Tit for Tat

by Jean Roberta

Re lesbian relationships, the truth usually seems to be somewhere in the vast middle ground between a feminist vision of women as sisters who all instinctively understand each other and share the same interests and a porn image of two (or more) sexy chicks trying to tear each other’s eyes out because they are competing for the same thing, usually a man.

In the opening story in my new collection, Spring Fever and Other Sapphic Encounters, two women who have been circling around each other in the same small community for 25 years finally have an over-the-top but still plausible (I hope) confrontation which leads to consensual sex.

When conflict is based on misunderstandings rooted in stereotypes (attractive blondes are always racist snobs, butch women are as bad as uncouth men), honest communication can dissolve the tension, or at least this is my hope. Or the tension of hostility can transmute into the tension of lust.

How often this works in real life is very debatable, as I think we all agree after almost a full month of discussion. However, in erotica, satisfying sex often looks like the answer to every problem.

In honour of LGBTQ+ Pride Month, here is the opening scene of “Tit for Tat:”

“Amanda, I was joking! You don’t want to do this.” Cee stared at the small gun which was pointed at her forehead. She wished she knew enough about weapons to assess its capacity for doing harm.

“Your joke wasn’t funny.” Amanda was the kind of woman who grew leaner, not fatter, with age, and her body now had a more sculptured quality than it had a quarter-century before, when she had looked as cuddly as a kitten.

Even then, Cee remembered, the cute blonde had a sarcastic edge and a chess-player's talent for strategy that surprised everyone who met her for the first time. Like a knife being sharpened on rough stone, Amanda had been rubbed into a clearer version of herself by the way she was treated by straight relatives and co-workers, as well as queer friends and “lovers.”

Cee, short for Cecile, had been attracted to Amanda when she first saw her in the Den, the local queer bar. As a baby dyke below the legal drinking age, Cee had gone to this den of perversion alone, armed with the driver’s license of her older cousin. It was common knowledge that white bar managers couldn’t tell brown people apart.

Amanda had been surrounded by a group of sporty-looking white dykes, so Cee had to wait until the cute blonde went to the washroom, where Cee told her a joke that she couldn’t remember afterward. Amanda’s laugh wasn’t exactly a sign of friendship, but it gave Cee an identity and a raison d’etre.

In the following years, Cee had survived the ageism and racism of the bar crowd, and the butch-phobia of the lesbian-feminist crowd, by being a clown, a trickster, the funniest person at every social event.

A funny woman isn’t threatening, even if she’s tall and muscular (or tall, middle-aged, and comfortably soft, like a cushion). No one, or hardly anyone, fights a dyke with some visible Plains Cree roots (straight black hair, slightly slanted eyes, olive skin) if she’s entertaining. And Cee was still around, with no visible scars.

She tried again. “Come on, Amanda. Kidnappers don’t have that much fun. They have to keep running from the cops. Just put the gun down, and we can talk.”

The cool, slim woman with short silver-blonde hair aimed her gun at the target on the far wall of the basement rec room. She pulled the trigger. The blast tore a hole in the wood, close to the central point.


https://www.amazon.com/SPRING-FEVER-Other-Lesbian-Encounters-ebook/dp/B07T91FCFC

A Little of What You Fancy

by Jean Roberta

Here is a little snippet from my story, "A Dowager's Hump," which was published in Ripe Fruit: Well-Seasoned Erotica, an anthology featuring women aged 50 and over, edited by Marcy Sheiner (Cleis Press, 2002).

The narrator is a kind of Mary Sue character: a menopausal (or post-menopausal) woman who is not afraid of time because she doesn't believe in depriving herself of anything she really wants. She is bisexual, for lack of a clearer term. And in this case, she wants to show her distraught sister-in-law the pleasures of self-indulgence.

--------------------------------------------------------

I came home from work on a day cold enough to freeze a witch’s tits, to use a vulgar expression. As I walked into my welcoming house, its warmth hit me like a burst of hormones. The phone was ringing.

“Margaret?” begged the voice on the other end. “I kicked him out. I hope you can forgive me.”

This melodrama from my ex-sister-in-law seemed to match the extremes of temperature in a Canadian winter. “Pfft,” I told her. “It was overdue. You’d better come over. Otherwise you won’t eat -- or you’ll binge.”

Sarah was pitifully grateful, and she arrived at my door before I had had enough time to confer with myself. Emerging from her parka, she looked sodden. She shook her brown hair like a cocker spaniel.

“Have a drink to warm up,” I told her, “then we’ll go out for dinner.”

She seemed childlike as she sat on my sofa, sipping a scotch-and-seven as though it could restore lost hope. I had catered to her taste: old scotch ruined by the adolescent fizz of Seven-Up. A good hostess, like a cruel
ancient god, gives her supplicants what they think they want.

I noted that Sarah’s breasts were fuller than they had been; she must have gained weight. I knew that she must consider this a disaster. We both sighed.

“I mean,” she was complaining, “I can see why he fools around. Men have this biological need to find younger women as long as they can. It’s just in them, no matter what they promise. But what’s left for us?” I glanced ironically at the framed print hanging next to my bookcase. It is a sepia-toned photo of Emmaline Pankhurst giving a speech on women’s rights, watched admiringly by her grown daughters. Sarah missed the reference.

“I’m thirty-five,” she complained. “I have to face it.”

“So you do,” I agreed. She remembered that the digits in my age were hers in reverse. She was embarrassed.

“Not that we’re too old for some things,” she assured me, politely ignoring the near-generation gap between us, “but we can’t pick up guys the way we used to.”

I was wearing my favorite royal blue knit dress with the pantihose that are supposed to stimulate my legs. I considered whether most male patrons of meat-market bars would like the way the dress skimmed my breasts and hips.

I asked myself whether Sarah would sputter with envy if I explained that I stay slim enough by eating only when hungry and by traveling on foot whenever possible. I realized that better food for thought was on the table.

“Do you want another man so soon, girl?” I asked her. Better to wallow in scotch-and-seven, I thought.

Now she looked deeply distressed. “I don’t want to end up like –“ she blurted. “You haven’t been with a man since David died, have you?” Cancer, my only successful rival, had taken my husband ten years before.

“Not often,” I agreed. “The ones I meet usually lack depth, so I don’t keep them long. They’re appetizers. But I wouldn’t underestimate the value of a good fuck.” Sarah stared, obviously wondering whether the combination of
alcohol and gassy bubbles had affected her hearing. I smiled. “I don’t need their money any more,” I explained. “Sometimes they need mine. I believe in noblesse oblige, of course, and I don’t mind helping them, but when they
assume I’m a fool, the romance is over.”

I could see that my thinly-veiled advice was whizzing past Sarah’s ears like pub darts missing their target. I reached for her empty glass, took it to the kitchen and refilled it.

-------------

a short trip

I remember frustrations of the past when I encounter them in the present.

I composed a post for this blog, tried to publish it, and it disappeared into thin air.

It was about family road trips and road trips with friends and fellow-members of the local queer choir (complete with home-made wine, with which Carla the Soprano -- as I thought of her -- baptised me while trying to pour from one narrow-necked bottle into another, over my lap).

Is there ever a trip without a mishap?

But somehow the wrong turns, flat tires, messes and disagreements on a trip mellow out in memory, and become funny stories.

I can hear it now. "Hmm-hmm." Someone is humming tunelessly, creating a weird medley with the 1970s pop song on the car radio. It's my teenage sister Laurie (as I'll call her), pressed beside me in the back seat of the rented British car. My other sister, Carey (so to speak - a precocious 13-year-old) is on my other side. Our parents are smoking in the front seat.

I hope we stop at the site of some gruesome historic event. I need the distraction.

"Don't hum!"

"HMM - MMM - HMMM." Laurie's volume increases. She's dangerous when she's bored.

Within moments, there is a scream-fest in the small, enclosed space. Two pairs of hands are scrabbling at each other over and around me. Our parents are telling me to get my sisters to settle down -- I'm the oldest & the designated peacemaker.

We swerve onto a shoulder of the road. "I can't drive! The noise is getting in front of my eyeballs!" That's dad.

He threatens to keep us parked there until order is restored.

A tense, eerie silence fills the car. We're on the move again.

Someone chews gum, loudly, with her mouth open.

"Oh, gross!"

And so it goes, punctuated by allegedly haunted inns and sites of massacres. It seems that human nature hasn't changed much over the centuries.

As they say, the journey is more important than the destination. I wouldn't have missed it.

Under Covers

“Aauuggh!” Carli had never made a sound like this before.

My own sounds were more staccato: “Uh! Uh! Uh!” I reminded myself of an old-fashioned train chugging uphill.

“’We – almost – there?” she huffed.

“Yep.” I couldn’t say more.

Oh the joys of a man-free lesbian life: we get to move our own furniture from room to room. The carved oak chest Carli inherited from her late grandmother definitely belonged in our bedroom, even if it killed us both.

------------------

This is the opening passage of a story which was accepted for the upcoming Girl Fever, an anthology of 69 short lesbian erotic stories.

Does the opening scene look erotic to you?

The history of written and orally-transmitted (ha) erotica is full of double-entendres like the one above. “Off-colour” jokes depend for their effect on clear sexual implications followed by a disclaimer on the part of the joke-teller: why, what did you think I meant? What a dirty mind you have!

The bad reputation of sexually-explicit literature (in conservative circles) is rank with hypocrisy. Apparently it’s fine to make wisecracks about big tools and busy people (wink wink, nudge nudge) among men and women in the average office workplace as long as you can claim you’re not actually referring to sex.

Writers of the past (including the very recent past) had other strategies: phrases in Latin or French and/or metaphoric veils. In Victorian novels, a secret affair may become public knowledge when the couple is discovered “in flagrante.” Or someone surmises that the French lieutenant has a “paramour.” Or a realistic description of foreplay (some shedding of outer garments) is followed by “their hearts and bodies entwined and the earth moved.”

An amazing number of people I know, who say they have read certain “classic” novels of adultery (The Scarlet Letter, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary), claim they are not the least bit erotic. Even Violet Leduc’s tortured autobiographical stories of lesbian passion (e.g. La Batarde) and Oscar Wilde’s thinly-disguised gay horror story, The Picture of Dorian Gray, are assumed to be “above” the level of erotic fiction.

Yet if sex as a major plot-premise is a defining element of literary erotica, much of the literature that is taught in schools (secondary schools as well as colleges and universities) fits the definition.

And no, I don’t buy the theory that literature is whatever the reader reads into it. A novel about “cheating” (extramarital sexual relationships) must be about sex and all the emotions that accompany it. And although it is possible to be emotionally unfaithful to a spouse or partner without "going farther," the great novels about the great tragedy of being tempted, surrendering to temptation and losing one's respectable public image always include sex as a physical activity that can be discovered.

A whole lot of literature describes sexual feelings. Most of us who include explicit sex scenes in our writing were first inspired by reading-matter that was recommended by our teachers or our parents. We simply imagined what was implied but not clearly described in the original versions. (Note the current spate of rewritten versions of Jane Austen’s genteel romance novels of the early nineteenth century.)

“Erotica” has always been hard to define clearly because it has always overlapped with supposedly non-erotic genres. If I have to define the difference, I would say it’s a matter of awareness. Writers who label their work “erotic” are conscious of writing about actual sex, the desire for sex, and the consequences of sex. Those who would be insulted to be reminded of the erotic elements in their work tend to be writers in denial, or writers of double-entendres.

Sexual feelings seem to be an unavoidable factor in the general human comedy (or tragedy). Differences in genres seem to be largely about how that thread is spun in the fabric of a story.

-----------------

Coming Out

by Jean Roberta

(We're delighted to welcome our first guest author at the re-invented Oh Get A Grip, the erudite and eloquent Jean Roberta. See the end of her post for her links.)

Doing anything for the first time tends to inspire nostalgia later on (oh, how innocent I was/we were then), but at the time, it’s usually embarrassing.

I “came out” as a lesbian in the winter of 1982 by going to the local gay bar (in a town of under 200,000 on the Canadian prairie) after thinking about this for years. I went alone. I had ascertained the existence and location of this dark and smoky place by calling a telephone number I had discovered, trying to lower my voice to a mutter so I would sound like a Real Dyke, newly arrived from a more worldly city.

At the bar, I was delighted to meet friendly strangers, both men and women. At one point, I was sitting at a table where everyone was telling their “coming out” stories. “Gay” life at that time and place was parallel to the life of a debutante in a narrow circle of “good families” circa 1870 or so – everyone in the lady’s community could guess her age, social status and availability from when, where and how she had “come out” into “society.”

That night in 1982, I would rather have died than admit that I was “coming out” at that moment. I had no juicy stories of sweet or tragic love affairs with other women to tell, no stories of conservative parents throwing me out of the family home. I could imagine myself in a debutante’s white gown, exposed as a blank slate to the knowing eyes around me. I pretended to be too buttoned-up to discuss my private past. The woman sitting next to me asked: “Are you straight?”

There it was, the question I dreaded. I hadn’t been able to answer it conclusively for myself.

I gulped and said, “No.” That answer seemed good enough to gain me entrée into the bar crowd. Within weeks, I had enough lesbian experience to realize that you can only enter a small, gossipy community once – after that, you have a role in it, for better or worse.

There are many ways to “come out,” and most people do this several times during their lives. Each time you start a new job, you are taking on a new role in a new milieu.

“Coming out” as a writer is parallel to other debuts. I was thrilled at age ten when a teacher showed me my poem in the teachers’ magazine to which she had submitted it. I was published! But the world didn’t care for long, and I was never asked to join a secret club. Since then, I’ve learned that the secret writers’ club (publication guaranteed) is largely a myth.

It’s true enough that writers, editors and publishers of a certain genre tend to know each other, and it’s true enough that being known in the biz can be helpful. But being known and being accepted without reservation are two different things.

After a year of submitting my erotic stories to editors who didn’t reply, I began getting thrilling messages telling me that my work was accepted and would be published somewhere. I still can’t predict reliably whether a certain story submission will appeal to a certain editor. I’ve been amazed to get glowing praise for writing of mine that I no longer like very much, and (rarely) to get wildly contemptuous rants from editors about stories of mine that I still secretly love. As they say, there is no explaining taste.

Stories posted to writers loops such as the Erotic Readers and Writers Association by writers who confess to being unpublished amateurs are sometimes so polished that I doubt whether the authors will stay unpublished for long, except possibly by choice. I’m tempted to point out that if you don’t want others to know that you have no publication history, you don’t have to tell them; readers (and ethical editors) will judge you by what they read.

Writers who want to satisfy themselves as well as others are always trying to grow and change, and this means always beginning again, always “coming out.” I no longer think that a blank page or screen is less intimidating to a much-publisher author than to a novice. Every new work-in-progress is another first-chance to make an impression, for better or worse.

---

Obsession - Erotic short stories by Jean Roberta

Jean's links:

• Primary website: www.JeanRoberta.com


• Regular column - "Sex is All Metaphor": Erotica Readers and Writers Association


• Staff reviewer:
  
  
  
  • Erotica Revealed
  
  
  • The Dominant's View
  
  
  • Rainbow Reviews