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Location: Home.
Listening: "The Making Of Cyborg" ~ Ghost In The Shell soundtrack.

Released from work an hour early today, I rambled to Borders to pick up Aqua Erotica, on the off-chance that I decided to go through with the autographing scheme. Borders on Bellflower has tucked their "Erotica" section into two shelves between "Literary Criticism" and "Gay/Lesbian Interest" in an obscure corner on the first floor--at least for the moment. They've moved it three times since I bought Delta Of Venus in January, reducing it, pushing it farther and farther away from the main browsing areas. Which is exactly what they should be doing--smut is no fun if you can't feel like you're getting away with something when you're reading it.

I located Aqua Erotica in moments and slid into my habitual bookstore posture: hovering over the carpet in a crouch, my back arched slightly, balancing my weight on the balls of my feet. It's a frankly unladylike pose, but familiar from years of dance classes and, hence, more comfortable than just sitting cross-legged.

I never fail to be amused at the behavior of people when purchasing porn. Those who browse in, say, The Pleasure Chest or Le Sex Shoppe on Hollywood Boulevard will persist in slinking down the rows and then almost curling into their books, like kittens against their mother or, more accurately, like refugees against a barricade. I'll admit to some cruelty when dealing with them--one of my favorite sports used to be to pop into Le Sex Shoppe, hop down the aisle and make direct eye contact with the gentlemen reading Ass Man and Over Sixty And Sexy. I'd beam at them, dimples and all, and watch them freeze for half an instant, clearly panicked. Never once did I find one who could return my stare. This was probably fortunate, as I would have struck up a conversation and it tends to be a bad idea to chat up men one finds reading porn on the boulevard at two in the morning.

In places like Borders and Barnes and Noble, they always try to play it off--to sidle up to the "Erotica" section and then feign interest in the criticism texts. I've grown to enjoy watching them move from the thick books on Lacan and Foucault over to the "Gay/Lesbian Interest" section, only to realize where they are and instantly shift back to criticism. One of these appeared this afternoon in Borders and played the usual game, even going so far as to pick up a thin volume of Barthes and page through it while standing directly over me. He replaced it quickly, I heard him take a breath and was on my feet and walking away before he could get the "So..." out of his mouth. The end of that sentence is always one of two sequences:

"So...anything you can recommend?"--with that half-smirk of a frat boy about to ask your major--or "So...doing research?" --which translates into "What's a chick doing reading Pauline Reage?" with that underlying implication that because I'm wearing glasses and am clearly comfortable reading O in public, I've got an owl mask in my backseat. Neither is particularly welcome and I end up either playing along and telling them "Actually, yes. I write and I'm keeping tabs on the competition." or staring at them evenly until they return to Lacan. I wasn't in the mood for either this afternoon.

My relationship with textual erotica began when I was about nine years old. I was an intellectually precocious child, who, according to my mother, began speaking months before the other children my age and using complete sentences at the end of my first year. I started reading Beatrix Potter before pre-pre-kindergarten and, by first grade, had completed the entirety of the arranged-by-color SRA folders (remember those?) and was assigned by my teacher to tutor my classmates. I completed Gone With The Wind by the middle of second grade and the Encyclopedia Britannica series by the beginning of third. In other words, I was a reading machine.

My passion for libraries began around this time as well. I used to beg my mother to drop me off at the local library on Saturday's, where I would run rampant through the aisles, sampling anything that seemed even vaguely interesting. At first reluctant and thinking me slightly insane, she eventually relented and I found myself in a pristinely quiet and well-stocked paradise. It was only a matter of time before I found the romance novels.

Books are munitions and libraries are dangerous places--especially when the relative innocence of an eight-year-old is at stake. I remember my utter fascination that anyone would--or could get away with--writing down the things that Judith Krantz and Jackie Collins had their characters engaging in. Not that I was complaining, mind you. Far from it. I never checked these books out--I knew better than to even try--but no one ever raised an eyebrow at my ensconcing myself in a corner for hours with The Thorn Birds or Hollywood Wives. By the time everyone in my sixth grade class was passing Are You There, God? It's Me Margaret around like contraband at lunch, I had memorized choice passages from Scruples and was trying to find Delta Of Venus (which I had heard Sherilynn Fenn reading from on MTV and knew I had to get my hands on or die). This is why I tend to scoff at current efforts to restrict access to internet porn in public libraries in the interest of "the children". Whatever "the children" are looking for, they'll eventually find, and the most standard library can be a veritable orgy if one knows how to use a card catalogue (or, rather, those detestable search engines).

So libraries became my training grounds, varius bathrooms in said libraries my testing facilities and the results formed the foundation of the majority of my more eccentric kinks: public (or near public) masturbation/sex and textual erotica in particular. The act of being physically written on came later, with The Pillow Book and our subsequent forays with Sharpies and cameras (some of my best work found its way onto his skin before I ever touched pen to paper). In elementary and, later, middle school, all I cared about was finding the most explicit material I could get my hands on and then, because the boys were still more interested in sports or picking fights on the playground, getting my hands on myself.

As Peter would say, "Ah! The halcyon days of my youth...".

I think that these early explorations of self and my consequent acceptance of masturbation as an essential part of daily life are what led me to give Peter the "odd, odd look" when he admitted discomfort at discussing the topic. While I've never been one to go into these details in the majority of the company I've kept, I've always assumed that everyone engaged in similar behavior behind closed doors at least once or twice a day. Three, four, five times, perhaps not--a fact that I shrugged off to always having had an appetite that literally terrified many of my earlier boyfriends--but certainly more often than once every month or so. To realize that someone so similar to myself in so many other ways would have reservations about sharing his thoughts on the topic was something I had never considered. However, I made it clear that I was open to discussion and ultimately accepting and, apparently, breakthroughs were made. These last few days have been sheer joy--to watch someone I love slowly move beyond a silence he's kept for years and finally not only embrace but also openly share his experiences in his journal has made me feel like I'm meeting him again for the first time. His enthusiasm always makes me smile and his honesty leaves me speechless. When he wrote that my email--sent in a playful moment when I wanted to illustrate the extent to which I felt his absence and invite him inside of my fantasies about him--set this in motion, I danced around the living room in celebration. I've never been able to share myself so completely with any of my lovers and to have him reciprocate...

When we laid awake talking on one of the first nights we spent together after he moved in, I told Peter that the way I felt about our interaction was the same way I had felt seeing a brontosaurus skeleton for the time. The sense of awe that overwhelmed me as I stood in the lobby of the Museum of Natural History in D.C., looking up at the remains of a creature so immense that I simply couldn't comprehend the possibility of its existence, was the same sense of awe I felt during our early conversations in Williams' den. I simply didn't have words. The only thing I could do was whisper "Brontosaurus" once more, turn and walk away, dazed.

"Brontosaurus."