A customer hooks up with his favorite waitress in the restroom of
his favorite diner. Up close and personal, “she smells like grease,
tobacco smoke, lipstick, and a perfume he’s never smelled before
— a perfume only broads wear.” He has a thing for that specific
type of female he calls “broads,” defined as “loud, brassy women who
sit with their legs open and drink beer straight from the bottle
— women who always say exactly what they’re thinking.” So begins
one of many salty stories in the new anthology X: The Erotic
Treasury, edited by pioneering feminist Susie Bright. The
author of eight books — including SexWise, The Sexual State of
the Union, and Susie Sexpert’s Lesbian Sex World
— and the editor of more than twenty others, she’ll be
at Diesel (5433 College Ave., Oakland) on January 22 to discuss
the anthology, along with contributors Pam Ward (author of Bad Girls
Burn Slow), Donna George Storey (author of Amorous Woman),
and Greta Christina (editor of Best Erotic Comics).
“To my own family, I’m not especially sexy or shocking,” muses
Bright, who remembers her father, the late celebrated linguist William
Bright, as her biggest fan. Raised Catholic — awaiting her First
Communion, “I was scared that eating flesh, and drinking blood, would
make me throw up. It would be worse than a boiled spinach and asparagus
milkshake” — Bright began writing at age eight: “I was
very upset about Ronald Reagan running for governor in California, and
I wrote a pamphlet denouncing him in my orange-red Crayolas and stuck
copies of it all around the neighborhood.” In high school, “I became a
radical and an activist, and I wrote for our campus underground
newspaper … about everything from narcs on campus to how to get free
birth control.” That paper, The Red Tide, “was a combination of
socialists, anarchists, and yippies. Eventually I dropped out of high
school and joined a group called the International Socialists, who were
dedicated to rank-and-file organizing in several major labor
unions.”
In San Francisco in the 1980s, Bright worked at Good Vibrations when
“it was little bigger than a closet,” and edited the now-legendary
journal On Our Backs: Entertainment for the Adventurous Lesbian,
which she now fondly calls “the first openly lesbian magazine about
anything.” Soon, Bright was invited to become a columnist for
Penthouse Forum. The rest is history — or Herstory,
to borrow the title of her first erotic anthology. “Since I was in high
school, when I got introduced to radical politics about most
everything, I have been quite frank about sexuality,” the prolific
author remembers. “I was appalled when I found out that masturbation
was not some secret hold that the Devil had over me. I couldn’t believe
all the lying about sin and sexuality that I had been taught as a
child. Once I wised up, I became quite intolerant of sexual hypocrisy.
From there, I became interested in the way the erotic mind works, and
how sexuality, politics, and culture feed off each other.” 7 p.m.
DieselBookstore.com
