Erotica and Sexual Culture

I’ve got an LGBT library near me that has some great old erotica. I like to rifle through the kink section now and then to dig up an older book, to get away from the current modern-day erotica.

And, while sex is sex and that never changes, gay erotica certainly has changed.

If anything, modern gay erotica is tamer. Like, honestly, the number of older gay erotic stories that involved shit play or shit eating just blew my mind. (I’ve put down a few books due to excessive brown play — I really can’t take it.)

A lot of the older stuff, understandably, is deeper into the cruising and hookup culture than you get nowadays.  And it’s more explanatory of cruising than I find in newer stuff — in a newer book, cruising can be as simple as two guys making eye contact or even a Grindr match and they just tumble in bed together — but in an older book, the characters tend to be shown lingering around washrooms and in parks for quite a while before the other man comes along.  It may be that he spends half the day riding his bike in circles in a park hoping to catch the eye of another young man on his way to the men’s room.  If anything, it sometimes comes across as an attempt to capture the “gay experience” of the time.

One thing that has definitely changed over the years is the source of tension. In the older erotica, it’s often set in a time and place where it is illegal or unsafe to engage in gay sex, and thus the stories have a natural tension to them.  Will they get caught?  Will they get away with it?  If they get caught, will the cop secretly be gay, too?

But in today’s world, at least in most of the world, it’s more or less safe to be gay and to live openly gay.  That natural tension is no longer present in current books — there isn’t necessarily a shared experience that all gay men have of gay sex being so forbidden they could end up in jail for it.  Gay sex is depicted on evening TV now and then — something that would have never happened in the time of this older erotica.

So, nowadays, gay erotica needs to find tension from other sources.  It could be a character’s internalized homophobia, it could be the fear of being spurned by his crush, it could be the danger of hitting on a very macho and possibly straight guy.  There are endless sources of tension, but now an author has to spend more time setting it up.

And the biggest difference, of course, is the use of condoms. Pre-AIDS, no erotica I’ve seen has used condoms. During the AIDS crisis and afterwards, almost everyone used condoms.  I don’t see them consistently in modern-day erotica, perhaps due to condom fatigue, perhaps due to something else. (Interestingly, in one modern erotica story, I came across the one and only reference I’ve seen to STIs. In the random hookup, the top sees that the bottom has anal warts.  He shrugs and fucks him anyway.)

Gay erotica seems to be an interesting time capsule of gay sexual culture.  (And I have no doubt that the same can be said of straight erotica reflecting straight sexual culture.)  I’m sure that in fifty years, someone will read through the erotica published today and find it wildly different from the erotica published in his present day.



Cameron D. James is a writer of gay erotica and M/M erotic romance; his latest release is The President And The Rentboy (co-written with Sandra Claire). He is also the publisher and co-founder of Deep Desires Press, a publisher of erotica and high-heat-level erotic romance. He lives in Canada, is always crushing on Starbucks baristas, and has two rescue cats. To learn more about Cameron, visit http://www.camerondjames.com.

Past Lives (#nostalgia #youth #NewEngland)

By Lisabet Sarai

Anyone who follows the Grip knows that I've lived in Southeast Asia for more than a decade. Throughout the previous two decades, however, my DH and I resided in a rural town in western Massachusetts, in a fabulous, idiosyncratic eighteenth century building on the banks of a small river. Rock-strewn, hilly and heavily forested, our town sheltered sixth-generation farmers whose names showed up in its Colonial-era graveyards as well as professors from the surrounding universities. We had no commercial establishments aside from the food co-op two miles down the road; every weekend I'd drive half an hour into Amherst to stock up on groceries for the week. We could not have lived there without a four-wheel drive vehicle, since our steep, tree-shaded driveway turned into a sloping sheet of ice too slippery to walk on for much of the winter. Indeed, we had to have two cars, because we'd be totally isolated if our sole vehicle broke down.

New England has a harsh beauty, which I truly appreciated when I lived there. Those decades were happy, or so I thought. My DH and I worked on the house, building decks, renovating bathrooms, installing a new well pump. We cut down trees and planted herb gardens. We hosted visitors from more civilized locales and threw legendary parties. We had dear friends. We had adventures, including those of a sexual sort, exploring swinging and polyamory. We were young, in love, full of energy.

These days, we get back to the U.S. every year or two, for business and to see family and friends, usually in April which is brutally hot in our adopted country. In fact, I am in the U.S. as I write this. We almost always schedule one night in our old area, to see our accountant and our mail forwarding people. This year, though, we spent several days in our old haunts.

We saw a film at a 1920's cinema we used to frequent, one of those grand establishments that seated nearly two thousand people before it was carved up into an eight screen “multiplex” in the seventies so that it could survive. We ate at restaurants that used to be our favorites. We drove the winding roads that once were so familiar we could almost traverse them in our sleep —or at least in the sleet or snow.

Not much in the region has changed. I discovered, though, that I have. Instead of feeling the warmth of nostalgia, I experienced a weird sense of disconnection. I could remember the woman I'd been back then, but I couldn't really identify with her. She might as well have been a character in a novel.

How could I have spent so much time driving everywhere? Especially in what was often such dreadful weather! Certainly, the woods still held a stark grace, even without a shred of green, but everything seemed so remote from everything else! Now I walk five minutes to a twenty-four-hour supermarket, ten minutes to the post office. The dry cleaner is literally just outside the door of my apartment building. I hop on the subway and in a quarter of an hour I'm at a shopping center or a movie theater or a museum or a historical site.

No snow tires. No auto insurance. No need to be concerned about how to get home after having a glass of wine with dinner.

I get tired thinking about how difficult life was back then.

Then I feel embarrassed. Guess I've gotten soft and lazy. I used to be tough New England stock, but now I'm a tropical wimp. Still, I can't imagine moving back.

In some ways, I've become a ghost, just a shadow of the vibrant, passionate, self-reliant rural woman I was in those days. Yet I think I'm more at peace, less torn by worry and insecurity, than she was. Prowling those old locations, I had a sense of loss, but no desire to go back. I suppose that's a good thing, since that woman is truly gone. Longing for the past can eat you up inside. I'm ready to let the ghosts rest.

 

A Whole Lot of Nothing Much

That's what I'm reading lately.

I think the last time I really got my teeth into a book, it would have been The Girl With All The Gifts by M.R. Carey. I suspect, but can't remember for certain, that I might have written about it in one of my previous "What Am I Reading?" posts. That was definitely last year some time, though I can't recall for certain exactly when.

So, what have I been reading since then?

Every time one of these posts comes up I start to feel rather imposteresque. We all know that good writing goes hand in hand with effective reading. And I suppose that's what I've been doing, in a fashion. Almost everything I've been reading lately has been either dystopian/post-apocalypse/zombies, or shifter-based erotic romance. I've been reading both of those genres simply because they're the two I'm most focused on writing these days.

Indeed, I have a shifter story coming out very soon (May 9th) in Milly Taiden's Sassy Ever After Kindle World. So the writing of that has nudged aside some of my other reading time.

The other factor which has taken up a lot of my time has been television. I long ago gave up on regular TV. Here in Australia we have a couple of dozen free TV channels, and a lot of them are duplicates, to a certain degree. Channel 9, for example, also holds all of the 90-99 numbers as channels. If they're broadcasting something they feel is important, they block it across four or five of their channels.

But we recently signed up with a streaming company, and we suddenly had access to some excellent (and not-so excellent) quality movies and shows.

The reason I bring it up in this blog topic is because I finally was able to block out some time and watch Breaking Bad. I then followed up with the first two seasons of Better Call Saul. And while neither of those shows is exactly in my chosen genres, nor in the medium I choose to write... they're brilliant examples to learn from. There's some great fodder for both individual character development, and also the almost tidal way one character's nature and actions will re-shape another.

I tend to write rather visually. I'm not necessarily talking about the words on the page, but I tend to run the story through my mind like a movie, and then use my words to describe the way I saw it. For that reason, the intricacies of Breaking Bad, especially, gave me so many pointers. With stories, we can't use an actual visual to highlight an emotion (such as how in BB, they would cut to a tight shot on a character's face when that character was somehow trapped, then cut to a wider shot if the danger had passed). But it does give pointers as to how an author could get across subtle reinforcements, using descriptions of body language, or of the immediate area.

So I'm gonna count my time watching both those shows as "reading"!

Danish Teenagers

By Annabeth Leong

Lately, I’ve mostly been reading in Danish. We seem to take some of these posts as recommendation lists, but I’m guessing there aren’t many fellow Danish students checking this blog out.

I do think it might be interesting for you to hear about one of the most striking differences I’ve noticed between the YA I’m used to reading in English and the Danish language YA I’ve read so far.

I particularly enjoy the work of Anika Eibe. I read Er Du Okay, Marie? and immediately downloaded its sequel, Er Du Okay, Fie? (The titles mean Are You Okay, Marie? and Are You Okay, Fie?). I’m not sure if I’m good enough at Danish to judge how well written something is in that language, but I do know whether a story is compelling. Er Du Okay, Marie? kept me up at night with dictionary in hand, powering through the book despite difficulties of translation, all because I had to know what would happen next.

That’s full marks for the story. I learned a ton of Danish working my way through the book, and I loved every minute of it.

Anyway, Eibe’s series is about adolescents with various sorts of difficulties. Marie’s book is billed as being about bullying, but I’d say it’s better described as a book about the bewildering experiences a teenage girl has when she suddenly becomes hot and highly sexually desirable.

I think part of what grabbed me so much about this book is how unflinching it is, and at least some of that, I think, comes down to Danish culture. While English-language YA tends to be very squeamish about detailed sexual description, this book didn’t pull back from any of that. And it was a much stronger story for that. I’ve never before read a portrayal of the teenage sexual experience that I could identify with so much, largely because it feels like writing about that at all in detail in English is forbidden.

Also unlike many heroines I’ve encountered in English language books, Marie is forthrightly lustful. She feels a lot of conflict about whether she really wants to make out with particular boys at parties, but she often gets caught up in the thrill of exploration and physical lustful urges. I so rarely see that in female characters, especially when the lust kind of exists on its own rather than for a particular “special” boy.

She also has a sort of passivity, a sense of going with the flow that I really identify with, too. It’s always been difficult for me to figure out what I actually want, and my default is to say yes to things. That’s Marie, too.

And being this way gets her called a whore and a slut at school, which also happened to me when I was a teenager, and is, I suppose, where the bullying element comes in.

A final difference between what I’m used to when reading in English and what I found in this book was that the ending was much less neat, though it did tie up the main character arc. Throughout the story, there’s a boy that it seems is the “right one” for Marie, and he is a part of the ending. The story, however, is about her, not about a romance, so the note it ends on is a note of Marie figuring out more about how she wants to conduct herself, solidifying her friendships, and telling that boy that, while she’s interested in him, things are too confusing right now for her to jump into anything. That felt like such a realistic ending, and I loved it, but I am so conditioned to expect a romantic ending that I was a bit shocked.

Anyway, I’m only in the beginning of the sequel about Fie, and I’m impressed all over again. This book is an unflinching portrayal of self-harm that seems like it will be just as daring and profound as the first book.

So I’m excited to read this series (there’s a third book out soon, and perhaps more in the future), but I’m also left wondering why I feel like so much is missing from portrayals of teenage experience in my native language.

Like Musical Chairs

 by Daddy X

When Jim Harrison passed a few months ago, I was compelled to read his The Big Seven, title referring to the seven deadly sins.

Harrison writes beautifully flawed characters, mostly country folk, and what makes them tick. How hearts and lives intertwine and affect those around them. In The Big Seven, Harrison’s recurring character, retired NY detective Sunderson, (Harrison doesn’t seem to give him a first name, but I didn’t realize that while reading) moves to a remote woodsy cabin for some lazy trout fishing and peaceful retirement.

Not to be. If what Sunderson is hoping for is peace and quiet, he doesn’t quite get what he needs. Except, of course, screwing virtually every female he comes in contact with, (or he at least thinks about it). He begins by falling for his cleaning lady, a member of the feuding, drunken redneck clan living on the next property over. Her murder prompts Sunderson to come out of retirement, confronting the reprehensible family for a hoot of an adversarial relationship.

In February, on the way to Hawaii, I bought Stephen King’s “Revival” at the airport. I like King’s storytelling abilities, and technical excellence, but lately, many of his books have left me cold. I read over half the book on the flight over. Sure, we all love an effortless read where we turn page after page, enthralled at the pacing, prose or scope of the narrative. Not so with “Revival”. I think it went down so easy because it read like a YA novel, not challenging at all.

(Momma X has called me a literary snob, and I will cop to that, so it may not be King’s work, but me who gets distracted too easily if not anchored to the page. One of those “It’s not you, it’s me,” kinda deals. :>)

So when we arrived at north shore Oahu, a book in the rental cabin bookshelf caught my eye: Reckless, by Chrissy Hines of the rock group The Pretenders. Wow, what a mistitled book that was. Talk about written for the lower IQ levels! I read the entire book in less than a day.

I have no doubt Ms, Hines did carry on. I’ll bet she drank a lot, did lots of drugs and had plenty of edgy times. She admits to much of that. But her account of the events lacked both detail and the energy I expected from such a potentially wild and interesting story. Ho hum. And, it distracted me from the King book I had read halfway through on the flight. When I went back to King’s Revival, it couldn’t hold my interest. So I went out, and, on Lisabet’s recommendation of Haruki Murakami, bought Norwegian Wood .

Murakami was a welcome change. His smooth delivery, sensitive characters and gentle pacing made Norwegian Wood the perfect introduction to his style. A note from the translator at the end said that this particular novel didn’t incorporate the understated magical properties typical of Murakami’s work. So when I got home, I went out and bought Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki—again, on Lisabet’s recommendation—and her choice for the last “What I’m Reading” topic.

When I began Colorless, the setup was so similar to Norwegian Wood, I decided to go with something else, lest the two Murakamis run together in my pea brain. So I set it aside when a friend loaned me A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson, his account of hiking the Appalachian Trail. Not unlike what Cheryl Strayed accomplished in Wild, though Strayed went through a more ambitious and challenging experience.

The Appalachian Trail differs from the Pacific Crest Trail in that the AT has many places along the way where a hiker can meet other hikers, buy a sandwich, stay in a motel or drink a beer. In fact nearly every day held options. Not so on The PCT, where Strayed could walk for days or weeks at a time, living off the land and what it provided in necessities, filtering her own water and carrying her own food.

I tend to only review books I like on these pages, but it isn’t a perfect world. If a read doesn’t hold my interest, I want to move along.

So many books, so little time.

Dark and shade and my inner filter

My reading tastes are pretty eclectic, but I always come back to sexy romance every third book or so. Within the genre, I tend to steer clear of Daddy/little girl stuff and ‘sweet’ romance. Not being sniffy, but DD/lg just isn’t my kink and fluffy stories leave me a bit cold too. I like raunchy, explicit sex in the stories I read, but this is no substitute for a strong plot and great characters.

Do I have a favourite sub-genre? Not sure, but if I do it would be dark romance. I love the emotional gymnastics needed to redeem a seriously unlikeable hero and I never cease to be amazed at the ingenuity demonstrated by exemplars in the field. Natasha Knight is perhaps my Number One go to, the queen and Queen Mother of dark romance. Anna Zaires, too, spins a gloriously torrid tale.

All of this said, are some scenes just too graphic? I recently read Natasha Knight’s Benedetti Brothers duo of books and whilst the first in the set, Salvatore, is darkish but not overly so, the second story, Dominic, really had me wincing. There is one particular scene where the mafia villains torture a man and chop off his tongue. This is described in graphic and visceral detail and made for pretty hard reading.  The violence was not gratuitous, it added to the plot and gave credence to the fairly extreme thirst for vengeance which drives the pace of the story. Still, it is an image I find hard to get out of my head.

I wonder if perhaps this is the difference between film and the written word. Had this scene been part of an 18+ mafia crime thriller I would not have been even remotely tempted to watch it. When it happens in a book I might shudder but my inner filter renders the image somehow acceptable, keeps it within my ‘shock and horror’ parameters. We are able to be our own censor when we read; we interpret the words the author gives us and we make of them what we will.

Dark romance is one of the few sub-genres of romance that I have never written in. I think about it from time to time but I know I would struggle to keep my hero nasty enough for long enough. In my writing I gravitate to towards sexy alpha males with a soft centre, not the stuff of dark story-telling at all. Natasha Knight, Anna Zaires and the rest have the field to themselves and long may they continue to delight and horrify me in equal measure.

Here are my reviews of Salvatore and Dominic. I gave them both five stars.

Salvatore:A Dark Mafia Romance (Benedetti Brothers, Book 1)

I have read all of Natasha Knights books and every time she brings out a new one my one-click finger goes into over-drive. Ms. Knight never disappoints, and Salvatore is another real treat. Somewhat dark, though less so than some of her other books, the story is set against a backdrop of mafia and organized crime. Salvatore is the heir to the Benedetti empire, soon to become boss of a network of violence, robbery and vice. He is also the not-so-proud owner of Lucia, the daughter of a vanquished enemy who has been gifted to the Benedettis in settlement of a debt.

Never entirely comfortable with the arrangement, Salvatore is drawn to his ‘property’ and finds himself protecting Lucia from the rest of his family. He wants her, but not as a possession. Lucia, too, should loathe her ‘master’ but somehow just doesn’t.

If you like your heroes sexy as hell with a soft centre, you’ll love Salvatore. The plot is brisk and engaging, the characters well fleshed out and Ms. Knight’s raunchy prose delivers a satisfying HEA.

Go grab yourself a bit of Benedetti – you won’t regret it!

Dominic:A Dark Mafia Romance (Benedetti Brothers, Book 2)

Dominic is dark with a capital D. The character, and the plot are set against a pretty disturbing backdrop of human trafficking, sexual slavery and brutal violence. This book is not for the faint-hearted, but offers a solid and compelling read. I couldn’t put it down.

Dominic is the dysfunctional outcast son of the Benedetti clan. Illegitimate, he doesn’t belong and he is eaten up by resentment and bitterness. Ostracised following a violent confrontation with his family he embarks on an even darker career which brings him up against Gia.

Helpless, the captive of a violent and terrifying adversary, Gia simmers with her own demons and her thirst for revenge is even greater than his. Bound by love and hate in equal measure, Dominic and Gia are made for one another and their explosive, sensual, twisted relationship hooked me in right from the off.

If you like dark romance, Natasha Knight should be your go-to writer. On my scale of dark and shade, Dominic is positively pitch black. Don’t miss it.

Reading, Writing, Reeling, Writhing

Sacchi Green


This going to be a real cop-out. My brain is scrambled. I’ve been reading about 130 submissions for my Best Lesbian Erotica anthology, with 20 more to go, and then I’ll have to reread the 30 I’ve already put in a “Yes” file and some from the “Maybe file” to prune them down to the 15-17 I can actually fit into the book, depending on length. 60,000 words is all I’m allowed for the manuscript.

And I’ve been reading, for research, The Kurds: A Concise Handbook (concise, my ass, but full of sometimes interesting detail) and Revolution in Rojava: Democratic Autonomy and Women’s Liberation in Syrian Kurdistan which does have some nice photos of women soldiers in the desert looking totally kick-ass. I’ve also been getting background information online about the Zagros mountain range in what is ethnically Kurdistan but politically parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, all of whom might be willing to let the Kurds have their own nation if there hadn’t turned out to be quite a lot of oil under those sandstone and salt dome mountains pushed high by the movement of the African-Arabian Tectonic Plate nudging under the Eurasian Tectonic Plate.

Other topics of my research for the same work-in-progress have been: casinos in Switzerland and Lebanon; the Sumerian goddess Ishtar; and Neanderthals, the latter just because I was already interested in them before I discovered that the archaeological site where Neanderthal remains were discovered, with evidence of ritual burial, is a cave in those very mountains where my superhero characters will be training for their massive rescue mission. I probably won’t be able to work the Neanderthal bits into the story, but you never know.

In something completely different but powerfully distracting, I’ve been reading complex hospital discharge papers and prescription information regarding my elderly father who has been having adventures with a recurrence of an antibiotic-resistant staphylococcus infection in his foot leading to cellulitis, now responding, slowly, to treatment, but requiring frequent doctor appointments and extra care for him.

AND I’ve been reading online weather forecasts. I intended, having finally arranged for a few days free while my brother takes on a couple of the doctor visits, a trip to my cabin in the New Hampshire mountains to see whether the water pipes froze there when the oil company accidentally skipped a delivery and let the furnace go out (it’s on again now, so if the pipes froze, they’ll have thawed and burst by now.) I’m all set to head north today (Monday), except that now the forecast is for snow and sleet and freezing rain on Tuesday, so if I got there, I’d probably be trapped in the cabin (with no wifi) for all of Tuesday and into Wednesday, which is when I planned to come home. AAARRGH!

So, that’s what I’ve been reading. Aren’t you glad you asked? Sigh.