Image from Susie Bright’s Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir
I have a new short story coming out tomorrow, Friday, July 23. It is one of my first pieces of short fiction published in a while and I am super excited for it. It’s called “Orgy” and the plot, I have been telling people, is about the oldest woman at a sex party in Brooklyn. Scribd is publishing it and they are offering a 90 day trial to allow you to read the story for free. You can access it here.
“Orgy” was a lot of fun to write and I hope it’s a lot of fun for you to read. The craft challenge I set up for myself in writing it was to explore a main character who loves sex, uses it as a form of connection and also a way of being and curiosity in the world, and doesn’t suffer for it. A rare type of woman to find in literary fiction. But I also did not want this story to read like a fairy tale. Nessa, the woman in question, lives with the consequences of sexual freedom. She has a few regrets, some yearning, but those occasionally diffident feelings are not an indictment on the project of sexual liberation. In that respect, Nessa remains a committed freedom fighter.
An excerpt is up at THE CUT right now! It’s Here. And here is a bit of what the writing reads like:
Nessa does not understand this relationship. She could get it if Laurie was keeping him here for sex, but they aren’t having any during the pandemic. Nessa knows this, as she’s held a glass against Laurie’s bedroom door at night and heard only the boyfriend’s deep, blissful snores and Laurie’s furious typing. They do not use the shower at the same time and there’s no evidence of condoms — either the tied-off discarded skins or the garish crumpled wrappers — in the trash, so Nessa has come to think of Laurie and the white boy as pandas, too scared and sad and precious to fuck.
If Nessa is being honest with herself, this is why she resents the two of them so much. If she had someone in her bed right now — even someone as feckless as a 36-year-old white boy in Harry Potter pajama bottoms — she would screw them until they couldn’t stand up straight. She hasn’t slept with anyone since the pandemic began — one of the few dry spells of her life, unfortunately coinciding with the city’s decline. Usually she has her sweeties, a rotating list — some she’s known for years, some she knows only briefly — but since the pandemic they are unreachable. Georgina, the gorgeous Creole boomer painter she’s known since the early ’00s, decamped to her sister’s house in New Orleans; Carl, the guy half a decade younger than Nessa who she met on a park bench, has decided to brave the pandemic with a serious girlfriend and no longer answers Nessa’s texts; and Frankie, a very pretty Pratt student, has decided to be celibate until a cure is found. “I think if we dedicate our libidinous energies toward healing the planet, we’ll win,” she’d texted. To which Nessa replied, “Idc bout dis hoe ass planet pussy please,” and then taken it for granted that Frankie blocked her.
You can join me and Nicole Cliffe TONIGHT at 7 PM EST to talk about this story and so much more. It will be a virtual event at the Strand. Here’s the link.
I’ve been lucky enough to know women like this throughout my life. As I write this to you, my cheeks are hurting and my eyes are watering from a really ribald riff session with my sisters on subjects that would undoubtably result in all three of us getting cancelled, if I detailed them here.
One book that I’ve loved that contains a woman like Nessa is Susie Bright’s excellent memoir Big Sex Little Death. It’s written in pointed, staccato sentences, sharpened for maximum wit. Before she became a sex educator and before she helped found the famous lesbian sex magazine On Our Backs, Bright was a teenaged communist. In high school, she edited and wrote for the Communist youth paper The Red Tide, and regularly worked to organize her fellow Californian high school students and workers.
Bright’s recounting of her work for Red Tide is both pointed about her political conviction and about the wild parties a bunch of teenaged, horny Leftists could throw in the 1970s. What’s great about her memoir is that she doesn’t see a divide between the two—all of them are part of her life and her understanding of her political praxis is as much tied up in how curious she is about the world, other people, her own body, the comedy of life.
Eventually, Bright joined an underground organizing cell to move to first the South, later the midwest and infiltrate workplaces to organize them. In the south, she was sent to work at a department store and immediately ran up against the dilemma of organizing in the US—her white coworkers wouldn’t trust her when she spoke with and was polite towards her Black coworkers. When she spoke with other members of her cell about what to do, they wouldn’t acknowledge race as an issue to incorporate in organizing and ignored her warnings. This, and other experiences, caused her to become disillusioned with this approach to organizing and eventually she left for other adventures.
This is the last fifth of the book, when Bright explains how she got involved in On Our Backs. It involved hitch hiking to a pot growing lesbian separatist commune in Alaska to take part, by chance, in a group insemination ritual; making her way back to San Francisco and applying to be one of the first women to work for the Golden Gate Bridge maintenance team and then, eventually, finding her way to working at the woman-owned sex toy shop Good Vibrations, where she spent a night with a young Robert Crumb and his artistic collaborators, helping them stage photos in the store after hours for a comic, using the shop’s inventory. She also reports on two of her favorite customers—a pair of nuns who had been lovers for twenty years and came into Good Vibrations to buy an “anniversary vibrator” and dildo, and, when a lonely Bright asked what kept them together for so long, they both simply answered “Love”.
On Our Backs was a direct response to the 1970s strain of feminism that was decidedly anti-sex and “believed sexual liberation was playing into the hands of the bestial impulses of male dominance”, as Bright puts it. This was a feminism that argued for a political lesbianism, that viewed lesbianism as a statement on removing oneself from the world of men, and not about sex, desire, fantasies, the messiness of the body. Bright explains that she came to know the founders of On Our Backs after reading a piece of erotic poetry at a gathering at a local communist bookstore. The women invited her to a baby shower, her first, where they explained that “The premise of OOB was going to be that lesbians were not celibates-in-waiting-for-the-revolution, or coldly distant planets. We were alive to sex and adventure and being every kind of queer we could be.”
I cannot recommend this memoir enough. It’s a joy to read and, for me, made me rethink so much of what I thought I understood about 1960s/70s youth culture. Bright writes in the kind of fantastical non sequiturs that will be familiar to you if you’ve ever spent an afternoon in a dive bar or a slightly cramped apartment living room, hearing older revolutionaries, radicals and queers trading war stories. What I love about this type of storytelling is that the asides and jokes and one liners and surreal images all add up to a life fully lived, a life to long for.
Kaitlyn,
I am so touched you wrote this take on my memoir; I can’t get over it. A friend of mine in Texas just wrote me to share the discovery.
Thank you so much!
The photographer who took that picture of me, by the way, is the late great Honey Lee Cottrell. I wish I still had that shirt!
Now I’m going to run over and ready your Oldest Lady at the Orgy story. Can’t wait.
Clits up
and power to the people, Susie