Revelations

by Jean Roberta

The following scene in my story “The Feast of the Epiphany” is definitely stormy, but it includes glasses of wine and bowls of soup rather than cups of tea.



This story first appeared in Coming Together: Into the Light, a more-or-less erotic anthology of stories about surprises and discoveries. The "Coming Together" anthologies are sold to raise money for good causes.

Consider the context: I suspect that most people have taken part in a meal at which someone makes a unexpected announcement to a group of relatives or friends. The scene in which a young-adult son or daughter “comes out” to the rest of the family has almost become a movie cliché, but the revelation of a secret can be more complicated than it is usually shown.

In my story, Joanne (the narrator) is divorced from Peter, and she has a crush on Wendy, who seems like a more experienced dyke. Joanne has agreed to go out for supper with Wendy and her friends Mark and Roland, who seem to be a gay couple. All four friends, who would all say they are “not religious,” are ironically celebrating the Feast of the Epiphany, one of the oldest Christian holidays, when the wise men supposedly arrived at Bethlehem in January to see the baby Jesus. (This is also called Twelfth Night.) An epiphany is a revelation, and all sorts of secrets are revealed over supper, including the waiter’s interest in the proceedings, and his role as a referee.

This story is from my newest collection, Spring Fever and Other Sapphic Encounters (Renaissance Publishing, 2019).

We sit across from each other at a corner table while the waiter makes a show of lighting a candle which must then be covered by its little shade. He seems to be going out of his way to be gracious –- because he needs good tips to pay his post-holiday bills? Because he wants us to know that he is willing to serve two women who look like a couple? Because he knows we are waiting for two men who are entitled to good service?
The waiter offers to take our coats, and we hand them to him. He goes away, leaving us to enjoy the warmth and the dim light.

Wendy leans forward. “Joanne -–“

A gust of cool air brings Mark and Roland toward us, led by the waiter. Roland’s dark hair and sideburns are literally frosted, and Mark looks like a skinny homeless puppy, teeth chattering from the cold. “It’s damn cold,” says Mark as though we don’t know this. “We had to park halfway down the block.”

They settle into their seats, rubbing their hands. Roland looks around the restaurant, then lets his gaze caress my hair (medium-short, streaked-blonde) and linger on my necklace (a pearl pendant from before Peter) and the neckline of my dress. He smiles.

“So what are you lovely ladies drinking?” asks Mark. We all agree to share two bottles of wine, one red, one white.
The waiter returns. Wendy and Mark order the steak and seafood. I’m not sure I can eat all of it, but I am feeling greedy and decide that I can justify the cost to myself if one-third of my meal becomes tomorrow’s lunch. Roland orders a steak by itself.

The waiter is not yet out of earshot when Wendy announces her agenda. “Let’s tell each other what we all did for the holidays.”

Mark grins. “How we kept warm. Man, this is a great season for hooking up.” I look at Roland. I’ve never been told that they have an open relationship. Maybe they haven’t opened that can of worms yet.

Roland looks at Mark, and takes a contemptuous swig from his glass of ice water. “If you don’t care who you hook up with.” The ice clinks as the glass is placed firmly back on the table.

Mark fidgets. “Hey Ro, we agreed to have a good time tonight. No flaming at this table. Not that kind, anyway.”

Wendy leans over and pats Mark on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, baby, I have a thick skin. Roland, we’re all adults here.”

I hate this conversation. Everyone here seems to know something I don’t. I try to keep my face neutral and gaze at the wall beyond Wendy’s head.

She reaches across the table and grabs one of my hands, forcing me to look at her. “Joanne, Mark and I had a thing. It started out as a good friendship, and we didn’t think it would go any further. Well, I didn’t. One time he came over and it got so late that I just invited him to spend the night. My place is closer to his work anyway. It’s really no big deal. We talked about it after he met you” -– she nodded at Roland -– “and I said I would butt out to keep things simple. Obviously, we’re still friends. That’s not going to change.”

“So he can hop into bed with you and your girlfriend and get you pregnant, is that it?” Roland is openly showing his teeth. His hair is free of frost, and now he seems to be steaming. “That’s what all the dykes are doing these days, isn’t it?”

I am really afraid that in an instant, someone’s fist will plow someone else’s mouth. I don’t know who is more likely to strike first, Wendy or Roland. I feel unreasonably responsible for this mess.

“You need to apologize to Joanne,” says Wendy. “She has nothing to do with this.” But I have a stake in the outcome.
Mark is standing up, holding Roland by the shoulder. “What are you doing, man? You knew about her before.”

The waiter appears with the wine, and everyone freezes but me. “Who wants to taste this?” he asks, looking around with raised eyebrows.

“I will.” The resident connoisseur, that’s me. The waiter pours a small amount of wine into my glass with exaggerated concern. The look of it reminds me of fresh blood. I take a sip, nod and say, “Robust and fruity. Very good.” This means go away, and the waiter takes the hint.

“Okay, chill out.” It’s not clear to me if Roland is speaking to the other two or to himself. “I’m not an asshole. I just want to know what the hell is going on. If you’re both straight, you need to stop playing games.” He is looking at Mark.

“Dude, we talked about this.” Mark reaches across the table, and Roland pushes him away.

Wendy is staring hard into Roland’s eyes. “Hey. Roland. Get a grip. You can’t tell me what I am and what I’m not.”

“I think I should just go,” I say quietly, almost hoping no one will hear me or notice my absence.

“Don’t go, Joanne. Please stay. We need to talk.” The look in Wendy’s eyes could melt a stone.

As if to coax me further, the waiter approaches with bowls of soup. Its warm, rich smell reaches us first.

Mark’s expressive face can’t seem to hide anything he feels or thinks. Now he looks upset, and he can’t stop watching Roland. His shaggy hair hangs over his ears in an artless way.

Mark looks feminine to me. Why would Wendy be sexually attracted to him? Because he has the qualities that attract her. They play video games together, and they understand each other. As long as I can keep my own feelings out of the way, it’s not complicated.

Soup is a consolation. The earthy taste of spiced carrots is satisfying, but my stomach isn’t ready for it. I alternate between sips of soup and gulps of wine.

“Is this about sexual identity, Roland? Do you think we all need to be labelled?” Wendy is demanding a logical answer from a man who is choked with emotion. He seems as unable to admit his real fears as any of the heterosexual men I’ve known. Roland is vibrating with the effort not to jump up and lash out.

I feel a surge of compassion for the man who wants to know what the hell is what. Of course he wants a secure relationship, and he wants to avoid being humiliated or left behind. He wants a lifelong, unbreakable promise from his partner, as Peter did. Men like this can’t really get what they feel entitled to, but I can understand why they want it.
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Coming Out as a Writer of Smut

When I first started erotic writing years ago, I kept everything on the down-low.

I did tell my mom that I was embarking on some erotic romance writing and that I wouldn’t divulge my pen name or any details. The only person who knew anything more than that was my husband (then-boyfriend), as we do nearly everything as a team. It didn’t take long before I divulged this to our writing group, but for years, word of what I wrote didn’t spread beyond that select group of people.

Part of it was due to embarrassment of writing erotic fiction and part of it was due to not wanting to be out as gay to everyone. (Oh, I should mention, it’s gay erotic romance and erotica I write.)

For example, at the time my day job was accounts payable and receivable at a battery warehouse. The boss was rather forward thinking, I think, but my co-workers and the delivery drivers were all very, hmm, redneck. I didn’t want any of them know I like dick, so that meant never telling them about what I write (not that I had anything close to a conversation with 95% of them).

When I moved onto my next job, a desk job at an office, I soon went on a trip to a writing convention in Calgary (just a few hours’ flight from here) where I had agreed to do a few author-type things, like a public reading of a smut scene. I told my boss what I was up to — my workplace is very gay, so liking dick is normal — but asked him to keep it secret.

In Calgary, I did that public reading of a smut scene. I was more comfortable there than I was back in my home city because I knew almost no one there. It was also a genre-focussed convention, so smut was fairly common there. I read the opening scene of Autumn Fire to a room full of middle-age and senior women. The opening scene is an anonymous bathroom blowjob. I was so uncomfortable. Afterward, a kindly older woman came up to me and gave me suggestions on how to make the scene even sexier, to really root the reader in the blowjob.

I managed to put aside the awkwardness for the rest of the weekend. I made some conference friends there — you know, the kind you hang out with for the weekend and never see again after that. A couple of them read my book over the weekend and told me they loved it.

Also at the conference was a female friend and her ex-boyfriend, and the ex fell in love with my bathroom blowjob scene and literally followed me around for the whole weekend. It was during that weekend that my friend found out her ex was bi and had kissed guys before. He was cute.

I was starting to get used to the idea that the world wasn’t going to end if people knew I wrote sexy fiction.

Still, though, I was happy to leave it all in Calgary.

However, when I returned to work the following Monday, a co-worker came up to me and asked me how my weekend in Calgary was. He wasn’t discreet. From his body language, I could tell he was trying to draw a secret out of me — a secret he already knew.

On the one day of work that I was absent — the Friday — apparently the whole staff had found out what I write. While some co-workers had that awkward “I’m uncomfortable that you write about sex” attitude that can be expected, the rest of my co-workers were surprisingly cool with it, to the point that they seemed almost proud of me.

Over the years since then, it’s been an interesting journey. Some folks are still of the “I’m uncomfortable that you write about sex” category and they try to cover it up by making jokes about sex writing that don’t really hide their discomfort. The rest, though, continue to think it’s very cool, especially the business aspect as I start up and grow a publisher, expand into podcasts, and somehow continue to write.

Since then, I’ve been slowly coming out to friends and family about what I do. A handful of those friends have gone on to read some of my books — which is a whole new level of awkwardness for me as a writer — and loved them.

Recently, I think I passed the final level of smut-writing awkwardness and exposing my smutty self. I published my latest novel, New York Heat, through my publishing company and needed it proofread. I had recently taken on a couple family members as proofreaders at the publisher to help us get through a glut of work and there was only one proofreader available and able to read my mammoth smut book (186K words, with 27 filthy gay sex scenes)… my mom.

She took it on with little hesitation, powered through it, and told me she loved it. She’s not eager to read another smut book by me right away — but she’s up for reading more if they appear in the production queue.

It’s kind of odd.

Six and a half years ago, I ventured into smut writing as a mental break from the crushing workload of my masters degree and the epic sci-fi trilogy I was trying to perfect. I landed a publisher for the first smut book and a year later that book was out, along with my first self-published short story.

I entered into a world of secrecy, not unlike a steamy and dimly-lit bathhouse. Little encounters happen here and there, names are not exchanged, and secrets are kept.

And over the five and a half years since that first publication, my confidence in who I am and what I do has grown. Shame and stigma have been cast aside. As I let people in on my secrets — sometimes not of my own choosing — I found that I didn’t face the rejection or ridicule that I had expected.

It’s like emerging from that dark and claustrophobic bathhouse and walking into the middle of a pride parade. Honestly, coming out as an author of erotic fiction was as hard, if not harder, then coming out as gay.

When I figured out what was going on with me — that I was gay — it took less than a year to come out. I wasn’t ready to fully admit it to myself until that fateful day I met the man who would become my husband. After meeting him, I came out a week later.

Coming out as an erotic author? Man, that took years.

But I’m glad I did. Just like being gay, I found being a closeted erotic author to be stifling, restrictive. And to be out about it was freeing, thrilling.

My name is Cameron D. James and I write erotic fiction — and I’m proud of it.

Cameron D. James is a writer of gay smut. His most recent publication is New York Heat.

Coming Out Against Appropriation

I don’t have cable TV, so I’m often behind on knowing about TV shows and what the latest buzz is about them. It didn’t escape my attention, thanks to Twitter, that Roseanne re-launched with a new season and got really high viewership numbers. (So high that President Trump called her to congratulate her. *eye roll*)

From clicking around on Twitter, I’ve learned that Roseanne Barr is Republican and super conservative. That’s fine, I mean, everyone has the right to their own political beliefs and values. I do have trouble, however, with how she uses her platform as a tool to spread animosity and hatred, including denigrating the Parkland shooting survivors and spreading unfounded conspiracy theories about them.

But what really gets me is that on Twitter (did I tell you I spend too much time there?), a newspaper (can’t remember which one) tweeted their article about how Roseanne is helping conservative women “come out of the closet”. I came across this because another user on Twitter was complaining about the appropriation of the phrase “come out of the closet”.

I don’t think it’s unfair or wrong to use the phrase “closeted” or “come out of the closet” in a non-queer context. After all, I use it myself. I regularly accuse my sister of being a closeted Star Trek fan. (While she hates the show, she knows all of the names of the ships and captains, as well as a bunch of the alien species.) When my husband tells new friends that I’m a writer, I usually make a quip that he’s outed me and my career when I wanted to keep it on the down low.

In a non-queer context, “closeted” and “coming out of the closet” can be an apt description of someone’s interest in something. However, I do see the point of that Twitter user’s complaint.

Here’s the difference created by different contexts:

If a conservative woman comes out of the closet about her conservative political stance, the world doesn’t end. There isn’t some big to-do. There isn’t a risk of being kicked out of the family. There isn’t a risk of murder. And it’s really a “once and done” thing.

In a queer context, coming out can have serious consequences. We often hear of and celebrate the instances where coming out goes well — the movie Love, Simon was about that — but we often don’t hear of where it has negative consequences. Young people are sometimes kicked out of the house and forced to live with a friend or live on the street. There are organizations that pray for us to die horribly (from extremist factions in the Mid-East to the Westboro Baptist Church in the USA to evangelical Christians who "love the sinner, but hate the sin" who might not want us to die horribly but still hate our existence). We’re often labelled as deviant and wicked. We can lose our friends, our communities, our families, our churches, and our support networks. A close friend of mine has had multiple attempts on his life before leaving his home country.

And coming out as queer is never a once-and-done thing.

I’ve been out to my friends and family for seven years. Though I knew it would go well with everyone I felt I needed to tell, it was still a terrifying experience, one I would never wish on anyone, but one that all queer folks have to go through at some point. I was an adult and in a relationship with my then-boyfriend/now-husband, so I had stability and support if I needed it.

I’ve been out for seven years. Yet, it’s only last year that I told my doctor I’m gay and married to a man; that took years of building up the courage to tell my doctor, the one person who should absolutely know. Several months ago I ran into an old school classmate and he asked what was new, I nervously told him I was married to a man. And just last week I came out to a few women I know at the local grocery store — and even then, an instance where there’s no relationship at risk of ending, it was intimidating to come out.

It never stops.

Super supportive straight people are wonderful and amazing, but even they sometimes lack the understanding of how vulnerable it makes a queer person feel to have to come out on a regular basis. My mom talks about me and my partner just as enthusiastically as she talks about my sister and her opposite-sex partner — and, really, that’s a great thing — but it sometimes means my sexuality is put in front of people when I might not want that aspect of myself to be out in the open. One day, same-sex relationships will be entirely normalized, but we are still a very long way from it.

I generally don’t take offence very easily. If I come across an insensitive comment, I usually do a mental “meh”, shrug my shoulders, and move on. But that tweet about the appropriation of the phrase “come out of the closet” has sunk in. While I’m still not offended by the general use of the phrase, I’m finding it harder and harder to do the mental “meh” and shrug my shoulders and move on.

In that particular newspaper tweet describing how Roseanne has helped conservative women “come out of the closet”, I do now take offence at that one. Conservatives (not all conservatives, of course) don’t want people like me to exist, succeed, or be happy — and so for conservatives to be the ones to appropriate the phrase is really starting to get to me.

But my mental shift has gone further than that. With the whole President Trump fiasco — his unfolding legal issues and the divisive nature of American politics — I’ve come across tweet after tweet after Facebook comment after Facebook comment where people attack Trump’s supporters with gay sex references. With Fox News commentator Sean Hannity, in particular, I’ve seen so many comments about how he’s sucking Trump’s dick or licking his flabby taint.

These social media commentators, who are both straight and gay, are appropriating gay sex acts to insult or humiliate the people they dislike. And that bothers me.

Over and over throughout my life, I’ve heard gay sex terms used as insults — cocksucker, felcher, bottom, etc. — which implies that gay sex is something that is disgusting, perverted, and shameful.

If you’ve never had gay sex, let me tell you that it’s the complete opposite of those things. Gay sex is wonderful, intimate, passionate, and deeply connective. It doesn’t matter if you’re the top or the bottom of if you’re covered in cum or if you come out of it squeaky clean — all aspects and roles are part of the whole amazing experience.

It’s all the things that (I assume) straight sex is. Yet if someone is using a sex term to insult someone, nine times out of ten it’s a gay sex term. Our sex is being appropriated and mis-used to hurt and harm others.

We like to think we're getting better or more inclusive as a society — I mean, how many times have I heard "You've got gay marriage, what else do you want?" Equal marriage was a big accomplishment, yes, but it's not the end.

With my first novel, Autumn Fire, the main character has a crush but doesn't want to act on it because he's not out and isn't sure he believes in gay love. One critical review I received said that the reader felt the book wasn't realistic — she said that gay marriage is legal in Canada, so why wouldn't the character be out already and just follow his heart. To make a statement like that means there's an obvious lack of understanding of how complex and terrifying and still-possibly-dangerous the act of coming out is.

The ongoing fight for equal rights is far from over.

Just last week, I was told by someone that they'd been watching the news about the serial killer in Toronto that's taken the lives of several gay men over the last couple decades — and then this person said that someone needs to do the same thing in our city and take out all the gays. Yes. They said that. To me. Knowing I'm gay.

As long as being queer is looked upon by so many people as shameful, disgusting, and sinful — and as long as people wish we'd go back in the closet or wish we'd stop flaunting our sexuality at Pride or wish a serial killer would take down every last gay person — then there is still more work to do.

Is Roseanne Barr helping conservative women come out of the closet? No. She might be helping conservative women be more open about their political views — I can totally accept that — but she's not helping anyone come out of the closet about anything.

Coming out, for most people, is painful, awkward, and never-ending.

Don't appropriate our experience for stupid things like that.





Cameron D. James is a writer of gay erotica and M/M erotic romance; his latest release is Autumn Fire. He is publisher at and co-founder of Deep Desires Press, member of the Indie Erotica Collective, and hosts two podcasts, Deep Desires Podcast and Sex For Money. 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.

Forks in the Road

I’m a huge fan of science fiction, with a somewhat unhealthy love for all the various incarnations of Star Trek.  And it’s in science fiction that I see “forks in the road” explored most often, usually through the sci-fi tropes of either time travel or parallel universes — what if Hitler had won?  What if Captain Picard had never gotten in that devastating fight?  What if Edith Keeler didn’t die?  (Sorry, getting a bit too far into Star Trek now — backing up...)

But we don’t have to explore sci-fi to understand the impact of forks in the road.

As a gay man, I’ve encountered that fork that all LGBT persons face at one point in their lives or another.  To come out or not to come out?

Back when I was in my late twenties (and I make that sound like it was ages ago, when in fact it was about four years ago), I knew I wasn’t 100% straight, but I didn’t know what that meant.  I didn’t identify as gay — not out of some form of internalized homophobia, but simply because I had not yet met a man that I felt any strong emotional attachment to.  I had some minimal sexual experience with men, but it had always left me feeling unsatisfied.  So... I knew I wasn’t straight, but didn’t think I was gay either.  If anything, I had wondered if I was asexual, given that not only did I never feel a romantic/sexual attraction for a man, but neither did I feel that for a woman.

About four and a half years ago, I was deep in the midst of writing a sci-fi novel, which I’m still dabbling with when I have some time.  I had heard that the annual sci-fi/fantasy convention in my city was hosting a few writing and publishing workshops and, reluctantly, at the urging of a friend, I registered for a few things.  The only workshops I was interested in were on Sunday afternoon, but I had to drop off a writing sample on Friday evening, at which point I got my registration package with a complete timetable of workshops and lectures.

Saturday morning I was bored beyond belief and happened to see the timetable on my desk.  I already had a weekend pass, so I headed on down to the hotel to check out a few of the writing workshops that had barely interested me.

I went into the first one — I don’t even remember what it was about — and there, across the table from me, was the most gorgeous man I had ever met.

Afterward, we exchanged numbers to talk about writing and maybe exchange some chapters to edit.  I saw him every single day for three weeks after that.  I still didn’t know what I was feeling or what was going on in my head.  Since I’d never felt a real attraction to anyone before, of either gender, I wasn’t able to completely identify what I was feeling inside.

Eventually, I did come to understand it was an attraction — emotional and sexual — and that I was falling in love with this man.  Then I was faced with that fork in the road that all LGBT persons face — come out or not?  For me, knowing my situation, there was no difficulty in that choice.  I was, and am, in a liberal-thinking family and part of a forward-thinking church.  Heck, my mom had even asked me years before if I was gay, so I knew there wasn’t going to be an issue.

But what if I had been too fearful?  What if I had chosen the path that leads to a closeted sexuality?  Would I have continued my relationship with that man?  Or would I have shunned him and tried to deny my feelings until it was too unbearable to continue doing so?  Would I be as happy and content with myself as I am right now?

I know one thing for sure: I wouldn’t be writing gay erotica.

What makes this chance meeting at a convention all the more remarkable is the number of forks in the path that had led both me and this man there.  I mentioned that I had had a few sexual encounters with men that were largely unsatisfying — well it was one of those men who told me about the writing aspect of the convention and convinced me to go to at least part of it.  And remember I was only interested in the Sunday workshops?  If I hadn’t been so bored to tears on Saturday, I wouldn’t have gone on that day and I wouldn’t have met this man.

This man I met also nearly didn’t go.  It was a chilly and rainy Saturday morning — an absolutely miserable day — and he didn’t have a car.  His means of transportation was walking to the convention.  It was only about a twenty minute walk, but in the frigid rain, it might as well have been an hour.  One of his friends gave him a kick in the ass and he got off his butt and went to the convention... and then we met.

And while I wasn’t sure of my sexuality, he was.  But he wasn’t sure if I was straight or something else, so he almost didn’t talk to me, almost didn’t exchange numbers.

Yet, all of that happened.  All of those paths were taken.

Life is filled with little forks in the road.  Often we think of the big ones — coming out, car accidents, cancer scares, career paths — but it can be the smaller ones that also have a lasting impact on our lives.  If I had picked up a book to read on Saturday, I wouldn’t have gone to the convention.  If the weather had been just a few degrees cooler, this man I met wouldn’t have gone, either.  Those were minute forks, minuscule, yet they’ve had the biggest impact possible on my life.

Cameron D. James is a writer of gay erotica and M/M erotic romance; his latest release is Go-Go Boys of Club 21: The Complete Series.  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.

Why I lost the gig

by Helen E. H. Madden

I'm in the hinterlands of Arkansas this week, enjoying some time off with my family. I could use a break. Work has been picking up around here lately, and I've had more than a few offers come in from people to work with them on various projects. I think one of the sure signs your career as a writer is taking off is when people invite you to participate in their anthologies, or ask you to come speak at their events. Sometimes this is great, sometimes not so much.

I recently had a not-so-great offer come up. A friend who knows I'm a podcaster recommended me to a science group he belongs to. Apparently his group is interested in learning about podcasting. Being a geek girl who has run her own podcast for a year and a half now, he figured I was qualified to speak on the subject. Having taught some workshops at EPICon 2009 and other conventions this year, I thought I was qualified too.

And I am qualified to discuss the subject, not just because I am a podcaster, but also because I have two degrees in communications (which makes podcasting right up my alley), and I've had a LOT of experience teaching and training people on a variety of technical topics. I'm so good at teaching classes, you can give me the topic a day in advance and I'll present a whiz bang course the very next day. I'm used to being asked to teach on pat.

So when my friend's group contacted me about teaching a class on podcasting, I said sure! I like podcasting and I like teaching, and it's nice to be invited to come do things as a professional. Plus, it was an opportunity for this stay-at-home mom to get the heck out of the house for a day without the kids and act like a grown-up.

There was just one problem. I thought this was a small club I'd be speaking to, a bunch of science guys who wanted to learn the ins and outs of podcasting. It turned out to be a rather serious professional association. And my friend had failed to inform them that not only am I a podcaster, I'm also an erotica writer.

I didn't realize this gap in information until after I had already accepted the engagement. It just sort of dawned on me when the very nice lady I'd been e-mailing mentioned that her organization would like to have a copy of my professional bio with a list of professional publishing credits to put in their newsletter, and maybe do an interview as well.

"I can certainly pass on my bio," I e-mailed her back, "but just so there aren't any surprises, did Joe mention to you that I'm an erotica writer, and that my podcast is an erotic fiction podcast, and that all my professional publishing credits are also erotic fiction? E-mail me if you have any questions."

E-mail me if you have any questions is code for I'm being very honest and polite here, and I'll understand if you would rather have a non-erotica writer come speak about podcasting. The nice lady understood exactly what I meant and politely replied with Given your professional experience, I think it would be very hard to promote this event...

It sucks, but it doesn't. It's one thing for me, Helen E. H. Madden, speculative fiction erotica author and podcaster, to speak to a small informal club about podcasting, or to go to a science fiction convention and do workshops there. Those are my forums, my kind of people. They aren't bothered by the word erotica, and nine times out of ten, I got invited to speak because I'm an erotica author. But for a professional group in a corporate setting, where the members probably aren't even allowed to say the word erotica, let alone be associated with an erotica author? Let's be real, folks. This was not the venue for me.

And I don't mind. I don't mind that I lost the job because of the stigma associated with writing about sex. I don't mind that these people don't dare put me in front of their organization because someone might get offended by my insistence on exercising my freedom of speech but writing about sex. I don't mind being labeled as undesirable by the corporate world. And you know why? It's because that stigma, that "Oh my god, she's got a filthy mind!" gasp that comes out of people whenever I tell them what I do, that avoidance of eye contact, that cold shoulder, that's what I enjoy about being what I am. Let's face it, if writing erotica wasn't dirty and forbidden, it wouldn't be nearly as much fun. I like being the perverted outcast. I enjoy being shunned, and I wear my scarlet A (for author) with pride.

And besides, it wasn't a paying job anyway. };)

Nyah!

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.

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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


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