Susie Bright

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Nobody else titles essays like Susie Bright does: 'Shiny Plastic Dildos Holding Hands,' 'A Good Butch Is Hard to Find,' 'I Got This Way from Kissing Donahue.' The titles tip you off that you're in the presence of a writer for whom sex is much more than an issue--it's a deliriously, excessively, joyously pleasurable touchstone of life. In fact, taking pleasure seriously--and laughing at sexual solemnity--is what Susie Bright is all about.

In 1984 she cofounded the pathbreaking magazine On Our Backs: Entertainment for the Adventurous Lesbian, whose stirring images of women loving women were meant to be a major turn-on and a wake-up call to a community that, as Bright puts it 'believed in this perfect foursquare lesbian life, where you could be gay as long as you were white-bread, sexually speaking.' Since then (and since leaving On Our Backs in 1990) Bright has been an unstoppable bisexual force for happy fucking, in all permutations and by all persuasions--writing (Susie Sexpert's Lesbian Sex World, 1990; Susie Bright's Sexual Reality, 1992), lecturing, giving safe-sex demonstrations, and infuriating chastity belt wearers, gay and straight.

'Twice, people have threatened to blow me up or shoot me--in western Massachusetts,' she says with a laugh. 'So many people are frightened about where male sexuality will lead. Because I write about explicit sex, they believe I'm a monster. That I'm actually killing women.' And she notes that many lesbian-feminist bookstores still will not stock her writings.

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