Clean Dirt

by Jean Roberta

I already discussed “splosh” under a previous topic, so this time, I have to interpret “filth” as a metaphor. This is tricky. If “filth” means immorality, it can be interpreted in various ways. One person’s filth is another person’s revelation.

In my story, “The Battle Lost and Won,”* two nuns form a “special friendship.” The younger one, Sister Mary Agnes, feels horribly guilty about it, even though an androgynous Angel Gabriel has already appeared to her to warn her that entering the convent to avoid the complications of desire was cowardly, not virtuous.

Sister Mary’s lover, Sister Benedict, gives birth to a baby that seems to have supernatural origins. The Reverend Mother, wishing to avoid a scandal, threatens to cut the baby’s throat.

That’s when Sister Mary Agnes grows a spine and starts to develop her own moral code. Like many other single mothers, Sister Mary decides to keep the child alive by any means necessary:

Sister Mary held the child tightly against her bosom, where it mewed like a kitten and moved its little limbs, smearing the woman's habit with blood. Somehow Sister Mary knew the creature was female. "I will find a wetnurse for her and work for her keep. Sister Benedict, you must wait for me!"

Mother Anne tried to block Sister Mary's way. Summoning strength that she hadn't known she had, Sister Mary pushed her aside and strode to her room to collect her few belongings.

Soon, the woman was hurrying down the road that led to the village, holding the baby wrapped in her cloak.

Sister Mary walked past one humble cottage after another. Which dwelling had room for another child? None looked promising. At length she came to the inn, or so it appeared to be. A smiling gentleman strode past her to ring the bell. He was ushered inside by a plump, dark-haired woman in a bright red bodice that revealed the deep valley between her generous breasts. Sister Mary felt sure that she had come to the right place.

The young nun knocked at the back door, as befitted one seeking work as a servant. A maid wearing a saucy yellow gown opened the door, looking as though she had been interrupted while dressing. Her hair hung loose over her shoulders, and she casually bent over to tie one of her garters before acknowledging Sister Mary.

"What have we here?" she sneered. "A fallen sister. Well, it's not my problem. I'll fetch the Mistress."

"Please," begged Sister Mary, "my child is hungry." But the maid had already turned away.

Sister Mary cautiously looked at the face of the baby girl she thought of as hers. The child looked gravely back at her with the eyes of a sad woman. "Whether you come from Above or Below," promised Sister Mary, "I'll take care of you."

The woman in the red bodice swept forward, her petticoats rustling under her gown. This was Mistress Alison of the house known as the Lion Rampant. She laughed aloud at the sight of Sister Mary, who had resolved to take back her old name.

"Mistress, I am Susanna," she said as sweetly as she could. "I would be honored if you could use my services. The hospitality of your house is renowned."

"You needn't tell me that, girl," smiled the Mistress. "I'm sure we can reach an agreement. You're a comely wench and you still have an air of innocence. Are you willing to please me?"

The baby opened her tiny mouth as widely as she could, and screamed in hunger. Her face turned red, and the color spread to the tender scalp under her wisps of dark brown hair.

"You may feed your child, Susanna. You needn't pretend to be modest with me."

"My milk has not come in, Mistress. Is there no one in your house who can suckle a child?"

Mistress Alison laughed and made circles in the air with both hands. Susanna felt a tingling in both her breasts. "Come," ordered the Mistress.

The former nun knew that service would be required of her, and she could guess that housekeeping would not be a major part of it.

The Mistress brought Susanna and the baby to a bedchamber where she told Susanna to lay baby Lilith on the floor and remove all of her clothes. With fear and mounting excitement, Susanna freed her hair from its covering and unplaited it, leaving it to flow in ripples down her back, awkwardly holding the baby in the crook of one arm and then the other. She removed her stained cloak, awkwardly folded it and laid it on the floor as a pallet for the baby.

Mistress Alison watched, looking as though she had just heard a colorful story. She seemed pleased that Susanna had not presumed to hang her cloak from one of the hooks on the wall.

Soon Susanna was pulling off her shift, exposing her hard, round breasts, the charming little pit of her navel, her firm buttocks, gently curved hips and coltlike legs. To her amazement, streams of milk flowed from her nipples down the slopes of her breasts and over her belly.

"The Lord provides, dear," said the Mistress, winking.

Susanna held the baby to each of her breasts in turn, and Lilith drank loudly, slurping and smacking her lips before fastening them tightly on the source of nourishment and sucking with force. Susanna was shocked by the pleasure that flowed through her, and by the answering moisture that gathered between her lower lips. Susanna felt herself melting into her role as the nurse of her child and the servant of her Mistress, bound to both by remorse, gratitude and secret pride.

Susanna is shocked by how much she enjoys her new job in the local “house of ill repute,” yet as a nun, she was expected to be of service to others. Her new form of service also involves living with other women in a spirit of sisterhood. She can’t help rejecting the conventional morality that defines her and all the other wenches in the Lion Rampant as “fallen,” while celibate women are considered holy.

Susanna is also shocked by the pleasure of breast-feeding. Surely mothers aren’t supposed to be turned on while suckling their babies? (This was a controversial issue in the Erotic Readers and Writers lists several years ago.) Yet she feels what she feels, and she can't see what harm it could do. Note that this experience does not turn her into a pedophile; for sexual pleasure lower down, she prefers adults.

Eventually, the convent is destroyed after a cemetery full of baby bones is discovered on its grounds. Susanna is reunited with Sister Benedict, a.k.a. Joan.
To this day, two lesbians raising a child (or several) are not considered “clean” by conservatives, but if they are filthy, it’s worth asking: “Compared to what?”

Regarding the moral nature of young Lilith, the Angel Gabriel answers with exasperation (after being summoned repeatedly to make announcements) that she must decide for herself whether to be good or evil; it’s up to her. Even if the child’s origins are as mysterious as the origins of life itself, she is as human as the rest of us, and she can find her own definition of “filth.”


*This story is in my collection, The Princess and the Outlaw: Tales of the Torrid Past (Lethe Press, 2013). https://www.amazon.com/Princess-Outlaw-Jean-Roberta-ebook/dp/B00EW46W66

Glimpses of Truth

by Jean Roberta

I have all sorts of qualms about following the traditional advice to “write what I know” in the most literal sense. To start with, when Sacchi’s call-for-submissions came out for Wild Girls, Wild Nights, I had already written three lesbian stories that I thought of as unvarnished truth, in which only the names were changed.

One of these stories, “Family Gathering,” was about my first ever woman-to-woman sex, and it was published in Up All Night: Adventures in Lesbian Sex, edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel and Stacy Bias (Alyson Books, 2004). The second, “Gabrielle’s Fountain,” was about a first event (“squirting” or female ejaculation) in a doomed, long-distance affair I had with a woman who wanted me to move in with her in another town (with my grade-school-aged child), but her life alarmed me, and I didn’t really want to share it. This story was also published in an anthology from Alyson, edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel: First-timers: True Stories of Lesbian Awakening (2006). For awhile, it seemed as if Cleis and Alyson were competing for the biggest share of the “true queer sex stories” market.

My third (or first, really) autobiographical lesbian story was/is not sexually explicit because we didn’t have sex. It is about my flirtation or one-sided crush with a charismatic local singer-songwriter who was an avid reader, and therein lay the problem. Unlike the women in my published stories, this person was likely to find and read any publicly-available material I might write about her. I only sent this story to one place: the Storytime list of the Erotic Readers and Writers Association, in 1999.

This story felt dangerous for various reasons: the character was recognizable, and if I spiced it up by making it an actual sex story, and it got published, what kind of fallout could I expect? The risks didn’t seem worth it, especially since I had no problem making up stories which didn’t seem libellous.

When Sacchi’s call came out, I asked if she would accept reprints. She said no, the publisher wanted original stories. I had promised my spouse when she was still only my new girlfriend (in 1989) that I would never embarrass her by describing her naked body on a page for all to see. That seemed fair to me.

Of course, most of what I write (including fantasy stories) is rooted somewhere in my life, but I prefer to avoid gossip and accusations, if possible. So when a call for “true,” original lesbian stories comes out, I just have to pass.

Even when I’m writing about a general scene or situation (e.g. the sex trade) which is real, there is the question of how to present it, as Annabeth brought up. Even though the fierce feuds over “political correctness” which characterized the Feminist Sex Wars of the 1980s seem to be over, I think they left me with traces of post-traumatic stress.

When I read Michelle Tea’s latest more-or-less autobiographical, meta-fictional, surrealistic novel, Black Wave (so I could review it for The Gay and Lesbian Review), I was amazed, once again, that Ms. Tea is currently described as the voice of young, working-class queer women who dare to tell it like it is. Considering that her narrator, named Michelle, is constantly high and usually drunk, and that she breaks promises and hearts, including her own (as people in altered states of consciousness tend to do), I suspect that the same book, written in, say, 1982 (when Audre Lorde’s autobiographical Zami came out), would not have found a publisher. Or if it did, the author would have been barred from every conference and publication with “feminist” in its title.

In 2007, I dared to write a story for an anthology about (and largely by) “women of colour,” edited by Jolie du Pre for Alyson: Iridescence: Sensuous Shades of Lesbian Erotica. This was not a “true stories” anthology, thank the Goddess. My narrator looks white but has a dash of native blood, which actually describes me, so I hoped I would not be trashed for writing it. (I wasn’t.)

The story, “For All My Relations,” is about two sex-workers (based loosely on my experience in the early 1980s), and it starts with an anti-erotic scene. (Things heat up later.) I argued with myself about this opening, but I decided to leave it in. The fate of “Lynette” in the following passage shook me up at the time, and still does:

“Lynette had been missing for a week when she was found behind the Royal Arts Centre, naked and tied up. She had been left in the bushes in the surrounding park, on a January day when the temperature hovered at forty below zero in Fahrenheit as well as Celsius. She was found too late.

‘Jesus,’ I said to Amanda. We were watching the image of a covered shape on a stretcher being loaded into an ambulance by paramedics on the TV news. Police were looking for the last man who was known to have seen her.

‘Did you know her?’ I asked.

‘A bit, yeah. She worked for Crystal and Sapphire when I was there. She took on too many guys on the side, though, just to collect the agency fee. That’s not safe.’

Crystal and Sapphire were legendary, and their fame went a long way toward convincing most of our johns that all whores were dykes and vice versa. The two madams (Mesdames? I had taken some French in high school), one black and one white, had arrived in our simple town from a more worldly city five years before, and opened the first escort agency here.

A woman who could cheat on Crystal and Sapphire would have to be shortsighted, to say the least. It didn’t follow that she deserved a slow, painful death.”

“Crystal and Sapphire” were a lesbian couple from Winnipeg (capital city of the province of Manitoba, said to be in the exact centre of Canada) who started the first escort agency in the town where I live, which was formerly known mostly as the national headquarters of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Making a profit by renting out call girls here in the late 1970s took a certain vision, or business savvy, or cynical, woman-hating gall, depending on your perspective. If they saw a niche that needed to be filled, however, they were on the right track. They were so successful that their multiple agencies produced spinoffs. As far as I know, all the surviving local agencies can be traced back to the founding mothers.

I realized that this whole story could be read as a cautionary tale about the wages of sin, which is certainly not how I intended it. As other writers have said, however, once a story goes public, in some sense it no longer belongs to the writer. Readers interpret it through the lens of their own experience, their own biases, and whatever is generally deemed to be “true” in the cultural climate of the time. “Truth” is never a stable thing.
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Hustling Through the Ages

by Jean Roberta

The concept of sex workers (people, mostly women, paid to provide sexual services for customers) as “hustlers” has always filled me with mixed feelings. If a “hustle” is a con game, are whores/harlots/call girls/courtesans offering something bogus or overpriced? Is this because women are expected to provide unlimited sex for men without expecting anything in exchange?

In my experience, most heterosexual men are willing and eager to have sex with women, so why would women have to make a great effort to tempt them into it?

This line of thought reminds me of double-bind conversations I’ve had with men who disapprove of 1) women who manipulate men into marrying them and supporting them financially, and 2) women who boldly go into the paid workforce to steal “men’s” jobs. Men who don’t think women should try to survive in any material sense also tend to disapprove of: 1) “frigid” women who say no, and 2) sluts who don’t say no. These seem to be the dudes who resent the female “hustlers” who fascinate them and who supposedly spirit men’s money right out of their wallets.

Disapproval of women who offer sex as part of a “hustle” is often blended with disapproval of women who outwit men in various ways, often during a war. Behold “Rahab the Harlot” of ancient Hebrew times, as imagined by a nineteenth-century French painter, Jacques Tissot:



Supposedly she helped the Israelites conquer the city of Jericho by hiding two Israelite spies from the men who were searching for them. From a non-Israelite viewpoint, this made Rahab seem untrustworthy.

Here is a Greek image of a sex-worker plying her trade. For some reason, this has been associated with Rahab.


Part of the problem of morally evaluating the likes of Rahab is that the sex trade has often been conflated with other careers (such as tavern-keeping), and the cultures of the ancient Middle East were distinctly different from the later Christian cultures of Europe and Britain.
For example, this woman would look like a “hustler” to most puritans:


They would suspect her of being a follower of this guy:

According to traditional Christian theology, a wedding ceremony neutralizes the evil inherent in sex, so that married couples can procreate without committing sin, but women who couple with men who are not their husbands are doing something illicit, which is akin to other sins such as blasphemy, lying and stealing.

In 1660, when Puritan rule ended in England, and King Charles II brought back the monarchy, Christmas revels and the theatre as a popular place for hanky-panky, he had already fathered his first child on an early mistress. (Eventually, he fathered between 12 & 19 of them, none born to his legal wife.) One of his favourite playmates was Nell Gwyn, who worked in her mother’s bawdy house in her early teens, progressed to selling oranges in the theatre, then to performing onstage, and then to the King’s bed. Apparently, when he was on his deathbed in 1685, he told his advisors: “Let not poor Nelly starve.” How generous of him.


The Victorian Age brought about stricter morals in theory, since the reigning Queen and her husband the Prince were role-models of proper domesticity. In real life, the sexual double standard created a thriving “underworld,” some of which was surprisingly above-ground. Here are two relatively well-known courtesans of the time:

[Catherine Walters]
[Cora Pearl]

By the Edwardian Age (early 1900s), naughty postcards like this were popular. Undoubtedly, the women who modelled nude for photographers and painters were thought of as “hustlers” who earned a dishonest living.


Despite what I’ve sometimes claimed, this is not an image of me in my distant youth.

I haven’t actually sold sex since the early 1980s. Here is a very recent photo of me, taken this week for the university website. Am I still a "hustler" in any sense? I honestly don't know.

If women in general have an illicit relationship with a money economy, then yes, I am still "hustling," since I not only support myself, but help to support my spouse & stepsons. I do this by introducing impressionable young adults to the mysteries of grammar, and of literature. Heh. There are so many ways to corrupt the righteously ignorant.

Rentboys in Gay Culture

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I Guess It Skips A Generation

by Giselle Renarde

I took my mother for a walk a few weeks ago.  She won't go on her own.

We walked through the neighbourhood where I grew up.  It's not the ritziest area.  According to the Rap Dictionary, it has "the dubious distinction of having the highest concentration of subsidized housing in all of Ontario."  Lots of gang violence--the kind that's not widely reported because, hell, it's just black people shooting each other so who really cares?

When I was growing up in the 80s, the community had its sights set on cleaning up one particularly noticeable aspect of my neighbourhood: the rampant street prostitution.

I was young back then, and my family had problems of its own, so I'm not sure street prostitution was something I really noticed.  Actually, I remember seeing many more anti-prostitution signs than actual prostitutes.

But, as I said, I was a kid.  Sometimes kids take things at face value because, if you see something every day, it seems normal.

Although, realistically, of everything that goes on in this world, I'd say prostitution is right up there with falling in love on the normalcy scale. It's always existed, and it always will.

When my mother and I were out for our recent walk, the topic of prostitution came up--kind of weird, in a family that NEVER talks about sex.  And it was my mother who brought it up, too.  We were talking about the controversial proposal of building a casino here in Toronto.  My mom was against the idea because "people get addicted to gambling, and a casino would probably attract prostitutes."

Huh.  Is that what casinos do?

Anyway, my mother's general opposition to prostitution surprised me, and not just because I believe so strongly that sex work is real work and should be widely recognized at such.  My maternal grandmother and I have talked at length about sex work and we're 100% on the same page:

We believe that sex work is a valid career choice.  It existed long before we did, and it's not going away any time soon.  We recognize that some people are forced into the trade or enter it for reasons related to poverty and systemic oppression, but we have hopes that decriminalizing prostitution would ease many of the dangers faced by sex workers by allowing them easier access to protection from the forces that now tyrannize and harrass them.  That said, the biggest shift is never a legal one.  Stigma and sin are so deeply attached to sex work that very little can be gained until those perceptions are dealth with.

My grandmother and I have spoken at length about sex work.  For her, it's a feminist issue.  She's been my feminist inspiration for as long as I can remember.  That's why it always boggled my mind that my mom, wedged between her own mother and me, held such brazenly different opinions.

Maybe I shouldn't have been so surprised.  After all, isn't it normal for a kid to rebel against her mother's ways and beliefs?  My grandmother was (and is) an unapologetically strong woman.  I now realize my mother's got more strength than I gave her credit for when I was younger, but she's rather more on the Marge Simpson side of the scale.  And then along came me, and I rebelled again, swinging back in my grandmother's direction.

Prostitution, like pretty much everything else, is a divisive issue among feminists.  I'm starting to think there are as many feminisms as there are individuals.  But my grandmother laid a path for me, and I walk it whether I'm in my cozy neighbourhood or the rough but familiar one in which I grew up. 

I'll mention one more thing--a bit of a tangent to the conversation I had with my mother that day.  I'm not sure why, but I asked what her favourite song was.

She said, "These Boots Are Made For Walking."

"Really?"  I wondered if maybe she didn't understand the song.  I asked, "Why do you like it so much?"

She said, "It's about being a strong woman and standing on your own two feet."

Oh, mom.  I'd never have guessed.