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.