Bookshelf

Take Me There: Trans and
Genderqueer Erotic
One of the most invisible
groups of people in the literary cannon of erotica has to be transgender folks.
Sure, porn sensationalizes and objectifies pre-op trans women’s lives (one of
the best selling categories of pornography is called “she-male” porn, which
tells you how progressive its creators really aren’t). But in reality, very
little has been written about trans individuals in a way that eroticizes
without exploiting their lives, their minds, and their bodies. In Take Me
There: Trans and Genderqueer Erotica
(Cleis Press, $15) editor Tristan Taormino has pulled together a number of
writers, trans and otherwise, to create a collection of erotica that shows
trans and gender variant people as desirable. In a collection of erotica that
is by, for, and about anyone who challenges or defies rigid gender
constructions, whether they ID as transgender, genderqueer, or somewhere else
on that spectrum, the stories are expectedly about bucking traditions — but
whether it’s about fumbling teenage sex or butt plugs and bondage tables, they
are ultimately about sex. Patrick Califia (the legendary queer and trans author
of numerous tomes), S. Bear Berman, Ivan Coyote, Julia Serano, Laura Antoniou
(whose Marketplace series is still one of the finest S/M books out there),
Helen Boyd (who has written non-fiction about her transgender wife in She’s
Not the Man I Married) and more
contribute. A must-read for anyone who loves erotica or trans people. — Diane
Anderson-Minshall