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Purveyor, Fine Asian Porn
Industry Role:
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: San Francisco Bay Area
Posts: 38,323
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Good read! 
I love Susie Bright. 
Read this too (I read it years ago):
Quote:
REVIEW BY DAVID TALBOT
America's sexual parade is a sorry spectacle, a brassy band of snickering talk show hosts and their compulsive guests, sexperts hawking 10 Ways to Achieve Total Body Ecstasy, advertisers bent on sharing their kiddy-porn fixations and a legion of militant prudes marching grimly against lust, led by men who are all too prone to falling flagrantly into its honeyed traps.
Set against this pathetic panorama, Susie Bright seems a starburst of sanity and health. For more than a decade, Bright has written and lectured and performed on behalf of sexual pleasure and in opposition to its twin goblins -- censorship and the cheap, dishonest American habit of titillation. Much of Bright's message boils down to this simple question: What is our problem? Sex is a gift from the gods, it creates life and it makes life worth living. Why must we keep afflicting it with a crown of thorns?
"Sex is such an urgent message from our body that sometimes we call it our soul," writes Bright in her new manifesto, "Susie Bright's Sexual State of the Union" (Simon & Schuster). "Lust carries risks, sexual intimacy has consequences; it IS nature, not a gadget with a warranty. Nobody would go through it if the rewards were not so magnificent: the knowledge of one's body, the basic connection with another person ... Of course it's worth it, and what's more, what the puritans and their gong shows don't seem to realize is that it's inevitable. Their prudery is killing people, both metaphorically and literally, but they cannot mandate their vision of purity because it is, at its very core, an affront to our survival."
Bright's own sexual banquet has been a multi-course affair. After shaking off the chains of Catholic school indoctrination, Bright ended up in San Francisco in the early '80s, where she fell into the sex toy business and the world of avant-garde lesbian erotica and journalism. In 1984, Bright became the chief editor of On Our Backs, the pioneering magazine "for the adventurous lesbian." She later became a porn critic for Penthouse's Forum magazine and the editor of the annual "Best American Erotica" book series, as well as a "sex consultant" and collaborator on such films as "Erotique" and "Bound." In 1995, Bright moved to Santa Cruz, Calif., where she teaches "The Politics of Sexual Representation" -- or "Porn 101," as she calls it -- at the University of California campus there. Bright, who is 39, lives with her 6-year-old daughter, Aretha, and her long-time companion, whom many are surprised to discover is a man, Jon Bailiff.
Salon caught up with Bright in Boston, where she launched her "Sexual State of the Union" book tour last week.
Are we really "erased below the waist," as you write in your book? It seems to many people that American culture is awash in sexuality, from MTV to Calvin Klein to TV talk shows. Do we really need a champion of sexual freedom like Susie Bright in the current overstimulated climate?
I know what people mean by that, because I often have a sense of being burned out and bored. But when I take a closer look at what's getting on my nerves, it's not refreshing, frank sexual disclosure, it's just massive amounts of titillation that purports to be about something, but really isn't. You mention TV talk shows -- they're supposed to be scandalous and shocking, but there's nothing truthful about sex on those shows. It's just bread and circuses.
Are there any sexual icons or programs in mainstream American culture that you do find inspiring?
I'm a big fan of the Dennis Rodman phenomenon. When I read that a fingernail polish company was doing a special line of colors for men with names that would appeal to guys -- like the black color was "Gigolo" -- when I read that story, I said, "Thank you, Dennis Rodman." Yes, this is just a little trend, it's not earth-shaking, and he's not a revolutionary leader, he's not the Che Guevara of cross-dressing -- but I love the notion that a man can be a very powerful athlete and that his athleticism and masculinity are not diminished in the least by his sexual deviancy. He's deviant and he loves something about femininity. It makes him feel confident and beautiful and he wants to show that. I love that, that he can be both those personas at the same time.
Some people would say the same about you -- that you like to play with sexual ambiguity.
(Laughs) Yes, I've been playing in little girls' dresses for way too long.
What I mean is that throughout your career you've been publicly identified as a lesbian, and yet those who know something about your life know that you've been lovers with a man for a long time. So what the hell are you?
(Laughs) You know, Dolly the sheep and I are having a fling right now. I'm into cloning big-time.
That's a new sexual frontier!
The reason I was so associated with the lesbian magazine On Our Backs was because way back when, when I was the only little vibrator clerk at [the feminist sex shop] Good Vibrations in San Francisco, there were all these women who were interested in creating contemporary women's erotic culture -- writing and performance. And most of those women happened to be lesbians, or bisexuals. Those were the kind of women who were willing to go out and buy a Macintosh and start cranking out something exciting of their own. It's an interesting question to me that the erotic renaissance has not been embraced by a lot of heterosexual women. They're certainly consumers of it, but they're not in the forefront of making it.
Like every year when I edit my "Best American Erotica" books, the only famous straight woman I've found is Anne Rice. And of course her favorite thing is writing about gay men. There's a hesitancy on the part of women to be forward about what they're interested in sexually. Lesbians as a whole are not wild bohemians either, but there are certainly enough of them to do a few magazines and movies.
So your sexual orientation was shaped by the fact that the creative action was in the lesbian scene?
Well, I was bisexual to begin with. And then my political and cultural interests in the '80s were totally shaped by the queer community in San Francisco. So yes, that's where the action was. And there were plenty of people who weren't four-square homosexual who were involved in this movement. People who might say, "Well, I'm really more into the leather scene, I don't really care who ties me up -- as long as it's nice and tight." Or you might have people who just loved erotica and wanted to be around the most exciting artists. I was involved with Honey Lee Cottrell at the time so it was click, click, click. But anyone who got to know On Our Backs, or read us carefully, knew we didn't have a dress code at the office about what it meant to be a lesbian. Some of us were bisexual, and some of us were getting sex changes, and some of us didn't know what we were going to do -- or with whom -- when we woke up the next day.
(cont'd)
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