By
Roger Leatherwood (Guest Blogger)
I
didn't start out to write erotica (or erotic romance, or pornography,
or whatever the label is you're putting on it). I started like most
writers (I will presume) with journal entries and literary pastiche,
then with Twilight Zone-y crime stories and romance fantasies.
But
the writers I most admired and the ones I most went back to were
always the honest ones, the ones who were fearless with their prose.
Some (Burroughs and O'Connor and Bukowski and Delaney) added messy
and sexual details which weren't often polite for public school or
writing seminars, but these were the books I held dear and kept
hidden in my bedside drawer.
Whenever
I wrote out of genre conventions and told unexpected truths about my
protagonists (and possibly telling on myself (where did you come up
with that?!)) I got occasional responses from readers to know that
the effort landed true - my words had power to connect in some secret
spaces.
I
think the first time I went full-bore into some kind of pornographic
content was a call for submissions for Lovecraftian horror tales with
Cthulhu tentacle sex, which is kind of stupid but inspired me to go
outside my comfort zone (and consider using a pseudonym). Since then
the barely mapped territory between the horror of the lies we tell
ourselves and the joy of sexual abandon has opened up a new country
of fascinating and difficult subject matter.
Look,
I'd never been one for the regular pornographic descriptions, the
"throbbing of his member" and the type of fantastic
airless, zipless fuck scenarios in most "mommy porn" in
which every limb was in the right place, every uttering intoxicating
and romantic, and love was forever (or at least until the last line
of the story).
Instead
I discovered placing normal people in unexpected sexual (and
emotional or physical circumstances) introduced an explosive
potential for conflict that normal conservative stories simply didn't
dare touch.
For
some reason I have my male partners end up blowing another guy. Don't
read too much into that. Sex, as expressed desire or just practice
with inappropriate partners, opened up opportunities to let
characters reveal what normally the most conservative and in-control
of us wouldn't otherwise reveal.
The
erotica we see most of, from Sorority Den Mother in Heat (I
read that when I was 17) to Fifty Shades of Gray (I only read
the first 55 pages), are really by-the-numbers fantasies outside
reality, wish-fulfillment rather than journalism. They're little more
than rude diversions, conservative in their story construction and
designed to distract from our shared truth rather than illuminate it.
They're
too damn polite. And regrettably, often generally not very well
written.
The
key's in the details; the sensuality of specific sounds and
unexpected textures have a poetry more effective than mere "deeper,
faster, harder" dialog. Attention to the surroundings and
context creates sensations in the reader no blow-by-blow can convey.
The
following is a non-sex scene from my story, "Carpet Burn";
the female protagonist wants to get a co-worker up to her room during
a convention.
*
* *
Excerpt
from "Carpet Burn" (originally on Thirteen Myna Birds):
I
go to the bathroom, the chrome and the piped-in Fleetwood Mac gives
me a moment alone. When I wipe I'm wet. Finger along my crease.
Florescent lights unflattering and I undo my bra and pull it off
through my sleeve, that's better. My nipples against the silk. Fuck
that heat down my chest, deep in my stomach, run my hand down to my
hips, does he know I'm in here like this - and are you in the men's
room getting hard, holding your cock right now like your wife does, I
want to fuck you with every look, your every glance down my blouse at
work.
1000
miles away from home, away from all of them, so late, first meeting
tomorrow not until 10. We don't need to get up early. So take me up
there.
Return
to the bar, you're paying the bill, you go now. Yes. I'm off-balance,
laugh so you hold my arm, get me to the elevator.
I
lean back against the mirror. Hi. You looking at me I want to reach
out and feel your pants, that cock, feel it grow under my hand, the
gin, you knew, look in my eyes, smash my mouth against yours, flavor
of lime, your ardor out of control, seize me you bitch, sorry, my
cunt is damp, tingling you could take me now, against this wall. Do
you smell me, the hot breaking across my back, my armpits. Breathe
deep.
I
lean back, legs spread, mere inches. Apart. Nipples pointing. Get to
the room. Turn off my phone. Flowercunt lips slick open wait under
silk. Yes . . . we . . . can.
The
elevator opens, breath of conditioned air breezes over us. We walk
into the hallway on the thick carpet red/blue pattern, with fishes
and a repeating letter A. Mobius sequence down the hallway, A A A.
Legs. It's empty up here. Hallway endless before stopping at the tee.
A red vase with plastic ferns.
*
* *
Although
no actual sex occurs in the story, it's an example how
stream-of-consciousness details can build to a horny climax in
suspended sex-dream time.
Erotica
writer Remittance Girl on her "About" on Goodreads laments
erotica has bifurcated to either romance novels with "spicy
bits," or boring stroke fiction with the express purpose of
providing masturbatory fantasies.
"I
believe that erotica, as a genre, should deal with the theme of
erotic desire and, ideally, how desire informs, changes and
manipulates the lives of the characters who are desirous."
Absofuckinglutely.
Writer Steve Almond agrees, saying:
"...human
beings are never more alive to their own hope and shame and fear than
when they are naked and aroused, and because the same must therefore
be true of our characters, who are nothing more than poorly disguised
versions of ourselves."
All
right, you got me. What I'm really writing about is my own
psychosexual doubts and desires, the ugly things I'm attracted to and
the beautiful things that bored me.
Life
isn't perfect; neither is sex most of the time. But when it's the
right kind of fucked up it turns into its own kind of perfect. Do you
feel the same way? Are my obsessions half as interesting as yours? A
recent story called "What You Wear," about a housewife who
finds her husband's sex toys and wonders how he uses them, shows her
learning how much pleasure they can give while he's at work.
*
* *
Excerpt
from "What You Wear" (forthcoming in a Cleis anthology):
While
folding the clothes and putting them away in the drawers the next
day, making it a point not to go back into the nightstand
where she knew that was (must remain focused, must let
sleeping dogs lie) she found the dildo.
It
was a big plastic thing, and unlike the cock ring she knew exactly
what it was. Mostly because it was not for a cock (the cock
being the invisible element she had to visualize in the ring) - this
thing was a cock itself. In her hand. Big, rubbery and hard.
She
squeezed the rounded arrow-shaped head. It was like silicon, not
natural or realistic, more a stylized representation of the general
size and shape of an erect penis - except for a network of raised
veins running along its streamlined surface, and a rough ballsack
sewn in leather and attached at the base that served as a grip. To
get hold of the thing and push it where it needed to go.
What
the hell did he have this for? To shove up his ass?
She
looked out the window. The gate was closed but the inside door was
open. The neighbor was in there doing something else, and she could
hear dishes clicking against each other echoing like water running
down her leg.
She
tentatively licked the tip. She wasn't sure where it had been. She
looked for something to lubricate her plastic cock, Hank's personal
dildo into her own crevice.
In
the bathroom there was no Vaseline. But she found his Brylcreem.
It
was hair gel, "Body Splash" scent. She squirted some
between her fingers. Nice and thick and she nodded. It was like,
well, like cum. Like she had been working her own pussy and the cream
had become foamy on her fingers.
She
spread it across the crown and sat on the edge of the tub. She slid
it up inside her. God, so much better than the Niagara bullet.
A real cock, hard. Legs open on the tile and her ass on the
cold porcelain, her thighs tightened at the join by her cunt. Her
clit glowed and began to stiffen and grow.
She
rubbed her tits with one had as the other plowed the engorged plastic
sslloooooowwllyyy up her cunt, massaging both ends of her
body. She felt stuffed, fat. Her tits warmed and tightened from the
areolas out to the tissue under her arms and not since her period did
she feel so full.
Ah
- the ring!
She
went to get the cock ring. It fit perfect along Hank's plastic dong,
pressing up against her labia as she went deep, splurshing in
the white Brylcreem spunk.
She
was there for 20 minutes, going crazy, her pussy coated with
Brylcreem mixed with her own creamy ooze. Drips of thin watery milk
dripped from the pores of her nipples as she pinched them and milked
herself with a fervor. The foam ran down her asscrack onto the
porcelain.
She
pulled the cock out and slid it, so carefully up her wet asshole, up
where she had never had a cock before. Only his fingers in occasional
exploration. Now it opened and let it in. Grabbed and tightened upon
it.
Hank's
cock - Hank's fat cock up her ass. The cock he had up up his
ass.
The
cream from her nipples thickened, she hadn't milked herself like this
since she'd been 19. There in abandon, a cock up her asshole and
fingers furiously massaging her tits, like limes squeezing their last
drops of juice into Oscar night margaritas.
A
sudden drip spurted out of her right nipple in a thin string,
surprising her. She licked and tasted her milk. It was sweet, and
warm. There was a cup on the counter by the mirror and she picked it
up to collect the emission.
*
* *
Basically
a solo sex scene but with the added kinky element of breast milking
and the tension of when Hank will discover she's being unfaithful -
with his own toys! From pornography into a detailed study of the how
married couples negotiate their personal sexual identities. My own
stumbling attempt to make sense of what we seek out of the ordinary
and why when it's transgressive it seems so much more delicious.
That's
not like the mommy porn I've ever read. So I keep exploring that
country.
These
kind of stories are confessionals, not fantasies. They're like
literary pastiches of authors I admire, trying to write one true
sentence. Like a journal entry.
Hey!
About Roger
Roger
Leatherwood worked on the lower rungs of Hollywood for almost 20
years before turning to print fiction, where the stories he could
tell were his own. He is currently answering calls for submissions to
the various erotic publishers' anthologies, trying to slip in his own
taste of trouble and danger into what might otherwise end up too
goddamn polite. His work has appeared in Thirteen Myna Birds, Oysters and Chocolate, Burning Press's Written On Skin anthology, Oulipo
Pornobongo, Nefarious Ballerina, HorrorSleazeTrash and other
publications we don't display in public.
The Last Taste of Ginger
by Roger Leatherwood
