A Cold Way To Go

by Daddy X

Taboos are defined as cultural prohibitions of certain acts, or improper use of objects deemed sacred in a particular society. In a larger sense of the word, could taboo be linked to karma? Will defying human ideals or even cultural norms wreak havoc with one’s path? Will we, in fact, reap what we sow?

Take one executive Momma X used to work for. It was her first gig after building a 20-year career, ending up as director of Design and Production for a non-profit publisher.  She’d now be working at, not only a for-profit business, but at a much higher salary. Yesssss….

She was already acquainted with the owner of the company when she sent in her resume. Years before, they had attended psychic reading classes together, but hadn’t had contact for many years. Upon reviewing her resume and knowing her reputation, he hired her on the spot, saying “I liked her back then, and I like her now!”

The world of for-profit publishing operates with somewhat different criteria than a Greenpeace. The former’s funding is private, and expected to make a profit (duh) for its investors. Just as in the non-profit world, the game is to keep costs down. There are ways to achieve this, and one of those ways is not paying the bills, easier to do when reputation isn’t as critical as in the non-profit realm.

So let’s call the new boss Sam. Sam the publisher—at Samco Publishing.

Sam was a self-starter, having historically produced a line of hobbyist calendars: sports cars, art, trains, dolls, etc. When he hired a high profile, highly competent sales personality, he managed to acquire some big-time licenses: Star Wars, Ann Geddes, Harry Potter and the like.

Samco eventually grew to employ well over a hundred people, a considerable entity in our little county. Sam was a local success—the Golden Boy. His employee Christmas party was an extravagant bash at an exclusive hotel. We saw him speak at a dinner served in his honor at the prestigious Officer’s Club in the San Francisco Presidio.

However, all was not well with the company. Sam (like our President) was one of those guys who thrived on chaos. He would get a new idea the day before a six-figure print run. He’d halt production of a book when the delivery date was imminent. He didn’t pay his bills. After a run, he’d claim some minor (read invented) error and refuse to pay the printer, threatening to sue. Suppliers would often take the loss rather than fix the alleged error. They knew that any revised product would also be deemed ‘imperfect’.

Momma began feeling badly for her supplier reps, many with whom she’d had prior relationships. When she’d tell them they were unlikely to be paid, the reps would say they got their commissions when the deal went through. It was their company who had the responsibility to collect. Obviously, this way of doing business involves a law of diminishing returns. Employees were laid off. Suppliers shied away. New suppliers were found, and were subsequently screwed as well.

For years, Samco had an ‘angel’ investor. Rumor had it that the guy had sunk 30 million in the business. At one point, said investor decided to cut his losses and quit throwing good money after bad.

Samco’s unorthodox closing made front-page news. The day before the headlines, employees were called into a room and told to clean out their desks, go home and not come back. Locks were to be changed. No paychecks would be issued; no accrued vacation time would be addressed. Their health insurance hadn’t been paid for several months. There were employees who were scheduled for medical procedures. Others were at home recuperating. Some had used vacation time as a savings account.

Fast forward ten years. Nobody had heard from Sam after a few lame attempts to do short run calendars, soon after he’d closed Samco. Nobody wanted to work with him. Momma X didn’t even return his call.

In 2016, Sam’s dismembered body was found in a freezer in Bangkok. Authorities said it had been frozen for at least 8 years.  It was found during an investigation of a passport forgery ring. That sounds right. Sam was in printing. The Bangkok paper reported they had found the person who’d cut the body up, but not the murderer, likely a disgruntled associate who hadn’t been paid.

It took a year to identify the body; there’d been no missing person report. Nobody had looked for or even asked about Sam.

Sam, the Golden Boy.

Nobody cared.

Thou shalt not...

Inspired somewhat by Lisabet’s post last week I’ve been thinking about the times I broke the established taboos of writing. There haven’t been that many, law-abiding soul that I am, but once or twice I have strayed from the path of writer righteousness

My sins are not so much in failing to deliver the happy ever after so stridently demanded in our romance genre, more that I invented a version of happy that the readers didn’t anticipate. Romance, erotic or otherwise, is fairly formulaic. A HEA means the two (or more) central characters find their happiness with each other. That’s the norm, readers expect it.

Her Noble Lords is a historical ménage, set in medieval England. The main characters are twin brothers, and their female partner. Towards the end of the book one of the twins is killed, the cause of much grieving for the remaining pair. But, as so many of us do when faced with immense tragedy and loss, they manage to pick themselves up and reinvent their relationship. They find a way to carry on, because they have to. A twin can’t be replaced, but people can move on.

I had emails from readers deploring this ending. It broke the rules. A ménage story couldn’t be reduced to a traditional pairing, they said. Perhaps they were right, but that ending was the one that seemed right to me. And it was my story.

Then of course there are the rules handed down by publishers. Often misleadingly described as guidelines, don’t be fooled. These are rules, as firmly set in stone as any commandment.

I first fell foul of these early in my writing career when I wrote a non-con/dub-con spanking scene. My publisher liked the book in general, but insisted that this particular scene be re-written to comply with their ‘guidelines’ regarding consent. In those early days I was far more malleable (for which read insecure). I felt I had no option but to do as the publisher asked or my book – and perhaps subsequent ones – wouldn’t see the light of day. I now work with multiple publishers, and have a few self-published books as well, so I would be a lot less easily swayed. I have options, I can shop around or go independent. I never really warmed to the re-written version. It took so much of the subsequent tension and angst out of the story to leave what seemed to me a more lukewarm plot.

I faced a similar dilemma just recently. Another historical I wrote included in the back story a marriage which took place when the girl was only about twelve, common enough back in the medieval period. Although the marriage wasn’t consummated until years later when she was eighteen, the publisher didn’t like it. It was counter to their guidelines and policy regarding under age characters. It had to be changed. A betrothal would do.

Except, it wouldn’t. The actions of most of the core characters in the first five chapters were driven by the fact of this marriage. It was historically accurate (though I wouldn’t die in a ditch over that, necessarily), and it was simply the bedrock upon which the story rested. I discussed my views with the publisher, naturally, but their policy was clear.

So was mine, by then. I politely withdrew my book and placed it elsewhere. Unchanged.

The Taboo of Growing Old

Sacchi Green

Getting old is taboo in erotica. Not in the sense of being forbidden—no one will stop you from writing about characters advanced in years, and every once in a while an editor will talk a publisher into backing an anthology of stories where all the characters are over—shudder—50. Or sometimes even ust over 40. The horror! And you can occasionally place such a story in other anthologies. I’ve done it a few times myself. Yes, I admit that “taboo” is an overstatement in this context.  

Still, in erotica, as in most forms of entertainment, pretty much anything goes except being physically unattractive, in terms of what’s generally considered attractive in one’s particular time and culture. In our culture, that tends to be youth-centered. Fortunately, even within a culture tastes do vary, and a good writer can make a case for one character being attractive to another even when one or both of them fall pretty far outside the norms, but most erotica seems to toe the mark of what’s commonly considered youthful movie-star looks.  

Speaking of toeing the mark, I’m not very familiar with toe fetishism, although I know it exists. Do toes need to be “’cute” to be fetishized? I rather suspect not. There are certainly some exceptions to the necessity of exceptionally attractive characters in erotica, and we humans being as contrary as we are, there are probably some who fetishize dramatically ugly characters, or parts thereof. And there may be those who prefer to read about older people having sex, for various reasons, not necessarily kinky ones.

Aging is a complex issue in our society in ways that go beyond the matter of looks and therefore desirability, although those are the prime counts against it. Getting old is a challenge to the young’s sense of immortality.  There seems to be a feeling that those who grow old must somehow deserve their fate. They should have known better. This attitude isn’t quite as pernicious as the one that sees poverty and ill health as the fault of those who suffer them, or possibly a just punishment from God, but the two are similar.

What set me off on this tirade isn’t the fact that I’ve somehow allowed myself to get to an age that’s considered old. I am as good as anyone else of my generation in defining “old” as some years older than wherever I am now. But I’m annoyed by the click-bait headlines I see again and again online, the ones about “So-and-so was gorgeous in such-and-such TV show back in the 70s, 80s, but you won’t believe what they look like now!” You know, the ones interspersed with “Celebrities who have to work at Regular Jobs!” and “So-and-so Lost 100 pounds and Looks Like a Model!” There seems to me to be an underlying motif of, “Ha ha, they got old!” I have to admit that I don’t click on those, so for all I know they show pictures of celebrities who have managed to stay gorgeous, but I still think they’re intended to appeal to people who want to see the formerly beautiful and famous brought low by aging.

When it comes to averting the eyes (and mind) from images of old people having sex, there may be some connection to the possibly universal distaste for thinking of one’s own parents (or grandparents) in sexual situations. I suppose this is to be expected when the parents have been responsible for such oppressions as toilet training. And I suppose that thinking of grandmothers as hyper-prudish seems reasonable from the perspective of the grandchildren, who can’t imagine that anyone that old was ever young, or sexy. Every generation thinks they invented sex, or at least sex with the lights on. I guess they never heard of the 60s, and Free Love, back when I was their age. Granted, not all of us had the luxury of being hippies, but we paid attention.

But back to erotica. I have an admission to make. What really got me thinking along these lines is wondering whether I’ve included too many stories about older people in my next anthology. Wondering about that, of course, makes me guilty of seeing erotica with old people as slightly taboo, too. Will readers complain? Will it affect sales? Well, screw it all. The book is Best Lesbian Erotica of the Year Volume 2—how I miss the days when it would have been titled simply Best Lesbian Erotica 2018!—and it just happened that among the stories I considered the best, there were more than usual with older protagonists, and fewer with young ones. Maybe this is a trend. Most of them were younger than what I consider old, but there are several over 40, and one lovely piece set in a geriatric psych ward.

Hmm, as I look again at my Table of Contents, there isn’t really as big a percentage of older-folks stories as I’ve been thinking there was. More indication of my own unexamined bias. It’s like the study that shows that if twenty percent of a group is female, the males will be sure that the females constitute an overwhelming majority.  I’ll stop obsessing about it. You know, I think the reason I feel like there are too many of those stories is just that they’re so good, and stick in my mind.

So I guess I’ve been attacking a straw man. Or straw woman. Like beauty, taboo is in the eye of the beholder, and if I think growing old is taboo, that says more about me than about our youth-oriented, celebrity-obsessed, fat-phobic society.

Fiction in the First Degree

by Jean Roberta

Are there taboos in erotica? Apparently there are words, images, and acts that will get a book thrown into the “dungeon” at Amazon.com, but no one seems to know the rules, or why they vary.

Re childhood influence, I also grew up in a home where sex was never discussed except for “the talk.” I was warned that boys have sexual feelings, and therefore they would try to persuade me to do things that were not in my interests—and which, presumably, I wouldn’t like. When my parents became aware that I had had consensual sex, they were horrified. My role as the Family Madwoman dates from about that time. Like parents in the Victorian Age, they seemed to believe that girls who have sexual feelings are mentally ill.

In some sense, that freed me. Since a sex life of any kind was not something my parents approved of for me, I could do it with men, with women, or presumably with goats, all with the same results. If anything, non-heterosexual sex was both safer (it couldn’t lead to pregnancy) and kinder than sex with men, since most heterosexual men (in my experience) can’t believe that a fuckable woman has other talents and interests.

As an adult leftist, I’ve been exposed to various definitions of political correctness. Anti-porn feminists in the 1980s made me nervous about expressing desire in any direction, especially on paper. At about the same time, I was introduced to “cultural appropriation.”

Oy vey. (This is an appropriated Yiddish expression. My mother used it often, having been raised partly by her smart, bohemian Jewish friends in 1930s New York, but I could probably be criticized for using it. This is not my worst offense. Read on.)

Last week, the national Assembly of First Nations had its annual conference here in Regina, Saskatchewan. This was a big deal in a Canadian province where a large minority of the population is of indigenous or First Nations descent. (The taboo label, used in bar fights, is “fuckin’ Indians.”)

Spouse and I went to hear a panel discussion by four female indigenous artists on “cultural appropriation.” They each had a somewhat different approach, but as one of them said, “If you’re not sure whether to borrow something from a culture that isn’t yours, don’t do it.”

The problem is that fiction writers are always tempted to describe something they/we haven’t experienced, and write first-person narratives from a viewpoint that doesn’t match our social personae (e.g. White Anglo-Saxon professional). Therefore a lot of fiction could be considered politically incorrect, and not just the sexually-explicit stuff.

In fairness, I can see why the original practitioners of an ancient martial art or healing practice (kung fu, karate, capoeira, yoga, herbalism, sweat lodges) feel violated when foreigners turn it into something trendy and sell it to other white folks for big bucks while the folks who started it remain marginalized and poor. This situation requires honest discussion and fair trade.

To give another example, every form of popular music I know of in the U.S. was originated by folks of African descent, many of whom were kept out of segregated venues and paid tiny amounts for songs they had written by recording companies that made big profits from them. This subject requires a book, preferably with a soundtrack CD.

However, the boundaries between that kind of exploitation and simply taking on a fictional persona are always vague and subject to interpretation. So I’m never sure when I will run into an outraged reader who will “call me out” for something I’ve written, and not just because I got a few details wrong.

Being scolded by prudes for writing about sex doesn’t scare me nearly as much as it used to. The possibility of being called a totally unwoken bigot worries me more, since the accusation would probably come from someone I respect.

Let me recklessly provide some ammunition that could be used against me. Here is part of the introduction to Iridescence: Sensuous Shades of Lesbian Erotica (Alyson Publications, 2007) by the editor, Jolie du Pre:

“Literary erotica is a fascinating genre and there are some wonderful l stories to be found. But what I’ve also found is that a majority of those stories contain a white cast, which wouldn’t be a problem for me if it weren’t for the fact that lesbian sex isn’t just for white folks and not all lesbians are white. . . So, I had an idea: why not combine my love for lesbian erotica with my desire to see more characters of color?”

(Note: the editor is African-American.)

Here is a passage from my story, “For All My Relations,” in Iridescence:

“I thought of the myth of the Vanishing Indian as a kind of human dinosaur that had supposedly been dying off for at least two hundred years because he (she? it?) couldn’t survive the spread of civilization. But in the Canadian prairie town we lived in, which was civilized enough to have computers in every government office and crystal meth on the street, twenty percent of the population showed some native blood, some more (Amanda with her hair, skin, cheekbones, and shape) and some less (me with my pale face, wood-brown hair, hips, and ass).”

The story is about the sex trade, something I had first-hand knowledge of, and the narrator is not far from being me. However, that story got into the anthology on grounds that it is about “lesbians of color.” As I found out lately through DNA testing, I am as white as a sheet. So did I sneak into that book on false pretenses? I don’t really know. (But whatever you think, you should read the book. Some of the other contributors are fabulous writers.)

In an earlier story, “Sisters,” in my first single-author story collection, Secrets of the Invisible World (long out of print), I wrote about two Jewish sisters who could have invented the term “sibling rivalry.” The younger one has just come home from Israel, only to learn that the older one (the narrator) is a lesbian who had a baby boy by artificial insemination. Here is a passage:

“She [younger sister] surrounded herself with friends, and although she asserted her opinions against all opposition, she was always defending her right to take up space, because she felt that I’d been trying to crowd her out of the light ever since I was born seven years earlier. Ours was not the sisterhood of modern feminism. Ours was the tribal sisterhood of Leah and Rachel.”

Despite some shakiness of style, I’m still proud of that story because I think it contains some raw truth from my life which might resonate with some readers. I just couldn’t resist the reference to Leah and Rachel in the Old Testament because it seemed to fit.

However, we’re not Jewish. None of us ever were. I can hear my Inner Critic shrieking: Do you really think you can compete with all the brilliant Jewish women writers currently writing in English? My only defense would be that I’m not trying to compete with anyone. I just wanted to write FICTION, and changing a few facts seemed like part of the game.

To round out the examples of my outrageous first-person claims to be what I’m not, here is the opening paragraph of my recently-published story, “Innsmouth Blues:”

“My Daddy would not like me to write about all the things that happened after I set out to be a schoolteacher. Not a bit. He always told me to keep my business to myself, and especially not tell white folks anything they could use against me. I loved Daddy when he was alive, and I still feel him with me, but it’s my story to tell. The colored have been keeping their mouths shut since the first Africans were brought to this country, and it hasn’t ever kept us safe.”

The narrator, Henrietta Baker of 1920s Boston, gets invited by a mysterious old woman to travel to Innsmouth to teach the town’s children, who are not fully human. This story appeared in Equal Opportunity Madness (Otter Libris Press), an anthology of stories based on H.P. Lovecraft’s “Mythos.”

So far, I haven’t been excommunicated from anywhere for writing any of the above, but my “politically correct” credentials are far from secure.

I probably won’t stop writing first-person stories—and sneakier third-person-limited stories in which the narrative voice jumps into a character’s head—about people I’m not. I just hope most readers forgive me, especially considering that I’m not making a fortune by exploiting imaginary people.
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We don't talk about these things: #Sex, #Taboo & 90210

by Giselle Renarde

I'm loving everybody's posts this week. Taboo is such a great topic of discussion.

As I read Lisabet's post, I was reminded of something you're going to laugh at me for doing but I don't even care.

I've been re-watching Beverly Hills 90210 on DVD.

I just finished the first season and I'll tell you this: I remember watching EVERY SINGLE ONE of those episodes when they originally aired in 1990.

Yesterday I got to the episode that has lived inside my brain since I first watched it: the one where Dylan and Brenda have sex for the first time. It's been almost 30 years since I first watched this episode and I still remember tons of lines from the show. Like how after they have sex for the first time Brenda makes the hotel bed and when Dylan tells her she doesn't have to do that she says, "What will the maid think?"

That line has stayed with me all these years. I don't know why.  I just like it.  It would make a good book title, wouldn't it?  The butler did it! What will the maid think?

Okay, something else about that episode has stayed with me too.  Something more personal.

My parents knew I loved 90210 even though, being a preteen when it first came on the air, I was a tad young to be watching it.  Maybe not by today's standards, but I don't have kids so what do I know about today's standards?

Anyway, I've mentioned before that my mother worked nights and my father was always passed out by the end of Entertainment Tonight.  That meant I got to watch 90210 (and everything else that came on after 7:30) without parental supervision. And THAT meant I didn't experience the awkwardness of having my mom glaring uncomfortably in my direction as teenagers on TV discussed the risks and rewards of having sex.

Thank goodness for that, because sex was a taboo topic in my household. Still is. Nobody ever discussed sex when I was a kid.  Nobody ever discusses it now. I'm very close with one of my sisters. We've never talked about sex.  Not once.

My mom did give me "the sex talk" (which was more awkward than informative) but here's what prompted that discussion:

When my mom announced that she was pregnant with my youngest sister, I was mad as hell.  This wasn't your typical sibling rivalry or whatever kids go through when they're afraid a new baby will usurp their Favourite Child crown. I already had other siblings. I hadn't been upset about their existence.

This one was different. I was ten years old and already I had more than enough experience raising children.

You know, I had an epiphany a couple months ago. I heard the word "neglect" and started thinking about the way definitions shift over time.  When I was a kid, I would have defined child neglect as, like, taking off for two weeks and leaving your kids to fend for themselves. I wouldn't have considered myself or my siblings neglected. There was always an adult body present in the house. Now I realize that if that adult body is not conscious, it doesn't count. If one parent is out of the house and the other is perpetually drunk and you've got a 7-year-old running the show, yeah, sadly, that's neglect.

Ouch.  I hope my mom never reads this.  It would kill her.  She is such a devoted parent.  Being a mother is the most important thing in her world.  I know she did what she thought was best for us, always, but living in a domestic violence situation with an alcoholic made life really difficult for all of us.

Not only was I raising myself and my siblings, but I was babysitting a parent as well.  I remember that I always had to wake myself up during the night to go downstairs and check the kitchen. My dad had a habit of coming to late at night or early in the morning and cooking when he was barely conscious. He would put something on the stove or in the oven, then pass out again.  One of my responsibilities was to get out of bed at regular intervals to make sure there was nothing burning downstairs.

So when my mom announced that she would be having another baby, my little 10-year-old brain did its little 10-year-old version of screaming, "How dare you stick me with another kid?" I felt like she was spitting out babies for me to look after. I was so mad.

For whatever reason, my mom was convinced I was angry about her pregnancy because I didn't clearly understand where babies came from.

When I heard this theory, everything inside me did a little 10-year-old version of going: "You have got to be fucking kidding me!" Her theory seemed so juvenile and irrelevant. I had bigger fish to fry.

Of course, I didn't communicate to my mother WHY I was mad.  It would have hurt her feelings, for starters.  More than that, we didn't talk about feelings in my family.  That was a taboo even bigger than sex. I chose to sit through the awkward sex talk rather than admitting to my mom that, at 10 years old, I was already too worn out to take care of another kid.

A few days after that highly memorable Brenda-and-Dylan-have-sex episode of Beverly Hills 90210 first aired, my mom confronted me on the topic. She told me I wasn't allowed to watch the show anymore. Apparently that episode had caused an uproar. Moms across America (and Canada too, I guess) were pissed these two teen characters on a TV show discussed the possibility of having sex, had sex, were happy about their decision, and nothing bad happened.  Everybody knows that when teens have premarital sex on TV, their genitals are supposed to shrivel up and fall into a bucket of boiling lava.

Anyway, the hoopla around this episode was such that my mother heard about it and confronted me on the issue.  I remember her exact words: "I've heard that Dylan and Brenda have already had sex!"

And you know what I said?

"No they didn't."

I lied for them.

I lied for Dylan and Brenda.  I did it to protect their reputations.  No, that's not true.  I lied because I wanted to keep watching the show.  Mind you, one of the perks of being a neglected child is that, between raising someone else's kids and making sure the house doesn't burn down, you can really watch whatever you want on TV.

Giselle Renarde is an award-winning queer Canadian writer. Nominated Toronto’s Best Author in NOW Magazine’s 2015 Readers’ Choice Awards, her fiction has appeared in well over 100 short story anthologies. Giselle's juicy novels include Anonymous, In Shadow, Cherry, Nanny State, Seven Kisses, and The Other Side of Ruth.
http://donutsdesires.blogspot.com

Midnight Conversation #5: a talk of taboos

 I’m back outside in the dark, at the Blue Moon café on Broad Street.  She said she’d meet me here tonight and it’s been so very long since I’ve seen her.  I’m on time and she’s very old school German, so by nature she’ll want to be here on time.  But also by nature she’ll want it to be stealthy the way a young house cat wants to be stealthy around strangers.  I’m helping her out by taking a table outside in the shadows, with my back to a street corner, making it easy to be stalked if it makes her happy.  But she’ll see that too.  She may even be insulted by my sophomoric attempt at letting her get me.  It is, in some ways, disrespectful to her craft.  Discrimination of low expectations.  I get that.  Still.

Oh.  Here she comes.  Hell, she’s not even trying.

She comes out of the Blue Moon with a bottle in her hand, surprisingly, Sam Adams instead of imported.  She’s very snobbish about American beer but I guess she’s coming around.  She’s going to spit it all into the bushes anyway.

She stands in the doorway ignoring me, again like a proud cat.  She knows I’m here.  She knew I was here a long time before I knew she was here.  She’s making me wait while she scans the street, planning God knows what.  What a difficult and vulnerable creature she is.  Powerful as a goddess of destruction in her natural element of night and dark.  As helpless and fearful as a cripple, cringing probably in her hidden box in the day.  She needs a day walking friend.  I was that friend.  She will never hurt me, partly because she’s a sentimental German, and because I’m that link to her humanity still.

Now she’s looking at me.  She lets the light gleam off her irises like a cat’s eyes.  That's how a vampire says hello to an old friend.  Hello, Nixie.

She’s wearing cut offs tonight right up to her ass, showing off those weirdly long legs, the legs of a fast cheetah sprinting in the moonlight after some poor doomed schmuck.  She waves, shows her teeth in a big smile and I lift my bottle and wave her over.  In all this time I’ve never fucked her, and if I tried I think she wouldn’t let me.  She likes what we have just the way it is.  Lovers you lose.  In her case, lovers come to a bad end.  Friends stay with you.

“Guten Abend, ScheißeKopf!”

“Hey, Nix.  How’s tricks?”

“Same old shit.  You?  Did you become smart yet?”  

“Been busy.  I wrote this play about you.  It made it to Le Chat Noir last April.  I would have taken you to see it but you weren’t around.”  

“I’ve been around.  Like the Satan in the Book of Job, walking to and fro upon the earth.  To and fro.  Fro and to.  To and fro.”  She sways her hips.  She pulls out a steel chair, grinding it on the sidewalk and slips into it.  “You’re getting a bit thick.”  She nods her bottle at my waist.  “Look at you.”  

“Ten pounds over.  I got to fix that.  I know.  It shows.”

“You look positively juicy.  Some old witch will feed you candy and shove you in the oven.”

“Did I tell you I know witches?  I know three of them personally, pagan priestesses, my good friends.  Nicest people in the world.  It’s crazy.”

“I’m a nice person too, ScheißeKopf.  Now.  I’m a much nicer person.”

“Where’s your blood family at?  You usually don’t go anywhere without a couple of them.  You’re out alone?  Nixie?  You’re not doing evil shit again are you?”

“Oh shut up.  No.  They’re taking me for pizza, actually.  I have a few minutes, and I haven’t seen you. I miss you.”  She takes a swig of the Sam Adams and holds it in her mouth, enjoying it.  Her eyes, like blue marbles look around with a gentleness I never thought I would see there and she spits the beer into the bushes.

“You ever think about hunting?” I say “The old days?  The meaning of it all?”

She looks grumpy.  “You have that look,” she says softly.  “This look you get, and then I think – oh he’s going to go all philosophical on me.  Jah, there he goes, sitting alone until he gets up inside his head.  You can be such a bore when you’re philosophical.  Yes, I miss it sometimes, hunting.  Yes.  But I enjoy the peace too.  I’m such an old home body.  I’m so terribly boring I wish I were dead.  Oh, oops, I am.”

“I’m getting overweight and you’re getting domesticated.  What is the world coming to?”

“We’re not what we were.  Two boring old people.”

“Very old in your case.”

“So what is your philosophy tonight?  Inflict it on me.  Flick it on me like this booger off your fingernail.  Please tell me lest I perish.”  She takes another swig of the Sam Adams, holds it without swallowing.  Swallowing anything but living blood makes her ralph her guts like an old drunk.  But she's stubborn about her beer.

“I was thinking about freedom,” I say.  “I was thinking about the state of my country.  Your country Germany, people are saying that’s going to be the new leader of the free world.”

She spits the beer into the bushes.  “And why not?  The German people, we know our inherent evil, our shadow as Jung calls it.  We know our shadow and we bear witness and watch over it.  We have done evil such as the world never saw and we resolve not to do that.  I myself have done deeds I cannot possibly be forgiven for, yet I go on.  You know what I have learned?”

“What?”

“The universe does not keep score against us.  Isn’t that funny?  Is there a God?  Is there justice?  I am a massacre of humanity, yet here I sit with you, bearing the burden of existence and yet my friends are coming, my blood family.  And they are my friends, and why shouldn’t they be?  A drop of blood, my blood every night has cured them of the most terrible things.  A drop of my blood a night has kept them young and healthy and they are doctors and social helpers, making the world better, infinitely kinder than I ever could be.”

“You ever heard of the Butterfly Effect?" I say.  "A butterfly falls in America and makes a volcano erupt in Africa.  Everything is connected.  These people you killed before, I don’t know if its justice, but the people you save now may go on to save others.  Maybe it balances out, I don’t know.”

“Don’t look for the justice, Meine Liebste, there is no justice. Maybe everything is good, maybe everyone is a saint in the egg, and maybe even Hitler could have been a saint if he had been born in some other place.  The worst of us, with infinite despair, has the power to become a saint at an instant.  That is a beautiful thing.”

“Jesus, Nix.  Listen to you.”

“Clearly I have caught your disease.  What does your country bear witness to?  Where is your shadow?”

“Here’s my shadow, Nix.  Here’s what I know for sure is true.  Here’s what I know about freedom.  Here’s what I know about people – people are terrified of freedom.  People can’t wait to get rid of freedom. And you know how they do that?  By making things complicated.  By making rules and taboos.  Making a taboo is such an easy answer.  You get out of so many things by just cutting a deal with God and that’s what taboos are.   Don’t eat meat on Friday.  Call Jesus by his Jewish name.  Don’t eat shrimp or pork.  Does God really care about that shit?  But people do that because they need taboos.  You keep the taboos and you know you’re right with God, even if you know you’re an asshole really, and that’s what people want, way more than they want freedom.”

“You know how I became nosferatu?”

“Hell.  I wrote about that.  You told it to me.  Never published it.  Stuck it in a drawer.”

“Papa, my own papa.  He wanted my blood.  He made me this.  Isn’t that a taboo?  To sell your little girl to the devil?”

“I don’t know anything about a devil.  I recall a wounded lonely girl who had a crush on an older girl and saw a chance to get her wings and become somebody special.  You took it.  Why not?  Anybody would.”

“I took it.  But Papa, he set me up, he made me become this, this hungry leech, because he hated me, he said so.  There’s no mystery about it.  He wanted to live off his child’s blood and live forever without pain.  He called me his cow.  His own little girl.  There’s no word for such a transgression.  There’s no word for it.”

“I’d say that word is Papa.  I’d say that word is family.”  She turns away from my words.  Dredging up this stuff drives her bats.  “Who messes us up more than our own family, Nix?  Who points us in the direction of our destiny more than family?  Taboos and freedom.  We carry our parent’s worst terrors inside of us without even knowing.“

She sighs.  The only time I ever hear her draw a breath is when she sighs.  She sips and spits.  Finally -

“But you, ScheißeKopf, you see me tonight.   I’m very glad I lived this long.  I’m very glad.”

“How’s that?”

“Redemption.”

“For you?  How?”

“I save the good people with my blood, the little taste, though I am not good.  They feed me a little each and I give back my blood, they become strong, these good souls though I am evil.  I’m giving back and they give to me.  A drop or two, a little, little taste, that transforms and heals and then those who are good, who have always been good, they live longer and keep their good in the world.  I am breaking a taboo in doing that, they are breaking a taboo of justice in not simply putting me in the sun for my past.  But we have love.  Isn’t love better? I don’t want to hurt anyone, I don’t have to.  I have found my little heaven.  I’m happy to abide there a while.  I have saved lives.  I am saving lives.  

 There is no justice for my crimes, ScheißeKopf.  But there is love.”

I look up and I can see that love coming down the sidewalk.  I count seven of them, men and women.  She smiles over the rim of her beer.  She flashes me a look at the special killing teeth, let’s me see them, the very last thing in this world that countless people have seen, a gesture which has that forbidden zing as if she had exposed a breast for me.  Reminded me that the world is not at all what it appears.  The world is inexplicable.  My Nixie.  The Cheshire smile of life and death.

Her blood family gathers around.  A few of them look suspicious.

“It’s okay, guys,” I say, holding up my hands as though being arrested.  “We’re old friends.  I know her.  And I know all about her.  I knew her before you did.”

Hands extend to me.  Names in the night air.  Hi, hi, hi.  She rises.  “I love this man,” she says to them, rather sternly as though addressing a pack of wolves.  She looks at me.  “We’re going to Mellow Mushroom Pizza before it closes.  You come too.”  She looks at my waist and shakes her head.  “They have good salads."

Taboo Or Not Taboo? (#gayerotica #taboosex #forbidden)

What I’ve learned over the years of writing gay smut is that there’s no such thing as too taboo. There’s also nothing that’s not taboo.

Every story is taboo to someone, and every story is very vanilla to someone else.

I once had someone offer to review one of my books and they were looking for something raunchy. I sent them my most taboo title (which, admittedly, isn’t very taboo compared to most of what’s out there) and the review came back saying it was ho-hum and they expected dirtier.

On the other hand, though, around the same time, I came across a reader review for one of my other stories — one I considered to be one of my tamest titles — and they freaking loved it and called it dirty.

I think when it comes to erotica and taboo, it’s all relative to a person’s lived experience and personal desires. But when it comes to gay men and gay erotica, the bar for what’s considered taboo can be much lower for some readers.

An out gay man in the kink scene would be hard pressed to call anything taboo, whereas a closeted gay man, perhaps one struggling to live the “straight life”, would find a rather vanilla but steamy scene to be taboo. For such a man, the simple desire to be intimate with another man is something that he has denied himself for years, perhaps even for his whole life, and a story about a man overcoming internalized homophobia and having his first passionate (yet vanilla) encounter with another man would be exactly what that reader needs. And, to him, it would be very taboo, as it’s something he feels he can never have.

A short while ago, I blogged about how my stories aren’t necessarily the dirtiest, but it’s what I want to write, so I’ll keep writing them. It’s the same with taboos — if I were to attempt a taboo, I might hit a niche with a hot market and start selling better, but my heart wouldn’t be in it. As many of the authors around here have said in the past few weeks, we write what we are compelled to write. Most authors will tell you they don’t really have a choice in the matter — they either write or they go crazy with all the story ideas in their heads. It’s like a faucet — you open it up and what comes out is what comes out. It might not be what’s hottest on the market, but it’s what we’re working with.

Some readers will continue to call my stories boring and for others I’ll be lighting the fuse on their erotic imagination. Writers can’t please everyone; no writer can claim that their target audience is all readers. So, if we can’t please everyone, then we shouldn’t write for everyone, we should write for ourselves.

For me, that means my “taboo” is illicit sex — it’s fairly vanilla (some mutual jerking, move to oral, end with anal), but it tends to be cloaked in the forbidden (teacher/student, jock/nerd, etc.). What I’m after isn’t necessarily “how raunchy can I make this?”, it’s more “how is this story going to unfold?”



Cameron D. James is a writer of gay erotica and M/M erotic romance; his latest release is Forbidden Desires: The Complete Series. He is publisher at and co-founder of Deep Desires Press and a member of the Indie Erotica Collective. 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.