From the monthly archives:

July 2004

Eee-yikes. Xeni emailed me this morning, about the Alabama sex toy case ruling setting the precedent that *the Constitution does not include the right to sexual privacy.* This is really bad. All this about a vibrator — and a vibrator sales sting operation, nonetheless! I wonder, was it called “Operation: Barefoot, Pregnant and in the Kitchen.”

But last night is what I really want to tell you about. After work, a friend and I swung by Good Vibes and we whisked over to North Beach, SF’s famous Italian district. Last night was the kickoff of the Jazz festival, which I think is the best Jazz festival in the world. It’s totally free, whereas other Jazzfests charge you $50 or what have you, and the music happens in bars, clubs, galleries, doorways, everywhere all over the neighborhood’s restaurant area. And the music is incredible, it always is, and last night I heard the straitlaced Marcus Shelby Orchestra, randomly discovered a smokin’ trio called Jilool (sounded like hip 60s movie music with jungle beats), and finished off the night with my favorite SF band (sorry EA), the 19-piece Realistic Orchestra. A trip to SF is complete when you see Realistic; with four trombones, four trumpets, a fat handful of saxophones, vibes, a DJ and a rapper, there’s nothing like them.

But though I had a blast hearing incredible live music for free, and my dinner at my favorite sidewalk cafe (cafe Prague) was terrific, the true highlight of my evening was the moment I finally lost my lapdance virginity. I may never be the same. (I don’t count my trip to the Mitchell Bros. as a lap dance — having a hard-titted stripper hump my belt buckle really fast and then jump up to say how weird it is to dance "for a girl" *so* doesn’t count.)

My friend and I were going from bar to bar, band to band, cocktail to cocktail, when we found ourselves walking by a club called the hungry i. We stopped and remarked that neither of us had been in this famous club, where Lenny Bruce made his name in 1959 — and with the promise of more cocktails and topless girls inside, I was compelled. I’ve always wanted to hang in a cheesy bar with scantily clad girls dancing in the background; it’s the influence of all those Russ Meyer films and the best worst movie of all time, Showgirls.

And I got the cheese I hoped for. Comfy, stained chairs beckoned inside the small club that was the size of the Good Vibes store, but with a stage along the side backed by mirrors and flanked by two brass poles. As we sat in the second row of chairs I realized that there were more women than men in the club — then I noticed that none of the women were porn Barbies, but a gorgeous array of sexy regular women. No silicone. It was a big surprise, and I noted that many of the women looked like Suicide Girls models, but without the tattoos and piercings; there were Goths, a rockabilly… was this for real? The fake smoke and garish lights only enhanced the atmosphere as I watched a very bored brunette lazily dance around the stage chewing gum while lackluster male patrons tossed a dollar or two on the stage. She was boring, but it was perfect, know what I mean?

Every once in a while a girl would come by and sit on my lap, or my male friend’s, and chat with us, but there was little pressure to buy anything. We were just hanging out, and the women were really nice to me. Way different than the all-business attitude at the Mitchell brothel, or when I got ignored at the Musty Lady.

We watched a bunch of different girls hit the stage, some were really fun to watch, some were not. Then one girl came on, and she was magnetic. Her body was a lot like mine, so I was instantly attracted to her, and under her schoolgirl attire she wore cute little hip-hugger boy shorts. Her dancing was slow and outrageously sensual; she closed her eyes and knew what felt good to show the audience.

She made eye contact with me, and held poses that looked like erotic photographs. I don’t even remember the music, but I’ll never forget the way her breasts looked when she pressed her chest to the stage floor and coiled her back up like an “S” Not explicit dancing, but very arousing nonetheless.

After, she came over and sat next to me and asked if I wanted a dance, or if we wanted one together. My friend offered to pay for me, but he had to get funds; the dancer — named Apple — sat with me. Apple! Her name was Apple.

She leaned in close, and we talked about a lot of things, including Lenny Bruce (“when guys are rude, I channel Lenny”). Apple was very excited to be my first lap dance, and moved me to the little half-couches in the back hall, directing my friend to sit away from us, but still within sight. Then she asked me about what brought my in, what my experiences with strip clubs had been like. After talking with me for a while to relax me, she told me to keep my hands at my sides and started. It was like I was the stage, and she slowly moved all over me, wrapping around me and touching the small of my back; pulling down my bra straps; leaning back on me and kissing my face, my neck. I bit my lip as she ground her beautiful, round ass into my crotch, and I fantasized that I was wearing a strap-on under my clothes — and about fucking her with a strap-on.

She did this for several songs, then slid over to sit by me again, ending the lapdance. I thanked her. Then we talked for a long time, about all kinds of things, from porn and filmmaking to dating girls and guys. She got prompted several times by staff to move on; I don’t know why she stayed to talk with me but I really enjoyed it. Then she walked me back over to my friend, told us she’d be happy to dance more, and off she went to work the room. The bartender brought me another beer, on the house. I was really worked up, and regrouped with my friend and my beer before heading over to the Velvet Lounge to see Realistic. And they were incredible, like Apple.

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Dyke Dolls

by violet blue on July 28, 2004

Just a cute quickie — Barbie, meet Bobbi. Does Bobbi come with a little plastic U-Haul?

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from passion of a goddessImage from Passion of A Goddess via Mormon Erotica).

I had dinner last night with my dear friend Alison Tyler; she’s such an awesome girl. We talked about how we’re both addicted to nonfiction books right now. And in fact, I’m deeply caught up in reading Under the Banner of Heaven, though I’m making the mistake of reading it before bed. I read passages in it last night that were so horrifying and blood-chilling that when I turned the light off, then actually had to turn it back on again and read something different. Scary.

Which was a sharp contrast to the nice Sunday afternoon I had. It started out with Hornboy and I talking about when “for women” porn sites promise that the men featured are “100% straight.” I have to wonder, how do they know? I mean, look at Playgirl, where I saw one of last month’s featured guys in a gay male porno, but in the magazine he was going on about how he just wants to find a lady to have long romantic evenings with. I mean, I totally get that straight women want to see straight guys naked, etc. I guess the truth would be complicated to market. It’s just that I wonder if the rampant homophobia in the straight porn industry, because it is “for men” hasn’t washed over to color what people think women want to see. Perhaps that is why bi porn is so badly handled by the industry, (even though it is so appealing and in high demand).

Take for instance a double penetration scene in straight porn. The gentleman I’m dating pointed out that while it’s okay for these guys to be fucking the same woman, it’s not okay for them to, as he so delicately put it, “slap balls.”

Acknowledging this accidental ball slap is out of the question. I said, yeah, in the mainstream porn industry they typically won’t even do certain positions, such as two-guy, one-girl, doggy-style because it means the two guys have to face each other. I’m told that most male performers detest this position, and directors get agitated and angry should the female performer insist on the position.

My date pointed out that it *is* okay for them to high-five, though. Then he got this look in his eyes… And came up with a brilliant idea: “What if I invent a DP [double penetration] ball-barrier, a little thick wall that’s a piece of plastic the girl wears to prevent the guys’ balls from touching?” We were laughing hysterically at this point and started imagining the bizarre details of marketing a fake product that would cater to the hypocrisy of homphobes’ real-life demands. I told him I’m at the ready for the product launch, to write fake testimonials for the website. On that note, we departed for the SOMA district to meet friends at the Dore Alley Fair, the smaller, less commercial version of SF’s famous S/M festival, the Folsom Street Fair. This is typically a mostly gay male, SF community event, and the local precursor to the bigger popular fair. But as you’ll see by the pictures (pictures are not work safe), it wasn’t so small after all…

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Granny’s Gone Wild

by violet blue on July 21, 2004

When I was in Colorado last weekend I found myself in lovely, beautiful Colorado Springs. By accident I happened to be there for their gay pride celebration, which by SF standards is more like a cute craft fair, but I discovered by Colorado Springs standards is a major leap into the modern era. Why? Because as it turns out, Colorado Springs is the home of that most warm and fuzzy organization, Focus on the Family.

Which made me excited. You see, FotF and I have a relationship — a special relationship. They started it — er, I mean, they made the first move. Regular readers will know this story, so bear with me. The time: about six months ago. There my Fellatio book was, in the library minding its own business, when a really creepy guy picked it up, found his, uh, passions to be inflamed, and took the book home against its poor little will. Then he stayed up all night torturing his Christian soul reading every page, every excruciating line. Then he called Focus on the Family, and they all had to get their own copies, and read every single line, too. Mysteriously, that’s when angry Christian reviews started appearing on Amazon, berating the book for its sinful ways, chastising it for its ungodly lifestyle, wishing the book would just go away and quit its evil job and work at Starbucks instead. Focus on the Family became a major player in the ensuing campaign to ban my book from libraries. So I had to visit their stronghold, I had to make a pilgrimage. And visit I did, a hilltop where their vast campus stretches far and wide, and quite eerily empty. I was eyed suspiciously by two security guards and three parked, empty cars as Hornboy took a photo.

On other fronts, I realized last night that I’m reading five books at once. I need to cut back. They are The Corrections, In a Sunburned Country, Under the Banner of Heaven, Stormy Weather, and Eats, Shoots and Leaves. But I adore Eats, Shoots and Leaves and never has a book rang so true to my professional experiences. I mean, in porn, and in sex writing from small publishers who annoyingly don’t bother to edit their authors, the punctuation and grammar often have me in fits ranging from despair to violence, often back and forth within the span of a minute. Porn boxes are the worst offenders. The criminals of the spelling and grammar underworld. These people shouldn’t be prosecuted for obscenity, but for depicting obscene acts against the English language. Nonconsensual apostrophe abuse. Word bastardization. Grammatical rape. An endless gangbang of inappropriate capitalizations. Here are a few examples:

Big Cock Maddness (spell check for boxcover titles, anyone?)
Interracial Sex at It’s Best (the apostrophe is there against its will)
Muff Diving Maidens (compound that ‘muff-diving’ unless a fuzzy little old-fashioned hand warmer is going swimming with the girls)
Bi-Lingual Interactive Sex (it wasn’t even a ‘bi-sexual’ title)
Assufication (huh!?)
She Gets Dirty Stripped Down Naked (the frightened missing comma doesn’t want to see her dirty or naked, apparently)
Smell it, Lick it, and Fuck it! (but the dirty little comma after the second ‘it’ wants a piece of *this* action)
Young Ripe Mellons (another boxcover title, another misspent youth)
Dives Into Jordan’s Cucchi (it must be one of those new designer coochies)
Girls Who Love 14′ Up Their Ass! (they are evidently really, really long girls)
An Idea Whose Time is Cumming! (my editor at Cleis would faint)
Young3sum (possibly also the AOL IM name of the sleazy director)
I Love’ Em Natural (the apostrophe is trying to escape)
Meat Pushin in the Seat Cushion (this lucky one got away)
Double Filled Cream Teens (proper useage: ‘double-filled’ unless it’s two teens filled with cream, or many teens filled with double cream)
Granny’s Gone Wild (is granny lost in the outback? has she gone feral?)

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My friend Thomas Roche has been in LA for exactly one week. Here is a sample reply to my queries about how things are going:

"The one thing I cannot change is the fucking weather, and I hate it. Sunny and beautiful? That is a crock of shit. It is hot, hazy and smells like ass, all the time. And remember how they tell you ‘Oh, the heat’s not bad, because everywhere in LA is air conditioned.’ But it is not. Nowhere is air conditioned. I walked into a 7-11 today and I thought I was going to pass out from the heat. It was like a fucking oven. Even places that have air conditioning don’t turn it on because they like it warm. Oh, it’s nice and toasty warm and it smells JUST LIKE ASS, how fucking WONDERFUL!!!!"

I sent Thomas these pictures to cheer him up (not work safe, big images). "I love those pictures. Maybe I can make movies like that some time soon. Right after the climate change when LA is buried under 10 feet of snow so I can stand it."

More, I guess he read my blog: "I WOULD NEVER SEND YOU AN "AGGRESSIVE" EMAIL, LET ALONE ONE IN ALL CAPS, AND I AM CERTAINLY NOT A "BEST-SELLER!!!!" IF YOU WANT ANY GIRL SCOUTS YOU BETTER BE GOOD TO ME!!!! SO THERE!!!!"

I couldn’t be happier that he is suffering. I care *that* much.

Meanwhile, I’ve been away from my blog for a bit, with a mixture of time off and major stress. First off, I have had the unlovely discovery that I have been plagiarized in print. It is a terrible feeling. I was in a bookstore and picked up a cute new sex book — only to have the sinking sick feeling of recognizing many sentences I wrote (dozens, with one or two words changed). I wanted to throw up, or possibly become the first Cleis author in their 25-year history to actually put a Mafia hit out on another sex writer. I brought the book home and found whole sentences, every one feeling like another little dart stuck in my skin. A few years ago, while having time off from a robotics show I was working on, I saw a bullfight in a small, dusty, makeshift ring in a tiny town in Portugal. They didn’t kill the bull in the ring, but filled it with darts for hours. That’s how I felt with my highlighter pen going over the books, side by side. I really don’t know what to do.

So I ran away to Denver, Colorado, to visit friends. I am drying out my liver as I write this, and in fact it is over a towel rack in the bathroom. They have the best bar scene there and some of the coolest bars I’ve ever been in, which is probably because there is little to do in Denver except drink. I particularly liked a bar called the Skylark, which you should visit if you ever happen to be there, because it is like the kind of bar Tom Waits would take a classy dame to, and it is not too clean, yet is new, but feels straight out of the American Midwest 1940s. A real Americana dive.

Denver’s bookstores have like *no* sex books in them. I went to a few and found about 20 books, mostly from several years ago, none of mine, and the sections were ghettoized in weird places in stores. Not that I was on an ego trip, I just like to see what’s up in different communities. I was with a friend and she asked if I knew any of the authors on the shelves and I was like, well… I do know most of them but the sex writer business is so weird. I’ve never encountered such a fractured, disconnected, often mean-spirited group of writers. I mean, you think we’d all be friends (or at least supportive colleagues), trying our best for the greater good of fucking and licking and sucking and all. I mean, we’re pretty marginalized as it is, so you’d think that there would at least be a semblance of camaraderie, as in "when the water rises, all the boats rise," you know, that sort of thing.

But I’ve been feeling pretty critical of the whole business lately. Sure, it’s like any other, but it’s pretty easy from my perspective both as a writer and 6+ year sex book reviewer to see who’s in it for a quick buck, who’s in it for fame and ego and "stardom," who thinks it’s a nobility trip, and then the tireless writers and educators. There are plenty of granola-type older female writers who are really just incredibly mean, and have a rep amongst us younger upstarts for being exclusionary and cruel, big time, which totally contradicts their outer personas. And they are all so desperate to be taken "seriously," and be the absolute authority on the subject, so much that they wind up doing some really weird things at appearances and parties and stuff. It’s all incredibly interesting. I’ve been just kind of observing everyone, how they work and what they do and how they treat others, and I have a lot on my mind about it. And especially my role in it.

First of all, the egos and the quests for fame make me feel like I need to do more for things I care about. I’ve been a volunteer for the Stop AIDS Project a bit over the past year, but there needs to be more of that in my life. That’s a start.

Most of all, these cranky, serious "sexperts" really need to be pranked. I don’t know what I want to do yet, but I am inspired by Ali G, the British comedian who came to the US presenting a bizarre comedic persona to everyone he encountered in a public capacity: that of a gangster rapper journalist from Kazakhstan. It seems that he made many appearances on TV and did several interviews with famous TV personalities and US government officials in his persona and they bought it, and he really effectively pranked them in a truly hilarious way. Like when he got Conan O’Brian to touch his penis on the air, goading him onto doing it by accusing him of being a homosexual for *refusing* to touch Ali’s cock. These cranky sex writers need to be pranked like that; harmless, hilarious. I want to put them all in a room together or on some really tweaked reality show and see what happens, see if they can MacGuyver sex toys to help them survive on a desert island or some sort of public version of putting fighting ants in a jar and shaking it up really hard. I had an idea a while back to give a group of "sexperts" the same assignment in a reality-style setting to see if they could each, say, help a couple to perform a certain type of sex act. But that’s not funny enough, and it definitely doesn’t give enough room for diva temper tantrums, arguments about bizarre sex practices and hair-pulling antics over the best lube flavors, etc. I mean, these people need desperately to be made fun of, especially now that sex guide writing as an industry is turning into such an amusing bloodbath, that anyone can copy a bestseller and write a book about sex with no experience, than prance about like a fancy ham thinking they’re all sexy and mysterious because they wrote a book about sex, or worse, thinking they’re hip or extra literary. Come on, these people make up freaky hippie words about sex like "coreplay" and take very serious the fruity names they give sex acts, such as "cradling the yoni" and "tickling the pickle." Cranky sexperts need to be made fun of. After all, it’s just sex.

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Free Hot Smut

by violet blue on July 14, 2004

Hooray for free hot smut! Blowfish, those erudite, pervy purveyors with a great toy selection, now have a free online erotica magazine, Fishnet. And like their toy-buying sensibilities, you can expect heavy doses of explicit kink. Updated Tuesdays.

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Hurricane Roche

12 July 2004
I've been out of the blogosphere for a week, and what a week it's been. Mostly I was on a self-imposed editing exile to finish the final *final* edits on The Ultimate Guide to Sexual Fantasies, an exile where I go over the whole thing like a little monkey looking […]
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Making Pris

4 July 2004
It's the fireworks holiday. And following with what must be a centuries' old tradition here in SF, a huge fireworks celebration is planned for 9:30 tonight, while The City is surrounded by an ominous wall of fog. A juggernaut of fog, a behemoth of fog on all sides, ready to […]
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Cabana Pony

2 July 2004
Right now, my best friend Thomas is driving to LA. Which means it's time for me to face the music and blog about some news I got last week, news that I've been in total denial about. […]
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