Betwixt

Violet Blue posted today about a lot of amazing things. Her point of departure is the JT LeRoy hoax and how it epitomized the kind of poseur she says she encountered throughout her early years here as a queer gutter punk in San Francisco at a time when the sex underground was already well-established. She writes about breaking into sex writing and reviewing, competing against privileged middle-class people who pretended to be punk (she graciously leaves out the names) -- a fascinating perspective on the so-called community of the San Francisco sex demimonde.

The subtext is that the SF sex demimonde is just as cliquish and elitist as any other close-knit collection of people, whether it's a high school, a country club, a summer camp, or (in this case) a few hundred people who live the rest of the country's sexual fantasies, both explicit and hidden.

By virtue of publishing Frighten the Horses for a few years and being a SFSI volunteer, I managed for a brief time to reach just the edge of this community, though I had a totally middle-class background and was holding down a full-time straight job the whole time. And the only thing I could see from the edge of that community was how difficult it would for someone like me to get any deeper -- because the center of the demimonde is very much off the edge of straight society, a society I never really left.

On the other hand -- having just visited my mother and been reminded of how far I've come -- I know I don't live in the utterly square world of my parents' expectations either. To them -- if they had ever glimpsed my life -- I would have looked like an utter freak. To the real freaks I looked utterly middle class. I've always been sort of neither-nor, neither a freak nor a square, and if only in that sense, I really am sort of a misfit.

Violet Blue, San Francisco,queer community, sex positive,sex writers