When I was a kid, we had this one book lying around—bottom rung of the bookcase, floor level: a glossy collection of ’80s food erotica. A woman with two tufts of whipped cream covering her nipples, cherries on top. A gently held guava, crotch-height. A mouth eating a banana. When I was home alone I’d often sneak the book back to my room and page through it, fascinated, fully aware I was doing something a bit wrong or embarrassing and not quite sure why. My first knowledge of sex came as a thing hidden in books. In middle school me and this other girl had a friendship that was mostly exchanging books we’d found that had sex in them. I gave her De valse dageraad, a Dutch tomb where the young protagonist makes love against the reedy embankment of a lake; she gave me J. M. Auel’s The Valley of Horses, a 470-page novel where two prehistoric lovers have sex, repeatedly and in many ways, while stuck in a valley.
By the time everyone around me was actually having sex, I had read so much about it that I was sure that I, too, would be having it soon enough. It was confusing, then, to find that I was not having it at all. To find that whenever I made the smallest step toward it, all I felt was all-encompassing horror. Memorable was the time when my then almost-boyfriend proposed to give me a foot rub during a sleepover, and I, sweating and hyperventilating, allowed it, but the socks were staying on. It was with that almost-boyfriend that I witnessed my very first queer sex scene. In the 1998 movie Fucking Åmål: where the main character jerks off under the covers while looking at a picture of the girl who bullies her at school. I was mortified. I wouldn’t stop thinking about that scene—angrily, thought it was too explicit and unappealing and went on for far too long. I’ve watched the movie many times over in the years since, and I can tell you—the scene is barely a few seconds long.
There was an ease—a distant fascination—that I felt with straight sex in novels and on screen that flipped into mortification when I was faced with either a) the reality of it, having to do it with my own body. Or b) the theoretical, completely hypothetical queer version of an otherwise familiar fantasy. There is something about erotica in novels that is both private and exhibitionist—safe and unsafe—somehow at the same time; no one can know what you’re reading on the page, the scene unfolding in your mind. You can carry with you on the metro, you read it over lunch. No one knows, but you know. What would happen if they find out?
There’s an almost overripe metaphor to be had here. The secret thing you carry with you, the private narrative of desire that no one knows of unless they look into your head. And yet for me, the two feel intrinsically connected: reading queer erotica and my coming out. Reading straight sex, I felt as a voyeur, untouched and titillated. I was the anonymous reader on the metro, at the cafe. Reading queer sex, I wasn’t the objective camera lens. I was the subject, considering its own mortifying, bodily, embarrassing self.
In my novel, The Safekeep, it’s that exact exploration of voyeurism, sex, discomfort, and self-discovery that stands central. The idea came to me first as a premise: a woman, alone in an old family home; a stranger arrives in the form of her brother’s newest girlfriend, made to stay for the summer. The two are at odds. They are stuck together in this house, alone. That was the premise. Then, came the question—and what does sex have to do with it? The novel tilts itself around the notion of the erotic in the way I have tilted myself around it, wondering at how we recognize desire when it doesn’t come to us in the way we’ve been told to expect.
The seven scenes on this list come from some of my favorite novels and short stories. Through language, story tension and some wonderful discomfort, they each explore what makes desire translate from page to reader, and what allows a reader to remain objective; or turn, quite unexpectedly, into the subject itself.
The One With the Victorian Dildo
Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters
Of course, this had to be the opener. This scene occupies a near-cultish-level position in the lesbian literary spheres. Briefly mention Tipping the Velvet, or even Sarah Waters in general, and the whole room will sigh a collective, “Yeah, that one scene.” You don’t have to ask what scene. You know what scene. The main character, Nan, is commanded by her older lover, Diana, to wear a strap. The context? We’re in the 1890s.
The dildo is described in detail (“It was a cylinder of leather, rather longer than the length of my hand and about as fat, in width, as I could grip. One end was rounded and slightly enlarged, the other fixed firm to a flattened base”), as is the delightful galloping of the scene that follows. Nan is made to sit on a chair, and Diana rides her, “then proceeded to rise and sink, rise and sink, with an ever speedier motion.” The purposefully archaic narrative voice creates a friction between the words and what happens on the page, “Soon her breaths became moans, then cries; soon my own voice joined hers, for the dildo that serviced her also pleasured me—her motions bringing it with an ever faster, ever harder pressure against just that part of me that cared for pressure best.” It teeters between earnestness and humor, desire as bodily and the bodily as camp. A true and timeless classic.
The One About a Zombie Apocalypse Sex List
“Inventory” in Her Body & Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
It was last year when I read that Carmen Maria Machado was writing the script for an erotic queer porn film. I have still not recovered from this news. Truly, no one does it like Machado—the ease, the swiftness of how she can go from desire to horror, from arousal to fear. It was hard to pick one for Machado, and I went back and forth, paging through other stories (especially “The Lost Performance of the High Priestess of the Temple of Horror” in the collection Kink deserves a very notable mention), but settled on “Inventory.” It was my introduction to Machado, and haunts me daily. The premise? A zombie apocalypse written in the form of a diary-entry list of people the narrator has had sex with. My favorite entry opens with: “One woman. Brunette. A former CDC employee.” And continues, “I met her at a community meeting where they taught us how to stockpile food and manage outbreaks in our neighborhoods should the virus hop the firebreak. […] She wanted cock and I obliged. Afterward, she traced the indents in my skin from the harness, and confessed to me that no one was having any luck developing a vaccine. ‘But the fucking thing is only passing through physical contact,’ she said. ‘If people would just stay apart—’ She grew silent. She curled up next to me and we drifted off. When I woke up, she was working herself over with the dildo, and I pretended I was still sleeping.”
It’s the ease of the phrase, she wanted cock and I obliged. The sex we’re not allowed to witness and we understand only in the retrospective; the following emotion in the brunette’s speech—if only people would just stay apart!—is immediately contrasted and amplified with the evocatively crass, working herself over with the dildo, and our narrator sleeping. It plays with our expectations as readers: what we think we’re going to ‘see’, what we end up being allowed to ‘see’, and the subversion of the satisfaction we expect to find in a scene involving a, well—a dildo.
The One About the Very First Time
America is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo
At least once a month I have a moment where I think to myself, thank god for Castillo’s writing. On a personal level, yes, but also as a teacher: this is my most often used scene in my erotic writing course. The novel itself is a deft exploration of the politics of immigration and how they intersect with sexuality. My favourite sex scene in it is the one where one of the protagonists, Hero, takes Rosalyn to bed for the first time. It does one a trick that I’m endlessly fond of—switching in and our of the moment, in and our of physicality, creating tension by allowing us to witness and then suddenly throwing us back into memory. In media res, with the two lovers in bed, we’re told that “Hero had been told before, not always in a complimentary way, that she was loud when she came—near-silent panting all the way through, and then deafening, devouring cries when it happened. Since arriving in California she’d toned it down, couldn’t let herself go, thought she’d changed.”
Then, a few sentences later, the non-sequitur of the reflection is resolved: “But when she finally came, slick-lipped, lifting her hips to grind her clit shamelessly against Rosalyn’s finger [ . . . ] she felt Rosalyn physically startle at the volume of her cry, fingerhold briefly slipping, before she rallied and rubbed Hero through it.” The language here does something brilliant: alliteration (slick-lipped-lifting) is prefacing the rise in tempo, the repeating comma’s echoing the climax. However, Rosalyn continues, “wind[ing] Hero back up again, circling, no mercy, so it didn’t take long for Hero to give it up a second time, growling, annoyed—at how good it was, at how much she’d missed it, at how much more she wanted. Shit.” If Machado plays with what we’re allowed to witness, Castillo waits until the last minute to pull back the curtain altogether and letting us witness it all, slick fingers and growls and all. Ending the paragraph on the shit does something delightful: brings the third person close into a first almost direct dialogue—an orgasm so good it breaks the narrative structure.
The One Where the Sex Fantasy Spirals
The First Bad Man by Miranda July
Perhaps an unorthodox choice, but I’m obsessed with everything that July’s strange little brain comes up with, and this novel was no different. I recall that heady period in 2017 where I forced everyone around me to read it because I was talking of so little else. The moment I realized where the story was headed—the escalation of the relationship between the two unlikely bedfellows, older Cheryl and younger Clee—something very physical rattled through me. I remember sitting straight up in bed and saying, oh no. The sex in this novel comes at you in the most diverted ways (literally—Cheryl can only experience desire if she reroutes it through the fantasies of others), at first indirectly and then all at once. There’s this one scene where, during a party, Cheryl considers Clee across the room and imagines that she herself is a former lover, a man called Philip, and that it’s in fact Philip who’s aroused by Clee and not herself: “I was in him, in her. […] He wanted to rub her through her jeans. Jiddy jiddy jiddy rah rah. And cream in her mouth. Mutual soaping. Jiddy jiddy jiddy rah rah. My member was stiff. […] I went into my room, locked the door, took off the purple bra with its shiny, shiny straps, and pressed my balding head into her jugs. My big, hairy hand worked itself down the front of her jeans and my fingers, with their thick blocky fingernails, slid into her puss. She was wet and whimpering. ‘Phillip,’ she moaned. ‘Put it in me.’ So I quietly, forcefully, made love to her mouth.”
This, again, teeters between humor and discomfort—that most camp of combinations. What happens here creates a feedback loop for us, too. As readers, all we do is pretend we are in the mind of the main character, and now the main character does that too, through someone else; we are us, we are Cheryl, who is Philip, who wants Clee. Her fantasy is an extension of ours, and we’re taken into it so easily. So much of sex is fantasy, and July plays with it here, plays with coming to queer desire through the straight roundabout. It’s effective because it’s unsettling and shocking, because it’s a little too effortless.
The One About Fucking a Rockstar
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor
Where July plays with redirected desire, Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl takes desire apart and puts it back together upside-down. A wonderful, sexy, chaotic exploration of gender, Lawlor’s novel follows Paul, the shapeshifter, as he shifts through bodies and identities in his search for connection. The novel opens with Paul as a young woman heading to a lesbian punk concert in the form of a groupie, where he flirts with the lead singer, “The rock star.” They end up at a house party where the rock star leads him to a spare room: “Paul stood near the bed, waiting to be directed. The rock star closed the door and walked up very close to Paul. ‘Are you going to kiss me now?’ Paul whispered. ‘I’m gonna do more than that, little girl,’ growled the rock star, pulling Paul’s hair from the nape of his neck. Paul let himself fall back onto the bed and the rock star fell on top of him like a high-school quarterback, lithe with purpose, grinding expectantly onto Paul.”
I love discussing this scene in class, especially because of the initial confusion with the uninitiated readership around bodies and pronouns, how the language first seems to ask us to keep up—and then basically says, oh please just stop caring. The rock star asks, “‘What do you want?’, and “Paul couldn’t think. You tell me, he thought. The rock star stuck her hand down Paul’s special vinyl pants, under his black panties, into his cunt. ‘You’re so wet,’ she said. ‘You want my cock so bad.’ Paul nodded. It was true. He was very, very, very wet. He could smell himself. His cunt was gaping and his stomach was gaping and his mouth was kissing, kissing, kissing. He whimpered as the rock star unbuttoned her jeans and pulled out her plastic cock, black and shiny to match her rock-star shininess. I am being penetrated by punk, he thought as she thrust into him, pushing his legs legs apart, collapsing onto him like a pistoning flesh blanket.”
There’s so much joy in Lawlor’s sex writing, so much enjoyment in desire that I so rarely read in queer narratives. But there’s texture, too, there’s always something small and grating right below the surface: “Inside Paul something tight released: a rusted nut turned finally around its old bolt. White sheets were thrown off moldering couches with fanfare of dust and sunlight. Then the release stopped, as if it never was.” Implications within metaphors—the rusted nut, the old bolt; the release coming and then disappearing. “’Don’t stop, okay?’ Paul said. ‘Don’t stop.’” Joy and lust transitioning into desperation: As the novel continues, we see that Paul can be anything, but he can’t have everything. It’s a fascinating and sexy mix, and unlike anything else I’ve ever read.
The One Filled With Tenderness
“The Frog King” in Cleanness by Garth Greenwell
Can we even talk about queer sex writing without mentioning Garth Greenwell? A master in both his erotic writing and his meta analysis of desire in page. There was so much to choose from, but in the end I settled on his short story from Cleanness, “The Frog King.” When I first read it I recall slowing down halfway through, then eventually returning to the beginning to read it anew, through calmer eyes. This, too, is a rare exploration of joy and comfort in queer sex. It’s a conversation around being seen, too. By others, by ourselves. Our two protagonists have just returned from a holiday in Italy where everything was joyous and sexy, and now, back in Sofia, Bulgaria, the two men first drift briefly away and then toward one another. The main character seeks out his lover, R., and turns a playful scene in the bedroom into an earnest one. “He was harder now, he pressed his hips up against mine, but I lifted myself off him, beyond his reach. He moaned in frustration, he tried to pull his hands free but I held them firm; Porta-te bem, [behave], I said to him, and then I did kiss him, I put my tongue in his mouth and he sucked at it hard, tasting me but tasting himself, too, that was what he loved, the taste of himself in my mouth.”
There’s that theme again, that seems to return in so much of queer sex writing: the self in the other, possession that is also surrender. It’s through this possession/surrender dichotomy that R. finds something soft and the moment shifts. “He was being good,” the main character says. “He let me do what I wanted. But I wasn’t sure what I wanted, or what I wanted had changed. I had thought I wanted to make him laugh, that after that I wanted sex, but I didn’t want sex, I realized, or not only sex.” The scene then moves away from the climax; R. weeps, our protagonist holds him. Greenwell’s incredibly skillful pen reminds us how lust in the erotic sense and want in the tender sense are always a breath away.
The One Where Sex is the Antidote to Demonic Possession
Feast While You Can by Onjuli Datta & Mikaella Clements
I was saving this one for last, because boooy, am I excited about this book. I’ve been joking about the season of bad sexy lesbians being upon us, and Feast While You Can will surely soon take the crown. Poor Angelina lives in the ugly but beautiful village of Candenze. One day, two strangers arrive: on a bus, her brother’s suave and much-hated ex, Jagvi; from the mountains, a demonic monster called the Thing. The monster wants to possess Angelina, and turns out, the only thing to keep it at bay? Jagvi’s touch. After a scorching and torturous 160 pages of unresolved tension, the two finally give in in a breathless rattle of a scene: “It felt like a wave, like some big animal pressing her into the long grass, like giving her body up again. Jagvi was still mostly dressed, rough denim against Angelina’s legs, belt buckle knocking against her poor bruised stomach, and Angelina couldn’t stop wriggling beneath her, shameless, arching her hips up, trying for something, anything.” Possession in the demonic sense is replaced by possession in the sense of desire, in the sense of, yes, yet again—surrender. “‘I won’t let it touch you,’” Jagvi promises, “‘don’t want it anywhere […], not your leg, […] Or your ear, […] And definitely, definitely not in your head,that’s, Angel, I don’t want it there, not ever—’” To which Angelina says: “‘You’re the only thing in my head.’”
Where the Thing took Angelina’s body forcefully, she then gives it up to Jagvi willingly, allowing her to “[kneel] between Angelina’s ankles and [flip] her over, her hand knotted in Angelina’s hair. Jagvi was sure of herself and relentless, pulling Angelina neatly up onto her knees, knocking Angelina’s thighs apart, reaching around to cup Angelina’s tits, squeezing them together. Angelina grabbed fistfuls of the sheet, and Jagvi drifted easily down, mouth against Angelina’s spine, then biting her hip, then sliding her underwear down. ‘Jag,’ Angelina said, the only word left to her. She could feel Jagvi’s smile against her hip, and then Jagvi’s fingers slid hot inside her, knuckle-deep, curling up and out and in again.”
The sex in Feast While You Can brings forward an uncomfortable question that applies both to demonic possession and also normal relationships: how far can we crawl into another person before we’ve crawled too far? Datta and Clements bring us the answer in a blisteringly hot (and messy) denouement and one of my favorite endings of the last decade. Do not sleep on this one!
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