Sunday, May 26, 2002

 
Girls, girls, girls

That's right, I was going to write about Stephanie.

But first -- I found a great new site. Suicide Girls is a porn site with a Riot Grrl look and feel. The girls are punked out, pierced, tatooed, and they're all about 22. If you like that kinds of thing, it rocks.

So about Stephanie. Above is a link to a page I started for her, once I realized she had no presence on the WWW. Usually, of course, it's not up to any person to make a page for some other person. It would be rude and intrusive, unless of course the subject is a public figure. But since Stephanie is dead, and nobody else has done it, I went ahead.

I met Stephanie in 1990 or 1991 when we were both in Queer Nation, a wondrous pack of fun and frolic. Queer Nation infused the usual headline-grabbing protest culture of San Francisco with a sense of humor. "Focus groups" would form around an affinity -- like our bisexual focus group -- or an event. An example of the latter was the group that pulled together the protest against Larry Lea on Halloween 1991; the focus group was named Grand Homosexual Outrage against Sickening Televangelists, or GHOST. Not only were we featured in national media -- I got on CNN and was quoted in the Wall St. Journal -- but journalists always named GHOST and splled out what it stood for. This counted as a trifecta win in the game of protest politics. Stephanie and I, along with several other friends, were members of (deep breath) Uppity BI Queers United In Their Overtly Unconventional Sexuality. What's that spell? UBIQUITOUS.

A year or so after Queen Nation peaked, I was still doing my magazine, Frighten the Horses. At the Folsom Street Fair of 1993, I staffed a booth with several other zinesters. Stephanie stopped by, we chatted, and one thing led to another. For some reason we never got together during the QN years, but in 1993, we did.

We were lovers for four years. About this I don't quite know what to say. Maybe it's ironic given that I'm a pornographer, but I've never talked much directly about the sex I've had with people. And for all the sex stories I've written, I never wrote one directly about her. But I have written about our affair and about Stephanie herself in bits and pieces in several stories: "Booth Girl," "Amateur," "How I Adore You" and "Caller Number One" all contain bits and pieces of our affair. Maybe the first two pages of "Caller Number One" come closest to being a documentary minute of our affair. It's in "Too Beautiful" -- that's a plug. Buy the book and see.

The greatest thing about Stephanie was how radical she was. She was a fervent vegan. She was the most genuinely bisexual woman I've ever known. She was completely unpossessive. She was not turned off or weirded out by anything, yet if I really used my imagination, I was capable of shocking her. She was love embodied. If these sound like the perfect ingredients for a lover, they are. I was so lucky to have been Stephanie's lover for so long.

Stephanie and I broke up about two years before her death. I saw her a week before she died, when we went hiking on Mount Tam. Typical Stephanie moment: She pied a garter snake in the grass, chased the frantic wriggling thing up the trail and grabbed it, shrieking "I caught you! I caught you!"

Then she released it and we watched it slither away through the grass. "Euww, my hands are all snakey now!" she then exclaimed. That was her -- joyful, spontaneous, weird. Rest in peace, my pearl.


Saturday, May 25, 2002

 
Whoa there

Once in a while I search on the web for some mention of my work. By that I mean my two books and the magazine I used to publish, Frighten the Horses. Today I did the query a little differently than I ever had before, and I came upon this weird mention of the magazine:

FRIGHTEN THE HORSES. Its primary audience appears to be lesbians who enjoy bondage and sadomasochism. It contains many thoughtful and tender articles on the art of making love (excuse me for being so bold). I always thought myself worldly wise, and believed I had seen everything. But the article by the woman who dresses in diapers, sucks her thumb, and desires to be administered "disciplinary" enemas by her girlfriend was a real eye opener! Some dedicated readers even send in pictures. My issue featured a centerfold of a lady reminiscent of Margaux Hemingway (God rest her soul -- it's so sad when one is taken so young). The woman is bound, gagged, and tied to a ladder, while her lady friends drip hot candle wax on her belly. Ouch! I wish I had this magazine when I was still sewing [sic] my wild oats.

Gene Santagada

This was from a little article that comprised, ostensibly, a letter to the editor of the Publishers Clearinghouse Catalogue. It was written in 1996 -- at least a year after our last issue of the zine. I found it at http://cyberpsychos.netonecom.net/editor/pchsup.html.

The strange thing about the letter is that that woman looked nothing like Margeaux Hemingway. That is quite a stretch. I also don't remember publishing a story about a woman who wears diapers and sucks her thumb. Whatever.

Friday, May 17, 2002

 
Here to stay

I'm in Massachusetts, visiting the suburban Boston office of my employer on a business trip. This morning I drove into town to go to morning zazen at the Cambridge Buddhist Association, and on the way back to my hotel in the suburbs I turned on the radio. To my pleasure, I hit upon WZBC-FM, the Boston College radio station. They were playing a bunch a great jangly indie rock, and it reminded me of two things.


The first thing was that rock and roll is proving to be an immensely flexible genre, and because it's so flexible, it's still alive after fifty years. I'm not talking about the simple blues progressions that have been adapted into countless songs, or even the verse, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus structure that is so endlessly adaptable from song to song.

I'm talking about all the different parts or options that rock songwriters and musicians have to choose from, and the sum that is greater than all these parts. There are the classic rock instruments -- electric guitar, bass guitar, drums -- and other instruments that sweeten the mix, like organ, tambourine, harmonica. There are the classic vocal conventions of lead singer and backup chorus, coming from gospel. There are the conventions of solos, riffs and percussive instruments, coming from jazz. There is the beat, coming from r&b. There is the shouted or screamed vocal co-developed by Americans and the British. There is the convention of the singer-songwriter, invented by Woody Guthrie and confirmed by Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan. There is the wonderful choral effect of the band's total sound, an effect first produced by big bands and jazz groups; that's what the record producer contributes.

And finally there is the notion that the single unit of rock and roll is not the song -- that is, the product of the songwriter -- but the recording. The product of the song plus the band plus the production.

None of this is new, but my point is that rock has many, many conventions which, taken together, are what make a rock and roll recording rock and roll and not jazz or r&b or folk or "Sing, Sing, Sing." No single record has all of the elements. But a record has to have a critical mass of them or it's not a rock record -- it's folk or r&b or something else.

So I'm immensely cheered when I hear some good, new stuff. The kids are still playing with this toy invented by their grandparents' generation! They're working within the genre, deepening and expanding it, and it's still not played out.

This discussion leaves out hip-hop, a genre I do not claim to understand or like (although that new Eminem song "Without Me" is stuck in my head like a bad cold).

And the other thing I was reminded of was my friend Stephanie. My ex-lover Stephanie, who is now dead. In her college years, she was a night-time DJ at WZBC. More about Stephanie in the next post.

 

Wednesday, May 01, 2002

 
Exhibitionism for the nerdy

Living in San Francisco, I have more than my share of chances at media exposure. When I was in Queer Nation, I played the "media whore" (as we called our spokespeople) for several different events. Then when I started putting out Frighten the Horses and later when I started published my books, I became just a wee bit more famous, at least for a dozen or two people.

And now, of course, we have the internet. One of the people who works at my company stumbled across this website. He wrote me "Cool site." But because I write about sex here and in my books, I am a little careful to separate my work life and my life as a pornographer, so what would you do? I basically answered "Thanks for the compliment; I kind of keep these things separate, but enjoy."

But that's not all. One of the guys who works for me is the boyfriend of the well-known humorist Cynthia Heimel. Now, I wouldn't want to be in that position, just like I wouldn't want to be the wife of a Las Vegas comedian. But anyway, here's her column on nerve.com all about their sex life.

Obviously it's different exhibiting yourself, the way I do (and the way Heimel does in her column -- I don't mean that in a bad way, it's a funny column, if kind of revealing), and making your partner a player in your journalist fun. I only make fun of people who bug me, like Josh. I wouldn't dare make sport of my partner Cris. Who can live with that?

This raises the question of how confessional my pornography is. I go into that in each of the pages devoted to my books (this one and that one). Not that I really go down the list and say "I've done this, this and this, but that, that and that are pure fantasy." What fun would that be? Besides, fantasy or not, my particular fetishes are pretty easy to tell from my books. (Now go out and buy them! I'm broke!)