REVIEW ESSAY: Lesbian Sex Writing

by Randy Tur off Within the lesbian community, erotic writing is all the rage. It’s as if a restrictive social code of decency has been dropped, along with the time-worn metaphors, unveiling a new, raw, and naked body of work. It’s a tum- of-the-century lesbian revolution in the exploration of sex for sex’s sake. Lesbians of the 1990s are expanding the para¬ meters of sexual expression. We’re filling in the spaces left by the fadeouts; we’re fleshing out the ellipses; and we’re taking the camera of the mind into the bedroom or playroom and projecting it into an art form. For me, the best lesbian erotica takes the reader into the world of the sexual imagination where she can travel with the author in a heightened state of arousal. It’s not simply a matter of describing graphic sexual acts and who does what to whom. The writing of erotica or porno¬ graphy requires literary skills. Erotica, like mysteries or sci-fi, is a literary genre. It takes skill to seduce the reader's imagination. Basically, an erotic novel works if it makes you feel or think about your own sexual experiences and desires. If it uncoils and awakens the lust within you, it's made the grade. The distinction between erotica and pornography was once a contentious issue of debate. Now the terms are often used interchangeably—a further relaxation of the code of decency. Kissing and telling publicly in print is no longer taboo. In fact, it's a further breaking of the silence over lesbian sexuality and a moving out of the closet in terms of what makes most of us tick as lesbians. Women loving women in a homosexual context is, to put it bluntly, women fucking women. Carnal lust in its various guises is the stuff of erotica, and it is the domain of lesbian pornography. ust before he died, the pioneering gay writer and pornographer John Preston gave an interview to journal¬ ist Michael Rowe for an anthology on w riters of pornography (both female and male) called Writing Below the Belt. In it, Rowe pressed him for his view on the distinction between erotica and pornogra¬ phy. Preston didn't feel that there was any major difference. But he did say something interesting: The Arena is going to be published by a publisher like Badboy. ... It is pornography. . . . My other novel is going to have a shot at being pub¬ lished by somebody like Dutton. What's the difference between the two? Well, it's going to take a hun¬ dred pages in the second novel for them to have a hard cock that seeps come. And The Arena couldn't be published unless sex was in the first ten pages. Commercially, there's a difference. . . . But those are literary distinctions. People want to make moral distinctions. I'm constantly being pressured to claim that my books are erotica, not pom. And I reject...