This is the autobiographical chapter of this book: the very quick story of my life in writing. However, you don't need to know anything about me to begin your erotic expression, or to start your reading and publishing adventures. Enjoy my story if you like, or dive into the chapters that address your most important questions today.

I did not have a "reputation" for writing about anything, let alone sex, for the first ten years I was publishing my work. I didn't even know how much I would be affected by my notoriety until I was hit over the head with it.

In 1994, shortly after I began the Best American Erotica series, I was interviewed for a cover story by Dwight Garner, a journalist for the Boston Phoenix at the time. He wrote that I was the "goddess of American erotica." For the next few hours after I read his glowing praise, I was insufferable. All my sins and weaknesses were washed away as I climbed Mount Olympus with my paper crown.

Later in the day, humbled by real life and toiling in my office, I photocopied the review a dozen times to send to my agent, as well as to publishers I wanted to impress. I thought how curious it was that I had arrived at this place, an erotic "deity." It occurred to me that it had been decades in America since anyone had taken erotica seriously, or treated erotic literature as something to be respected. The trials of the 1950s that made D. H. Lawrence's and Henry Miller's classic works first available legally in the United States were unknown to all but our eldest generation. No wonder I seemed remarkable in my interests and enthusiasm -- I was raising a genre from the grave!

I've been asked so many times by fans how, or why, I studied to become an erotic expert. I've been asked which courses I took for my university degree, or how I made my professional calculations to achieve success. The answer is that I did nothing -- I mean nothing -- to intentionally become a sexpert. Yes, I loved sex -- and reading and writing -- probably above all other personal pastimes, but without any notion of my affections becoming a career. In retrospect, my progress has been as much a wonder to me as it has been to many of my readers.

I came to sex writing first as a lover, writing poems and letters to my earliest infatuations. Nobody outside my bed knew anything about my erotic devotions.

At the same time, however, I was a political activist; and in addition to the usual suspects, I was also swept up in the early feminist and sexual liberation movements of the 1970s. I started having sex just as the women's movement and gay liberation were peaking. I wrote articles in underground magazines and newspapers about sex, about how to get birth control without your parents' finding out, about coming out gay at your high school, and what to do when you wanted to have a great teenage sex life but you had no privacy and little money -- classic themes that I could write about all over again twenty-five years later!

In 1976 I dropped out of high school and became a full-time organizer for a socialist group that was very involved in labor organizing. At the end of the 1970s, my group was split in pieces, and I entered college in southern California to set up camp between the women's studies and theater arts programs. This was the same time that the Moral Majority was founded, when, for the first time in national politics, mainstream politicians raised the issue of the "evil homosexual" as a "lavender" herring.

At this time, although I produced a lot of writing, it rarely appeared with my name on it. The political emphasis at the time was to enhance our collective consciousness and effort. To insist that one needed a byline was considered the worst self-aggrandizing stunt. I would have been embarrassed if anyone had suggested it. I loved the collaboration and the emphasis on group potential; but, in retrospect, I realize that I didn't have any particular sense of my talent for writing. I thought it was just something that everyone needed to know how to do, like cooking for a full house or changing a tire.

To finish college, I moved to northern California, where I found a program at UC Santa Cruz called Community Studies that was devoted to political activism. Best of all, it was largely field study. My major became the pursuit of sexual politics in San Francisco -- which at that moment, just after Harvey Milk's assassination, was exploding in several directions.

We were right on the cusp of AIDS and at the beginning of a gay political establishment in San Francisco; instead of merely fighting puritans, gays were now fighting among themselves over who was going to represent sexual diversity in our city's political agenda. Every other sexual minority -- from leather folk, to prostitutes, to transgendered men and women -- was starting to publish its own books of theory and activism. But the erotic element behind all that protest was still pretty quiet.

I was, and always have been, bisexual; but at that time, every bit of heat in sexual politics was in the gay community. Every straight and kinky person was attracted to the gay scene. It was where every erotic idea was debated and ignited.

I worked a part-time job in a women's vibrator store, composed a play called Girls Gone Bad, and read my erotic poetry in abandoned storefronts. It was an exciting time, and it was then that I became frustrated at how little reading matter was available, for women in particular, about our sexual lives and stories. It occurred to me that even though feminism had ignited a revolution in consciousness about women's bodies, we hadn't really gone all the way into a woman's erotic mind.

The Internet hadn't yet become ubiquitous, and as far as books were concerned there was hardly anything -- a little Anaïs Nin here, a little Nancy Friday there. Everything erotic in print for women was either antique or was predicated on heavy psychological rationales. Why couldn't women have their own fabulous smut? We were exasperated with much of the male porn that we'd been "making do" with for years.

Two things happened. Joani Blank, the owner of the store where I worked, agreed to publish a book of women's erotica that I would edit -- we called it Herotica. At the same time, a fan of my poetry readings phoned to ask me if I'd like to contribute to a new magazine for "the adventurous lesbian." It was called On Our Backs, and I became its editor.

At that time, no one wrote "women's erotica." It didn't exist as a genre. On the one hand, that made our task of finding talent very difficult, because everyone was so startled by the idea (Women digging sex? Ridiculous!) that it became a challenge to ask any writer to participate. A lot of writers were afraid to use their names, or they wondered if erotic writing would be the end of their careers.

On the other hand, there were lots of women who were writing about sex -- beautifully, passionately, and with great intelligence and imagination -- and they were shut out of mainstream publishing. I was able to publish authors who, if not for the prejudices of the traditional publishing business, would have been discovered and published to great acclaim.

There was a treasure trove here, and it was being completely ignored. Dorothy Allison, Pat Califia, Sarah Schulman, Lisa Palac, Carol Queen, Joan Nestle -- all these great writers who have now been published widely but couldn't have gotten cab fare from a publisher once upon a time. A whole generation of remarkable talent was looking for an "in," and my magazine and anthologies came along at just the right time.

By 1990, after the third volume of Herotica and six years of On Our Backs, the notion of the sex-positive feminist, with her PC and modem by her side, became ubiquitous. There were dozens of imitators and a flood of talent. Major publishers began to court the new sex-radical divas, and the notion of the "do-me feminist" became a cliché.

In the meantime, I'd become known for my critical and sometimes funny essays about porn, sexual politics, and erotic adventurism. Yet at the same time I was chafing at the boundaries of what I'd created. For one thing, I was bisexual, but most people assumed that I was interested only in lesbian work, since I was so well-known as the editor of On Our Backs. Privately, I was appalled that women who dig men didn't have a stronger erotic voice of their own. I was frustrated that I didn't have a venue to publish the work of outstanding gay and straight male writers.

I knew that what erotica fans wanted was something wonderful and new, and they didn't care what the genitals were on the people who wrote it. I knew that the conventional wisdom of the publishing establishment was that gay and lesbian work had to be ghettoized, that straight audiences had to be protected by feeding them only the vanilla fantasies that would fit into their own lives. I'd been looking under people's beds for years, surveying their secret porn collections, and my conclusion was the old maxim: You can't tell a book by its cover.

Right as I was hitting my literary wit's end, I got a phone call. An editor from Macmillan, Mark Chimsky, said he was interested in talking to me because he had heard I knew more about erotic writing than anyone else in America. I'm sure he was soliciting my favor at that point, but his flattery gave me pause. I had never thought of my knowledge that way. I told him yes, it was true -- it was a sad commentary on the state of erotica that hardly anyone else cared to become knowledgeable.

I was the "erotica guru" he was after, but it was only because, up to that point, no one else had given a damn. The few scholars who concerned themselves with erotic writing had been isolated and were not involved in the countercultural publishing scene. Most of the prominent mainstream writers of the day were terrified to have their names sullied by "dirty" writing, so they were of no use at all. For me to be the expert, at that point, simply meant that I was a devoted contrarian.

Mark had a concept for an annual series -- a collection of the best American erotic writing. The timing was perfect, since I was aching to publish a diverse body of work.

The first edition of The Best American Erotica, in 1993, was a national best-seller, and it has continued at that level of popularity ever since. My role has been that of editor and promoter, and also an in-house critic. Each year I've tried to look at the current trends in erotic literature; I've tried to assess what the contents of each volume tell us about sex in America, about writing, about our taboos, and about the status quo. I've written several books of my own that explore my personal sex history and the landscape of American sexual politics.

How did I achieve goddess status? In my more self-deprecating moments, I've said, "Because no one else wanted to." But in a more celebratory mood, I would say it was because of my most elementary passions -- sex, reading, and writing -- and because my passion for those things became a mission. I was also ambitious at a time when there was a vacuum -- where there should have been bountiful literature. There were a lot of beautiful stars in the writing universe to whom no one was paying any attention. I cultivated that world, and it was a galaxy of future Olympians.

Erotic writing today is not only the best work of its kind that we've ever seen in the English language, it also has had an indelible effect on all of American literature. The flinching factor is gone -- the former stigma and prejudice against erotic writing have been exposed for the embarrassing ignorance that they represented. If I've acted as a goddess in that stream of events, I've been glad to be part of the faith.

There is no such thing as a person without an erotic story. I don't mean a tall tale, or a punch line, or a story about the one who got away. I'm talking about our personal erotic history, what you might call our "sexual philosophy." Take a look at your own erotic story, and you'll see that it's a motion picture of everything about you that is creative: the risks you'd be willing to take, the weightless depth of your imagination, your attraction to the truth, and the things that would make you go blind.

Susie Bright, Full Exposure

To begin as an erotic writer (or any kind of writer, for that matter), you need to think you have a story worth telling. You need a certain head of steam that makes you believe your sexual point of view is arousing and fascinating, even profound. You have to think well of your erotic writing talents -- sex can make even the most confident of us curl up in a ball of anxiety. Erotic speech is one of the few writing themes that has crippled otherwise self-assured authors.

If you're full of writerly spunk, and just raring to market your latest erotic triumph, then go ahead and skip this chapter -- or read it, and perhaps remember when you weren't so bold. But if you are ever plagued with thoughts like "Why am I even bothering to try? Who would ever want to read what I have to say about sex?" then stop here for some relief and reconsideration.

We've been told all our lives that sex is something you perform, furtively, and that you never talk about it, let alone write about it. Even if your family had more liberal attitudes, you couldn't have possibly missed the cultural chill. It's taken a long time to warm up, and only now are we starting to sort out what we have to say about sex. Let's break the ground.

What You Wouldn't Expect About Erotic Writing

• Virgins Can Write Great Erotica

The amount of sex you've had is irrelevant to whether you can observe, describe, and create a potent sex scene. Stop thinking in terms of notches, bouts of intercourse, or orgasm statistics.

Start recording the sexual experience of being alive, noticing what turns you on, listening to how your body responds to your own erotic weather report. After all, what's a bigger turn-on than teenagers' secret diaries of all their lusts and crushes? What's more poignant than a single sexual moment that arrives after a drought? Lack of experience often inspires some of the most excruciating erotic vignettes.

• Really Bad Lovers Can Write Great Erotica

You don't have to be a master at any particular kind of sex in order to write well about it. What you do need are empathy and information. You need to care about the issue, not personify it.

Consider how many overweight, chain-smoking, clumsy reporters cover sports with complete devotion. No one asks them if they are great athletes, or if they have even the smallest interest in physical fitness. Likewise, political writers would be the first to admit that they could never be a candidate.

• Really Bad Sex Can Be Great Erotica

The evidence of powerful bad sex can be found all over classics of erotic writing. Often the characters we read about in erotic fiction are inept, cruel, indifferent, manipulative -- and yet they can be arousing in their tortured bedroom adventures. A couple of years ago, someone came out with a whole anthology of short stories called Bad Sex. Tell me you wouldn't be tempted to pick up such a book if you saw it at your bookstore! There's only one crime in erotic writing, and that's being a bore -- the criminal who touches any subject and turns it into lead. A good writer can take even the most seemingly inconsequential act and turn it into a riveting read.

• Erotic Content Can Be Very Small

The pornographic "plain brown wrapper" has served as a misleading role model for a lot of writers interested in sex. In the "porn per page" example, you have to show somebody getting stuffed every 400 words, or else your manuscript is no good. That's an interesting exercise in creative repetition, but it's hardly required, or even desirable.

An erotic scene can be unforgettable, regardless of its length or the number of times such a scene appears in a story. Think of the hottest R-rated movies you've ever seen. Those sex scenes that are embedded in your brain probably took all of three minutes on the screen -- a page or two of script at the most. In how many fat novels have you secretly turned down a page or two to mark the erotic highlights? Writing erotica is about quality over quantity.

• Erotic Writing Doesn't Have to Be "Erotica"

The most popular erotic writing today is being done by authors who aren't setting out to write a pornographic tour de force -- they just want to include their characters' sexual lives as they would naturally come up in the course of a story. Don't think, "I'm writing an erotica book"; think, "I'm writing a great book, and sexuality will inevitably be part of it."

What's been strange about the history of erotic censorship in America is how often, in a story, the shades are suddenly drawn, an implied act is substituted for an explicit one. But it's as bizarre to eliminate sex from fiction as it would be to exclude any other monumental fact of life. As fascinating and devious as titillation may be, it's been an artificial barrier to more revealing and honest erotic description.

• Assume Everyone Is Sexual

This is excellent advice for living, but it's absolutely mandatory advice for writing. If you dwell on stock characters, whose sexual MOs can be spotted a mile away, then you're killing any element of surprise in your plot. You're boring us if you think that, in order to be sexy, your characters have to embody certain physical or psychic measurements.

Mrs. Robinson of The Graduate was sexy because she was old and corrupt and unabashedly horny. The Beast in Beauty and the Beast was deeply erotic in his desperation and devotion. O in The Story of O was an absolutely ordinary little thing whose boundless sexual masochism was in stark contrast to her bourgeois, dull past. Yes, bring on the homely, the deformed, the aged, the plain, and the absurd -- these characters are the inspiration for the most profound erotic discoveries.

• (Erotic) Writing Requires Ego and Discipline

Once you believe that your writing is worthwhile, that you have something to say, you have cleared the first hurdle. Getting specific ideas is the fun part, because you can use all sorts of inspirations, mental exercises, and outright silly tricks. I've included many of them in this book!

Discipline is hard, by its nature, although such practice is the path to your maturity as an artist. That's how it works -- in any genre, for any author. You have to have the ego for writing, and you have to actually do it, rather than dream about doing it, in order to become remarkable. Flourishing as an author is really just another name for showing up and beginning a new page every day.

Sometimes, yes, it is.

Here's the best part about writing sex -- once you get started, it's always good. The unhappy part comes when you don't know how to get started, when you hate your first paragraph, when you wonder why you're even trying in the first place.

But once you hit your zone -- when the story takes over your mind and you're just taking dictation, when you're laughing at your own jokes and choking up at your own pathos -- that's when euphoria, ego, and adrenaline all serve up the perfect orgasmic cocktail.

Writing an erotic scene is arousing, but so is writing any scene you believe is well crafted. You might find yourself writing a brilliant treatise on higher math and find you are unbearably aroused. You might build up a tremendous hunger or exhaustion from writing prolifically. Writing, which is so deceptively illustrated by seated figures scribbling or tapping at the keyboard, is hugely physical, because it demands every bit of your body's mental energy.

Writing sex scenes will make you excruciatingly aware of your body. As you compose your work, you will search your memories to find the most sensitive and lasting observations. You'll remember what you've seen and felt in the most acute way. The strength of your imagination is what makes the fiction come to life; and if you're writing at your best, you're going to internalize those stories -- when you're writing them, they feel real.

Writing about sex "works" for writers because, ultimately, it's such a true and vivid part of humanity. The hard part of sex writing is getting to that truth, its most candid expression, instead of the mechanics and morals that we've heard ad nauseum so many times.

The Advantages of Real Sex

The difficult part of "writing sex" is that when you do come out of your reverie, you may be quite alone. I often finish a story with the most blinding desire to show someone what I've done right that minute -- and since that's not always possible, I have to face the loneliness that is both the strange comfort and the bane of every writer's existence.

I say "strange comfort" because dedicated writers have a certain taste for their aloneness; while bitter, it's still something we couldn't live without. This is why we often get called "prickly," "oversensitive," "eccentric," and "impossible to live with." This is why every writer takes one look at Virginia Woolf's title A Room of One's Own and sighs in recognition.

Many nonwriters who have lots of sex would like to chime in that they too feel just as lonely after their bedroom climaxes, even with their lovers by their sides. I would encourage them to write about that! It's true, though, that body contact alone does not make one feel loved. Still, the traditional forms of sexual relations do provide physical affection and direct arousal, which can ultimately seduce the mind into bliss. With writing, it's the opposite -- your craft is always foreplay. You're always getting turned on above the neck first -- then later you realize that your whole body is affected.

How About Writing with Someone Else?

Writing as a team, side by side -- where you exchange sentences, pages, and concepts, fashioning a work together -- is an incredible aphrodisiac. If your results are any good at all, you're going to be attracted to each other. It's competitive, yes, but also thrilling. There's no statistical survey to prove my point, but I defy any writing team to tell me they haven't felt the tug and consequences of the heat they create together.

In the beginning, in America, there was smut. There was no Best American Erotica series, because anything erotic was likely to be considered the worst possible taste -- if it was considered at all. Like a bastard child whom everyone knows but no one acknowledges, erotica has traditionally had a rich life in American folk culture, humor, and songs -- rarely published except surreptitiously, never discussed except in jest or scorn.

I asked my father once, "What was the first 'dirty' story you ever saw?" He recalled that when he was a schoolboy in the 1930s, he came into possession of a page of naughty rhymes, typewritten carbon copies, that were being passed around the playground. This was typical enough -- forty years later, I was sneaking my first look at a "fuck book" that was passed through the eighth-grade coat closet. The only thing that changed was the carbon copies. Erotica was simply not printed by any respectable American press, nor sold in ordinary bookstores, until the early 1960s.

American erotic writing lived like this, in a ghetto of prurient interest, until the second half of the twentieth century. It was, and in many places still is, a genre in a segregated twilight world, with many boundaries dictated by class and culture. Until the 1970s, its pleasures and initiatives were largely reserved for men.

The Nature of the Beast

Sexual repression is not simply about words and pictures. Everywhere that erotic art has been suppressed, sexual behavior is similarly curtailed. In any state where laws have prevented adults from consensual relations, there too, the harshest censorship also prevails. In Georgia, for example, not only are you forbidden from performing a cozy act of sodomy in the privacy of your own home, you are also barred from buying or selling pictures of such sinful deeds; you would have to go out of your way even to read about such subjects.

It's not just in the South where we see broad definitions of obscenity; it's all over the United States, in any region where a strong religious tradition prevails over a population that experiences little change.

Our Puritan founders were not known for bringing enlightened erotic beliefs across the Atlantic. More than any other nation that preceded or followed, the United States was founded on a punitive sense of sexuality. That's a remarkable thing to think about. Immigrants, Indians, and slaves who were subsequently conquered/assimilated were each given a walloping dose of Anglo-Saxon-style prudery. The American world of arts and letters came of age under this type of morality and double standard.

When erotica has not been directly banned, it has been derided. It wasn't that long ago that Erica Jong was called a "mammoth pudenda" by the New Statesman for her breakthrough book Fear of Flying, the first contemporary women's erotic novel. In a different world, I would like to think that such an epithet would be the highest compliment, but in her generation, it was an insult.

Sexual fiction has been ridiculed for lack of intellectual substance or eloquence, and for its commerciality or its dehumanizing qualities. But are these doubts based on our personal feelings about sex? Are we bored by desire, immune to lust, objectified by passion? Hardly. The bad name given to erotica is a direct result of sexual chauvinism and repression -- and their big stick, the legal arm of censorship.

The Early Censorship Wars

The history of literary censorship in the United States is a time line of erotic silence interrupted by fierce but isolated rebellion. When the Bill of Rights was composed, its authors had no clue that the First Amendment would be most sorely tested not by partisan dissent, or abolition, or suffrage, but rather by explicit sexual speech. Think of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, first printed in Florence in 1928. Of course, Lawrence was not Italian -- his work was considered too sexually explicit to be printed in England or the United States at that time. How about Radclyffe Hall's Well of Loneliness, written in the 1920s? It wasn't even erotic, but its mere acknowledgment of lesbianism was considered obscene. In the greatest cause célèbre of obscenity cases, one of our greatest American writers, Henry Miller, did not see his milestone Tropic of Cancer available legally in the United States until almost three decades after he published it in Paris in the 1930s.

The Bohemians Come Out

As much as we think of the 1950s as the cradle of American wholesomeness and sexless cheer, those years, in fact, were the dawn of the postwar counterculture -- an explosion of poetry, jazz, theater, and political dissidence that, as everyone found out a decade later, turned our world upside down.

In the 1950s, hundreds of American readers passed around underground copies of Miller's soliloquies on the Land of Fuck that he described so vividly in Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, and Black Spring. Among those smitten were the heralds of the Beat Generation -- William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac -- and later, Charles Bukowski. Miller's tradition of declaring the insistence and prerogative of masculine desire can be seen among erotic writers ever since, even women writers who subverted it for their own purposes.

The development of erotic writing had suffered for decades from its stagnation in a quasi-legal atmosphere. Can we imagine what quality we would find in mystery novels, or sci-fi, if such writing were banned? When topics are not spoken about, criticized, or appreciated openly, they stay the same; writing about them is reduced to the habits of shock value and predictable titillation.