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

I Challenge You to a Game of Sex #sexuality #confidence #kinky #queer

A post by @GiselleRenarde

I'm asking myself if I've ever been attracted to my opposite, and I honestly don't think I have--not in any big sense. The people I'm attracted to are always similar to me in most ways. Our values and beliefs are the same, we tend to enjoy the same literature, films, music, all that.

I've never been the bookworm making eyes at the biker, nothing that extreme.

But if we're talking about sex, well, that is one area where I suppose I have been drawn to people who weren't exactly my mirror image.

When I was younger, I was strikingly confident with regard to sexuality--seeing as I was a virgin and all...

I remember watching American Beauty when it came out in 1999.  When it turned out that (spoiler alert!) Mena Suvari's ravenously seductive character was also a virgin, it was like looking in a weirdly humiliating mirror.

That was me. That's how I behaved. I found the idea of sexuality very empowering, but I'd never actually HAD sex.

Was I attracted to other people who made raunchy jokes and flaunted their assets? Of course not!  I had friends who were like me, but the people I was attracted to, when I was younger, were really quite bashful. Innuendo embarrassed them... excited them, too, I found out years later... but in the moment all I saw was the bashfulness... and all I felt was the power I wielded over men with my feminine wiles.

I liked being able to intimidate men, and I liked men I could intimidate.

I wanted to be in charge, and I was.

Later on, when I was confident in my sexual skill (because I actually had some), I found myself drawn to people who could expand my horizons. Looking back, I was pretty gosh-darn vanilla, at that point. If you'd asked me, "Are you vanilla?" I would have been like "Of course not! How dare you!" but when I think of all the things I hadn't done... wow, that's a long list.

I ended up with someone who was kinky as hell, and not because she was trying to be--she just exuded that brutal feminine confidence I'd felt so sure I possessed all those years ago. It was the dominating nature of her personality that taught me to submit. And, I tell you, it came as a relief to not be in charge in the bedroom anymore.

The effects spread beyond the bedroom, too.  Spread to my writing. If not for that confident kinkster, Lexi Wood would never have been born. She pushed me to write beyond my boundaries--to write incest erotica like the Adam and Sheree series, and Lexi's ever-growing list of short stories.

Sometimes you need someone who's going to challenge you.  You need it to grow.

Now I see myself as a kinky queer who is quietly confident about sex, but who doesn't have to be in-your-face about sexuality or wield it like a sword.

Maybe the whole "opposites attract" thing has operated with subtlety in my life. At times, I've challenged others to a game of sex. At times, I've been challenged. But the result has been growth, overall, and a better understanding of relationships, myself, and my place in the world.

The President and The Rentboy

by Cameron D. James

For "Opposites Attract" month, there aren't two men more opposite than a bombastic and powerful American president and an illegal immigrant Mexican rentboy.

I regularly get asked if The President and The Rentboy is based on a certain American president. The answer is "sort of". It definitely started that way (as I wrote, edited, and published this novella on the weekend before 45's inauguration), but it did take some different directions. However, you will find similarities in the first lady and the VP.

~~~~~

Newly inaugurated as the President of the United States of America, Daniel Grant has a secret. Despite winning a surprise upset election, built on a campaign filled with raucous rallies and an oft-repeated promise to deport illegal immigrants, Daniel is unhappy. While the media loves to speculate about him and his trophy wife, Melanie, the truth is there is no love in their relationship — moreover, as time goes on, Daniel is coming to understand that he prefers men. Itching for some sexual release, a senator discreetly hands him a phone number for Ricky — a rentboy.

Each sexy encounter with this seductive younger man leaves Daniel panting for more. But while his private sex life amps up, so, too, does his public political life, including increasing pressures from his vice-president to deport all illegal immigrants and bring about religious freedom laws so business can discriminate against LGBT customers.


Daniel struggles to balance his personal and public lives, to somehow continue seeing Ricky, despite the intense media scrutiny of everything the president does. Forbidden love is never easy, but it becomes near impossible when Daniel learns that Ricky, the young man he loves and desires so much, is an illegal immigrant from Mexico.

~~~~~

Click here for an excerpt and buy links!

Contrary Fantasies - #opposites #tropes #chemistry

By Lisabet Sarai

Opposites attract.

We’ve all heard the saying, dozens of times. But is it true?

In real life, I have my doubts. However, the trope has abiding popularity, especially in the romance genre. The impoverished but virtuous serving wench wins the heart of the wealthy, titled rake. The mousy office temp catches the eye of the billionaire CEO. The virgin librarian finds herself swept up in the hedonistic world of the rock idol. The sophisticated city gal moves out west, only to end up with the gruff, unpolished (but rugged and handsome) cowboy.

Hey, I plead guilty to using the device myself. In Challenge to Him, set in the first decade of the twenty century, my heroine Olivia is a liberated, intellectual labor activist. Somehow she finds love with a robber baron whose riches depend on the oppressed masses. Theo, in The Gazillionaire and the Virgin, is a surly, sexually-inexperienced recluse who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. Yet he manages to snag the affection of extroverted, media-savvy Silicon Valley hotshot Rachel, who’s had dozens of lovers.

The attraction of opposites shows up in a lot of erotica, too. In these stories, “opposite” often means unfamiliar, forbidden, even dangerous. A buttoned up career woman ends up with her back against the brick wall of an alley, being fucked without mercy by a luridly tatooed biker. A hen-pecked husband takes a risk and hires a glamorous, seductive high class hooker for a night. A petite, Caucasian woman gives in to her craving for a huge, well-hung Black man. In my erotic story “Muse”, a popular author of erotic romance discovers she’s being stalked by the scruffy janitor of her apartment building – and that he’s exactly the sort of stern and demanding Master she has secretly craved all her life.

Why does the “opposites attract” trope work so well in erotic fiction? To be honest, I think we’re trading on everyone’s contrary fantasies. The sexual grass is always greener over on the neighbor’s lawn. We imagine how exciting love and lust could be, if it were somehow different from what we actually experience. Nothing seems hotter than sex with a stranger — a real stranger, someone from a totally different world, with a different background, different expectations, different tastes. (Perhaps this explains the popularity of alien abduction!)

For the romantically-inclined, there’s another angle to consider. In the most satisfying romance, love conquers all. It bridges gaps, heals divisions, harmonizes even the most extreme differences. The greater the disparity between the protagonists, the more impressive and affecting we find love’s ultimate triumph.

Fiction is designed to entertain, to enlighten, to provide cathartic identification with the characters. It’s exciting, fascinating and novel to fantasize about loving (or fucking) the Other.

In the real world, though — well, at least in my personal experience — I’m not likely to be attracted to someone who is truly opposite to me. I’m never going to be drawn to a rap musician who sings about beating up his bitches. I can’t imagine connecting with a rabid sports fan, or someone who spends six hours a day in the gym, or, to be honest, with a millionaire. I just couldn’t communicate with people whose priorities were so different from mine — and great sex, even for one night, depends on communication as much as on chemistry.

All of my serious relationships and most of my casual encounters have involved people with whom I had quite a lot in common: educational level, intellect, values, and interests. Most of my lovers have cared more about books than money, more about world peace than basketball, more about new experiences than new things.

I do believe in biologically-based attraction. There have been a few times in my life when I’ve been inexplicably drawn to someone who seemed all wrong, a panoply of opposites. Usually it turned out that he or she was wrong for me, the chemistry spoiled by a persistent lack of comfort.

Hence, I tend to be skeptical when people claim that opposites attract. Except, of course, in books.

By Candlelight

By Lisabet Sarai

It seemed, at first, like we had everything in common. At the party (my party, a birthday gathering, where he showed up as a friend of a friend), we got high on ideas. We talked non-stop about everything from books to God (although now I realize those topics are not so far apart). The chemistry was immediate and visceral, apparently independent of his skinny limbs, strong glasses, droopy mustache and the rumpled shirt hanging out of his worn jeans. (Later, I discovered that simply breathing the scent from a discarded item of his clothing was sufficient to make me ache with want.) 

 Whether deliberately or through some Freudian intervention, he left his bottle of Stolichnya in my freezer. Of course he had to come back to retrieve it. Thus began one of the most luminous and painful relationships in my life.

I loved him. I think he loved me, in his own way. And sometimes, when our bodies connected, our minds seemed to mesh as well, until I couldn't tell where the physical left off and the psychic began. We both loved words, but words couldn't capture the intensity of our best times (despite all my attempts).

He was a night owl, though, while I woke with the dawn. He seemed oblivious to mess or even dirt, while I preferred a neater, more predictable environment. A classic Bohemian, he drifted through life, working odd jobs and writing into the wee hours. Meanwhile, I was working on my PhD and obsessing about my career. Oddly, though, despite our manifest mutual attraction, our most critical divergence was in the realm of the sexual.

In another era, he might have been a monk, holed up in his cell, avoiding the carnal and pondering the spiritual. He appeared to believe that our lust was unworthy; his obvious desire for me kindled guilt rather than joy. As for me, at that time in my life, especially, I was convinced that sex was my personal path to enlightenment.

I began to feel gross and dirty around him, a whore who cared more for the flesh than for the mind. Meanwhile, the contrast between my well-ordered life and his mad bouts of creativity convinced me that I was shallow, ordinary, uninspired. I tried to control him, too, wanting a kind of commitment that he was completely unable or unwilling to provide. We should have split up long before we did – but the chemistry still drew us together.

One New Year's season I drove 2000 miles to spend a week with him in his basement apartment, in the western college town where he'd somehow ended up working as a waiter in a spaghetti restaurant. Never had the contrasts between us been so clear. I still couldn't let him go, though.

The poem below comes from that painful, ecstatic visit.

By Candlelight

You sleep defensive

hugging the wall

awaiting an ambush

pinned

on your longhorn dreams.

Lulled

by the radiator

and last night's wine

while a noontime ray,

dusty, stealthy,

through basement panes

pales the room

into false dawn.

My candle crammed

in a vodka bottle

the only gold

in this gray.

You talk in your sleep,

in the pages of

this manuscript:

times apart,

times alone,

captured and sealed

in neat pica.

Your dialectic

tears at my thoughts:

the world, the road;

the body, the soul;

security,

ecstasy.

Suddenly know

that you are creating

the cliff-edged dilemmas,

teetering here

on the fringe of the world,

gasping to gather

enough of the air

to keep you alive.

And I?

Invader,

sister and lover;

I'd like to raze

your philosopher's city

of walls and opposites,

shake you from sleep,

show you a mirror -

how you are a hobo,

scholar and sinner,

a monk and a dancer

all together

(as I am a whore

and a holy sister).

No thought, no word,

can capture the richness

of me, of you,

in this backstreet room

in sordid Missoula.

It's noon

and you

are the rush of a drug

and a slow sunrise.