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© Simon Sheppard “Welcome to the humiliating world of professional writing.” —Homer J. Simpson OK, let’s say you’re at the video store and you’re thinking, for some odd reason, I wanna rent something about the mysteries of identity and the mutability of human personality. Two films spring to mind. On one shelf there’s Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, a chilly, astringent work featuring an agonized Liv Ullman in tight close-up. And on another there’s Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a massively fun mystery which features luscious Kim Novak in fabulous gowns. Be honest, gentle reader, which one do you think you’ll take home from Blockbuster? Well, that’s how I think about smut. Yeah, it’s “just” genre fiction, and sure, there’s a whole lot of crappy porn around. But it is, I keep telling myself, surely possible to address deeply-felt issues in stories more likely to produce a hard-on than a yawn. Or so I’d like to believe. Sometimes, though, it’s an uphill battle to believe it. There are the well-meaning folks who ask me, “Have you tried writing anything besides porn?” Meaning, of course, “How about trying real literature?” And there’s disdain from the literary world, as well. Each and every new mystery novel gets reviewed in your Sunday paper. But with the exception, maybe, of Susie Bright’s Best American Erotica series, when was the last time first-rate porn got the critical attention given to some third-rate John Grisham wannabe? I don’t know, maybe things will change. When Vertigo came out, anyone who thought it worthy of Serious Critical Attention would have been laughed out of the room. Likewise, there’s only been a market for what I’ll pretentiously call “Quality Porn” for maybe a decade, decade-and-a-half. Thanks to trailblazers like Bright and John Preston, there’s now a space to write explicitly about sex without pretending we’re doing anything else (such as churning out Redeeming Social Value). And after all, who knew that Raymond Chandler’s pulpwork for Black Mask would someday be taught in college? I do have a great appreciation for well-crafted genre work that doesn’t aspire to be much of anything else. (Vertigo too deep for you? Well, how about John Woo’s Face/Off?) And sometimes I just want to write a plain old stroke story, maybe funny, maybe sad, but one with no more relevance to real life than an Agatha Christie. (English Cosy Porn...now that’s a concept!) And then there’s the ol’ economic imperative-a girl’s gotta eat, after all, and standard stroke stories can bring home the arugula. The problem, for me at least, is that a steady regime of writing formula stuff is so damn unchallenging and therefore unrewarding. At some level, I’d like to touch the reader’s heart and/or mind as well as his dick. (It’s the same for me, I’m afraid, when I have sex, even with a one-off trick. I’m sooo old-fashioned.) So on the one hand, there’s the opportunity to spin out simple-but-bill-paying tales of lust for Big Meat Magazine. And on the other, there’s that Call for Submissions for one of those high-concept anthologies, a collection of erotic stories about, oh, cross-dressing, differently-abled CEOs. Of color. Of course, me being me, I’ll choose to write for that damn antho. And I’ll sweat over that story for weeks, potentially making less per hour than a Mickey D fry chef-if and when the story sells-only to have the manuscript rejected because they already had another story about a quadriplegic Thai peanut oil magnate. In a ballgown. Like I could sell that fucking story anywhere else. It’s a hard world. But yes, I keep writing porn. Because I believe, as Pat Califia said, and as I never tire of quoting, “Pornography changes the world.” Well now, the rhetorical reader asks, how does it do that? For starters, it should do what any enjoyable fiction does: entertain. Porn lets us pass a pleasant hour on an airplane, in the bathroom, in the park while we’re surreptitiously cruising that guy over there. (Yeah that one lying on the grass, nice nipples, a slight paunch. Yeah, that one. He’s hot.) But erotic writing can do more, much more. Not that it should do more, but it can. It’s one genre we all can relate to, first-hand. Not every mystery reader will solve a murder. Very few science fiction fans will actually journey to Uranus. But every one of us has had erotic desires, and most of us have actually had sex, of one sort or another. Even the Pope has jacked off, I bet. At least once or twice. The reader of erotica has a particular relationship with the text. Just as a persuasive piece of political fiction can lead a reader to join a cause, write a letter, or attend a demonstration, so porn can lead to action. It may only be jerking off. And that’s fine. Masturbation is a perfectly respectable, longstanding tradition that deserves to be honored, and if I found out that someone somewhere had an orgasm directly traceable to my work, it would make me smile. Confession: I myself don’t directly use text as jack-off fodder. That is, I’m not a one-handed reader. But there have been times I’ve read a story, put the book down, and found myself so horny that I just had to let the jism fly. There’s more that porn can do, though. Let’s be clear here: I’m not saying you should read erotica because it’s good for you. Yuck. I once heard a well-known erotic writer say that one of the best things about porn is that while the reader is all sexed-up and receptive, an author can sneak in constructive messages about race, gender, class. I think that’s exactly wrong. I’d hate to see a porn universe populated entirely by well-to-do buff white boys, true, but for the most part, unless it’s directly about a political situation, porn should teach by example, if it must instruct at all. By all means, make that character African-American, but don’t have him stop mid-fuck to lecture his trick on the evils of racism. Because, if porn is going to do explicit political work, it might as well as do political work around sexuality itself. I’m not the first (or hundredth) writer to point out that human culture, Western culture, American culture, is awfully fucked-up about sex. Sure, the signifiers of sex are everywhere we turn. But as the inevitable Michel Foucault pointed out, just because everybody’s talking about something, that doesn’t mean they’re truly tolerant of it. Just because we’re all discussing sex doesn’t mean we’ve conquered shame. So one of the things porn can do, especially well-crafted, thoughtful erotica, is help convince us that sex is worth, not just talking about, but thinking about. In depth. And not just thinking about in a Dr. Ruth “everything is groovy and sunny and, gee, sex can just be so much fun” way. Yeah, sure. But sex can also be dark and dysfunctional and even destructive and still be worthwhile. The difference between “erotica” and “porn” is groaningly, endlessly debatable. But maybe one useful distinction is that porn presumes that no one can be harmed by sex while erotica is given the freedom to speak of consequences, to admit that, yes, desire can be frightening and awful and truly destructive but is worth pursuing all the same. And we can and should tell those darker stories, too. Maybe in an Ingmar Bergman way. Or maybe in an Alfred Hitchcock or John Woo or David Cronenberg way; to my way of thinking, the first great film about AIDS was Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly. Erotic text is special. Badly-acted videos can only go so far. Photos of Calvin-Klein-pretty hairless lads with hard-ons can only tell us certain things. But well-written erotica can communicate, in one way or another, so much more. Not didactically; nobody wants to lectured to when his dick is hard. (Unless he and his trick are doing a schoolroom scene.) But it can communicate, nonetheless. When porn goes beyond mere entertainment, when it takes its world-changing possibilities seriously (ick, there’s that word again), it can open whole new worlds for the reader, even if it’s just a matter of whom he’ll consider fucking. (Did you notice how when I talked back there about cruising a hot guy in the park I gave him a little paunch? See, I was trying to subvert mass-market stereotypes of sexual attractiveness. Hope you didn’t mind.) A lot of the best erotic writing, even the stuff that seems like just plain old smut, can help us explore who we really are. Maybe feel better about it. Maybe even, on occasion, feel not-so-good about it, make us rethink long-held desires. But pierce us to the quick, in any case. What we don’t grasp, necessarily, is that nothing we can desire is truly new, nothing. Somewhere, someone else got there first. So let’s stop burying those squirmy little things in the back of our mental closets, ok? (I can still recall reading, years ago, a piece by a man who got off on the sight of a guy with his foot in a cast. “Oh my fucking God!” I thought. “And I thought I was the only one!”) The wider the universe of erotica, the more surely we know we’re not alone. The Andrea Dworkin anti-smut gang want us to believe that porn desensitizes, that it gives readers permission to do all sorts of terrible things. And maybe, just maybe, Sociopathic Sam will use his copy of Anal Sluts in Bondage to convince himself that, yeah, women really do want to be abused, treated like shit. Or to confirm pre-existing beliefs to that effect, beliefs that may be implanted by culture or may even be hardwired into the ever-fallible human animal. But most of us know the difference between flesh and fantasy, between right and wrong-most of us who’ve read Dennis Cooper don’t rush right out to eviscerate anomic, drugged-up young guys. At least, I sure don’t. Still, one strange thing about being a writer is that you’re never sure who your eventual audience will be. If I write a hardcore SM story with lots of pain and piercings, who’s going to pick that up and read it? Maybe some 18-year-old, still half in the closet, even to himself? And what will that story mean to him? Will it be so scary that he’ll be shamed deeper into self-denial? Or will he be so turned on by the infinite possibilities of desire that he’ll embark on a lifelong journey of erotic self-discovery? The cliché answer is that it shouldn’t matter, that the writer should go where his imagination leads him and let the chips fall where they may. But I think the pornographer who truly, thoroughly believes that, without a single twinge, is either an irresponsible knave or a psychopathic fool. And that’s probably even truer for writers of queer male erotica, where AIDS and homophobia have made the terrain all the more treacherous. So what’s an erotic writer to do? Self-censor, which is to say lie? Each of us draws the lines in personal, idiosyncratic ways, I suppose. When I was co-editing the anthology Rough Stuff with my good pal M. Christian, the question of unprotected sex came up. What would our policy on condom use be? If a barebacking story came in, how would we handle it? Well, the solution I felt comfortable with, as conditional and muzzy as it may be, was this: it was just fine if a story featured sexy unprotected fucking, but we wouldn’t accept a piece that explicitly eroticized the unprotected aspect of the barebacking. Am I being an uptight prude? Maybe. Or giving readers license to do risky things? Hmm. Am I contradicting what I just said about the influence of porn on the reader’s behavior? Perhaps. But then, consistency never was my strong suit. Listen, we’re only human, even the guys with ten-inch dicks. And when we’re having sex, we’re humans with a dense complexity of needs, regrets, limits, impulses. At some level, even the dumbest stroke story might suggest that very thing, that there’s more to sex than the plumbing involved. Not “should suggest,” but “might.” I don’t care whether it’s a tale of ten Rumanian midgets fucking on a tightrope, a story can have authenticity. Example: I truly believe that virtually anyone participating in a raunch scene or a verbal abuse scene or any of a variety of other edgy SM activities has a bit, and maybe it’s only a teensy-tiny bit, of self-disgust. Only schizophrenics wouldn’t. Does that ambivalence make those scenes “wrong?” Of course not. If you ask me, that just makes them hotter. So if I’m going to write about that stuff, I’m going include that darker side, or at least not deny its existence. That sort of truth-telling is part of what makes a story authentic. Sure, fiction is made up, and writers are liars. But that doesn’t mean we should be dishonest liars. Each of us has a truth to tell. Whether dark erotica or fluffy porn, genre writing can become transcendent if it’s written from the heart. When we’re talking to people about their deepest desires, when we’re influencing what young queers think about themselves, when we’re describing what sex is and what it feels like and the consequences it may bear, authenticity matters. For erotic writing to reach its fullest potential, not only to make readers sigh or moan or get a hard-on, but to connect in one way or another with their deepest desires, then it matters. People sometimes ask if I write stories based on my personal experiences. Well, yeah, some of my work, a small portion really, is pretty thinly veiled autobiography. Other pieces incorporate just bits-and-pieces of places I’ve been, men I’ve been with, feelings I’ve felt. But nothing I’ve written, I believe, is completely divorced from my life and heart, from real things I’ve done and desired and gotten off on. And writing has, circuitously, opened my eyes to new ways of experiencing my life, sexually and otherwise. The story that I’ve chosen, “My Possession,” pretty much reflects what I’ve been talking about. It’s a genre piece, cross-genre piece actually, using the gambits of both fantasy-based fiction and sex-writing to explore some dark places. It deals with some of what I think of as My Themes: impossible need, betrayal, transcendence, the mutability of power positions. You know, All That Stuff. It actually has less sex in it than many of my other works; this is, I hope, a story about the acute edge of desire. It may not be conventional pornography, but I think it’s very erotic; what can I say-I think need is sexy. The story’s also got a bit of postmodern smartassitude about it. I employed literary devices -e.g., faux translations of nonexistent theoretical text, letters written to the narrator-to suggest deceit, self-awareness, and the masks we all wear when it comes to sex. It’s all a bit on the ambitious side, perhaps, but I’m fond of the story. Whether it works I leave for you to decide. I’m hoping the tale raises a chuckle as well as a frisson, and maybe a hard-on, too. And I’m hoping that, however dense things get, it has a plot that keeps chugging along. “My Possession” is, I can now reveal, based on some real things that happened to me, and I wrote it while I was still trying to make sense of betrayal and duplicity and some pretty self-destructive behavior on my part. Writing the story was part of my attempt to claw my way back toward sanity, and now, looking back on what seems like foolhardy, drama-queen self-indulgence, I can comfort myself with the writer’s ultimate consolation: Well, at least I got a story out of it. © 2001 Simon Sheppard |
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