Honey Mine: Collected Stories - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

CAMILLE ROY is a San Francisco-based writer and performer of fiction, poetry, and plays. Her books include SHERWOOD FOREST (Futurepoem Books), Cheap Speech (Leroy), Craquer, (2nd Story Books), Swarm (Black Star Series), THE ROSY MEDALLIONS (Kelsey St Press) and COLD HEAVEN (O Books). Her recent work has been published in Amerarcana and Open Space (SFMoma blog). Roy has taught creative writing in multiple genres and forms at several institutions, most recently at San Francisco State University.

ERIC SNEATHEN is a poet living in Oakland. His first collection, Snail Poems, was published by Krupskaya. With Daniel Benjamin he edited The Bigness of Things: New Narrative and Visual Culture and organized Communal Presence: New Narrative Writing Today. A Ph.D. candidate in Literature at UC Santa Cruz, he writes about the history of LGBT poetry and innovative writing of the San Francisco Bay Area. Essays can be found at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Open Space platform, Social Text Online, and in From Our Hearts to Yours​ (ON, 2017), edited by Rob Halpern and Robin Tremblay-McGaw.

LAUREN LEVIN is a poet and mixed-genre writer, author of ​The Braid​ (Krupskaya, 2016) and Justice Piece // Transmission​ (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2018). With Emji Spero, they were developmental editor for ​We Both Laughed in Pleasure: the Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan​ edited by Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma (Timeless, Infinite Light/Nightboat). From 2011-2014, they co-edited the Poetic Labor Project blog. Their gender identity is some mix of belated queer, Jewish great-aunt, and aspirational Frank O’Hara. They are still figuring it out. They live in Richmond, CA, are from New Orleans, LA, and are committed to queer art, intersectional feminism, being a parent, and anxiety.

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LYNETTE #1 I am waiting in line for a movie at the Castro when I see them in front of the ticket booth. They are leaning towards one another; there is an atmosphere of indecision. The tall one, the one I love, looks just like she does in the ads. She’s even wearing the same outfit. Thick wavy hair, soft toothsome leather jacket, spotted leopard pants. Big heels. Her date motions with a hand and runs off using short steps. This signals a short absence. The woman in leopard print stretch pants walks over to me. Her name is Lynette; we’ve been introduced. She has a wide mouth and wide eyes; large brown irises. She hands me a folded piece of paper. ‘A party,’ she says. ‘I hope you can make it.’ ‘This weekend?’ She nods, I nod. I put the paper in the pocket of my jeans jacket. She walks back to wait for her date. She puts all her attention into that. I take this as a sign that she’s at work. I bring a friend to the party. I am feeling insecure and my friend has a low, husky laugh. She isn’t moved by much. Small and hard like a hazelnut with lovely facial bones. Many people are attracted by her aura of experience. I recognize some of the women at the party as strippers I’ve seen at the Baybrick’s show. Wrapped up in red or black lace, they are noisy and demonstrative. It’s a screen I can’t penetrate. I am vaguely uneasy with the amount and variety of drugs being consumed. My friend and I wander through the crowd with cigarettes and glasses of gin. Sometimes I see Lynette. She’s wearing big dark clothes, kind of sloppy looking. I as-sume this means she’s not working. Clothes are conductors in the electrical sense. I want to slip my hand under her shirt. I am happy when she looks at me. Some sort of recognition, then waiting. Sitting on the carpet eating a carrot stick. Lynette walks over, quickly nudges me hard under the throat. I lean back on my elbows, her hand slides over my shoulder, presses me down. I feel very hot, I think this is what I want except I also want to finish my carrot stick. She is suck-ing my neck, which has become soft and elastic. In my mind I say, ‘I am the beloved of the whore with a heart of gold.’ ‘But I don’t love you’ she says. ‘You’re some other whore’ I say. I’m only doing this because my beloved is unavailable. She comes back from the conference with Lucy, a woman I am jealous of. They are agreeing that the conference was peculiar: paying eight dollars to hear one male psychiatrist present his han-dling of a case while two others attack him in minute detail. I am curious whether the psychia-trists, by attacking one another, can come to be on the side of the client, who is female. Then, if one changes his position, does his relationship to the client also change, or is this fixed… I’m not in the habit of revealing my thoughts. Privacy is a service I perform; it’s arbitrary what I reveal and what I don’t. I say, ‘Silence is drainage.’ One of the most interesting ways of making narratives within narratives complex in gay porn is the use of films within films. Many gay films are about making gay porn films; and many others involve someone showing gay porn films to himself or someone else (with the film-within-the-film becoming for awhile the film we are watching). Interrupted. My erratic motion toward the ‘sexual fringe’ means the characters fall off before we get to see them fuck. Anne flicks her wrist when she says, ‘I can’t understand why my friends don’t invite me to see them fisting.’ Anti-porn, where the narrative is taken out. My tongue is a fish wife, flowing and stuck. Messages sliding over glove-like intrusion. I decide my beloved ought to be more jealous of me than she is. First I get my waist cincher, which has an amusing way of making me sit up straight, and other underthings in a matching color (black). Then I dress up in a long forties dress with black paisleys and bits of turquoise, a short of black jacket with a jet beaded collar, a pink rag around my head and a blue scarf around my neck. Next are the rhinestones. Rhinestones have to occur in sets in order to be really effec-tive so I wear the bracelet, earrings, and necklace. (Last time I was in my favorite old clothing store my friend Renaldo who works in there started hissing at me about ‘Did I see that rhinestone bra?’ I could have died for it.) I put on white lace gloves and go out to buy a card for my be-loved: something with roses and gold. Since that sort of thing isn’t in style anymore the only thing I can get is Chinese, but it looks romantic and there’s no greeting to cross out. I take my beloved out to dinner, and give her the card. The little story inside is about my previous lover: Randy Raye was a sweet thing I was happy to love. Dark hair and brows in even strokes across her face. Her lips lifted back from her teeth when she laughed, un-curling a quick and sometimes nasty wit. Girl with a cigarette and leather jacket, so fifties and all mine. Slim firm legs I wanted to bite and did. When she worked at the pinball parlor, her co-worker―a blond boy named Bill―started on hor-mones and grew breasts. One day he asked her to call him Luann. When I saw him he seemed unsettled, more vagueness across his face. Later she worked at the parlor. Not as a prostitute of course. She couldn’t take that on, though some of the butch girls did. After we broke up I thought of her sit-ting at the table at the top of the stair, saying “And these are our models tonight” as she introduced the women. I couldn’t go up there since we were on the outs. Twice that summer I circled the block in my waitress uniform and padded shoes after a long day at work. Wanting to see her so bad was like a groove laid into me that I had to learn to live with. My beloved is a prostitute and thinks I should try it out. ‘Would you clean toilets for seventy bucks an hour?’ I’m not interested, but I listen to her stories which are flat, like the drama has gone somewhere else. So-and-so-comes in when he can’t stand it anymore because his wife won’t give him sex. He hates himself for this and won’t touch her, but masturbates while she un-dresses and lies around. They talk about sex roles and she says he’s kind of a feminist. Every month or so he comes to the house and I take a walk for forty five minutes. I walk around the wide flat streets of our residential neighborhood and look at the trees. The suburban silence is irritating. I go to the promo event with my friend Shelley. I find myself edging up to Lynette with a plastic glass of champagne. She is talking to a tall thin gay man who is dressed like an Eisenhower en-gineer, except the crew cut is too long and sticks up bristly with dippity-do. Circling them incon-spicuously I hear Lynette say, “I can make love to a woman like her very best lover.” Instantly I imagine her in my grainy cotton sheets and flush, decide to head back towards Anne. I pass Lynette’s partner Cheryl. Blond, wearing a red satin merry widow and fishnets, she’s dealing with the radio reporter, a rather anxious looking feminist. She speaks soothingly into the micro-phone: “…a luxury item, in the same vein as getting a massage. You pay for my undivided atten-tion. There’s no responsibility or performance anxiety for the client to deal with, because it’s all for her. The woman’s pleasure is our only concern.” When a stripper’s show is going well, the air is thick, charged with sexuality, and she is in total control. This pleasant feeling of immunity is close to contempt. As in the fantasy of the passive man, the stripper takes pleasure in being a tormentor. While I think all of us strippers felt some disdain for men, the only women I ever heard admit to feeling that pleasure were gay women. As a sensualist living under threat I have incorporated threat. My complicity is violent. Head unwinding newsreels of gore where I am never the victim, sometimes the sadist. My switchblade my first boyfriend gave me is always in my pocket (I made that up) and...