Things I want to say about sex, now that my mum isn’t in the room.
Last night I sat on a panel titled Queer Love and Longing, and was interviewed alongside Alan Hollinghurst and Yael Van Der Wouden by Maeve Marsden. At dinner on Enmore Road afterwards, my friends laughed about a story I’d told on stage about the sexual tension imbued in travelling to a farm with a lover a few years ago where we’d pretended to be ‘friends’ in front of her conservative family throughout the day. My friends were laughing because I described this weekend on the farm something like this: “we were desperately waiting all day to close the bedroom door behind us, so that we could just … undress.” These friends who know me not to be so coy in real life were rinsing me last night for using the word undress in lieu of the utter debauchery this lover and I had descended into during those closeted nights on the farm – scenes that ultimately amounted to one of my favourite passages in my novel, A Language of Limbs:
“All the books speak of butterflies, but I feel birds in my stomach, thick-winged and thrashing. I watch her fingering her purse for coins at the checkout and imagine her hand inside me. She notices the thought on my face and bites her lip. Then, when the woman serving us isn’t looking, she winks and I think I might explode through my skin. This is our game, of subtle gestures, a language of limbs written like words in sand. We toe the shoreline between rock and ocean, between what you see and what we are underneath.”
I reminded my friends that my mum was in the audience, but this did little to quieten them.
Then, as I later made my way home, I thought about the word – undress. It got me thinking about the ways I had censored myself in that moment on stage. Was it really because my mum was in the audience? Or was it because I was on stage at a major literary festival and wearing a headset mic for only the second time in my life? Something about my Lizzie Maguire moment with a mic headset felt more ‘serious’ amongst an overwhelmingly white and middle-class crowd, and therefore I began to embody the scene’s conservative attachments.
When I said the word 'undress' I was answering a question from Maeve about how to write good sex scenes. I’d been talking about subtext when I relayed this story from the farm. What I didn’t say on stage, however, was how I also write erotica in the form of a bi-monthly publication – Fruits Zine – which I co-create with queer graphic artist Peo Michie. One of my favourite passages from our second edition, Flesh of Valencia, goes like this:
‘All the books speak of butterflies, but I feel birds in my stomach, thick-winged and thrashing. I watch her fingering her purse for coins at the checkout and imagine her hand inside me. She notices the thought on my face and bites her lip. Then, when the woman serving us isn’t looking, she winks and I think I might explode through.
But I can’t quote my erotica here. Suddenly, there’s censorship. This blog post wouldn’t get published. Or if it did, maybe the social media sites we want to share this on would share it on would shadow ban it? If it wasn’t in the shadows, maybe an employer would find it later on down the line. Can I still give a workshop in a school about my award-winning novel, A Language of Limbs, or am I no longer a writer, just dirt?
Because it’s too filthy (you’ll have to go and find it) but what’s the line?
We celebrate sex scenes when they’re about subtext, but as soon as you get rid of subtext, literary crowds tend to believe something isn’t worth reading. But what no one asks is this: if you take away the subtext, what happens to you as a writer?
When you take away the subtext, do your desires get bigger? Mine did. Do the stories get bolder? Mine did. Do the characters get weirder? Mine became freaks!
I asked myself too, what does it mean to come out as someone who writes erotica? To me, writing erotica was a way in more than it was a way out. And yet, I think of how I’d paused on stage before covering up sex with the word 'undress' and how if I’d told the crowd, “my mum is in the audience,” people would have nodded as if to say, “of course, you can’t go there right now, because your mum is here…”
However, when I’m truly honest, the self-censorship is actually an elongation of how we feel and talk about sex and sex scenes in general. And how sex scenes are OK if they’re sitting in the subtext of critically acclaimed novels, but actually, to write erotica is to come out as smut and filth and dirt. And to come out as queer is also to come out as smut and filth and dirt. How does our opinion of people who write about erotica resemble our opinion of how we think about sex workers and sex liberation? What sex scenes are OK to write about, and what scenes aren’t? Is there an erotica panel at Sydney Writers’ Festival? Would there ever be one? Why? Who writes it? Who’s there? Who can write erotica? Who can’t?
I think of my novel and how it earnt me a place on stage with a headset mic, and my erotica, which I’ll probably never be interviewed about on stage at a major literary festival. Yet the first edition of the zine sold out in six days and has already been read in more countries than my novels have been published in.
Both, I think, have value. I love the scenes of queer love and longing that I wrote in A Language of Limbs. I love the scenes of queer love and longing that I’ve written in each edition of Fruits Zine. But I know these two forms are not treated the same, and I wonder who loses out because of it?
– Dylin Hardcastle
