Carol Queen

I want more of this book. I want ten thousand of this book and all its queer siblings. I'm appalled that I hadn't read it before and sad that it was so slim that I burned through it in two sittings.

This is a series of connected stories/moments in the life of a queer kinkster in SF in probably the 90's. The protagonist starts out in boy drag as Randy and picks up a leather daddy, Jack, at a gay leather bar. Unlike many of the gay men she's taken home before, Jack accepts Randy's gender fluidity and doesn't skip a beat when she transforms herself into her femme self, Miranda. A couple of chapters later, Jack's longtime lover, a Black man named Demetrius, comes home from his travels and they embark on a sexy, fun, caring, intentional journey to knitting themselves and others into a family of choice.

This is unabashed queer leather erotica. My favorite thing about it is that the characters spend just as much time discussing gender, sexual identity, queerness, sex work, the experiences of genderqueers and trans women, roleplay, BDSM, leather, alt sex cultures as they do having inventive hot sex. It makes the sex incredibly hot and it feeds a deepseated need in my soul for fiction that reflects my experiences building intentional relationships and being open to experiences beyond those circumscribed by their cultures or apparent sexualities. Miranda may be a woman much of the time, and a woman with a cunt all the time, but her attraction to gay leathermen over straight men really resonated for me, and Jack and Demetrius's willingness to see her as the complicated sexy fuckable genderfluid slutty bottom that she is was marvelous.

We need more erotica like this, that explores relationships in a low-drama way, that doesn't privilege romance over self-discovery and long-term close friendships, that reflects the diversity of queer communities on many axes, and that sees the heart of why people do the BDSM they do, and how identity labels can work for and against people. I loved the moments when Miranda or Jack come up against the censure and expectations of their own alt communities, who view their decisions as something of traitorous to their own queer selves by taking up with an ostensibly het relationship. I loved that the story didn't shy away from that, but dealt with it head-on while showing that this relationship helped each person involved grow into their queerness and explore beyond the constraints of identity politics. I like that it also didn't wholly trash or ask the characters to reject the more structured or separatist communities and community histories that they have been a part of, but rather showed the characters moving between spaces and roles with all the complexity and realism that I have seen in my own life.

This was a really fun book and I'm proud to have it on my shelf. I liked it even better than Macho Sluts, it had way fewer instances of dubious consent. I think this book's realistic depiction of a life lived, with all the context that that entails, rather than heightening that life with a layer of fantasy, gives it a stronger footing. This book isn't perfect but it's really really excellent and I recommend it. It's also fabulously sexy in a way I so rarely see in fiction--a way that resonated with my own relatively complex approach to BDSM, queer identity and gender fluidity, while not being about me in specifics, it was about me in spirit. A would rec again.… (altro)