Carol Queen

I want more of this book. I want ten thousand of this book and all its queer siblings. I'm appalled that I hadn't read it before and sad that it was so slim that I burned through it in two sittings.

This is a series of connected stories/moments in the life of a queer kinkster in SF in probably the 90's. The protagonist starts out in boy drag as Randy and picks up a leather daddy, Jack, at a gay leather bar. Unlike many of the gay men she's taken home before, Jack accepts Randy's gender show more fluidity and doesn't skip a beat when she transforms herself into her femme self, Miranda. A couple of chapters later, Jack's longtime lover, a Black man named Demetrius, comes home from his travels and they embark on a sexy, fun, caring, intentional journey to knitting themselves and others into a family of choice.

This is unabashed queer leather erotica. My favorite thing about it is that the characters spend just as much time discussing gender, sexual identity, queerness, sex work, the experiences of genderqueers and trans women, roleplay, BDSM, leather, alt sex cultures as they do having inventive hot sex. It makes the sex incredibly hot and it feeds a deepseated need in my soul for fiction that reflects my experiences building intentional relationships and being open to experiences beyond those circumscribed by their cultures or apparent sexualities. Miranda may be a woman much of the time, and a woman with a cunt all the time, but her attraction to gay leathermen over straight men really resonated for me, and Jack and Demetrius's willingness to see her as the complicated sexy fuckable genderfluid slutty bottom that she is was marvelous.

We need more erotica like this, that explores relationships in a low-drama way, that doesn't privilege romance over self-discovery and long-term close friendships, that reflects the diversity of queer communities on many axes, and that sees the heart of why people do the BDSM they do, and how identity labels can work for and against people. I loved the moments when Miranda or Jack come up against the censure and expectations of their own alt communities, who view their decisions as something of traitorous to their own queer selves by taking up with an ostensibly het relationship. I loved that the story didn't shy away from that, but dealt with it head-on while showing that this relationship helped each person involved grow into their queerness and explore beyond the constraints of identity politics. I like that it also didn't wholly trash or ask the characters to reject the more structured or separatist communities and community histories that they have been a part of, but rather showed the characters moving between spaces and roles with all the complexity and realism that I have seen in my own life.

This was a really fun book and I'm proud to have it on my shelf. I liked it even better than Macho Sluts, it had way fewer instances of dubious consent. I think this book's realistic depiction of a life lived, with all the context that that entails, rather than heightening that life with a layer of fantasy, gives it a stronger footing. This book isn't perfect but it's really really excellent and I recommend it. It's also fabulously sexy in a way I so rarely see in fiction--a way that resonated with my own relatively complex approach to BDSM, queer identity and gender fluidity, while not being about me in specifics, it was about me in spirit. A would rec again. show less

Could just as easily have been subtitled "In your societies disrupting your binaries." This is a fascinating collection of essays interrogating and exploring the experience of being queer in the late 20th century and the way language and political attitudes have created divides (and insiders and outsiders) in the LGBT&F community(ies). Written by a variety of writers falling all along the sexuality and gender continuums and coming at the topic from multiple angles, the book's unifying theme show more is a reaction against assumptions about sex, gender, and sexuality. Recommended. show less

Composed of thirty-five short stories, at an average length of three pages each, the collection features twenty-seven contributing authors including M. Christian, Thomas Roche, Cecilia Tan, and Sage Vivant.

In the introduction, Queen states that these stories were chosen for a female heterosexual audience. While the gender of the narrators changes throughout the pieces, the stories do remain largely heterosexual. The stories themselves are rather diverse; however, they do stay on the tame show more side of things. Topics covered by these stories include dressing up as a cat, fruit, power play, group settings, religion, flashing, spanking, and alien abduction. Thus, there are rather good odds of at least one story striking your fancy, though it will be over rather quickly and you’ll be on to another story.

Given that the stories range in length from one to five pages, there isn’t much in terms of character description or development. The plots also tend to be on the predictable side due to space. Not every story includes explicit sex; there are also stories that are more focused on desire or seduction. On the other hand, the short length enables one to read a story during a quick break, or to read the entire anthology in a little over an hour.
Unfortunately, there are quite a few typos and grammatical errors throughout the collection; though perhaps because of the subject matter, they do not significantly detract from the reading experience.

I would recommend this collection as a light introduction to erotica for heterosexual individuals as it can be a useful tool in figuring out what erotica one finds exciting. However, I would not necessarily recommend this to someone who has established tastes in erotica, as the lack of character and plot developments may be a turn-off, though it may be fun to fantasize about what happens next. show less

I was first told about this book spring of my sophomore year of college, but I haven't picked it up until now, and I'm sorry I waited so long. Though I can't really predict what my response would have been had I read it then; I believe it would've been very different, as my understanding of my gender identity and sexuality was in a different place at that time.
Pomosexuals is a collection of essays by various queers concerning what the concept of postmodern sexuality means to them. There's show more not a lot of theory, it's mostly personal anecdotes. Notable contributers include Kate Bornstein, Dorothy Allison, and Pat Califia (all three of whom I highly, highly recommend reading). The book is broken up into seven sections: "Beyond Definitions;" "The Politic Identity: Questioning Reputations;" "Don't Fence Me In: Bi-Pan-/Omni-Sexuals;" "Through a Glass Queerly: Our Boys, Ourselves;" "Hermaphrodykes: Girls Will Be Boys, Dykes Will Be Fags;" "Gender Pending: Denying Gender Imperatives;" and "Tectonic Shifts: Crossing Cultures, Mapping Desires." My favorite sections were definitely "The Politic Identity: Questioning Reputations" and "Hermaphrodykes: Girls Will Be Boys." To oversimplify, all the essays, to various extents, are about being queer and not fitting in with the mainstream queer community in America.
I loved this book. I'm a huge gender/sex kick lately. If I had read Pomosexuals before I read Genderqueer, it would have had a greater impact. The two books have some similar ideas, and with both of them I did the whole "gasp!omfgthisISme!" thing. (A review of Genderqueer is forthcoming, by the way.) If you're going to read Pomosexuals though, I think you should be comfortable with the idea of gender as a social/cultural construction first. After a few more of these (Genderqueer, The Judith Butler Reader, Cunt, Public Sex) I think I'll sit down and actually write an entry about my own gender and sexual identity.
I'd also like to note that I'm proud of myself for reaching a point in my reading career in which I can process different ideas, apply them to my own experience, use them to challenge my beliefs, take in contradictory theories and view them on equal levels, use them as I see fit, accept or reject them after thoughtful analysis. show less