O Pioneers! (#censorship #pornography #literature)

I've been publishing books about sex, including sexual activities that many people consider profoundly deviant, for more than fifteen years. So far, no one has given me any trouble. No jackbooted feet kicking in my door. No placard-waving fanatics protesting in front of my house. It's true that I carefully guard my anonymity, maintaining as strict a separation as I can between my writerly personna and my more prosaic day-to-day identity. Still, if someone wanted to unmask me, I don't doubt that it would be possible.

Maybe if I were more popular, I'd be more of a target. As it is, I feel moderately confident that I can continue to quietly pen my dirty stories (storing them on an encrypted drive, just to be on the safe side) and sell them to publishers without being ostracized by my neighbors, losing my job, or being hauled off to jail.

It wasn't always like this.

My contemporaries and I like to believe we are in some sense pioneers by writing openly about sex. The true pioneers, however, were the authors who fought to publish sexually-explicit work in the first half of the twentieth century, giants like D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Pauline Réage, and James Joyce. All of them faced legal battles against forces who wanted to ban their work because of its sexual content. Avant-garde publishers like Barney Rosset and Maurice Girodias circled the wagons and defended their authors against charges of obscenity (though perhaps with as much of an eye toward notoriety-inspired sales as for moral principle). Gradually, these trials led to a grudging acceptance of sexually-oriented fiction as a legitimate form of literary expression, at least in most Western countries.

Perhaps, however, I am being overly complacent, believing that these battles are in the past. Certainly, individuals continue to be harassed and discriminated against if they engage in sexual practices that are considered "abnormal" [http://www.revisef65.org/discrimination.html]. The Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics 2003 [http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/ind/PORNOGRAPHY.Public_opinion.1.html] reports that more than 38% of the U.S.population favors the existence of laws forbidding the distribution of pornography to adults and that this percentage has fallen only slightly between 1987 and 2002. Calls for censorship of the Internet are raised with increasing frequency and ferocity. I spent several hours on-line searching for authoritative data about societal attitudes regarding pornography but found only emotional diatribes and pseudo-statistics from both sides of the issue.

I did find an interesting scientific report on a survey taken in a mid-American city. The majority of respondents in this study thought that pornography was acceptable and should be legally available to adults. However, the people who voiced this pro-porn opinion believed that they were in the minority. Likewise, the minority who thought that porn should be banned were convinced that they held the majority opinion.

In short, you may support sexually-explicit entertainment, but you feel like an outlaw.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this argument. I personally don't feel that I'm taking risks or pushing boundaries in my work. Lately I've been writing more M/M erotica and erotic romance. It takes a deliberate effort for me to remember that many individuals regard homosexual relationships as an abomination. For me, men fucking men is more or less natural—maybe even more natural than being bound or spanked. Sex is sex, and variety is the spice of life. Very little of what I write feels particularly daring or transgressive.

I don't write for political reasons. I write to entertain my readers and myself. I would love to believe that my work is striking a blow for freedom of expression, striking down barriers, opening doors, but I strongly suspect that it is not. Those who read my work already appreciate erotic literature. I'm preaching to the converted. Embedded in a community of authors whose work is as sexually charged as my own, I find it difficult to comprehend that I may be engaged in activities that some view as immoral or illegal.

On the other hand, if the unthinkable occurred—if my website were shut down because of its prurient content or my books were banned, if I started to receive hate letters or the police seized my computer—I'd fight back. I don't know if my writing provides any societal benefits beyond recreation, but I am certain that it does no harm. And it is my right—perhaps even my responsibility—to express myself, to share with the world (or whatever segment is interested) my vivid, visceral, polymorphously perverse visions.

Review Tuesday: Killing Johnny Fry by Walter Mosley

[This is an old review, but it has received more likes and comments on Goodreads than all my others combined, so I thought I'd repost it for this week's Review Tuesday.]

KILLING JOHNNY FRY by Walter Mosley

ISBN 978-1-59691-226-7

Bloomsbury, 2007

Walter Mosley is well known as a writer of crime and mystery novels. Needless to say, his first foray into the genre of sex writing has occasioned a flurry of sceptical and childishly embarrassed media commentary. I first became aware of KILLING JOHNNY FRY when someone on the Erotica Readers and Writers Association Writers forum (www.erotica-readers.com) posted the URL of Jennifer Reese's scathing review from Entertainment Weekly.

Ms. Reese has given KJF a place her list of worst books of the year. According to her, the plot of this "pornographic novel" is "but a flimsy excuse for the raw sex scenes"; the writing is rife with

hyperbole and cliche; the entire book ranges from ridiculous to depressing. According to her, KJF is not even "good porn", although she then admits that she's never really considered just what might

deserve that label.

Rather than dissuading me reading KJF, this sex-averse tirade made me intensely curious. Could a book by the popular and acclaimed author of the noir classic DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS and the eerily spiritual science fiction novel BLUE LIGHT really be so awful?

My conclusion after reading KJF is that Ms. Reese's review says much more about her own lack of comfort with sex and lack of understanding of erotica/pornography than it does about Mr. Mosley's talent.

KILLING JOHNNY FRY is indeed full of raw, extreme and even violent sex. However, the sex is in no sense gratuitous. Although the story is narrated in plain, matter-of-fact language (despite Ms. Reese's complaints), it has a mythic quality. This is a story of passions and revelations, a pain-filled odyssey of personal discovery.

Cordell Carmel, the protagonist, unexpectedly drops by the apartment of Joelle, his lover of more than nine years, to find her being sodomized by Johnny Fry, a mutual acquaintance. Cordell slips away unseen, but the experience shatters his world and his sense of identity. Previously he was a mild-mannered, middle-aged schmo, hard-working, abstemious and responsible, a considerate but unimaginative lover. After the viewing the graphic evidence of Joelle's betrayal, he undergoes a transformation. He finds himself constantly aroused, especially by the ambiguous dynamics of D/s situations. He is newly, inexplicably potent. Women are drawn to him, and he takes them when they offer themselves, bringing them to painful ecstasy even as his own orgasms reach apocalyptic proportions.

Meanwhile, emotionally, he is confused and lost. He understands the emptiness of his previous life, but cannot comprehend the changes that seem to be tearing him apart. Tortured by headaches and nightmares, he turns to the mysterious Cynthia, a disembodied voice on a phone help line, for comfort. Meanwhile his world becomes more and more bizarre as he oscillates between raging lust and pitiful self-doubt, incandescent anger and paralyzing fear. In a twist that stretches credibility but works in the context of the story, he meets Sisypha, the star of a pornographic video with which he has become obsessed. She becomes his guide to a sexual underworld, his White Rabbit in a terrible and thrilling Wonderland.

KJF explores the relationships between sex and anger, and between freedom and desire. This is far from a trivial fuckfest. Cordell is a sexual Dr. Jekyll; seeing Joelle's secret self, the lust-crazed, abuse-loving creature that she becomes when she is with Johnny Fry, releases his Mr. Hyde. He experiences many climaxes, but little satisfaction, as he tries to understand his motives and to reconstruct his life and self-image.

In KILLING JOHNNY FRY, Mosley also concerns himself with the complex interactions between race and sexual identity. Like most of Mosley's main characters, Cordell is black. So is Joelle. Johnny Fry is white. Mosley makes it clear that Cordell's previous well-ordered, compliant life is an attempt to make it as black man in a white world, to be accepted and financially successful and to prove to his abusive father that he is worthwhile. Johnny Fry steals not only Cordell's lover but also his manhood, his pride as a black man. The historical echoes of slavery are there; Mosley doesn't haveto harp on them.

Is KJF erotic? My initial reaction would be negative; most of the sex scenes did not particularly arouse me while I was reading them. Yet after finishing the book, I found myself in the grip of intensely erotic dreams, so the work must have touched something in my unconscious.

Certainly, KJF is a serious book about sex and identity -- or at least it pretends to be. Reading some of Mosley's comments about his own work, I began to wonder if in fact it's all a sham, a publicity

stunt. Perhaps the book was intended to be exploitative, banking on its controversial subject matter to attract media attention and stir up sales.

Even if this is true, the book stands on its own merits. I found it intense, though occasionally uncomfortable. The sex is messy and dark but somehow fascinating. You can't look away. The cleverness of the final plot twist left me with a smile, and relieved some of the tension that knotted my stomach so badly that I couldn't read more than a few chapters at a time.

Could Mosley have written a serious novel, despite himself? You, the readers, need to decide. Don't pick up this book if you're squeamish about rough sex. If you're curious, though, about just how hardcore a mainstream-published novel can be, I recommend it.

Review Tuesday: Thirty One Days by Ronan Jackson Jefferson

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