Compersion in Queer Women’s Polyamorous Relationships by Jillian Deri (University of Toronto Press, 2015).

I asked RS if I could have it for review. He said I could, but he suggested that a shorter review might be better than a longer one, even though another member of his posse of reviewers had advised him to devote a theme issue to polyamory. He suggested to me that any book with the word “compersion” in the title is probably too abstract and obscure for readers of a scholarly queer magazine.

He sent me the book anyway, and I soon learned that “compersion” means the opposite of jealousy: a feeling of shared joy that results when one’s lover acquires a new playmate or friend-with-benefits. The fact that “compersion” is less-well known than “jealousy” is a clear sign that in Western society, only monogamous couples are considered normal, and that jealousy (even when it inspires murder) is assumed to be the normal reaction to any violation of the monogamous bond.

Even for those who have been “out” as gay men, lesbians, bisexuals or transpeople for many years, the dominant model of sexual/romantic commitment has enormous gravitational pull. RS’s comments about the large, fascinating concept of polyamory showed what looks to me like a queer (inconsistent) streak of conservatism. Although we have been exchanging emails for years about books which may or may not have relevance for an educated LGBT audience, we haven’t had any direct philosophical debates about our personal moral codes for engaging in sexual/romantic relationships.

RS did tell me that he considers polyamory to be a largely imaginary condition, i.e. many more people think about it than put it into practise. This seemed to be his main quibble about running a theme issue: is there an actual polyamorous community? If so, where are these people? (When I mentioned the above book to a friend and colleague who grew up on the West Coast of Canada, he suggested that all the women who were interviewed for the book probably live on Commercial Drive in Vancouver.)

When I mentioned RS’s quibble to the local director of the campus LGBT center, s/he (born female, now identifying as male) laughed and said he could put me in touch with quite a few folks who identify as polyamorous, if I want to interview them for a theme issue of The Gay & Lesbian Review. Egad – I already have enough writing to do, even during my summer break from teaching, but what an intriguing research project. The journalist/researcher side of me wants to meet as many polyamorists as possible, and hear more about how compersion actually feels, since I’m fairly sure I haven’t felt it myself.

If there is a thriving community of practising polyamorists in the small city/large town where I live (population about 200,000, government seat of a Canadian prairie province and home of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police), there is probably a bigger tribe of them under RS’s nose in Massachusetts. Their reasons for keeping a low profile seem painfully obvious to me. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that divorce, the sex trade, and homosexuality couldn’t be mentioned on television.

One of the reasons suggested itself when my spouse (the woman with whom I’ve lived for 26 years) asked why I was reading that book, and why the topic interests me. Her anxiety was clear: was I suddenly planning to hook up with women, or men, or both? If so, was I simply going through a kind of post-menopausal frenzy, or was I planning to embrace a new lifestyle? If I was standing on the edge of a cliff, contemplating a leap onto a dozen mattresses already occupied by welcoming bodies, was I planning to discard her as an outworn First Wife?

I assured her that my interest is scholarly, more or less: as an erotic writer, I have already described polyamorous relationships that are intended to last for a lifetime, but I need more information about how such complex connections actually work, and why/when they don’t.

Lest my spouse sound more suspicious or insecure than I am, reading this book has reminded me of painful experiences in my dating past, when “I’d like to see other people” generally meant “We’re done, so get lost.” Women, in particular, are raised in most cultures to be polite and avoid scenes, which might be good training for humans in general, except when it prevents honest communication. The women I dated before the beginning of my current relationship in 1989 often tried to leave me behind by dropping hints and pulling away rather than by rejecting me directly. Their ambiguous behavior included “friends” who suddenly seemed to occupy so much of their time that they hardly had any left for me – but when I asked, they would assure me that we were still an item, and they certainly weren’t breaking up with me. I would rather march through a field of stinging nettles than go back into that swamp of doubt, dread, humiliation, and resentment.

Re the possibility of my spouse jumping off a cliff onto the mattresses below, I’m sure she could find welcoming bodies down there. In her sixties, she is still attractive, engaging, and a long-term community organizer who seems known to half the town. Years ago, when she made an unusual visit to the local queer bar by herself, she was apparently enticed by a male/female couple who regularly trolled the bar for individuals (usually female) to join them for threesomes. Apparently they assured Spouse that they would treat her well and that she had nothing to fear, but (according to her account the next day), she was turned off by their unvarnished lust, and said no. When I heard this story, my feelings were more mixed. Of course they found her appealing, which validated my taste. I knew who they were, and they had never approached me that way – was I less of a babe? What if she had said yes, and what if the couple had wanted to see her regularly, without me? Hookups that turn out to be peak experiences are not guaranteed to stay casual. I was relieved by her ironclad refusal to even consider it.

Reading a book seems safe enough. And I’m committed to the belief that knowledge, even when it’s painful, is usually better than ignorance, even when it’s comforting. For the foreseeable future, I’m willing to continue down a path of asking questions and seeking answers. Comments welcome.

Dressing the Part

by | June 26, 2015 | | 4 Comments

by Jean Roberta

Do you think about your characters’ clothing when you write erotic stories or poetry? As a girl who spent her formative years cutting out pattern pieces and sewing them together to make (hopefully) chic ensembles for myself, I am often disappointed by descriptions of clothing in the erotica I read. Either there is just enough information to emphasize the body underneath (cleavage-revealing tops and short or slit skirts on the heroine, trousers on the hero that bulge noticeably at the crotch), or there is a detailed description of clothing with no indication of what it actually signifies to the contemporary viewer. (A swimsuit at the beach is expected. A swimsuit in an office would probably be considered scandalous, and the wearer would be expected to explain his/her relative nudity. In historical fiction, a maid and a duchess –or a stableboy and a duke — would not be dressed alike, unless one were trying to pass for the other.)

I’ve been thinking about clothing ever since I agreed to review a fascinating book, Sex and Unisex: Fashion, Feminism, and the Sexual Revolution by Jo B. Paoletti, a professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland. The author has written several books on the sociological significance of fashion, including Changes in the Masculine Image in the United States, 1880-1910(her Ph.D. thesis, 1980) and Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America (2012).

The current book, Sex and Unisex, is about the drastic changes of fashion that took place in the 1960s and early 1970s, led by innovative designers, who were mostly gay men (although this was never openly mentioned at the time), and the hordes of teenagers and young adults who had been born just after the Second World War, and who wanted to look different from their parents.

As a member of that generation, who shopped for clothing patterns the way my classmates shopped for 45-rpm vinyl records of the latest Top Tunes, I am so glad that a scholar has analyzed trends which, at the time, were routinely dismissed as trivial, but which often produced over-the-top reactions from those in authority.

One current myth about the 1960s that Paoletti debunks is that girls and women were not allowed to wear pants (trousers) until some brave individuals (feminists and/or lesbians) paved the way for the rest of us. Contemporary images from mail-order and pattern catalogues show “play clothes” for boys and girls under the age of puberty that look identical. Little girls, especially in the U.S., could wear Western-style shirts with jeans and even add a holster with a toy gun, and this look was socially acceptable all through the 1950s and 1960s. There was a practical reason for advertising unisex clothing for the under-12 set: families of the Baby Boom tended to be large, so parents appreciated sturdy clothes that could be passed down to a sister from a brother, or vice versa.

Pants for adult women were also widely accepted – in the right social context. Images of Marilyn Monroe and other Hollywood bombshells from the 1950s and early 1960s in snug “pedal pushers” were titillating, but not really considered obscene. At the time, these photos presumably showed what the stars looked like in the privacy of their homes, in “casual dress.”

Puberty was a dividing-line, and so were school and church, as distinct from the playground, the campground, and the suburban neighborhood. Girls who had developed womanly curves were expected to wear skirts and dresses much more than formerly, and most schools (public and private) had a dress code that demanded skirts on girls from kindergarten on. The rationale was that pants on girls (and denim pants on anyone) were “casual dress,” and students of both genders were supposed to take the educational process seriously. (Note that denim pants were originally sold to men with strenuous physical jobs, so the widespread adoption of jeans as a middle-class teenage uniform could be seen as a shocking rejection of white-collar respectability as well as a refusal to grow up.)

Needless to say, religion was also taken seriously, so attendance at church or temple required gender-specific attire: suits for little gentlemen, dresses for little ladies. Special events (first communion, weddings, high-school proms, even extended-family dinners at home on holidays) required formal, gender-specific clothing on everyone, from the youngest to the oldest.

The spread of jeans and mini-skirts, feminist rebellion against traditional gender roles, and the “sexual revolution,” which accelerated after the invention of the birth-control pill in 1969, all progressed at approximately the same time. This is probably why minor variations in style (the length/shortness of girls’ skirts, the length/shortness of boys’ hair) were thought to represent philosophical positions that the Establishment was not willing to accept.

I’ll never forget my father’s explosion over my secretary outfit (as I thought of it) in the mid-1960s, when I was fourteen. I wanted to look like an independent woman working in an office. (My unmarried aunt was a secretary, and I imagined that this job involved a high salary and considerable decision-making power.) I made myself a straight skirt that ended just above my knees, with a back zipper and a kick-pleat for easy walking. It was made of pink wool, fully lined in acetate satin. (I knew the names of several famous designers, and I wanted to be Mary Quant when I grew up.) The skirt went with a long-sleeved blouse in a paisley-print polyester which I thought could pass for silk. The blouse had a notched collar and cuffs. Nothing about this ensemble violated the school dress code, so I couldn’t imagine why my parents would try to prevent me from wearing it to school.

I put on my new clothes to show my parents. My mother chewed her bottom lip while my father yelled loudly enough to be heard from the street. Neither parent seemed at all impressed with my dressmaking talent. The gist of my father’s sermon was that I was still a child, and therefore my outfit was inappropriate as well as indecent. He announced that I would never be allowed to wear it anywhere. (Later on, he seemed oblivious when I left the house in my new clothes.) Apparently, when my father saw me dressed like my idea of a secretary, he saw “Sex” written across my girlish bust, or my pink-wool-covered hips. He might also have seen “Pregnancy,” “Drugs” and “Bad Company.”

If possible, the boys who joined the “peacock revolution” in men’s clothing faced even more opposition. The threat of homosexuality was the elephant in the room which terrified fathers in grey flannel suits when their sons wore flashy shirts, open to the waist, with tight hiphugging pants and “long” hairstyles that included bangs and sideburns. Paoletti devotes a whole chapter to court cases in which young men fought a variety of institutions for the right to wear their hair any way they chose. For many employers, most school administrators, and virtually the whole top brass of every branch of the military, “long hair” on males represented everything that was likely to destroy civilization. The clothes that usually went with the hair just seemed to confirm the opinion of strait-laced elders that a whole generation of young men was refusing to accept adult responsibility, including the patriotic requirement to become warriors.

On the subject of length, I need to end this post before it becomes unreadably long. Suffice it to say that styles of presentation (including clothing, body types, hairstyles and facial appearance) in every era carry enormous symbolic baggage. Clothes are never just arrangements of fabric (or leather, metal, wood, or plastic). Wearers of controversial fashions can be accused of transmitting messages they never intended. Clothing styles of the past can be misunderstood as being either more or less radical than they were at the time.

When writing an erotic story, I am tempted to give too much information about what the characters are wearing, and I have to remind myself that a fashion show in words would probably be read as a digression from the action. Certain styles of face, hair and body display might also mean something different to the reader than they do to me. (My secretary outfit carried a horrifying message for my father than I didn’t even foresee at the time.)

Do you pay attention to the way characters display themselves in your reading-matter? As a writer, how do you approach this subject? Responses welcome.

The Objective Correlative

by | April 26, 2015 | | 5 Comments

by Jean Roberta

Teaching creative writing to young adults (second-year university students) is an instructive experience for the instructor as well as the students. Lately, I’ve been reading stories and poems that overflow with passion: usually the frustration of rejected love, or a desperate need for someone who responds with indifference. For someone who has had this experience for the first time, it must feel as monumental as Hamlet’s dilemma when he asks himself, “To be or not to be? That is the question.”

Let me state here for the record that I haven’t become too old or jaded to feel moved by expressions of anguish by young writers. I remember being their age, and my life didn’t run smoothly either.

However, my current frustration with student writing is triggered by extreme expressions of emotion that seems way out of proportion to the situation, as set forth in the work itself. Readers can empathize with Hamlet because we know that he came home from university to find that his father had died under mysterious circumstances, and his uncle had suddenly married his mother. If such things happened in our own lives, we probably wouldn’t be happy.

The writer T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) wrote a famous essay setting forth his theory that emotion expressed by characters in literature should always be based on an “objective correlative,” some circumstance that makes it seem logical and appropriate to the reader. (He complained that Shakespeare didn’t really succeed at that in Hamlet.)

Poetry by beginning writers often looks like a stream of consciousness, focusing on negative feelings. This semester, I’ve noticed a lot of screaming in student poems. (“I could have screamed, “Screaming, I cried.” “I screamed at the dark sky.”) In most cases, the cause of the screaming is briefly referred to, and it doesn’t seem to me to justify such an extreme reaction.

I’ve been looking for the objective correlative, often in vain. This can be a sensitive topic to bring up with student writers that I interact with in person. I don’t really want to know all the details of their lives, and some things are none of my business. I don’t care whether the events in their work have been made up; making up stuff is what creative writing is all about. However, I don’t want to read page after page of first-person descriptions of screaming that seem to be “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

I’ve read erotica that reads that way too. An attractive stranger walks into a room, and the first-person observer almost comes. I’m willing to let the writer take me into his/her imaginary world, but I need to be persuaded. If the observer woke up feeling horny, having dreamed about sex all night, her/his reaction to the attractive stranger would make sense, and I would probably accept it.

Maybe the attractive stranger looks exactly like a celebrity that the observer has admired for years, or maybe like an old crush. Maybe the “stranger” really is the old crush, and he/she has matured into a more glamorous, more successful person than before. All this could make the observer’s reaction not only logical, but almost inevitable. But the reader/voyeur needs to know the details.

Screaming in orgasm is likely to be a peak experience for the screamer. It’s probably something that doesn’t happen each time the person has sex. So if this happens in a sex scene on a page that I’m reading, I need to know what is unusual about this conjunction of bodies. The stars must have been aligned in just such a way that the friction feels exquisite.

I’m sure I’ve rushed into sex scenes in my own writing, especially when pressed for time. When the deadline for a call-for-submissions was last week and I’ve been given an extension by a generous editor, the characters need to get it on, fast. However, if a story or a poem doesn’t work for readers in general, or if the piece only makes sense to those who know the writer’s personal history, it just doesn’t work. I’m grateful to my students for reminding me of that.
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Passing Judgment

by | March 27, 2015 | | 3 Comments

by Jean Roberta

Every writer who has hoped to win a prize, but didn’t, should serve a kind of literary jury duty by volunteering to be a judge in a book award contest. It’s much like being an editor, except that the only payment is fame, glamour, and a sense of accomplishment. 🙂

Last May, I went to the Bisexual Book Awards in New York City, a fun event at which the finalists read from their work. (My “bawdy novella,” The Flight of the Black Swan, was nominated, and so was Twice the Pleasure, an anthology of bisexual women’s erotica, edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel, in which I have a story, “Operetta,” which one reviewer called “a meringue.”) I didn’t seriously expect to win anything, since this is the best attitude to adopt at such times, and I didn’t. However, I was invited to be one of the judges in the “Erotica” category of the awards for books published in 2014. (The ceremony will be at the end of May 2015.)

I was grateful for the honour, and I accepted. Little did I know that over the coming months, 22 books (most in the form of PDFs) would arrive in my inbox and my actual mailbox. They were more diverse than some readers might expect, although writers of erotica generally know how broad our field is. Francesca Lia Block and Alison Tyler of Los Angeles were among the authors of nominated books, and one book was set in Canada. There was BDSM and a multicultural cast of characters. There was historical fiction and suspense. There was magic and shapeshifting, not all of it cute. There was lightness (more meringues) as well as heaviness and graphic murder. There were several self-published books, and several from publishers I hadn’t heard of before; I found this informative.

Meanwhile, in my actual life, there were student essays to grade, pets to feed, meals to cook, and floors to mop. (My spouse and I have been the official cleaning ladies of the local LGBT bar/watering hole for several months. We get paid in money and compliments from bar patrons who find relief in washrooms that show no signs of the previous night’s debauchery.)

The deadline for the Erotica judges’ decisions was March 15, a Sunday. This meant a three-day marathon of reading for me and, I suspect, for the other three judges, one of whom politely resigned due to a personal emergency.

Living in the imaginary world of one novel can be a delightful experience, best enjoyed on a beach or a luxury hotel room. Rushing from the imaginary world of one novel to the next, 22 times, is like being a lunatic or a mystic who can’t turn off the voices in her head. Some of the books were – ahem – more effective on my libido than others, but I didn’t want the state of my crotch to be the determining factor in my decisions.

I added criteria of my own to the official guidelines. I ruled out several books that were thinly-disguised (or undisguised) examples of m/m erotic romance with no sex scenes involving women. One of these novels, in particular, was well-written, moving, believable, and was part of a series starring intelligent, compassionate, three-dimensional characters who change over time. However, I needed a somewhat objective way to eliminate titles until I was left with a choice that could qualify as bisexual in every sense, as well as being quality literature.

None of the books I read seemed to dramatize the tired old joke that bisexuals will jump on anything that moves. Few of them seemed to be written by horny teenagers. Bisexuality, it seems, has come of age.

I asked for a time extension of one day, but I was reminded that the judging had to be wrapped up, sooner than later. When I exchanged emails with the remaining two judges and the organizer, I was surprised at how much overlap there was among our choices for the top five finalists. One novel, in particular, appealed to all of us, so we reached a bloodless agreement to name it the winner.

So now my role in the decision-making is over, and I’m waiting – along with all the authors of nominated books – for the public announcement of the winners in all the categories of the Bisexual Book Awards, which will undoubtedly be scheduled (as it was in 2014) close to the Lambdalit Awards so that writers and fans can attend both.

One thing I know beyond a doubt is that judging, no matter how many rules the judges impose on themselves, is always subjective. And of course, the more nominees there are, the more competition there is.

If your book was nominated for a book award of any kind, but you didn’t win, don’t fret. It’s not you, it’s us.
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Fireworks of Yore

by | February 26, 2015 | | 5 Comments

by Jean Roberta

Erotica, fantasy and historical fiction seem to overlap in all sorts of delicious ways. If there is a fairy tale left in any of the traditional collections that has not yet been rewritten in a sexually-explicit version – or several – it must be fairly obscure. Greek and Roman mythology have also been heavily mined for modern-day erotic plots, and so have famous works of fantasy by known authors. The calls-for-submissions on this site usually include at least one that calls for stories about sex in the land of Faerie or on Mount Olympus.

So far, so good. However, much of the sex that occurred in Western culture in the actual past was necessarily forced or forbidden due to Christian laws. Any couplings that did not involve a husband and a wife had to be hidden, and were likely to result in drastic punishment for at least one partner if discovered. Marital sex was based on a husband’s legal ownership of his wife, who had no recognized right to refuse sex or pregnancy.

In short, what we know about traditional attitudes toward sex in the past few centuries is quite a bummer. (And on that note, laws against anal sex were widespread.)

Of course, fantasy literature doesn’t have to be based on historical reality. Authors and their characters can grow wings and fly away from anything that kills the buzz. But what if a certain authentic flavor is called for?

Ancient Greek and Roman myths and legends involve quite a bit of sex, even as written by contemporary Greek and Roman authors (Homer, Aristophanes, Ovid). However, the “affairs” of male gods, especially Zeus, tend to involve the capture and rape of mortal maidens, followed by further abuse by other deities (e.g. Zeus’s wife Hera) or mortal relatives. Attraction that is really mutual is likely to be illicit and therefore doomed.

Traditional British and European ballads, as recorded in a literate era (1700s-1900s), tend to be more violent than I remembered from having studied this material in the 1970s. I recently skimmed through one of my old textbooks, The Ballad Book, for inspiration, and found plots dealing with incest, with illegitimate, murdered babies, with the murders of women by the men who had seduced them, and of husbands by their wives, as well as a few lighthearted accounts of rape as a joke and abduction as a plot device. At one time, ballads were like tabloid newspapers for the common folk who couldn’t read or write. And as they say, no news is good news.

Then there are early written versions of older stories such as the Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Mallory of the 1400s, about King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. I recently skimmed through my old copy of this book after reading a call-for-submissions for “Arthurian” erotica.

The story of Arthur’s mother is intriguing in Mallory’s very brief version as well as in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s doorstop of an “Arthurian” novel, The Mists of Avalon. Igraine, before she becomes Arthur’s mother, is married to the Duke of Cornwall. He and the King of England, Uther Pendragon, wage war. Uther, aided by his court magician, Merlin, appears to Igraine disguised as her husband, “lies” with her, gets her pregnant, and then marries her after it is revealed that her husband was killed by the King’s forces before the crucial act in which Arthur was conceived. In due course, Arthur is able to establish his legitimacy as the rightful heir to King Uther.

Igraine’s feelings about all this are not recorded by Mallory. Does she ever love her husband, the Duke of Cornwall? If so, how does she feel after discovering that she has been deceived? Does she welcome her child by the imposter? (In Mallory’s version, Igraine has borne at least one earlier child, Arthur’s half-sister.)

In my version of the story, young Igraine is married to the much older Duke of Cornwall for diplomatic reasons, but King Uther has the “right of the first night” with the new bride. She finds him attractive, but she is still taken aback to discover that she is not to be deflowered by the man she has just wed. And then there is the siege in which the two men in Igraine’s life square off. Whatever the outcome, it will be bad news for at least one of them. Then there is the scene in which the King appears under a “glamor,” shouting a medieval version of “Honey, I’m home!” Does Igraine believe this man is really the Duke, her husband, or does something about him seem off? How does she react?

I sent my first version of this story to an editor, who responded by saying gracious things about my writing style, which she found suitable to the period. However, as she pointed out, the sex was not sexy enough. I saw the editor’s point. The problem seemed to be Igraine’s ambivalence. She needed to be more enthusiastic in the sex scenes with at least one of the men in her life. She couldn’t just be shown submitting to the inevitable.

Mutual orgasms – fireworks of the flesh – were required.

I did a substantial rewrite after getting the editor’s permission to ignore the original maximum word-count. I tried to show more ecstasy in the scenes of Igraine with the King, who is much more of a dream lover than one might expect because he is under a curse: a witch has ensured that if he ever ravishes an unwilling woman, he will die. To live long enough to beget an heir, he must become an accomplished seducer, and he must stop the moment his partner is really turned off. He has come to enjoy the challenge that this curse presents, and therefore he is in no hurry to be released from it.

Since the witch has placed her curse on King Uther’s whole army, an Age of Chivalry is born. Is this detail suitable to the historical period? Not on your life.

Like the inhabitant of a castle under siege, I am waiting for news about whether my story is now fit to survive the editor’s weeding-out process. I can only hope that the fantasy elements – specifically the female-centered sexual pleasure – don’t cancel out the period flavor.

Writing about Days of Yore appeals to me, but some aspects of the past simply don’t mesh with modern concepts of equality and consent. A touch of glamor seems necessary.
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Hot Chilli Erotica

Hot Chilli Erotica

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