The Blowfish Blog

Who? Pfft. I do it for the free stuff that people will eventually send me. So far I have gotten a t-shirt and a few books. I’m estimating that over the next few years, if I work hard enough I will be pulling in 2-3 more t-shirts and eventually a few mix cds.

That’s a tough one, because I cannot imagine wanting to enjoy the fetishes I don’t enjoy. That’s kind of what makes me not into them. I’m a big advocate for trying new
things, and an even bigger advocate for only doing what you like. I am very happy with my current kinks, fetishes and fantasies and I have enough of them to keep things fresh.

I love Animmmmmal! Gonzo is a close second, because I love the song he sings in the Muppet Movie when they are around the campfire. I don’t have a favorite super-hero, but if I could choose one superpower it would be to have the ability to know exactly what having sex with a person is like just by touching them.

I am at a very annoying phase right now because I am in that kind of love that blinds me. It’s unrequited, too. So when I close my eyes to think of someone kissing
me, touching me, licking my nipples, all I want is Tom. I know I’ve had a million crushes, but at the moment I have no desire for any of them.

I get annoyed when people drive really slowly with their blinkers on during sex. Or how about those people who talk on their cell phones at the movies during
sex? Rude.

Umm. I guess hearing about bad sex annoys me. I’ve had lovers who were inexperienced or not as adventurous, but even with them I was able to have good sex. I feel like if a person is having bad sex, they aren’t putting in any effort. Stop being lazy. Make the sex good.

I was doing what I do before I knew I was doing it. Heh. I wrote racy little stories for friends long before I knew people actually wrote romances for great gobs of money. That aside, I’ve been a writer forever. (There are photos of me pounding away at a typewriter before I could actually spell words.)

Once I knew what I wanted to write, I devoured books like Macho Sluts. The Beauty Books. Anais Nin.

Then there are the editors who took pity and pulled me from the slush pile: Judy Cole at Playgirl. Kerri Sharp at Black Lace. Richard Kasak at Masquerade. I wouldn’t be here without the help of that powerful trio.

Hello, fairy godmother. Please make me a Dom for a Day. Sure, I can get inside a dominant’s head, because I know from a sub’s POV what the world looks like. But damn. I would like to feel that tough-as-hell, make-you-beg, on-your-knees strength all the way to the tips of my shiny, shiny boots. It wouldn’t hurt if I had a cock to go with the look.

Wonder Woman. I have so many Wonder Woman t-shirts, it’s a little embarrassing. And I’ve been called “Erotica’s Own Superwoman,” which is sort of close, if you squint. Why? Well, I didn’t have one of the action figures when I was little, but my friend did. And I loved the fact that she was all buttoned up in a little suit. Were there even wee glasses? Then the jacket came off, and the hair came down… and her powers were revealed. Come on. What’s sexier than that?

As for a Muppet? Animal. Hands down.

Hmmm. I think I’d like to have sex with a living person, if it’s all the same to you. And I’ve got a roulette wheel’s worth of names. The celebrity crushes who’ve got under my skin. The musicians I’ve jacked off to.

But I have to just spin the wheel and land on… Anthony Bourdain Why? The way he writes. I can’t say how many times I’ve read Kitchen Confidential, but his words manage to echo in my head. Right behind him is Gordon Ramsey. What is it about mean chefs that makes me wet?

I’m such a voyeur, I suppose the most annoying sexual habit for me is a person who won’t share the dirty details!

A lot of people influenced and encouraged me. A few that come to mind immediately are: Dr. Carol Queen & Dr. Robert Lawrence, Layne Winklebleck, Karen of QSM and Kim Airs of Grand Opening Boutique.

Perfume - I’ve crossed paths with the very refined and rarified perfume enthusiasts communities . . . And it’s quite seductive to learn more and be drawn in to their pleasures and sensual pursuits. It’s another aspect of highly developed sense delight which simultaneously embraces the primal and the intellectual. Their gravitational pull on me is very strong.

Cutie Honey, a Japanese kid’s anime with not-so kids content I used to watch avidly while growing up in Japan. Perky, fun and sexy in that unselfconscious way. She has this awesome ability to change clothes in a flash to saucy motorcycle gear or fighter’s cat suit. She was always rescuing her handsome but hapless boyfriend. She had a great group of friends and family and a well-balanced, almost ordinary “day” life.

Rumi Read the poetry - need I say more?

A student in my “JoyStick Secrets: How to Thrill a Man” class confessed to me that once she texted or checked messages on her Blackberry during a hand-job. It’s just plain rude. Poor cell phone hygiene is generally in bad taste, but it’s really annoying when it encroaches in the realm of sex and pleasure.

In doing sex education and writing nonfiction about sex, I was influenced profoundly by the trainers of San Francisco Sex Information circa 1993 — Carol Queen, Robert Lawrence, Steven Brown, Cheryl Cohen — I’m leaving many out, but those are a few. Before that, I was very influenced by Patrick (then Pat) Califia, Susie Bright and Larry Townsend. Since then, my years at Good Vibrations influenced me a lot, and my 14+ years as an educator at SFSI have had a huge impact on me, as I’ve seen literally thousands of people come through the training and be profoundly changed by it, which is not to take away from the profound changes I experience each time I co-teach the training, particularly in hearing the experiences and insights of our many guest speakers and my fellow trainers. My very good friend Violet Blue has had a career of nonfiction sex writing that very much inspires me, and I think very highly of the writings of people like Midori, Tristan Taormino and the aforementioned Carol Queen who have been instrumental in changing the field. I read Furry Girl’s blog Feminisn’t and I think she’s got some serious brass ones. I always enjoy reading her insights.

But the biggest influence on me as an educator and an activist are the freaks, outcasts and culture warriors who proudly make San Francisco a place where not tolerance, but CELEBRATION of our sexual differences can be the norm. You see ‘em walking down the street — punks, outlaws, gender tamers, drag king commandos, bi dreamers, poly processors, freakazoid spazattack drama queens, alt-couples and alt-families, proud pervs, and a million other variations, often dozens of them in the same person. They’re here, they’re queer and/or inspired by diverse paradigms of human expression on political and/or aesthetic/artistic grounds, get used to it.

I also write erotica; in that field, I long since lost track of my influences because there are so many of them. Early on, the fiction of Townsend, Califia, Queen, Phil Andros, Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Georges Bataille, deSade, Marcus Van Heller, Alice Joanou, Danielle Willis, Lucy Taylor, and others were very influential on my erotic writing, as were generally non-erotic writers like Francesca Lia Block, Roger Zelazny, Samuel R. Delany, Philip Jose Farmer, and Harlan Ellison. In writing horror, which I was known for, at least for a while, I was influenced by the writers who often get labeled “Splatterpunk,” though I always hesitate to use that term because it was originally intended as a joke. Lately I’ve been reading and writing noir fiction religiously, and there I’m most influenced, in addition to the Holy Trinity — Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain — by Jim Thompson, Cornell Woolrich, Patricia Highsmith, John D. MacDonald, Ed McBain, and the writers showcased in Charles Ardai’s Hard Case Crime line from Dorchester publishing — best damn crime writing out there.

In all my fiction writing, music was at least as big an influence on me as literature — music to me being Lou Reed and the Warhol scene, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, the punk scene, the new wave scene, the goth scene, the alt scene, the grunge scene, the darkwave scene, the ambient, industrial and techno scenes, Scandinavian death metal and Germanic death industrial, as well as outlaw blues and country like Sonny Boy Williamson II, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Johnny Cash, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and folk singer-activists like Woodie Guthrie, Ani DiFranco, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan and even Bruce Springsteen and Linda Rondstadt. Without music I don’t think I would have learned about narrative rhythm; when I write a story I still think of its emotional parabola in terms of an epic auditory story cycle like The Velvet Underground’s “Heroin” or Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In the Aeroplane Over The Sea” — which I guess is not that different than Kerouac’s attempt to render twenty-minute saxophone solos in prose. I’m not being pretentious — I didn’t set out to do that shit; it just happened that way.

I see there being an entry-and-exit-wound between my erotic writing, my horror writing, and my noir writing; all of them represent the exposure of unsavory ideas. As such, they often seem to me to be in direct opposition to my educational work, where my central assertion is that sexual ideas are not unsavory ideas by their nature — they are only unsavory when they are problematic, or when they infringe the rights of consent or privacy. I strive to make my nonfiction responsible and my fiction irresponsible. But to be honest, I’m more drawn to being bad than to being good. That’s why I’ll always consider myself a fiction writer first and foremost.

Who has the time? I’ve got more obsessions than I can handle as it is.

I hate all Muppets, because I AM a Muppet. The only question is whether I am Waldorf or Statler. Most of the time I’m both, telling myself my own punchlines at Fozzie’s expense. Sort of an A Scanner Darkly corpus-callosum breakdown thing.

My favorite superhero is Commander Pleasure, the secret Hedonist commando in my unpublished steampunk epic, who frequently has to head off plots by self-flagelating monks to bomb Spiritualist sex communes in the Adriatic. However, since his rocket pack uses Hale rockets — that is to say, spin-stabilized — Commander Pleasure spends much time hurling his cookies into chamber pots and has to get bailed out by the Holy Knights of St. Aphrodite, the paramilitary wing of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Sluts, who wear nun’s habits and fishnets.

If I had to choose an existing superhero, it’d definitely be Wil Eisner’s The Spirit, whose first act would probably be to wreak bloody vengeance on Frank Miller for that mind-bendingly ill-advised cinematic adaptation from a few years ago.